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Michael Levin Λ Anna Ciaunica: Breakthrough Biology Research - Consciousness Beyond the Brain
January 29, 2025
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If you don't change, you will die. If you do change, you are no longer yourself. What all of this is about, it's not really philosophy, it's empirical claims about which set of tools is going to apply. You are in no way tied to the story that was told by your past self.
We need to figure out how basically we are linked to other individuals to understand the self. What you're really talking about is ways to relate to that system and gain optimal interaction that enriches both sides.
Biology, neuroscience, and philosophy often seem to walk separate paths, but two radical thinkers are challenging our most basal assumptions about consciousness, memory, and the self. Michael Levin, a pioneer in developmental biology, has discovered that intelligence isn't limited to brains, rather it extends all the way down to single cells and even bacterial colonies. Alongside him is cognitive scientist and philosopher Anna Chaunica, who upends the mainstream view of consciousness and selfhood.
My name is Kurt Daimungel, and this was part of my three-day tour at Harvard, Tufts, and MIT, where I recorded five podcasts, including this Theolocution with Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor at Tufts University, and Ana Chaunica, who's currently based at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London.
The other recordings are with Jacob Barndiz, which is over seven hours long on quantum theory, and Manolis Kellis of MIT. There's also Professor William Hahn, a computer scientist, and that was filmed live at the MIT Media Lab. Subscribe to get notified. Levin and Chaunica's groundbreaking Theolocution raises provocative questions that challenge the foundations of neuroscience and philosophy, such as what is the self? Can you be yourself without others? Is your memory yours to control? And what if thoughts have minds of their own?
What's the largest myth in your respective fields that you have to dispel even to your colleagues?
Neurons and the things that neurons do are an extremely unique aspect of the brain. So it is often assumed that different kinds of intelligence are necessarily limited to brains. And so that's, that's something that we talk about a lot about where neurons actually, and the properties of neural networks, where those things actually came from, both evolutionarily and developmentally, and that this is these kinds of capacities that exist, you know, far, far outside of, of, of brainy organisms. That's a huge one.
What sort of neural capacities are you referring to that are present in non-neural networks? Well, for example, I mean, the most obvious thing is that the actual mechanism, so the ion channels, the electrical synapses known as gap junctions, the neurotransmitters, all of those things working in a network to integrate information across space and time, those things are evolutionarily absolutely ancient. They predate multicellularity. So even bacterial biofilms have all of the components. And then there's the actual function. So
The ability to learn from experience to navigate some kind of problem space, not necessarily move around in 3D space, but navigate other problem spaces like physiological space, metabolic space, gene expression space, anatomical space, all of these things long predate the invention of nerve and muscle and running around the 3D world. So all of these capacities are very widespread. So Anna, we were talking off here about how you think differently than your colleagues. So please,
Yeah, so I think in my case the biggest myth because I work on the self and I think people want to want to understand the self. They start with self, but I think it's wrong. I think we should start with the other you know from the very beginning because we take another centric perspective and kind of like the individual self is already there. So fully fledged a bit like the Athena coming from zeus head, but I'm interested more how we get there. You know how you become a self
From a bunch of cells, right? Uh, so you how you develop that and when you ask yourself this question, then You realize that actually cannot be yourself by yourself You need another because the other was there from the very beginning. There's some sort of like lineage or transmission Later on. So I think the biggest myth the biggest myth is that we can figure out things About the self by looking just at the individual. I think that's deeply wrong. We need to look at in a wider
Aspect and I'll say even more product Provocatively that it's like actually we need to start with a second person rather than the first person in order to understand It's just like the second person comes first We don't really choose to be ourselves the way we are. So it's a We are we're kind of like part of something bigger So we need to figure out how basically we are linked as individual to other to other individuals to understand the self I think many many of the concepts that we have right now
I don't know if you know this epicycle thing that we had once upon a time. People started at the time with this preconception that the circle was a perfect figure and because the circle is a perfect figure everything has to move circularly in the sky.
But that obviously was not matching the empirical data because people realize and the planets are moving very differently than the, that they were expected according to the circle. So what they did, they had epi-circles in the circle to explain for the mismatching of data. So they basically, they constructed this complicated epi-circle until one day somebody said, actually just drop the idea of a circle. It's not a circle. It's an epi- ellipsis. Yeah.
So just like drop an idea and everything fall into place like the Kepler, you know, and I think it's we, we, we need something similar in, in philosophy of mind and cognitive science as well. I think this idea that's, you know, there is one system and then we try to figure out everything through that system. And then at a certain point, something happens, there is actually has dropped out. I look at the elliptic, you know, movement, and then you realize that actually that idea matches the observation. Yeah.
Well, what was that? Let's drop that moment for you. What was some axiom that you held on to that your field hold on to? Yeah, so I actually had a couple of those. So it's like a domino effect, boom, boom, boom, you know, from one another. So I did my thesis on physicalism and quality. I started to do the gold, old old fashioned is like, okay, so I have brain states and then subjective experiences like, um,
Fillings and a thing. So ask yourself how exactly some something like which is like immaterial in nature, ineffable is linked to something which is heavily material that can measure, right? You know, you have a brain in your hands has certain consistent certain color. Where exactly are my experiences in the brain? So that's that's a bigger question. And then there was like entire field is like looking up of like how you reduce or not the mental states to physical states.
And then I realized that the entire physical discussion around this was based on outdated physical science.
Uh, so, and they were not looking at other type of like, because they had taken into account the idea that the most fundamental part is the physics and we just ignore everything else. Just focus on those, like have the layer cake physics at the bottom and then chemistry, biology, psychology on the top. We have the chair in the top, like the subjectivity of experiences. And then we are obsessed about how to connect the cherry with the bottom of the cake. But I think that was like missing, missing the point.
And that was my aha moment. I said, okay, actually, what I really need to understand is like how physics relates to chemistry. It's like the two layers of the cake, how they basically link to each other. And then I realized that actually what is probably what is fundamental is not how the bits are layered one to each other and how to dismantle it like the bricks of this wall.
Uh, but basically is the interconnectedness between the two that actually is fundamental. So you basically have the relatedness between the two, which is fundamental. And then you keep the relatedness the same. You just like change the bricks and you have a very similar system. So that, that was my aha moment when I realized, wait a minute, actually it's like the armchair thinking and experimental science were kind of like disconnected. So I want to do both. So I, uh, you know, in my lifetime as a human being, a scientist, I don't want to just like,
just like take one track and ignore the other. I want to, you know, do the two together. Even though it's more complicated, it takes more time and it's messier because it's like in between. But I think we have a clearer understanding of like the phenomena. And if you allow me to use a metaphor. So suppose you have a table here.
and like this this thing you have and then you want to go from point A to point B and you take the straight line yeah it's the fastest way yeah which is fine but then you can also take right left right left right left right left and then you still arrive at the end point but at the end of the day you mapped better the surface of the that that table if you just like take the tours rather than just like
Go straight because basically experience other perspective on the thing. So you have a like a clear understanding of the phenomena. So that's the bullet I'm biting and say, okay, so maybe it'll take me longer to get to my end point. But
I want to have this like rich perspective because I don't think this idea of disciplinarity is quite new actually in scientists like people of three hundred years ago when they were doing philosophy like Rene Descartes or some mathematicians they were also opticians so he wrote a treat in optics
He was also a mathematician, so he invented the XY thing. So there is no clear-cut distinction, and I think this is something very new that we inherited in our society. It's like, okay, here's your discipline, here's your discipline, here's those methods. It's kind of like separate parallel tracks, and sometimes they don't communicate with each other. And when they come together, it's like, oh, it was like a collision. What was that? I realized that
You know, it's like you can spend your entire career on a truck and then is blown away in a couple of seconds by somebody coming from a different field. And I said, okay, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. I want to with that. So right now that's my moment is just like that. I can't do it from armchair alone.
I see. The point about the disciplines is very important because you know right away it's an issue because I can often tell what department I'm talking in based on which part of my talk makes people mad and it's often a different thing because certain things are completely obvious in one department and they're heresy in a different department and so you can right away tell that there's a problem
Can you give an example of when you're presenting and how you can tell the difference?
the information processing in a group of cells is not determined by the genetics. It's driven. The memory is stored in and is driven by and there's plasticity at the level of electrophysiological circuits and they hold the actual information about what's going to happen in a neuroscience department. Like, well, yeah, no kidding. But then, but then to them, the odd part is when I say, yeah, but it doesn't have to be neurons. And in fact, what's a neuron anyway, right? And we just get, okay, so that's, so the first part is obvious to them. The second part is, is, is weird.
If I say that in a molecular genetics department, it's like, what are you talking about? Of course, it's the genes and then the rest of it is, you know, sort of the fluff and the genes drive and then, you know, but then they're like, well, yeah, the cells are similar and whatnot. So it's like that same idea that a group of cells is reprogrammable with respect to what it's going to do. And that, you know, if I talk about, let's say, the pattern memory and the two-headed plenary and the fact that they had a physiological experience that permanently
altered how those cells are going to behave in the future there's nothing wrong with the genetics the genetics haven't been touched again into neuroscience yeah of course because we know you don't need to change your genome to learn new things if you're a brain that's obvious but in them in the you know in the molecular genetics world that's completely bizarre so so i think that's a very symptom of this adult-centric perspective of some why neuroscientists are focused just on the brain yeah because if you take a development perspective the brain development or you know cell developments then you realize that you have neurons
In the body before you have neurons in the brain and actually you need to understand the neurons how they function in the body rather than just in the brain. Whereas for biologists that's kind of like simple because they are not obsessed with the human cognition and just human centric type of like, you know, self-centred human lens and they take the organism as a starting point and then at the organism you have like cells. Yeah. And that's kind of like makes sense.
Yeah, and in fact, the whole developmental thing is so important. I was going to mention this as well in terms of these misconceptions and the things that... There's this really firm idea in a lot of people that we have a proper cognitive human being, and then there are physical objects, and then once you start sort of poking into that, like how did you get here? You know you were a single cell once, both evolutionarily and developmentally,
you were a single cell that probably most people will say that it's you know well described by chemistry and physics and most people not me but most people will look at a single cell and say that okay that this is this cannot be a cognitive system this is just you know it's a it's a it's a it's a chemical machine or you know biochemical machine.
But the facts of developmental biology are that there is no magic lightning flash that sort of says, okay, boom, now you've gone from the land of physics and chemistry and now you're a mind. There is no magic place where that happens, right? So to me, the important thing there to point out is that
The continuity, that's the null hypothesis. It's not on us to have to argue that actually, you know, people think, well, you know, to claim that physical systems and minds are on the same spectrum is this, like, bizarre thing that you have to argue for. No, no, that's the null hypothesis. We know those are the facts of development. So embryogenesis is a critical teacher of that.
If on the other hand, you think that there are great phase transitions or something special happens, that's the thing that needs arguing. And I'm not saying it's impossible. I've not heard a good argument for it, but that's the thing that would need to be shown. You know, the null hypothesis should actually be the background. And that's not how people think about this at all. So I am going to get you to argue for it, even though you don't want to, because, Anna, you're referencing these layers of the cake and the blending and physics and chemistry. Where is the borderline? Perhaps it's continuous between them.
So carrot cake which is like a mixed cake is quite a horrible cake compared to red velvet cake which is demarcated. So please make the case for me because we're talking about the self and Anna you mentioned the other which there's a distinguishing factor there so please what are the
Nourishing factors of talking about what is separated. Yeah. So here's my here's my approach to this. One of the ways that people argue against this kind of continuity thesis is the paradox of the heap.
So the idea is, right, so you get a pile of sand and then they say, well, you know, if, of course you could argue that every time you take a piece of sand away, you know, when does it stop being a heap? And the whole thing is kind of useless. That's the argument. So my point about all of that is that I think all of these terms in terms of these cognitive terms, the mentalistic terms and so on,
I think all of these things are interaction protocols, exactly as Anna was saying. They are ways that we are going to relate to the system. They're not objective facts about the system floating off by itself. They are relationship claims. So what that means is, if you call me up and you say, I have a heap of sand and I need to move it, I don't want to argue about the definition of a heap. What I do want to know is, am I bringing tweezers, a spoon, a shovel, a bulldozer? What am I bringing, right? It's functional. How are we going to relate to this thing?
And so the terminology is only useful to the extent that it gives us a bag of tools to work with. So now let's imagine, so I call this the spectrum of persuadability. And that's kind of an engineering take. You can also say that at the right side of the spectrum, it's more about bi-directional vulnerability and friendship and love and all of these things. But let's just look at the spectrum. So I'll just give you four things that are on the spectrum. So on the left side, you have a mechanical clock.
Okay. And then you have something like a thermostat and then you have something like a dog and then you have something like a human and who knows what you have after that. So what's different along the spectrum, there are a number of interesting things, but the key thing here is what are the bag of tools that you're going to bring to optimally relate to that system. So with the mechanical clock, you are not going to reward it or punish it or convince it of anything. Your only bag of tools is rewiring, physical hardware rewiring. That's pretty much all you're going to do with it.
Once you reach something like a thermostat you have some more interesting options from cybernetics and control theory where now you don't even really need to know how it does what it does what you need to know is a that it is a goal-seeking system and be how to rewrite the goal so if you wanted to keep the temperature in your house at a different range you know how to rewrite the goal and then you can walk away and trust there's a degree of autonomy there's a degree of trust you know this thing
It isn't going to ponder why the house is at a certain temperature, but the one thing it is going to do is hold on to that goal that you've specified for it. So that's interesting. Now we can control that system by rewriting the goals, but you do need to dip into the hardware and rewrite the goals. Now you get to something like a dog, and of course there's a million things in between the spectrum. You get to something like a dog or a horse. Interesting. Thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience whatsoever, you could train a dog or a horse.
You didn't know anything about its synapses. You didn't have to go in and try to run the thing like a puppet with, you know, moving all the neurons around.
It has this amazing interface, this very thin interface whereby rewards and punishments and now you've got a bag of tools from behavioral science and using those, now you're communicating with it and you're providing incentives and things like that. And because this creature has that interface, you don't even need to know much of anything about what's really inside in order to have some effective interactions with it because it's going to do the hard part of taking the signals you give it and converting it to its internal states and moving around the synaptic proteins and all that stuff.
And then, and then sort of further on to the right of that system, you have humans and there, you know, all it takes is sometimes is a whisper of something that's a convincing argument. And then they take it from there, right? They, they, they buy into it or not. They, they might change the course of their life. They might start a revolution. Who knows what they're going to do? Tons of complicated things are going to happen. You didn't have to micromanage any of that. So, so, and so now you're dealing, so what are the tools, right? So now you're dealing with the tools of psychoanalysis and psychiatry and things like that.
So the argument basically I'm making is that
What all of this is about are, it's not really philosophy, it's empirical claims about which set of tools is going to apply. And so now my claim is for novel things, cells, tissues, organs, novel synthetic biology constructs, weird minimal things that people in a life make or, you know, active matter droplets and all of these things. You can't from a philosophical armchair, just like you were saying, the experiments are critical. You can't sit there and say,
Well, that's a cell. I think it's definitely like the clock. You know, I'm a synthetic biologist and this is the chemical machine. It's going to be like the mechanical clock. No, you have to do experiments. And when you do experiments, you try the different tools from the different disciplines and you say, Oh gee, you know, when I use this set of tools, turns out I can do things that you couldn't do if you were treating it as a mechanical clock. And that's a lot of what we've done in this lab. And other people have done too, is to borrow tools from other disciplines. That could be computer science. That could be certainly behavioral and computational neuroscience.
So when one talks about tools, one is implicitly referencing goals because a tool is for something.
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Is that related to depression or derealization or depersonalization? Yes. So I think if you start with
Again if you start with the basic organism but not not with the mental processing right we have a goal which is from the mental and we have it all the time. Even when we sleep with just a life so cannot be depressed or happy if you're not alive so if you don't disentangle if you don't touch the cell from the body.
Then do you realize that the body has an interesting goal of its own which is part of the life which is like keep going keep going and eventually producing and you know keep so that so that's that's a fundamental thing that i like to keep it there because i think i think it's important yeah so there is a goal all the time that i want to say yeah so it's like i like the clock
Who doesn't care the goal and the thing is just like if I stop, I stop. Yeah, whatever. The living systems that we are part of some sort of like wave and process, which is like keep moving, keep moving. Yeah. Like on the fly. Yeah. So there is a goal there all the time. Now, on the top of that, you can be aware you have explicit goals. Right. So I want to be an artist or I want to make a movie or
I want to have an interview in Boston. So the type of goals that you can explicitly attend to and then they can disrupt it, but there is a strike and I cannot take the flight.
But what is really important, I think when you when you detach the when you have the feeling of detachment from the from the body from you also feel detached from reality, which is really interesting, right? As if your connection with the reality is not going through the thinking, but through the embodied experience that you have in life. So if those are disrupted, then
Then the the rest of the pyramid, so to speak, is kind of like feel like disconnected and floating. Yeah. And interestingly enough, enough does that not not makes you feel, let's say, more I don't I don't know how I need to carefully choose my words. Doesn't make you feel more present or real. Yeah. On the contrary, it makes you feel more
Unreal and not present. Yeah. So I think we have a taken for granted goal and body goal that we carry with us all the time, even when we sleep, even when you're in a coma, which is the goal that we share with all living system like viruses and cats and dogs, which is like, keep going, keep going. Yeah.
From the perspective of life, there is no principle reason why a human should keep going, but not the cat or a virus. Yeah. So there is like the same underlying principle of like survival, uh, that we share. And I think that's always there. And the rest is just something that we have on the top of the explicit level. And then you can have disruptions between the two. Right? So we have, um, I don't know, something happens to you. We have an accident and you have a traumatic event.
And then basically messes up with your internal bodily signals and that will change entirely the way you relate to your other goals in life, right? You, you change basically the perspective because now your goal will be like, I want to keep this system safe and disengage as much as possible from the interaction with the environment that might put you in a place which is dangerous.
Enhance this idea of the depression people what they try to do basically is to reduce the energy consuming and just like stick to the very Known scenarios To know not consume too much energy because a healthy person would be like, oh I want to explore because by exploration I want to I can interact with other things where I say and the pressure would be like no actually this is the state Body stays that actually safe. I'm going to keep it. Yeah, I
But paradoxically, this is not sustainable in the long term because in order to thrive, you need to be open to the change and to the uncertainty. And that's something that we need to train. You need to train how to do it. I think the most important thing is not how precise we are in the quality of our
Information processing from the environment. I think what is really important is like how flexible we are to adapt to a constant unknown environment That's like because we we cannot ever predict what is coming next. We are doing our best, but you never know. Yeah, so The information coming to us is always unpredictable in a way Yeah, and hence your best chances for survival is not to build the capacity to deal with
All the information that comes to you rather than just to flexibly adapt to whatever information comes That is useful for you in that particular moment and they just ignore. Yeah
If you are unable to ignore certain information, then it stands in the way, keeps you stuck. This is something like people with mental health would say all the time, I felt stuck. There is no flexibility anymore in the subjectivity on how they relate. I think that may have consequences on how we potentially help
to do interventional therapies because instead of like treating the individual what is wrong in the head or somewhere else actually we should be able to train or to help the to increase the flexibility of the adaptation right and like the safe interaction that you can have and then by by training this type of safe interaction you get
Relateness with the self for free to so to speak like the mental health the health benefits I wanted to
talk a little bit about a new thing that we're doing with a loss of goal directedness and I want to see what you have to say about one part of it which we haven't talked about before. This has to do with, so part of my lab studies aging and this question of why at some point the normal mechanisms that upkeep a particular pattern in the body are not doing that anymore.
And so I preface everything I'm about to say by saying that the paper on this has not been yet peer reviewed. This is a pre-print that's out by Leo Pio Lopez and Ben Hartle as two guys in my lab. So this is brand new stuff.
Standard theories of aging basically fall into two categories. There are damage theories that basically says that over time damage accumulates. So whether it's the DNA or something else, it just gets damaged and eventually you can't keep up. And then there are the programmatic theories that say that basically evolution wants the old organisms to go away. It's somehow helpful to, you know, more resources for the young, whatever. There's a reason for it. There's a programmatic reason for aging.
So I think we have a kind of a third alternative, which is basically, and then we have a bunch of computational work looking at this, where the way we understand morphogenesis, so the creation of the body and then the upkeep of the body as the single cells die and then are replaced and whatever, it's a constant kind of ship of theses situation going on. And what we've been studying is the idea that the tissues have an inherent
Memory, literally, some of it is bioelectrical, some of it is biochemical, maybe biomechanical, that basically is responsible for maintaining a large-scale shape. Cells and materials come and go, but the shape is maintained. Those memories are goals of the cellular collective intelligence in the cybernetic sense. Their goal states that the system works really hard to try and reduce the error against, so they keep trying to maintain that state.
So one of the things we're seeing is that when you have a system like that, a goal-directed intelligence system, which is able to find different ways to get to its goal and so on, something interesting happens after it has achieved its goal. After the goal has been met, if there is no new goal and no reinforcement, external reinforcement of the old goal, things start to degrade. And it's not because there's damage. There's nothing wrong with the hardware. There's nothing wrong with the data. There's nothing wrong with the pieces.
But the goal has been reached and the system does not know what to do anymore and it sort of regresses and disorder comes apart. It's a very weird kind of a way of thinking about it because it suggests that it's intrinsic to being a goal directed in morphogenetic space cognitive system. It isn't caused by some outside disturbance or DNA damage or any of that. It's a fundamental feature. So here's my crazy analogy. I want to see what you make of this.
Imagine kind of this Judeo-Christian version of heaven, right? So you get there, everything is great. There's nothing to worry about and it's infinitely long. So now I can sort of imagine, so this is just intuitively, I don't know if any of this is right, but you can sort of imagine if I had a snake under those conditions, I don't think there would be any problem. I think a snake could just do snake things for basically forever, right? If I had a dog,
I tend to think so. If you had a nice farm with rabbits and all the stuff that dogs like, I tend to, and every day was kind of like every other day, but they were all good days. I tend to think the dog would be fine maybe forever. I don't know. You didn't tell me what you think, but a human in that condition, I'm not at all certain that we could keep ourselves sane over, you know, I could probably keep myself busy for the first 10,000 years. What happens after that? Like a billion years or trillion years. It doesn't, it doesn't seem likely. Right?
So in my head, that's really the problem of aging is that once you meet a goal as a cognitive system, not a mechanism, but a cognitive system, you need a new challenge or some other kind of challenges. Something needs to change and something needs to happen. Otherwise, there's going to be degradation. What do you think? Is any of that plausible? What do you think a mind does over the long term when everything is fine? So I fully agree with you.
I like this idea of open-endedness. So I think that's interesting to life and it comes with the territory, right? So, so when people talk about eternal life, it's a bit like an oxymoron. Yeah. Uh, so I, um, I usually play this game with some of my students say, okay, I'm going to say what you need to say the opposite quite quickly, like good, bad, you know, and I'm saying to them death and everybody says life and I'm saying wrong. And they're like, what do you mean? It's like the opposite of death is life as I know.
The opposite of death is birth. Yeah. And life is what stays between birth and death. So it's intrinsic to a system to have an end and a beginning to have something in between. Yeah. And I think that's, that's probably that you, you, you're seeing with, with the heaven thing, right? It's like, you wouldn't be aware that you are alive, but you are doing things by just being an infinite flat way.
For that when is to occur you need and this is something beautiful comes from some
Because obviously I like science and philosophy, but also I like art because sometimes you get, as I said, very different perspective from art. And writers like Dostoevsky, they will say something like that. They will say, well, actually, you can't really be aware of the light if there is some darkness somewhere in the corner. And it's the contrast between the two that actually gets you the experience that you have right now. And I think that's the idea that I see in your saying, Mike, about
You know the open-endedness right? I need to have some sort of like There is openness, but there is also endedness. Yeah, so there is an end there which is open but has to be
um it's like at a contrast that that gives you like the access to it um and uh another question that i keep asking um because i like to work a bit on this so this idea that well as a as a philosopher i realized philosopher obsessed with death i was like where am i going when i'm going to die what i'm going to do after but i think that really interesting question is like where i was i when before being born it's like that's like
Who am I? Where am I coming from? Right. And that's kind of like this idea of birth was coming into existence, kind of like completely ignored. I mean, almost ignored from there. Uh, and the, the, the birth is missing. Yeah. From philosophy death is present, but the birth is not there. And the thing is like, can I have one without another? Because life is what stands in, in between. Um, and one of the reasons why the birth is not, yeah, because I think,
Going back to, you know, I'm a female philosopher, so this means that, you know, the thinking in philosophy has been dominated by male thinking for centuries. So the entire conceptual toolbox we're operating right now has been inherited through a tradition that has ignored half of the humanity embodiment, female embodiment. So this means that we might have different problems
different takes on the problems that we have by just simply taking in a different uh perspective um a different questioning right um and for me one of the things that are missing like the big elephant in the room it's like the invisible face of the moon is like the birth it's like the
beginning into life. And I think that the two are interconnected. Yeah. So the aging means also the very notion of aging means that there is a beginning somewhere. So it's like if you fall, if we've, I mean, I know that we are obsessed with the ending because we know that's going to end and we never knew that we're going to begin. Yeah. So that's something that is like out of the hour. It's like nobody asked my permission to
Bring me to life. Does I just show up some way or another? And it's like this particular time space, which actually I'm lucky because this particular time space, I, I can go to school, uh, and at the university as a, as a female, yeah. And in a country that I can, I can do that. But, uh, if it was 300 years ago, we don't have this conversation. Yeah. And I think, I think we need to point it out because it's important. So, um,
So I think that's that's the starting point. I think it's kind of like missing because again, this idea of balance here between the two and the communication and going back to the carrot cake. Yeah.
You said it's like the layers are nice. Well, it depends on taste. Some people don't like the layers. Some people like more like the mixture we have, you know, almonds and carrots and stuff. And maybe some things are more like the gelatin one or, you know, more fluid. There are lots of forms of life, not just the ones that we have. The only thing I would like to stress, which I think is really important, whatever we do, whether we like it or not,
We do it from our perspective yeah so we humans investigate things god knows maybe also i don't know maybe cats also to have their own science and they have their communication between the national completely miss.
Well, I think they're on the same spectrum in that
There is a scaling process that gets you from one to the other. I don't think they're radically different natural kinds, but I do think that there are significantly different approaches and those approaches overlap, right? Much like the shovel and the spoon, they overlap at some point where you can sort of get some utility out of both. So fundamentally, I think fundamentally they are not different, but in practical terms, we have different bags of tools that give you different options with different ones.
Because for me, what strikes me as big there is just like, we humans, we do clocks and thermostats, but we don't do dogs. So we don't make dogs. We make clocks and we make thermostats. So there is an interference, partly coming from our way of like, you know, putting matter together to do a thermostat and to do a clock.
We don't find clock naturally in nature. So if human doesn't exist it, clocks didn't exist it. Yeah. So, and the same with thermostats. Yeah. Uh, maybe dogs, they can do the thermostats if they could do different way and the different type of niche, right? They construct this complicated, um, you know, animals do this, they transform the environment and this is what we do as well. So we, but I think it's important to bear in mind that certain of the system that we use,
To map this like continuous actually this are part of the system that we are using to map the continuous right so this is part of the lens that you use and which is fine this is this is only way to do it because we don't have other ways but i think it's always important to be aware of that okay so i created the lens that i'm using to map reality.
I don't find the clock in the universe and then I put it on the scanner evolution trying to figure out where exactly I find myself in this because actually I put it there.
I put this, but I didn't put the dog, you know, something, maybe you are going to put now, you're going to put the centerboards and you know, say, okay, so here is another thing I can put between dog and, uh, you know, the human, it's a different thing. Yeah. It's like, uh, but again, it's not completely coming just from you or from us humans or completely coming from the money to enhance the carrot cake. Right. So it's not complete clear layer. Here is a human, here's a nature.
I'm going to put in, I think whether we like it or not, we kind of like mixtures. Yeah, mixture of we are composed beings all the time for better and for worse. Right. And I personally find it. I know some people find it like, I don't know, not disturbing, but, you know, unusual or
I can't find the word, but I find it more, you know, relaxing the fact that I know says, okay, it's not really my responsibility. I'm part of something bigger. I just need to figure out how to go to the flow, but I don't have to basically be in control and create stuff. It's just like, I need to figure out on the fly.
And there is some something big happening bigger than me. And I'm just part of it. And I find this reassuring. I think that's the word right. Rather than me being some sort of like centred, you know, it's like it's everything around, you know, this human centred special case, anthropocentric of you. And actually, I want to share this very quickly.
Going back to this is why i like when i want to do science right now to go back to the history of science because well it's like in the scale of humanity four hundred five hundred years ago is nothing so we literally thought the same four hundred years ago we have the same needs and everything so you see how the same problems come back again for different forms but it's basically the same problem so.
It was something very funny because you know back then they were saying that you know the center is the Earth is the center of the solar system and hence the center of the universe and everything revolves the Sun basically revolves around the Earth that was like they receive you and you know there was like fights against people lost their lives they were like burned because they they they Giordano Bruno and you know there is a there is a place in
Piazza dei Fiori where he was burned because he would dare to say otherwise. So it was a serious thing, yeah. But then they realized it because they put the hell at the center of the earth, yeah, because it is the fire, you know, this. And then after a while, they realized, wait a minute, it's just like if the universe and the sun is revolving around the earth, and if after the
Center of the earth is the hell then everything revolves around the hell you know that was like logical conclusion but oh my god that can't be that you know we can't put the universe to evolve around the hell you know it has to be the good yeah and i think slowly but surely they just dropped this idea okay so it's not uh yeah and it's there's something i think interesting or this idea that you know we should be extremely careful not to put
whatever concerns us the most at the center of anything like the human, the earth, you know, the health thing, the views that we have. Rather, I think we should take a more like open and porous way to be open to the possibility to actually to see whatever interconnects us with other systems rather than what makes us special.
And by understanding what makes us connected with other system, I think we'll get our specialness for free. We will get it through for that. But rather if we focus just on what have as special, then we're going to miss the rest of, you know, the connectedness with the environment. And I think that's problematic.
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By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here, hit subscribe, and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJayMongol dot org. Well, let me tie heaven and hell together along with your work and a Dostoevsky quote. So Dostoevsky said,
Modern man strives not for an attainment of heaven from earth, but for an abasement of heaven to earth. And so he was saying that, well, what is the paradise we use our, we'll say, well, we'll be bored in the next paradise because we tend to think of in these earthly terms, even if all that would occur would be, you would eat cake and speaking of cake, tying cake together as well. All you would do would be eating cake and then busying yourselves with the continuation of the species.
Then you man would deliberately break it. Okay. Now in that busying yourself with the continuation of the species, pregnancy is there and you have some views on the self and pregnancy. Earlier you talked about in order to understand the first, you have to understand the second. Now you said the second and not a second, not like another as if there was a privileged second. So are you referring to the mother?
Are you referring to something else? Please talk about pregnancy, what it means to be a self and how that comes about. Yeah, so I don't remember saying the self, the other or a other. Sorry about that. I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm trying to do my best with the English I have.
Thank you for asking me this question because I think this is a very important point. So when typically people talk about pregnancy, they automatically associate it with a certain category of people that have the ability to carry babies in their bodies. But if you think of the pregnant state through the perspective of developing human, all of us here shared our body with the body of another person, hence the pregnant state is universal state.
Whether we like it or not, this is how we come to the world. Yeah. So this means that the pregnant state is a universal state. And this is why I'm trying to say it's like we can get rid of the other with other, right? So the other is there from the very beginning. Hence we need to change the unit of analysis from the individual to the individual within another individual, which is within another society being and everything else. So basically you already have the interconnectedness. Yeah.
So, and this is fascinating because again, if you going back with fascinating work that Mike is doing, just forget for a second about neurons, you know, just like let's forget a bit of obsession with neurons in the brain and go back to the humble origins of our bodies as cells.
Because this is where it's incredible wisdom that just like fascinating things are happening at the cellular level way before actually you can't even get neurons if you don't have the cells function a certain way from the very beginning. Yeah. So let's start with the humble origins of it, which actually not that humble. They're sophisticated and super, super smart. Yeah. And I think this idea again, this is a very opening a parenthesis.
I think this idea that actually we starting very small and scale up i think again it's very naive so for instance like we say oh i don't have a better perception of the environment.
actually babies, they have a sense of smell like dogs way more developed than adults. Yeah. It's like the nature gives you the means that you need at a certain stage, the best means to relate to the environment. And at that stage, food is very important. So your sense of smell will be highly developed more than an adult. Yeah. So you have basically a better smeller at the beginning than later on, and then you lose it. Yeah. Because you don't need to do much. You focus on vision and other things. So I'm now on closing the parenthesis.
So this idea that somehow we have like a linear thing and it's like cells are very dumb, but neurons are very smart. Yeah, I think that's naive. Yeah, I think the different type of intelligence that you need can you need to have in place and to communicate with each other from the very beginning and art if you take the pregnant state.
I'm going back again to the self so if you take the pregnant state other cellular level then realize okay so inside the system like which grows again and what i'm talking because i'm using the language and it's like a discrete language with words and saccades but uh in in reality there is no end point and starting point is everything is happening as a continuum right um
So in this continuum which is the system at the level of cellular system that tells which one is you which one is not you does the immune system so you need a very good immune system in place very early on to make sure that you know the interaction that you have with the environment because you have it all the time is not going to give you some sort of viruses and then you let in the cells stuff that you shouldn't let in and then you
Your life journey is ending.
um period where you have the most miscarriages because sometimes that's the negotiation a tough negotiation what is going on it's like we're going to have the resources shared for a moment or not interesting um and basically you have three and then and there you have uh two immune systems within a single organism a single you know we have the pregnant person um and you have um a two immune system communicating with each other trying to
Like a violin, you know, make the concept or work and.
And it's fascinating because you have the placenta and placenta is like the intermediary relational organ in between and that has its own immune system. So basically have a hybrid immune system within one single system. And again, I'm telling you this, this is universal. It's like all humans go through this process. Yeah. So this means that you have this two system communicating and need to make decisions and roughly have three stages.
The first one is the inflammatory one and hence many pregnant people they'll tell you for many of them as like they have nausea and stuff because it's like you know inflammation and then they have the second stage which is like bliss stage because they reach an agreement and then you have the third stage which is like okay so now you're getting to be get out yeah so you need to have the inflammation again to
Make the childbirth happening here. So it's like so and this is a very carefully crafted mechanism. I find it fascinating. I think we should have more work on this because again what I'm trying to say is like this is how we get into life journey through this dialogue. So the first very very first thing we learn as individuals is how to negotiate.
Michael, because we've been talking about the self and we're going to continue talking about it, it would be useful to define it. So why don't you define the self and then we'll see if it comports with your definition.
Wow, yeah. I actually have a definition that I crafted. It's on my website. I can't remember it, of course, verbatim. So, I mean, I think one of the most, let's go back for a second. At one point, I tried, and this is in this 2019 selves paper, I tried to create a rubric on which
You could simultaneously place very diverse intelligences. So I'm talking about human cells, artificial beings, aliens, swarms, robots, all of it. And so I tried to ask myself, what do all these things have in common? So not what they're made of, not how they got here, not their composition or provenance, but what do they all have in common? And what I thought interesting agents have in common is some degree of goal directedness.
So that means that what you could do is you could draw what i call a cognitive like home which is basic it's kinda like a a poor man's minkowski kind of cone where basically what you're showing you collapse all the space into into one axis time is the other.
And what you're trying to draw is the scale of the biggest goals that the system can pursue. Not how far does it sense, not how far can it act, not the range of interactions. You know, there's like the James Webb telescope has massive sensory range, but not that, but the size of the goals, right? So what is the biggest goal? So what I mean by just to give an example, if I know the scale of your goals and the scale of things that stress you out,
I roughly know your degree
capacity and what you're really interested in is maintaining a particular state over a range of a few hundred yards, you might be a dog and you're never going to care about what happens four months from now, you know, 10 miles away. It's too far, right? That you've got a, there's a certain range that you can do. And if you tell me that you, you're working actively towards world peace and the state of the financial markets a hundred years from now, you're probably a human.
And if you tell me that in the linear range you can exert compassion for all the beings of the planet not like a small number the way we can but like all of them then then you'll be you know you're some sort of body software something or beyond human right so so so so from the scale of your goals you can kind of tell what you are so that's that's the basis that that's that's where i start and so we can say that is so so to to define yourself.
You can define a system, and by the way, all this is plastic. So the most salient thing about cells is that they're a process. They're not a fixed thing, so they change all the time. So all of this is plastic. The scale of your goals are plastic. The competencies with which you pursue those goals can change. The problem spaces into which you project your activities and those goals can also change. But a self is like this
I think a useful version of the self is a process that has several interlocked features and one of those features is the ability to remember and to pursue goals in the cybernetic sense. You may not be aware you have goals and you may or may not have the metacognition to change your goals, but you're a goal pursuing agent. That comes with some machinery to try to
Draw a computational boundary between yourself and the outside world. So you have some idea, some hypothesis about where you end and where the outside world begins, which again helps you set goals because your goals are mostly about a particular region. And then there's something else which is important in this. I don't know how deeply you want me to go into all this, but there's a fundamental thing where you are in charge of interpreting what your own memories mean. And
What I mean by that is, at any given moment, you don't have access to the past. What you have access to are the engrams that previous you has compressed various experiences into structures in your brain and body.
And at every given moment, you have to reinterpret those memory structures, whatever the medium is, and continuously tell and retell a coherent story about what you are, how you got here, what the outside world means, what you do next. This is a constant process of construction. So I think a self is that ongoing, basically,
Uh, kind of, uh, you know, self referential process that attempts to tell a story about an ongoing thing with particular boundaries, with particular goals, and in particular always projected forward, right? I don't exactly know what happened in the past. I'm going to do my best to kind of confabulate a consistent story on the fly. But what I do know for sure is that I need to make decisions right now.
i need to decide what do i do next and so that kind of forward-looking self-constructive process that continuously interprets the memory affordances given to you to try to figure out what you're going to do next that that to me sounds like a useful concept to myself and i want to get to your concept but i do want to delve a tad more into this so you mentioned that we're constantly constructing our memories are we constantly
in control of that? Is it us that's constructing the memory? Now, some of this has to do with control, like free will. Is this just automatically happening? Do we have some degree of autonomy or degree of direction that we can place on it? So I mean, so doing a proper discussion of free will can take, you know, an infinite amount of time. But just to say something relevant is two things. One is
I think a useful sense of free will is very time-extended. You don't have right now complete control of whatever your next thought is going to be. And in fact, as you think about free from what? Free from past experience? No. And you don't want to be free from past experience because then you don't learn. Free from the laws of physics? No. So what do you really have at the moment, like within a narrow timeframe? Maybe not much.
But over the long term by the application of consistent effort what you can do is shape your own cognitive structure so that in the future, new things are open to you your own structure allows you to do new things so so i think free will exist in the in the time extended sense where what is the one thing you have free will over is consistent effort to modify yourself in your environment so that future you,
Is more in line with whatever your values are then otherwise it would be that's what you have you have the ability to apply consistent effort i think about it almost like calculus you know in the in the limit it's infinitesimally small.
but eventually you end up with something right and that's what i think it is you know the actual at any given moment it's like infinitesimally small amount of free will but if you keep showing up and keep at it you will you will shape yourself and the information you have in the world you live in whatever in a way that is more in accordance to your values that that i think is a useful form of free will the other thing the other thing to point out and this is kind of a really weird um uh kind of direction that we've that i've been going in lately is that
There are actually two ways of thinking about this. One way of thinking about this is as the being that is interpreting memories. And so this gets into a whole thing of who's the machine and who's the data. So we have this standard kind of Turing paradigm where this is the physical organism or the machine. This thing takes actions and then there's passive data and it sort of processes the data, maybe interprets it, maybe stores it, maybe generalizes it to form some sort of an engram or something.
But I actually think for reasons that we could talk about that the patterns themselves and perhaps the memories themselves have agency of their own. And this is William James kind of nodded at this when he said the thoughts are thinkers, right? This distinction is fundamental. People tend to make a very fundamental distinction. I'm a real physical object and then I have patterns of activity in my excitable medium that are thoughts. I think it's much deeper than that. And I think what we could ask is,
Yes, the agent is interpreting those memories, but some of those memories as patterns as we are, we are metabolic patterns ourselves, have some amount of agency to
Here's a continuum.
a fleeting thought, right? There's a mental pattern that comes and goes. It's gone. Meh, not much agency there. Well, you get some persistent and repetitive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of and they do something interesting. They do a little, and you may have more to say on this than I, they do a little bit of niche construction on the brain. If you have certain kinds of thoughts, they will actually modify your brain such that you will have more of those thoughts, right? So ecologists would say that's niche construction.
Then we can go past that and we can think about something like a personality fragment or an altar, right? Not a full human personality, but also not just a repetitive thought. It's got a little bit of, you know, it has some goal directedness. It will actually do stuff in the world that sometimes screw stuff up for some of the other personalities. Like it really has some agent. And then you have a full human personality and maybe past that some sort of a transpersonal thing that people have talked about.
So we can easily see how there's a continuum here. And I think that some of these thoughts, and you can imagine as patterns within the cognitive medium, think like an easier way to think about this is the caterpillar to butterfly transition, right? So you have a caterpillar, it's a soft bodied creature with a particular control, right? Soft body means you can't push, there are no hard elements to push on like you would with a hard bodied robot, you have to do different things. And it lives in basically a two dimensional world, it crawls around and it eats leaves.
You can, and this is some old work by Doug Blackison and a number of other people, you can train those caterpillars. There's a certain color cue and then they crawl over and they find some leaves and they're happy. That caterpillar has to become a butterfly. In order to become a butterfly, that's a hard-bodied creature that lives in a three-dimensional world. The brain is completely different. So it has to tear down most of the brain, most of the cells die, most of the connections are broken, and you make a new brain, you make a butterfly.
The memories persist. Now that's amazing enough because you're like, wow, how do memories persist when you're refactoring the whole medium? But it's actually much more interesting than that. And it took me years to actually get to what's really interesting about this, which is that the actual memories, the fidelity of the memory,
Is actually not what you need here at all because the actual memories of the caterpillar are useless to the butterfly it doesn't move the same way it doesn't care about leaves none of the details matter the details are completely relevant what you do inherit as a butterfly are kind of the deep lessons that the caterpillar learn and so you have to not only keep the information you have to remap.
And reinterpret that whatever n-gram survive the brain refactoring those n-grams cannot be used the way the caterpillar use them you have to reinterpret them in a completely new way remap them onto a new sensory motor architecture and everything else. So imagine that if there's that process if a particular memory as an agent wants to survive that process.
You cannot stay the same. It's the same paradox that affects us all. If you don't change, you will die. If you do change, you are no longer yourself, so you're also not here. It applies to species, it applies to everything. It's the paradox of change. If you are a memory that wants to survive that process, you cannot remain exactly how you are.
But you might have certain features that would make you more easily interpretable by the butterfly brain, and thus you will make it into this new world, not the same as you were, but to some extent you will remain.
So I think there's two things going on in this process that you asked about. One is the agent is shuffling and reinterpreting these memories. And our current model of this is like this bowtie model that you see in, for example, in autoencoders and neural cellular automaton, things like this, where the process of learning compresses into a generative seed, into an engram, that thin middle layer of that architecture. And so that's an algorithmic process, right?
generalize instances
you know, sort of squeezed out a lot of the correlations. And now you're going to interpret what what those memories mean. And this is what I meant earlier when I said that, you know, a key thing of a self is to figure out what your own memories mean, because you don't know, right? You are not tied to using them. And you know, what you were saying about this makes you fit. This is the thing that makes me sort of makes me happy is this idea that you are in no way tied to the story that was told by your past self.
You are always in the job of reinterpreting and you can always tell a better story and the way that the your past self was it was compressing interpreting that information you are now free to tell it differently and this is also.
Just one last thing, this is also what happens in embryonic development with the genome, because every embryo, they look very reliable and it looks like all they're doing is interpreting, they're following the same cues that their ancestors did all the back in the lineage.
So interesting enough, that same information dynamic is true not only for cognitive systems within their lifetime, but actually for embryogenesis and for evolution as a whole. Because we might think that embryogenesis is stereotypical, that basically every embryo just follows the same rules that the past lineage has. But what we see, and that's what normally happens under normal circumstances, but when you start
investigating that cognitive system by putting barriers between it and its goal, meaning trying to deflect it from the thing it's trying to build. You find out that, no, it actually has incredible creative problem-solving capacity. It doesn't take the meaning of that genome literally at all. It takes the molecular mechanisms that are encoded by that genome as affordances, which it can reshuffle in new ways. And there are some amazing, I've talked about this before, but
some amazing ways that that embryos and other morphogenetic systems manage to make a new a new thing under a new environment in circumstances where all of its parts have changed like massive change they can still figure out how to get the job done by not doing it exactly the way their ancestors did but by creatively finding a new solution in this problem space.
So I think there are two aspects to this. One is that creative interpretation of what your memories, whether they be the genetic memories of your lineage or the actual behavioral memories of a mind, what do your memories mean? And then there's the other question of, okay, but you are a metabolic pattern, you're a ship of theses that exists in various other spaces. These memories are other kinds of patterns. Some of them have some degree of agency as well, anywhere along that spectrum that we talked about.
And what are their goals of their goals to proliferate through as many minds as possible is it to persist is it to grow is it to change i have no idea but i think we need to be looking at it from both both perspectives because it's not obvious who's the agent and who's the data that's our framing like you said before that's what that's a framing that we bring and how you map that onto reality is is there multiple ways of doing that.
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Well that's interesting and inspirational. Let me roughly state back what you said. There are tools that are given to us and there are the ways that our ancestors have used those tools and I'll call that the literal way. We don't have to use those tools in the literal way because we have a goal. We can creatively use those tools and in fact cells do that as well. They don't literally look at the genome. They have a goal and they can change. There's some wiggle room. Now you're extending that further into
memory that we don't have to look at the way that we have interpreted memory in the past. We can think about what is our goal now and then change our interpretation to serve us moving forward. Yeah. Yeah. The basic, basically because so, so biology, both the kind that gives rise to our bodies and, and the, by extension, what gives rise to our minds is committed to the idea that you, you don't know what your substrate meant to anybody, including your past self, because it is labile, but the biological substrate is unreliable.
This is one difference between us and our current computer architectures, where you work like hell to make sure that all the data at every level stays exactly how you put it. When you're programming in a high-level language, you don't think that your registers are going to float off because the copper gets warm. The whole point of a good computer is that that does not happen. In biology, it's exactly the opposite. Biology commits from the beginning. The material is unreliable. We don't know how many copies of anything we're going to have. We don't know if our parts are going to be the same. In fact, you know they're not. They will mutate over time.
So all we're committed to is telling the best story we can right now. And that's why I think, you know, all life is fundamentally a sense-making process. It's a storytelling agent, basically. And you don't know what your information meant to anything in the past. All you're going to do is make the best story of it you can now.
And those differences may be small for a human unlike a caterpillar, you know, your brain mostly doesn't change that much. So the story doesn't float that much, but it can significantly. And I'm sure you can talk about therapeutic the ways, the way, you know, situations where it changes massively, you know, feel free to respond to any of what Mike said, but also your definition of the self. And is it consonant with what Mike said? So I fully agree with what you said, Mike. And, uh, but I want to go back to the cake thing with the carrot cake and the layer cake, because I think this is super important. So,
How do you map a carrot cake, if you want to map a carrot cake? So if you have a layered cake, it's quite simple, just like a measure, you know, distinction from A and B, but a carrot cake, you can't really map that, but you do have a reality carrot cake, way more than layered cake. Actually, it's like clouds, for instance, it's an object, but where exactly the cloud ends and begins. So
There are some mathematical tools that are not mainstream, but they're coming from the chaos theory and fractal theories where they're trying to basically mathematically formalize fuzzy objects, like clouds, like caracades. Those are objects that exist, but if you want to mathematically formalize how you do it,
And I would say going back to your question about the definition of the self, I would say within the series, you have what they call an attractor. So at a state that attracts you, that's like, I would put that the self is that attractor state. Yeah. Right. So something that in the midst of the change, in the midst of the, um, an escapable change you can have, uh, which, uh, kind of like impinges over you, right.
You need to push back like and to keep the tractor state in a way. So basically you negotiate an environment, the negotiating like, okay, give me this, but I don't want this. I don't want the virus. Give me just oxygen. And then I moved to a different state. So it's, um, it's an ongoing like, um, um, track tracking or from a tractor state, which is ideas that, which is like, I want to exist like the, like a system. Yeah.
And paradoxically, I cannot exist without the environment pushing back. And but in the same time, I need to interact in the environment to, you know, be myself, because this is how it exists in a, in a lineage here. So I would, I would define the self as this highly desirable attractor state. Yeah, which at a certain point to the catastrophically
Disappear that's called death. Yeah, and then the question would be is the catastrophe also actually push us to life, you know, so we are we are A desirable attractor states between two catastrophes one is the birth and that one is like the death Yeah, like disintegration and in the meantime, we try to keep this like state in the you know desirable position, which is like
a certain range temperature for the warmth of the body than the sugar level in the human body because otherwise you just like pass out in one of pass out here so and that that attractor state has been not you know decided like that it's like the fruit of like lots of interaction through the time yeah figure out which one is the best attractive for that particular state yeah and that that's I would say but I would say again
Going back to your first question, it's like, without the pushing back, there will be no tractor state, right? So it's like the two define each other, right? In a way, otherwise it would be just like flat eternity, infinity. Going back to what Mike said, it would be so boring. You'd be like, okay, I need a catastrophe now. It's just like, because I need to be like, you know, the life thing would be like what lies in between.
I'm confused about the attractor because an attractor attracts something. So the person who's listening to this, are they supposed to think of their self as the attractor or as what's being attracted? So I would say that what we call the self is an attractor state, right? As I said, it's something that within the chaos, within like the midst of the carrot cake, there is a state that you really want to keep and that's yourself.
Now, the really interesting thing about this is that, as I said, you don't choose to be that attractor, right? It's like something that just exists. Yeah. Because as I said, nobody asked my permission to be alive. You know, it's just like it's a part of something bigger. So I'm connected as an attractor to another system that, you know, you know, interacted and then you have this new being. So it's it's a part of a chain, right?
and is the very fact of being part of the chain that defines me as it is. So hence this idea that you need a other before, uh, to be the self now. And, uh, so I, that's, that, that'd be the main idea. Is the reason for infantile amnesia when we don't access memories before too, usually.
Is the reason for that because we lack a model of self or is it because we lack language? So I push back against the idea that there is amnesia. So maybe there is no explicit recollection, but there is like an encoding in the body that which is really, really powerful and stays there. So children with nonverbal children, with abusive parents, there is a
Memory stored in the body and how they move the body around which is clearly shows.
Going back again to the body is like they haven't forgot about it. It's just like a store at a different level and then you access it. Sometimes people say it's like when I walk, I walk past an old wall this way and then I realize why am I doing this? It's like people don't do that and then realize it somehow connects with certain patterns that they experienced when they were babies and stuff like that which is like kind of inconceivable to explicitly recollect
But there is indirectly like storage because you need to keep track of those so there is no i don't think there is you know there is like this idea of this with switch on switch off right so it's like complete darkness and at a certain point boom with the language is like you become you know aware conscious aware i think we do have experience all the time as i said as uh fetuses uh sorry as babies and um
I'm not sure.
I would contest this idea that, as I said, it's like you have explicit memories on one hand and implicit memories on the others. I think there is really like a continuum and then you can access to different tools and languages, one of them. But you can access different feelings. I'm pretty sure you have this. It's just like sometimes accidentally do certain gesture and then you are triggering the different state and then you retrieve a feeling.
So now you're speaking directly to the audience. I want to know what are your parting words
And especially as we were speaking off air, you were referencing some of the ways that you were getting emails, eliciting new ideas and new connections that didn't occur to you before. Yeah, I think that some of the most interesting conversations take place across disciplines. And I've now had a number of amazing connections with people that are in psychiatry, trauma, of course, computer science and machine learning.
architecture, all kinds of deep history, all kinds of interesting fields where I don't have any expertise, but where people hear some of the stuff that I've been talking about and see interesting parallels to their work. So those kinds of connections, those kind of interdisciplinary projects and so on are some of the most interesting and valuable, I think, for the world going forward because I think the era of distinct
And what message would you like to leave the audience with? And keep in mind that our audience comprises a large portion of researchers. So people who are prospective researchers and people who are in the field already of philosophy, computer science, AI, math and physics.
Yeah, so I think I think my main message would be you need to be we need to be aware of the tools that we are using because the tools we're using changes basically the reality we're looking at. So for instance, like take language when you investigate things that others we take language and you have categories and conceptualization saccadic, you know, it's like one word after another. That's one way to map in reality. But
I mean, reality is a continuum. I don't think we have the conceptual toolbox to map this like continuity. Uh, and also because we are using language as adults, we tend to think of this type of understanding through language as being like the pinnacle. What I want to say is like, perhaps you have more embodied way of understanding would not necessarily require this type of conceptualization, which are
As smart as our high level abstract thinking at the moment, but that they are needed at that particular time when we need to develop it to the things. Yeah. So I think the take home messages be like to stop thinking very naively, like some sort of linear progression, you know, start with some very dump and achieve something like, like very smart, like the other thing. Yeah. I am on the contrary, I think we, um, life or nature call is what you want.
Give us the right tool at the right moment to get into the, um, into the flow, right? Like, like a continuity. So I think that's, that's important. So when we need to put back the humble roots into the spotlight with, um, the importance of an intelligence of the cells in terms of the body is not, it's not, so the body is not some sort of like mechanical thing, like a vehicle that is used to fuel and transport the mind, the smart.
you know, in individual. On the contrary, I think what we call the mind is like, given that to make sure that this body is safe and survive for such a for a long period of time. Yeah. So it's a it's a it's a collaboration. Yeah, so to speak. And there is no continuity between being dumb to being very smart rather just like we have intelligence at
Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. It was great. Thank you so much.
New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy, and consciousness. What are your thoughts?
While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist.
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants where everyone"
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"text": " If you don't change, you will die. If you do change, you are no longer yourself. What all of this is about, it's not really philosophy, it's empirical claims about which set of tools is going to apply. You are in no way tied to the story that was told by your past self."
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"text": " We need to figure out how basically we are linked to other individuals to understand the self. What you're really talking about is ways to relate to that system and gain optimal interaction that enriches both sides."
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"text": " Biology, neuroscience, and philosophy often seem to walk separate paths, but two radical thinkers are challenging our most basal assumptions about consciousness, memory, and the self. Michael Levin, a pioneer in developmental biology, has discovered that intelligence isn't limited to brains, rather it extends all the way down to single cells and even bacterial colonies. Alongside him is cognitive scientist and philosopher Anna Chaunica, who upends the mainstream view of consciousness and selfhood."
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"text": " My name is Kurt Daimungel, and this was part of my three-day tour at Harvard, Tufts, and MIT, where I recorded five podcasts, including this Theolocution with Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor at Tufts University, and Ana Chaunica, who's currently based at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London."
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"text": " The other recordings are with Jacob Barndiz, which is over seven hours long on quantum theory, and Manolis Kellis of MIT. There's also Professor William Hahn, a computer scientist, and that was filmed live at the MIT Media Lab. Subscribe to get notified. Levin and Chaunica's groundbreaking Theolocution raises provocative questions that challenge the foundations of neuroscience and philosophy, such as what is the self? Can you be yourself without others? Is your memory yours to control? And what if thoughts have minds of their own?"
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"text": " What's the largest myth in your respective fields that you have to dispel even to your colleagues?"
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"text": " Neurons and the things that neurons do are an extremely unique aspect of the brain. So it is often assumed that different kinds of intelligence are necessarily limited to brains. And so that's, that's something that we talk about a lot about where neurons actually, and the properties of neural networks, where those things actually came from, both evolutionarily and developmentally, and that this is these kinds of capacities that exist, you know, far, far outside of, of, of brainy organisms. That's a huge one."
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"text": " What sort of neural capacities are you referring to that are present in non-neural networks? Well, for example, I mean, the most obvious thing is that the actual mechanism, so the ion channels, the electrical synapses known as gap junctions, the neurotransmitters, all of those things working in a network to integrate information across space and time, those things are evolutionarily absolutely ancient. They predate multicellularity. So even bacterial biofilms have all of the components. And then there's the actual function. So"
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"text": " The ability to learn from experience to navigate some kind of problem space, not necessarily move around in 3D space, but navigate other problem spaces like physiological space, metabolic space, gene expression space, anatomical space, all of these things long predate the invention of nerve and muscle and running around the 3D world. So all of these capacities are very widespread. So Anna, we were talking off here about how you think differently than your colleagues. So please,"
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"text": " Yeah, so I think in my case the biggest myth because I work on the self and I think people want to want to understand the self. They start with self, but I think it's wrong. I think we should start with the other you know from the very beginning because we take another centric perspective and kind of like the individual self is already there. So fully fledged a bit like the Athena coming from zeus head, but I'm interested more how we get there. You know how you become a self"
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"text": " From a bunch of cells, right? Uh, so you how you develop that and when you ask yourself this question, then You realize that actually cannot be yourself by yourself You need another because the other was there from the very beginning. There's some sort of like lineage or transmission Later on. So I think the biggest myth the biggest myth is that we can figure out things About the self by looking just at the individual. I think that's deeply wrong. We need to look at in a wider"
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"text": " Aspect and I'll say even more product Provocatively that it's like actually we need to start with a second person rather than the first person in order to understand It's just like the second person comes first We don't really choose to be ourselves the way we are. So it's a We are we're kind of like part of something bigger So we need to figure out how basically we are linked as individual to other to other individuals to understand the self I think many many of the concepts that we have right now"
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"text": " I don't know if you know this epicycle thing that we had once upon a time. People started at the time with this preconception that the circle was a perfect figure and because the circle is a perfect figure everything has to move circularly in the sky."
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"text": " But that obviously was not matching the empirical data because people realize and the planets are moving very differently than the, that they were expected according to the circle. So what they did, they had epi-circles in the circle to explain for the mismatching of data. So they basically, they constructed this complicated epi-circle until one day somebody said, actually just drop the idea of a circle. It's not a circle. It's an epi- ellipsis. Yeah."
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"text": " So just like drop an idea and everything fall into place like the Kepler, you know, and I think it's we, we, we need something similar in, in philosophy of mind and cognitive science as well. I think this idea that's, you know, there is one system and then we try to figure out everything through that system. And then at a certain point, something happens, there is actually has dropped out. I look at the elliptic, you know, movement, and then you realize that actually that idea matches the observation. Yeah."
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"text": " Well, what was that? Let's drop that moment for you. What was some axiom that you held on to that your field hold on to? Yeah, so I actually had a couple of those. So it's like a domino effect, boom, boom, boom, you know, from one another. So I did my thesis on physicalism and quality. I started to do the gold, old old fashioned is like, okay, so I have brain states and then subjective experiences like, um,"
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"text": " Fillings and a thing. So ask yourself how exactly some something like which is like immaterial in nature, ineffable is linked to something which is heavily material that can measure, right? You know, you have a brain in your hands has certain consistent certain color. Where exactly are my experiences in the brain? So that's that's a bigger question. And then there was like entire field is like looking up of like how you reduce or not the mental states to physical states."
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"text": " And then I realized that the entire physical discussion around this was based on outdated physical science."
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"text": " Uh, so, and they were not looking at other type of like, because they had taken into account the idea that the most fundamental part is the physics and we just ignore everything else. Just focus on those, like have the layer cake physics at the bottom and then chemistry, biology, psychology on the top. We have the chair in the top, like the subjectivity of experiences. And then we are obsessed about how to connect the cherry with the bottom of the cake. But I think that was like missing, missing the point."
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"text": " And that was my aha moment. I said, okay, actually, what I really need to understand is like how physics relates to chemistry. It's like the two layers of the cake, how they basically link to each other. And then I realized that actually what is probably what is fundamental is not how the bits are layered one to each other and how to dismantle it like the bricks of this wall."
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"text": " Uh, but basically is the interconnectedness between the two that actually is fundamental. So you basically have the relatedness between the two, which is fundamental. And then you keep the relatedness the same. You just like change the bricks and you have a very similar system. So that, that was my aha moment when I realized, wait a minute, actually it's like the armchair thinking and experimental science were kind of like disconnected. So I want to do both. So I, uh, you know, in my lifetime as a human being, a scientist, I don't want to just like,"
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"text": " just like take one track and ignore the other. I want to, you know, do the two together. Even though it's more complicated, it takes more time and it's messier because it's like in between. But I think we have a clearer understanding of like the phenomena. And if you allow me to use a metaphor. So suppose you have a table here."
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"text": " and like this this thing you have and then you want to go from point A to point B and you take the straight line yeah it's the fastest way yeah which is fine but then you can also take right left right left right left right left and then you still arrive at the end point but at the end of the day you mapped better the surface of the that that table if you just like take the tours rather than just like"
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"text": " Go straight because basically experience other perspective on the thing. So you have a like a clear understanding of the phenomena. So that's the bullet I'm biting and say, okay, so maybe it'll take me longer to get to my end point. But"
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"text": " I want to have this like rich perspective because I don't think this idea of disciplinarity is quite new actually in scientists like people of three hundred years ago when they were doing philosophy like Rene Descartes or some mathematicians they were also opticians so he wrote a treat in optics"
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"text": " He was also a mathematician, so he invented the XY thing. So there is no clear-cut distinction, and I think this is something very new that we inherited in our society. It's like, okay, here's your discipline, here's your discipline, here's those methods. It's kind of like separate parallel tracks, and sometimes they don't communicate with each other. And when they come together, it's like, oh, it was like a collision. What was that? I realized that"
},
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"text": " You know, it's like you can spend your entire career on a truck and then is blown away in a couple of seconds by somebody coming from a different field. And I said, okay, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. I want to with that. So right now that's my moment is just like that. I can't do it from armchair alone."
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"text": " I see. The point about the disciplines is very important because you know right away it's an issue because I can often tell what department I'm talking in based on which part of my talk makes people mad and it's often a different thing because certain things are completely obvious in one department and they're heresy in a different department and so you can right away tell that there's a problem"
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"text": " Can you give an example of when you're presenting and how you can tell the difference?"
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"text": " the information processing in a group of cells is not determined by the genetics. It's driven. The memory is stored in and is driven by and there's plasticity at the level of electrophysiological circuits and they hold the actual information about what's going to happen in a neuroscience department. Like, well, yeah, no kidding. But then, but then to them, the odd part is when I say, yeah, but it doesn't have to be neurons. And in fact, what's a neuron anyway, right? And we just get, okay, so that's, so the first part is obvious to them. The second part is, is, is weird."
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"text": " If I say that in a molecular genetics department, it's like, what are you talking about? Of course, it's the genes and then the rest of it is, you know, sort of the fluff and the genes drive and then, you know, but then they're like, well, yeah, the cells are similar and whatnot. So it's like that same idea that a group of cells is reprogrammable with respect to what it's going to do. And that, you know, if I talk about, let's say, the pattern memory and the two-headed plenary and the fact that they had a physiological experience that permanently"
},
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"text": " altered how those cells are going to behave in the future there's nothing wrong with the genetics the genetics haven't been touched again into neuroscience yeah of course because we know you don't need to change your genome to learn new things if you're a brain that's obvious but in them in the you know in the molecular genetics world that's completely bizarre so so i think that's a very symptom of this adult-centric perspective of some why neuroscientists are focused just on the brain yeah because if you take a development perspective the brain development or you know cell developments then you realize that you have neurons"
},
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"text": " In the body before you have neurons in the brain and actually you need to understand the neurons how they function in the body rather than just in the brain. Whereas for biologists that's kind of like simple because they are not obsessed with the human cognition and just human centric type of like, you know, self-centred human lens and they take the organism as a starting point and then at the organism you have like cells. Yeah. And that's kind of like makes sense."
},
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"text": " Yeah, and in fact, the whole developmental thing is so important. I was going to mention this as well in terms of these misconceptions and the things that... There's this really firm idea in a lot of people that we have a proper cognitive human being, and then there are physical objects, and then once you start sort of poking into that, like how did you get here? You know you were a single cell once, both evolutionarily and developmentally,"
},
{
"end_time": 946.527,
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"start_time": 930.333,
"text": " you were a single cell that probably most people will say that it's you know well described by chemistry and physics and most people not me but most people will look at a single cell and say that okay that this is this cannot be a cognitive system this is just you know it's a it's a it's a it's a chemical machine or you know biochemical machine."
},
{
"end_time": 962.415,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 946.527,
"text": " But the facts of developmental biology are that there is no magic lightning flash that sort of says, okay, boom, now you've gone from the land of physics and chemistry and now you're a mind. There is no magic place where that happens, right? So to me, the important thing there to point out is that"
},
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"text": " The continuity, that's the null hypothesis. It's not on us to have to argue that actually, you know, people think, well, you know, to claim that physical systems and minds are on the same spectrum is this, like, bizarre thing that you have to argue for. No, no, that's the null hypothesis. We know those are the facts of development. So embryogenesis is a critical teacher of that."
},
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"text": " If on the other hand, you think that there are great phase transitions or something special happens, that's the thing that needs arguing. And I'm not saying it's impossible. I've not heard a good argument for it, but that's the thing that would need to be shown. You know, the null hypothesis should actually be the background. And that's not how people think about this at all. So I am going to get you to argue for it, even though you don't want to, because, Anna, you're referencing these layers of the cake and the blending and physics and chemistry. Where is the borderline? Perhaps it's continuous between them."
},
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"text": " So carrot cake which is like a mixed cake is quite a horrible cake compared to red velvet cake which is demarcated. So please make the case for me because we're talking about the self and Anna you mentioned the other which there's a distinguishing factor there so please what are the"
},
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"text": " Nourishing factors of talking about what is separated. Yeah. So here's my here's my approach to this. One of the ways that people argue against this kind of continuity thesis is the paradox of the heap."
},
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"index": 43,
"start_time": 1044.787,
"text": " So the idea is, right, so you get a pile of sand and then they say, well, you know, if, of course you could argue that every time you take a piece of sand away, you know, when does it stop being a heap? And the whole thing is kind of useless. That's the argument. So my point about all of that is that I think all of these terms in terms of these cognitive terms, the mentalistic terms and so on,"
},
{
"end_time": 1093.49,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1063.951,
"text": " I think all of these things are interaction protocols, exactly as Anna was saying. They are ways that we are going to relate to the system. They're not objective facts about the system floating off by itself. They are relationship claims. So what that means is, if you call me up and you say, I have a heap of sand and I need to move it, I don't want to argue about the definition of a heap. What I do want to know is, am I bringing tweezers, a spoon, a shovel, a bulldozer? What am I bringing, right? It's functional. How are we going to relate to this thing?"
},
{
"end_time": 1117.602,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1093.49,
"text": " And so the terminology is only useful to the extent that it gives us a bag of tools to work with. So now let's imagine, so I call this the spectrum of persuadability. And that's kind of an engineering take. You can also say that at the right side of the spectrum, it's more about bi-directional vulnerability and friendship and love and all of these things. But let's just look at the spectrum. So I'll just give you four things that are on the spectrum. So on the left side, you have a mechanical clock."
},
{
"end_time": 1142.773,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1117.961,
"text": " Okay. And then you have something like a thermostat and then you have something like a dog and then you have something like a human and who knows what you have after that. So what's different along the spectrum, there are a number of interesting things, but the key thing here is what are the bag of tools that you're going to bring to optimally relate to that system. So with the mechanical clock, you are not going to reward it or punish it or convince it of anything. Your only bag of tools is rewiring, physical hardware rewiring. That's pretty much all you're going to do with it."
},
{
"end_time": 1165.606,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1143.251,
"text": " Once you reach something like a thermostat you have some more interesting options from cybernetics and control theory where now you don't even really need to know how it does what it does what you need to know is a that it is a goal-seeking system and be how to rewrite the goal so if you wanted to keep the temperature in your house at a different range you know how to rewrite the goal and then you can walk away and trust there's a degree of autonomy there's a degree of trust you know this thing"
},
{
"end_time": 1192.244,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1165.606,
"text": " It isn't going to ponder why the house is at a certain temperature, but the one thing it is going to do is hold on to that goal that you've specified for it. So that's interesting. Now we can control that system by rewriting the goals, but you do need to dip into the hardware and rewrite the goals. Now you get to something like a dog, and of course there's a million things in between the spectrum. You get to something like a dog or a horse. Interesting. Thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience whatsoever, you could train a dog or a horse."
},
{
"end_time": 1198.439,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1192.551,
"text": " You didn't know anything about its synapses. You didn't have to go in and try to run the thing like a puppet with, you know, moving all the neurons around."
},
{
"end_time": 1227.978,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1198.831,
"text": " It has this amazing interface, this very thin interface whereby rewards and punishments and now you've got a bag of tools from behavioral science and using those, now you're communicating with it and you're providing incentives and things like that. And because this creature has that interface, you don't even need to know much of anything about what's really inside in order to have some effective interactions with it because it's going to do the hard part of taking the signals you give it and converting it to its internal states and moving around the synaptic proteins and all that stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 1257.602,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1228.49,
"text": " And then, and then sort of further on to the right of that system, you have humans and there, you know, all it takes is sometimes is a whisper of something that's a convincing argument. And then they take it from there, right? They, they, they buy into it or not. They, they might change the course of their life. They might start a revolution. Who knows what they're going to do? Tons of complicated things are going to happen. You didn't have to micromanage any of that. So, so, and so now you're dealing, so what are the tools, right? So now you're dealing with the tools of psychoanalysis and psychiatry and things like that."
},
{
"end_time": 1261.715,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1258.029,
"text": " So the argument basically I'm making is that"
},
{
"end_time": 1288.814,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1262.227,
"text": " What all of this is about are, it's not really philosophy, it's empirical claims about which set of tools is going to apply. And so now my claim is for novel things, cells, tissues, organs, novel synthetic biology constructs, weird minimal things that people in a life make or, you know, active matter droplets and all of these things. You can't from a philosophical armchair, just like you were saying, the experiments are critical. You can't sit there and say,"
},
{
"end_time": 1317.261,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1289.206,
"text": " Well, that's a cell. I think it's definitely like the clock. You know, I'm a synthetic biologist and this is the chemical machine. It's going to be like the mechanical clock. No, you have to do experiments. And when you do experiments, you try the different tools from the different disciplines and you say, Oh gee, you know, when I use this set of tools, turns out I can do things that you couldn't do if you were treating it as a mechanical clock. And that's a lot of what we've done in this lab. And other people have done too, is to borrow tools from other disciplines. That could be computer science. That could be certainly behavioral and computational neuroscience."
},
{
"end_time": 1346.749,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1317.568,
"text": " So when one talks about tools, one is implicitly referencing goals because a tool is for something."
},
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"end_time": 1369.616,
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"start_time": 1347.261,
"text": " As you know, on Theories of Everything, we delve into some of the most reality-spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies to stay informed"
},
{
"end_time": 1380.964,
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"start_time": 1369.667,
"text": " In an ever-evolving landscape, I see The Economist as a wellspring of insightful analysis and in-depth reporting on the various topics we explore here and beyond."
},
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"end_time": 1405.623,
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"start_time": 1381.408,
"text": " The economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments, whether it's in scientific innovation or the shifting tectonic plates of global politics. The economist provides comprehensive coverage that goes beyond the headlines. What sets the economist apart is their ability to make complex issues accessible and engaging, much like we strive to do in this podcast."
},
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"text": " If you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a deeper understanding of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist. It's an investment into intellectual growth, one that you won't regret. As a listener of Toe, you get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less."
},
{
"end_time": 1448.507,
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"start_time": 1427.329,
"text": " Is that related to depression or derealization or depersonalization? Yes. So I think if you start with"
},
{
"end_time": 1471.544,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1448.985,
"text": " Again if you start with the basic organism but not not with the mental processing right we have a goal which is from the mental and we have it all the time. Even when we sleep with just a life so cannot be depressed or happy if you're not alive so if you don't disentangle if you don't touch the cell from the body."
},
{
"end_time": 1494.172,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1471.92,
"text": " Then do you realize that the body has an interesting goal of its own which is part of the life which is like keep going keep going and eventually producing and you know keep so that so that's that's a fundamental thing that i like to keep it there because i think i think it's important yeah so there is a goal all the time that i want to say yeah so it's like i like the clock"
},
{
"end_time": 1524.735,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1494.94,
"text": " Who doesn't care the goal and the thing is just like if I stop, I stop. Yeah, whatever. The living systems that we are part of some sort of like wave and process, which is like keep moving, keep moving. Yeah. Like on the fly. Yeah. So there is a goal there all the time. Now, on the top of that, you can be aware you have explicit goals. Right. So I want to be an artist or I want to make a movie or"
},
{
"end_time": 1537.329,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1525.401,
"text": " I want to have an interview in Boston. So the type of goals that you can explicitly attend to and then they can disrupt it, but there is a strike and I cannot take the flight."
},
{
"end_time": 1562.278,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1537.79,
"text": " But what is really important, I think when you when you detach the when you have the feeling of detachment from the from the body from you also feel detached from reality, which is really interesting, right? As if your connection with the reality is not going through the thinking, but through the embodied experience that you have in life. So if those are disrupted, then"
},
{
"end_time": 1591.152,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1563.012,
"text": " Then the the rest of the pyramid, so to speak, is kind of like feel like disconnected and floating. Yeah. And interestingly enough, enough does that not not makes you feel, let's say, more I don't I don't know how I need to carefully choose my words. Doesn't make you feel more present or real. Yeah. On the contrary, it makes you feel more"
},
{
"end_time": 1619.428,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1591.698,
"text": " Unreal and not present. Yeah. So I think we have a taken for granted goal and body goal that we carry with us all the time, even when we sleep, even when you're in a coma, which is the goal that we share with all living system like viruses and cats and dogs, which is like, keep going, keep going. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1649.599,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1619.855,
"text": " From the perspective of life, there is no principle reason why a human should keep going, but not the cat or a virus. Yeah. So there is like the same underlying principle of like survival, uh, that we share. And I think that's always there. And the rest is just something that we have on the top of the explicit level. And then you can have disruptions between the two. Right? So we have, um, I don't know, something happens to you. We have an accident and you have a traumatic event."
},
{
"end_time": 1677.449,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1649.991,
"text": " And then basically messes up with your internal bodily signals and that will change entirely the way you relate to your other goals in life, right? You, you change basically the perspective because now your goal will be like, I want to keep this system safe and disengage as much as possible from the interaction with the environment that might put you in a place which is dangerous."
},
{
"end_time": 1704.974,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1677.841,
"text": " Enhance this idea of the depression people what they try to do basically is to reduce the energy consuming and just like stick to the very Known scenarios To know not consume too much energy because a healthy person would be like, oh I want to explore because by exploration I want to I can interact with other things where I say and the pressure would be like no actually this is the state Body stays that actually safe. I'm going to keep it. Yeah, I"
},
{
"end_time": 1728.046,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1705.265,
"text": " But paradoxically, this is not sustainable in the long term because in order to thrive, you need to be open to the change and to the uncertainty. And that's something that we need to train. You need to train how to do it. I think the most important thing is not how precise we are in the quality of our"
},
{
"end_time": 1757.722,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1728.643,
"text": " Information processing from the environment. I think what is really important is like how flexible we are to adapt to a constant unknown environment That's like because we we cannot ever predict what is coming next. We are doing our best, but you never know. Yeah, so The information coming to us is always unpredictable in a way Yeah, and hence your best chances for survival is not to build the capacity to deal with"
},
{
"end_time": 1770.162,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1759.497,
"text": " All the information that comes to you rather than just to flexibly adapt to whatever information comes That is useful for you in that particular moment and they just ignore. Yeah"
},
{
"end_time": 1791.101,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1770.794,
"text": " If you are unable to ignore certain information, then it stands in the way, keeps you stuck. This is something like people with mental health would say all the time, I felt stuck. There is no flexibility anymore in the subjectivity on how they relate. I think that may have consequences on how we potentially help"
},
{
"end_time": 1820.742,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1792.363,
"text": " to do interventional therapies because instead of like treating the individual what is wrong in the head or somewhere else actually we should be able to train or to help the to increase the flexibility of the adaptation right and like the safe interaction that you can have and then by by training this type of safe interaction you get"
},
{
"end_time": 1829.172,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1821.118,
"text": " Relateness with the self for free to so to speak like the mental health the health benefits I wanted to"
},
{
"end_time": 1853.029,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1829.531,
"text": " talk a little bit about a new thing that we're doing with a loss of goal directedness and I want to see what you have to say about one part of it which we haven't talked about before. This has to do with, so part of my lab studies aging and this question of why at some point the normal mechanisms that upkeep a particular pattern in the body are not doing that anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 1870.247,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1853.473,
"text": " And so I preface everything I'm about to say by saying that the paper on this has not been yet peer reviewed. This is a pre-print that's out by Leo Pio Lopez and Ben Hartle as two guys in my lab. So this is brand new stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 1897.312,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1870.674,
"text": " Standard theories of aging basically fall into two categories. There are damage theories that basically says that over time damage accumulates. So whether it's the DNA or something else, it just gets damaged and eventually you can't keep up. And then there are the programmatic theories that say that basically evolution wants the old organisms to go away. It's somehow helpful to, you know, more resources for the young, whatever. There's a reason for it. There's a programmatic reason for aging."
},
{
"end_time": 1923.387,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1897.551,
"text": " So I think we have a kind of a third alternative, which is basically, and then we have a bunch of computational work looking at this, where the way we understand morphogenesis, so the creation of the body and then the upkeep of the body as the single cells die and then are replaced and whatever, it's a constant kind of ship of theses situation going on. And what we've been studying is the idea that the tissues have an inherent"
},
{
"end_time": 1948.336,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1923.814,
"text": " Memory, literally, some of it is bioelectrical, some of it is biochemical, maybe biomechanical, that basically is responsible for maintaining a large-scale shape. Cells and materials come and go, but the shape is maintained. Those memories are goals of the cellular collective intelligence in the cybernetic sense. Their goal states that the system works really hard to try and reduce the error against, so they keep trying to maintain that state."
},
{
"end_time": 1977.875,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1948.78,
"text": " So one of the things we're seeing is that when you have a system like that, a goal-directed intelligence system, which is able to find different ways to get to its goal and so on, something interesting happens after it has achieved its goal. After the goal has been met, if there is no new goal and no reinforcement, external reinforcement of the old goal, things start to degrade. And it's not because there's damage. There's nothing wrong with the hardware. There's nothing wrong with the data. There's nothing wrong with the pieces."
},
{
"end_time": 2006.203,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1978.319,
"text": " But the goal has been reached and the system does not know what to do anymore and it sort of regresses and disorder comes apart. It's a very weird kind of a way of thinking about it because it suggests that it's intrinsic to being a goal directed in morphogenetic space cognitive system. It isn't caused by some outside disturbance or DNA damage or any of that. It's a fundamental feature. So here's my crazy analogy. I want to see what you make of this."
},
{
"end_time": 2033.677,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2006.596,
"text": " Imagine kind of this Judeo-Christian version of heaven, right? So you get there, everything is great. There's nothing to worry about and it's infinitely long. So now I can sort of imagine, so this is just intuitively, I don't know if any of this is right, but you can sort of imagine if I had a snake under those conditions, I don't think there would be any problem. I think a snake could just do snake things for basically forever, right? If I had a dog,"
},
{
"end_time": 2060.623,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2034.428,
"text": " I tend to think so. If you had a nice farm with rabbits and all the stuff that dogs like, I tend to, and every day was kind of like every other day, but they were all good days. I tend to think the dog would be fine maybe forever. I don't know. You didn't tell me what you think, but a human in that condition, I'm not at all certain that we could keep ourselves sane over, you know, I could probably keep myself busy for the first 10,000 years. What happens after that? Like a billion years or trillion years. It doesn't, it doesn't seem likely. Right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2085.009,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2061.032,
"text": " So in my head, that's really the problem of aging is that once you meet a goal as a cognitive system, not a mechanism, but a cognitive system, you need a new challenge or some other kind of challenges. Something needs to change and something needs to happen. Otherwise, there's going to be degradation. What do you think? Is any of that plausible? What do you think a mind does over the long term when everything is fine? So I fully agree with you."
},
{
"end_time": 2115.247,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2086.391,
"text": " I like this idea of open-endedness. So I think that's interesting to life and it comes with the territory, right? So, so when people talk about eternal life, it's a bit like an oxymoron. Yeah. Uh, so I, um, I usually play this game with some of my students say, okay, I'm going to say what you need to say the opposite quite quickly, like good, bad, you know, and I'm saying to them death and everybody says life and I'm saying wrong. And they're like, what do you mean? It's like the opposite of death is life as I know."
},
{
"end_time": 2142.807,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2115.742,
"text": " The opposite of death is birth. Yeah. And life is what stays between birth and death. So it's intrinsic to a system to have an end and a beginning to have something in between. Yeah. And I think that's, that's probably that you, you, you're seeing with, with the heaven thing, right? It's like, you wouldn't be aware that you are alive, but you are doing things by just being an infinite flat way."
},
{
"end_time": 2152.312,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2143.882,
"text": " For that when is to occur you need and this is something beautiful comes from some"
},
{
"end_time": 2180.725,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2152.722,
"text": " Because obviously I like science and philosophy, but also I like art because sometimes you get, as I said, very different perspective from art. And writers like Dostoevsky, they will say something like that. They will say, well, actually, you can't really be aware of the light if there is some darkness somewhere in the corner. And it's the contrast between the two that actually gets you the experience that you have right now. And I think that's the idea that I see in your saying, Mike, about"
},
{
"end_time": 2197.637,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2180.725,
"text": " You know the open-endedness right? I need to have some sort of like There is openness, but there is also endedness. Yeah, so there is an end there which is open but has to be"
},
{
"end_time": 2224.411,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2197.995,
"text": " um it's like at a contrast that that gives you like the access to it um and uh another question that i keep asking um because i like to work a bit on this so this idea that well as a as a philosopher i realized philosopher obsessed with death i was like where am i going when i'm going to die what i'm going to do after but i think that really interesting question is like where i was i when before being born it's like that's like"
},
{
"end_time": 2253.08,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2225.145,
"text": " Who am I? Where am I coming from? Right. And that's kind of like this idea of birth was coming into existence, kind of like completely ignored. I mean, almost ignored from there. Uh, and the, the, the birth is missing. Yeah. From philosophy death is present, but the birth is not there. And the thing is like, can I have one without another? Because life is what stands in, in between. Um, and one of the reasons why the birth is not, yeah, because I think,"
},
{
"end_time": 2278.2,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2253.524,
"text": " Going back to, you know, I'm a female philosopher, so this means that, you know, the thinking in philosophy has been dominated by male thinking for centuries. So the entire conceptual toolbox we're operating right now has been inherited through a tradition that has ignored half of the humanity embodiment, female embodiment. So this means that we might have different problems"
},
{
"end_time": 2297.602,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2278.729,
"text": " different takes on the problems that we have by just simply taking in a different uh perspective um a different questioning right um and for me one of the things that are missing like the big elephant in the room it's like the invisible face of the moon is like the birth it's like the"
},
{
"end_time": 2327.637,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2297.858,
"text": " beginning into life. And I think that the two are interconnected. Yeah. So the aging means also the very notion of aging means that there is a beginning somewhere. So it's like if you fall, if we've, I mean, I know that we are obsessed with the ending because we know that's going to end and we never knew that we're going to begin. Yeah. So that's something that is like out of the hour. It's like nobody asked my permission to"
},
{
"end_time": 2354.189,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2328.097,
"text": " Bring me to life. Does I just show up some way or another? And it's like this particular time space, which actually I'm lucky because this particular time space, I, I can go to school, uh, and at the university as a, as a female, yeah. And in a country that I can, I can do that. But, uh, if it was 300 years ago, we don't have this conversation. Yeah. And I think, I think we need to point it out because it's important. So, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2369.855,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2354.923,
"text": " So I think that's that's the starting point. I think it's kind of like missing because again, this idea of balance here between the two and the communication and going back to the carrot cake. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 2397.056,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2370.52,
"text": " You said it's like the layers are nice. Well, it depends on taste. Some people don't like the layers. Some people like more like the mixture we have, you know, almonds and carrots and stuff. And maybe some things are more like the gelatin one or, you know, more fluid. There are lots of forms of life, not just the ones that we have. The only thing I would like to stress, which I think is really important, whatever we do, whether we like it or not,"
},
{
"end_time": 2412.227,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2397.517,
"text": " We do it from our perspective yeah so we humans investigate things god knows maybe also i don't know maybe cats also to have their own science and they have their communication between the national completely miss."
},
{
"end_time": 2440.896,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2412.824,
"text": " Well, I think they're on the same spectrum in that"
},
{
"end_time": 2469.224,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2441.459,
"text": " There is a scaling process that gets you from one to the other. I don't think they're radically different natural kinds, but I do think that there are significantly different approaches and those approaches overlap, right? Much like the shovel and the spoon, they overlap at some point where you can sort of get some utility out of both. So fundamentally, I think fundamentally they are not different, but in practical terms, we have different bags of tools that give you different options with different ones."
},
{
"end_time": 2496.732,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2469.821,
"text": " Because for me, what strikes me as big there is just like, we humans, we do clocks and thermostats, but we don't do dogs. So we don't make dogs. We make clocks and we make thermostats. So there is an interference, partly coming from our way of like, you know, putting matter together to do a thermostat and to do a clock."
},
{
"end_time": 2525.247,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2497.466,
"text": " We don't find clock naturally in nature. So if human doesn't exist it, clocks didn't exist it. Yeah. So, and the same with thermostats. Yeah. Uh, maybe dogs, they can do the thermostats if they could do different way and the different type of niche, right? They construct this complicated, um, you know, animals do this, they transform the environment and this is what we do as well. So we, but I think it's important to bear in mind that certain of the system that we use,"
},
{
"end_time": 2547.978,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2525.64,
"text": " To map this like continuous actually this are part of the system that we are using to map the continuous right so this is part of the lens that you use and which is fine this is this is only way to do it because we don't have other ways but i think it's always important to be aware of that okay so i created the lens that i'm using to map reality."
},
{
"end_time": 2558.2,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2548.558,
"text": " I don't find the clock in the universe and then I put it on the scanner evolution trying to figure out where exactly I find myself in this because actually I put it there."
},
{
"end_time": 2586.186,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2558.831,
"text": " I put this, but I didn't put the dog, you know, something, maybe you are going to put now, you're going to put the centerboards and you know, say, okay, so here is another thing I can put between dog and, uh, you know, the human, it's a different thing. Yeah. It's like, uh, but again, it's not completely coming just from you or from us humans or completely coming from the money to enhance the carrot cake. Right. So it's not complete clear layer. Here is a human, here's a nature."
},
{
"end_time": 2614.565,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2586.903,
"text": " I'm going to put in, I think whether we like it or not, we kind of like mixtures. Yeah, mixture of we are composed beings all the time for better and for worse. Right. And I personally find it. I know some people find it like, I don't know, not disturbing, but, you know, unusual or"
},
{
"end_time": 2637.483,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2616.288,
"text": " I can't find the word, but I find it more, you know, relaxing the fact that I know says, okay, it's not really my responsibility. I'm part of something bigger. I just need to figure out how to go to the flow, but I don't have to basically be in control and create stuff. It's just like, I need to figure out on the fly."
},
{
"end_time": 2667.568,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2638.063,
"text": " And there is some something big happening bigger than me. And I'm just part of it. And I find this reassuring. I think that's the word right. Rather than me being some sort of like centred, you know, it's like it's everything around, you know, this human centred special case, anthropocentric of you. And actually, I want to share this very quickly."
},
{
"end_time": 2690.111,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2668.558,
"text": " Going back to this is why i like when i want to do science right now to go back to the history of science because well it's like in the scale of humanity four hundred five hundred years ago is nothing so we literally thought the same four hundred years ago we have the same needs and everything so you see how the same problems come back again for different forms but it's basically the same problem so."
},
{
"end_time": 2719.872,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2690.811,
"text": " It was something very funny because you know back then they were saying that you know the center is the Earth is the center of the solar system and hence the center of the universe and everything revolves the Sun basically revolves around the Earth that was like they receive you and you know there was like fights against people lost their lives they were like burned because they they they Giordano Bruno and you know there is a there is a place in"
},
{
"end_time": 2744.514,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2720.401,
"text": " Piazza dei Fiori where he was burned because he would dare to say otherwise. So it was a serious thing, yeah. But then they realized it because they put the hell at the center of the earth, yeah, because it is the fire, you know, this. And then after a while, they realized, wait a minute, it's just like if the universe and the sun is revolving around the earth, and if after the"
},
{
"end_time": 2771.664,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2745.111,
"text": " Center of the earth is the hell then everything revolves around the hell you know that was like logical conclusion but oh my god that can't be that you know we can't put the universe to evolve around the hell you know it has to be the good yeah and i think slowly but surely they just dropped this idea okay so it's not uh yeah and it's there's something i think interesting or this idea that you know we should be extremely careful not to put"
},
{
"end_time": 2798.319,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2772.688,
"text": " whatever concerns us the most at the center of anything like the human, the earth, you know, the health thing, the views that we have. Rather, I think we should take a more like open and porous way to be open to the possibility to actually to see whatever interconnects us with other systems rather than what makes us special."
},
{
"end_time": 2821.937,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2798.473,
"text": " And by understanding what makes us connected with other system, I think we'll get our specialness for free. We will get it through for that. But rather if we focus just on what have as special, then we're going to miss the rest of, you know, the connectedness with the environment. And I think that's problematic."
},
{
"end_time": 2843.609,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2822.756,
"text": " Hi everyone, hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like-minded pilgrimers."
},
{
"end_time": 2873.029,
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"start_time": 2843.609,
"text": " By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here, hit subscribe, and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, KurtJayMongol dot org. Well, let me tie heaven and hell together along with your work and a Dostoevsky quote. So Dostoevsky said,"
},
{
"end_time": 2901.664,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2873.78,
"text": " Modern man strives not for an attainment of heaven from earth, but for an abasement of heaven to earth. And so he was saying that, well, what is the paradise we use our, we'll say, well, we'll be bored in the next paradise because we tend to think of in these earthly terms, even if all that would occur would be, you would eat cake and speaking of cake, tying cake together as well. All you would do would be eating cake and then busying yourselves with the continuation of the species."
},
{
"end_time": 2931.152,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2902.346,
"text": " Then you man would deliberately break it. Okay. Now in that busying yourself with the continuation of the species, pregnancy is there and you have some views on the self and pregnancy. Earlier you talked about in order to understand the first, you have to understand the second. Now you said the second and not a second, not like another as if there was a privileged second. So are you referring to the mother?"
},
{
"end_time": 2948.609,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2931.852,
"text": " Are you referring to something else? Please talk about pregnancy, what it means to be a self and how that comes about. Yeah, so I don't remember saying the self, the other or a other. Sorry about that. I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm trying to do my best with the English I have."
},
{
"end_time": 2975.981,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2949.155,
"text": " Thank you for asking me this question because I think this is a very important point. So when typically people talk about pregnancy, they automatically associate it with a certain category of people that have the ability to carry babies in their bodies. But if you think of the pregnant state through the perspective of developing human, all of us here shared our body with the body of another person, hence the pregnant state is universal state."
},
{
"end_time": 3005.162,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2976.732,
"text": " Whether we like it or not, this is how we come to the world. Yeah. So this means that the pregnant state is a universal state. And this is why I'm trying to say it's like we can get rid of the other with other, right? So the other is there from the very beginning. Hence we need to change the unit of analysis from the individual to the individual within another individual, which is within another society being and everything else. So basically you already have the interconnectedness. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 3025.247,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3005.572,
"text": " So, and this is fascinating because again, if you going back with fascinating work that Mike is doing, just forget for a second about neurons, you know, just like let's forget a bit of obsession with neurons in the brain and go back to the humble origins of our bodies as cells."
},
{
"end_time": 3052.21,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3025.896,
"text": " Because this is where it's incredible wisdom that just like fascinating things are happening at the cellular level way before actually you can't even get neurons if you don't have the cells function a certain way from the very beginning. Yeah. So let's start with the humble origins of it, which actually not that humble. They're sophisticated and super, super smart. Yeah. And I think this idea again, this is a very opening a parenthesis."
},
{
"end_time": 3061.988,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3052.21,
"text": " I think this idea that actually we starting very small and scale up i think again it's very naive so for instance like we say oh i don't have a better perception of the environment."
},
{
"end_time": 3090.026,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3062.398,
"text": " actually babies, they have a sense of smell like dogs way more developed than adults. Yeah. It's like the nature gives you the means that you need at a certain stage, the best means to relate to the environment. And at that stage, food is very important. So your sense of smell will be highly developed more than an adult. Yeah. So you have basically a better smeller at the beginning than later on, and then you lose it. Yeah. Because you don't need to do much. You focus on vision and other things. So I'm now on closing the parenthesis."
},
{
"end_time": 3109.565,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3090.486,
"text": " So this idea that somehow we have like a linear thing and it's like cells are very dumb, but neurons are very smart. Yeah, I think that's naive. Yeah, I think the different type of intelligence that you need can you need to have in place and to communicate with each other from the very beginning and art if you take the pregnant state."
},
{
"end_time": 3133.695,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3110.282,
"text": " I'm going back again to the self so if you take the pregnant state other cellular level then realize okay so inside the system like which grows again and what i'm talking because i'm using the language and it's like a discrete language with words and saccades but uh in in reality there is no end point and starting point is everything is happening as a continuum right um"
},
{
"end_time": 3157.142,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3134.701,
"text": " So in this continuum which is the system at the level of cellular system that tells which one is you which one is not you does the immune system so you need a very good immune system in place very early on to make sure that you know the interaction that you have with the environment because you have it all the time is not going to give you some sort of viruses and then you let in the cells stuff that you shouldn't let in and then you"
},
{
"end_time": 3176.51,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3157.671,
"text": " Your life journey is ending."
},
{
"end_time": 3204.36,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3176.954,
"text": " um period where you have the most miscarriages because sometimes that's the negotiation a tough negotiation what is going on it's like we're going to have the resources shared for a moment or not interesting um and basically you have three and then and there you have uh two immune systems within a single organism a single you know we have the pregnant person um and you have um a two immune system communicating with each other trying to"
},
{
"end_time": 3209.36,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3204.821,
"text": " Like a violin, you know, make the concept or work and."
},
{
"end_time": 3236.425,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3209.718,
"text": " And it's fascinating because you have the placenta and placenta is like the intermediary relational organ in between and that has its own immune system. So basically have a hybrid immune system within one single system. And again, I'm telling you this, this is universal. It's like all humans go through this process. Yeah. So this means that you have this two system communicating and need to make decisions and roughly have three stages."
},
{
"end_time": 3260.964,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3236.425,
"text": " The first one is the inflammatory one and hence many pregnant people they'll tell you for many of them as like they have nausea and stuff because it's like you know inflammation and then they have the second stage which is like bliss stage because they reach an agreement and then you have the third stage which is like okay so now you're getting to be get out yeah so you need to have the inflammation again to"
},
{
"end_time": 3286.476,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3261.22,
"text": " Make the childbirth happening here. So it's like so and this is a very carefully crafted mechanism. I find it fascinating. I think we should have more work on this because again what I'm trying to say is like this is how we get into life journey through this dialogue. So the first very very first thing we learn as individuals is how to negotiate."
},
{
"end_time": 3316.8,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3287.056,
"text": " Michael, because we've been talking about the self and we're going to continue talking about it, it would be useful to define it. So why don't you define the self and then we'll see if it comports with your definition."
},
{
"end_time": 3344.974,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3318.712,
"text": " Wow, yeah. I actually have a definition that I crafted. It's on my website. I can't remember it, of course, verbatim. So, I mean, I think one of the most, let's go back for a second. At one point, I tried, and this is in this 2019 selves paper, I tried to create a rubric on which"
},
{
"end_time": 3374.548,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3345.384,
"text": " You could simultaneously place very diverse intelligences. So I'm talking about human cells, artificial beings, aliens, swarms, robots, all of it. And so I tried to ask myself, what do all these things have in common? So not what they're made of, not how they got here, not their composition or provenance, but what do they all have in common? And what I thought interesting agents have in common is some degree of goal directedness."
},
{
"end_time": 3390.333,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3374.548,
"text": " So that means that what you could do is you could draw what i call a cognitive like home which is basic it's kinda like a a poor man's minkowski kind of cone where basically what you're showing you collapse all the space into into one axis time is the other."
},
{
"end_time": 3415.009,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3390.333,
"text": " And what you're trying to draw is the scale of the biggest goals that the system can pursue. Not how far does it sense, not how far can it act, not the range of interactions. You know, there's like the James Webb telescope has massive sensory range, but not that, but the size of the goals, right? So what is the biggest goal? So what I mean by just to give an example, if I know the scale of your goals and the scale of things that stress you out,"
},
{
"end_time": 3433.916,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3415.623,
"text": " I roughly know your degree"
},
{
"end_time": 3458.985,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3433.916,
"text": " capacity and what you're really interested in is maintaining a particular state over a range of a few hundred yards, you might be a dog and you're never going to care about what happens four months from now, you know, 10 miles away. It's too far, right? That you've got a, there's a certain range that you can do. And if you tell me that you, you're working actively towards world peace and the state of the financial markets a hundred years from now, you're probably a human."
},
{
"end_time": 3480.572,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3458.985,
"text": " And if you tell me that in the linear range you can exert compassion for all the beings of the planet not like a small number the way we can but like all of them then then you'll be you know you're some sort of body software something or beyond human right so so so so from the scale of your goals you can kind of tell what you are so that's that's the basis that that's that's where i start and so we can say that is so so to to define yourself."
},
{
"end_time": 3505.776,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3481.203,
"text": " You can define a system, and by the way, all this is plastic. So the most salient thing about cells is that they're a process. They're not a fixed thing, so they change all the time. So all of this is plastic. The scale of your goals are plastic. The competencies with which you pursue those goals can change. The problem spaces into which you project your activities and those goals can also change. But a self is like this"
},
{
"end_time": 3532.415,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3506.391,
"text": " I think a useful version of the self is a process that has several interlocked features and one of those features is the ability to remember and to pursue goals in the cybernetic sense. You may not be aware you have goals and you may or may not have the metacognition to change your goals, but you're a goal pursuing agent. That comes with some machinery to try to"
},
{
"end_time": 3561.169,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3532.978,
"text": " Draw a computational boundary between yourself and the outside world. So you have some idea, some hypothesis about where you end and where the outside world begins, which again helps you set goals because your goals are mostly about a particular region. And then there's something else which is important in this. I don't know how deeply you want me to go into all this, but there's a fundamental thing where you are in charge of interpreting what your own memories mean. And"
},
{
"end_time": 3575.52,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3561.766,
"text": " What I mean by that is, at any given moment, you don't have access to the past. What you have access to are the engrams that previous you has compressed various experiences into structures in your brain and body."
},
{
"end_time": 3600.862,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3575.947,
"text": " And at every given moment, you have to reinterpret those memory structures, whatever the medium is, and continuously tell and retell a coherent story about what you are, how you got here, what the outside world means, what you do next. This is a constant process of construction. So I think a self is that ongoing, basically,"
},
{
"end_time": 3622.688,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3600.862,
"text": " Uh, kind of, uh, you know, self referential process that attempts to tell a story about an ongoing thing with particular boundaries, with particular goals, and in particular always projected forward, right? I don't exactly know what happened in the past. I'm going to do my best to kind of confabulate a consistent story on the fly. But what I do know for sure is that I need to make decisions right now."
},
{
"end_time": 3647.688,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3622.688,
"text": " i need to decide what do i do next and so that kind of forward-looking self-constructive process that continuously interprets the memory affordances given to you to try to figure out what you're going to do next that that to me sounds like a useful concept to myself and i want to get to your concept but i do want to delve a tad more into this so you mentioned that we're constantly constructing our memories are we constantly"
},
{
"end_time": 3672.807,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3647.944,
"text": " in control of that? Is it us that's constructing the memory? Now, some of this has to do with control, like free will. Is this just automatically happening? Do we have some degree of autonomy or degree of direction that we can place on it? So I mean, so doing a proper discussion of free will can take, you know, an infinite amount of time. But just to say something relevant is two things. One is"
},
{
"end_time": 3700.725,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3673.387,
"text": " I think a useful sense of free will is very time-extended. You don't have right now complete control of whatever your next thought is going to be. And in fact, as you think about free from what? Free from past experience? No. And you don't want to be free from past experience because then you don't learn. Free from the laws of physics? No. So what do you really have at the moment, like within a narrow timeframe? Maybe not much."
},
{
"end_time": 3724.497,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3700.725,
"text": " But over the long term by the application of consistent effort what you can do is shape your own cognitive structure so that in the future, new things are open to you your own structure allows you to do new things so so i think free will exist in the in the time extended sense where what is the one thing you have free will over is consistent effort to modify yourself in your environment so that future you,"
},
{
"end_time": 3736.084,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3724.497,
"text": " Is more in line with whatever your values are then otherwise it would be that's what you have you have the ability to apply consistent effort i think about it almost like calculus you know in the in the limit it's infinitesimally small."
},
{
"end_time": 3763.916,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3736.647,
"text": " but eventually you end up with something right and that's what i think it is you know the actual at any given moment it's like infinitesimally small amount of free will but if you keep showing up and keep at it you will you will shape yourself and the information you have in the world you live in whatever in a way that is more in accordance to your values that that i think is a useful form of free will the other thing the other thing to point out and this is kind of a really weird um uh kind of direction that we've that i've been going in lately is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3794.104,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3764.582,
"text": " There are actually two ways of thinking about this. One way of thinking about this is as the being that is interpreting memories. And so this gets into a whole thing of who's the machine and who's the data. So we have this standard kind of Turing paradigm where this is the physical organism or the machine. This thing takes actions and then there's passive data and it sort of processes the data, maybe interprets it, maybe stores it, maybe generalizes it to form some sort of an engram or something."
},
{
"end_time": 3823.183,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3795.06,
"text": " But I actually think for reasons that we could talk about that the patterns themselves and perhaps the memories themselves have agency of their own. And this is William James kind of nodded at this when he said the thoughts are thinkers, right? This distinction is fundamental. People tend to make a very fundamental distinction. I'm a real physical object and then I have patterns of activity in my excitable medium that are thoughts. I think it's much deeper than that. And I think what we could ask is,"
},
{
"end_time": 3837.295,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3823.575,
"text": " Yes, the agent is interpreting those memories, but some of those memories as patterns as we are, we are metabolic patterns ourselves, have some amount of agency to"
},
{
"end_time": 3856.732,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3838.114,
"text": " Here's a continuum."
},
{
"end_time": 3881.8,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3857.244,
"text": " a fleeting thought, right? There's a mental pattern that comes and goes. It's gone. Meh, not much agency there. Well, you get some persistent and repetitive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of and they do something interesting. They do a little, and you may have more to say on this than I, they do a little bit of niche construction on the brain. If you have certain kinds of thoughts, they will actually modify your brain such that you will have more of those thoughts, right? So ecologists would say that's niche construction."
},
{
"end_time": 3907.705,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3881.8,
"text": " Then we can go past that and we can think about something like a personality fragment or an altar, right? Not a full human personality, but also not just a repetitive thought. It's got a little bit of, you know, it has some goal directedness. It will actually do stuff in the world that sometimes screw stuff up for some of the other personalities. Like it really has some agent. And then you have a full human personality and maybe past that some sort of a transpersonal thing that people have talked about."
},
{
"end_time": 3936.015,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3908.131,
"text": " So we can easily see how there's a continuum here. And I think that some of these thoughts, and you can imagine as patterns within the cognitive medium, think like an easier way to think about this is the caterpillar to butterfly transition, right? So you have a caterpillar, it's a soft bodied creature with a particular control, right? Soft body means you can't push, there are no hard elements to push on like you would with a hard bodied robot, you have to do different things. And it lives in basically a two dimensional world, it crawls around and it eats leaves."
},
{
"end_time": 3961.869,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3936.613,
"text": " You can, and this is some old work by Doug Blackison and a number of other people, you can train those caterpillars. There's a certain color cue and then they crawl over and they find some leaves and they're happy. That caterpillar has to become a butterfly. In order to become a butterfly, that's a hard-bodied creature that lives in a three-dimensional world. The brain is completely different. So it has to tear down most of the brain, most of the cells die, most of the connections are broken, and you make a new brain, you make a butterfly."
},
{
"end_time": 3979.241,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3962.329,
"text": " The memories persist. Now that's amazing enough because you're like, wow, how do memories persist when you're refactoring the whole medium? But it's actually much more interesting than that. And it took me years to actually get to what's really interesting about this, which is that the actual memories, the fidelity of the memory,"
},
{
"end_time": 3998.183,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3979.497,
"text": " Is actually not what you need here at all because the actual memories of the caterpillar are useless to the butterfly it doesn't move the same way it doesn't care about leaves none of the details matter the details are completely relevant what you do inherit as a butterfly are kind of the deep lessons that the caterpillar learn and so you have to not only keep the information you have to remap."
},
{
"end_time": 4024.138,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 3998.183,
"text": " And reinterpret that whatever n-gram survive the brain refactoring those n-grams cannot be used the way the caterpillar use them you have to reinterpret them in a completely new way remap them onto a new sensory motor architecture and everything else. So imagine that if there's that process if a particular memory as an agent wants to survive that process."
},
{
"end_time": 4042.944,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4024.548,
"text": " You cannot stay the same. It's the same paradox that affects us all. If you don't change, you will die. If you do change, you are no longer yourself, so you're also not here. It applies to species, it applies to everything. It's the paradox of change. If you are a memory that wants to survive that process, you cannot remain exactly how you are."
},
{
"end_time": 4057.568,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4042.944,
"text": " But you might have certain features that would make you more easily interpretable by the butterfly brain, and thus you will make it into this new world, not the same as you were, but to some extent you will remain."
},
{
"end_time": 4087.329,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4058.097,
"text": " So I think there's two things going on in this process that you asked about. One is the agent is shuffling and reinterpreting these memories. And our current model of this is like this bowtie model that you see in, for example, in autoencoders and neural cellular automaton, things like this, where the process of learning compresses into a generative seed, into an engram, that thin middle layer of that architecture. And so that's an algorithmic process, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 4099.121,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4087.892,
"text": " generalize instances"
},
{
"end_time": 4124.531,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4101.015,
"text": " you know, sort of squeezed out a lot of the correlations. And now you're going to interpret what what those memories mean. And this is what I meant earlier when I said that, you know, a key thing of a self is to figure out what your own memories mean, because you don't know, right? You are not tied to using them. And you know, what you were saying about this makes you fit. This is the thing that makes me sort of makes me happy is this idea that you are in no way tied to the story that was told by your past self."
},
{
"end_time": 4140.674,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4124.531,
"text": " You are always in the job of reinterpreting and you can always tell a better story and the way that the your past self was it was compressing interpreting that information you are now free to tell it differently and this is also."
},
{
"end_time": 4156.749,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4141.101,
"text": " Just one last thing, this is also what happens in embryonic development with the genome, because every embryo, they look very reliable and it looks like all they're doing is interpreting, they're following the same cues that their ancestors did all the back in the lineage."
},
{
"end_time": 4182.739,
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"text": " So interesting enough, that same information dynamic is true not only for cognitive systems within their lifetime, but actually for embryogenesis and for evolution as a whole. Because we might think that embryogenesis is stereotypical, that basically every embryo just follows the same rules that the past lineage has. But what we see, and that's what normally happens under normal circumstances, but when you start"
},
{
"end_time": 4208.951,
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"text": " investigating that cognitive system by putting barriers between it and its goal, meaning trying to deflect it from the thing it's trying to build. You find out that, no, it actually has incredible creative problem-solving capacity. It doesn't take the meaning of that genome literally at all. It takes the molecular mechanisms that are encoded by that genome as affordances, which it can reshuffle in new ways. And there are some amazing, I've talked about this before, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4230.316,
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"text": " some amazing ways that that embryos and other morphogenetic systems manage to make a new a new thing under a new environment in circumstances where all of its parts have changed like massive change they can still figure out how to get the job done by not doing it exactly the way their ancestors did but by creatively finding a new solution in this problem space."
},
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"text": " So I think there are two aspects to this. One is that creative interpretation of what your memories, whether they be the genetic memories of your lineage or the actual behavioral memories of a mind, what do your memories mean? And then there's the other question of, okay, but you are a metabolic pattern, you're a ship of theses that exists in various other spaces. These memories are other kinds of patterns. Some of them have some degree of agency as well, anywhere along that spectrum that we talked about."
},
{
"end_time": 4279.292,
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"text": " And what are their goals of their goals to proliferate through as many minds as possible is it to persist is it to grow is it to change i have no idea but i think we need to be looking at it from both both perspectives because it's not obvious who's the agent and who's the data that's our framing like you said before that's what that's a framing that we bring and how you map that onto reality is is there multiple ways of doing that."
},
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"text": " A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's 499 Chicken Pot Pie. Warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables. It's a tender chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls. Whatever that means. The Colonel lived so we could chicken. KFC's Chicken Pot Pie. The best 499 you'll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last. Taxes, tips, and fees extra."
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"text": " Well that's interesting and inspirational. Let me roughly state back what you said. There are tools that are given to us and there are the ways that our ancestors have used those tools and I'll call that the literal way. We don't have to use those tools in the literal way because we have a goal. We can creatively use those tools and in fact cells do that as well. They don't literally look at the genome. They have a goal and they can change. There's some wiggle room. Now you're extending that further into"
},
{
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"text": " memory that we don't have to look at the way that we have interpreted memory in the past. We can think about what is our goal now and then change our interpretation to serve us moving forward. Yeah. Yeah. The basic, basically because so, so biology, both the kind that gives rise to our bodies and, and the, by extension, what gives rise to our minds is committed to the idea that you, you don't know what your substrate meant to anybody, including your past self, because it is labile, but the biological substrate is unreliable."
},
{
"end_time": 4395.469,
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"start_time": 4366.152,
"text": " This is one difference between us and our current computer architectures, where you work like hell to make sure that all the data at every level stays exactly how you put it. When you're programming in a high-level language, you don't think that your registers are going to float off because the copper gets warm. The whole point of a good computer is that that does not happen. In biology, it's exactly the opposite. Biology commits from the beginning. The material is unreliable. We don't know how many copies of anything we're going to have. We don't know if our parts are going to be the same. In fact, you know they're not. They will mutate over time."
},
{
"end_time": 4415.469,
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"start_time": 4395.469,
"text": " So all we're committed to is telling the best story we can right now. And that's why I think, you know, all life is fundamentally a sense-making process. It's a storytelling agent, basically. And you don't know what your information meant to anything in the past. All you're going to do is make the best story of it you can now."
},
{
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"text": " And those differences may be small for a human unlike a caterpillar, you know, your brain mostly doesn't change that much. So the story doesn't float that much, but it can significantly. And I'm sure you can talk about therapeutic the ways, the way, you know, situations where it changes massively, you know, feel free to respond to any of what Mike said, but also your definition of the self. And is it consonant with what Mike said? So I fully agree with what you said, Mike. And, uh, but I want to go back to the cake thing with the carrot cake and the layer cake, because I think this is super important. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 4469.138,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4445.981,
"text": " How do you map a carrot cake, if you want to map a carrot cake? So if you have a layered cake, it's quite simple, just like a measure, you know, distinction from A and B, but a carrot cake, you can't really map that, but you do have a reality carrot cake, way more than layered cake. Actually, it's like clouds, for instance, it's an object, but where exactly the cloud ends and begins. So"
},
{
"end_time": 4486.084,
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"start_time": 4469.735,
"text": " There are some mathematical tools that are not mainstream, but they're coming from the chaos theory and fractal theories where they're trying to basically mathematically formalize fuzzy objects, like clouds, like caracades. Those are objects that exist, but if you want to mathematically formalize how you do it,"
},
{
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"text": " And I would say going back to your question about the definition of the self, I would say within the series, you have what they call an attractor. So at a state that attracts you, that's like, I would put that the self is that attractor state. Yeah. Right. So something that in the midst of the change, in the midst of the, um, an escapable change you can have, uh, which, uh, kind of like impinges over you, right."
},
{
"end_time": 4540.725,
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"text": " You need to push back like and to keep the tractor state in a way. So basically you negotiate an environment, the negotiating like, okay, give me this, but I don't want this. I don't want the virus. Give me just oxygen. And then I moved to a different state. So it's, um, it's an ongoing like, um, um, track tracking or from a tractor state, which is ideas that, which is like, I want to exist like the, like a system. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4570.503,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4540.998,
"text": " And paradoxically, I cannot exist without the environment pushing back. And but in the same time, I need to interact in the environment to, you know, be myself, because this is how it exists in a, in a lineage here. So I would, I would define the self as this highly desirable attractor state. Yeah, which at a certain point to the catastrophically"
},
{
"end_time": 4596.613,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4571.067,
"text": " Disappear that's called death. Yeah, and then the question would be is the catastrophe also actually push us to life, you know, so we are we are A desirable attractor states between two catastrophes one is the birth and that one is like the death Yeah, like disintegration and in the meantime, we try to keep this like state in the you know desirable position, which is like"
},
{
"end_time": 4626.937,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4597.346,
"text": " a certain range temperature for the warmth of the body than the sugar level in the human body because otherwise you just like pass out in one of pass out here so and that that attractor state has been not you know decided like that it's like the fruit of like lots of interaction through the time yeah figure out which one is the best attractive for that particular state yeah and that that's I would say but I would say again"
},
{
"end_time": 4655.247,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4627.312,
"text": " Going back to your first question, it's like, without the pushing back, there will be no tractor state, right? So it's like the two define each other, right? In a way, otherwise it would be just like flat eternity, infinity. Going back to what Mike said, it would be so boring. You'd be like, okay, I need a catastrophe now. It's just like, because I need to be like, you know, the life thing would be like what lies in between."
},
{
"end_time": 4685.674,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4656.596,
"text": " I'm confused about the attractor because an attractor attracts something. So the person who's listening to this, are they supposed to think of their self as the attractor or as what's being attracted? So I would say that what we call the self is an attractor state, right? As I said, it's something that within the chaos, within like the midst of the carrot cake, there is a state that you really want to keep and that's yourself."
},
{
"end_time": 4714.787,
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"start_time": 4685.981,
"text": " Now, the really interesting thing about this is that, as I said, you don't choose to be that attractor, right? It's like something that just exists. Yeah. Because as I said, nobody asked my permission to be alive. You know, it's just like it's a part of something bigger. So I'm connected as an attractor to another system that, you know, you know, interacted and then you have this new being. So it's it's a part of a chain, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.998,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4715.35,
"text": " and is the very fact of being part of the chain that defines me as it is. So hence this idea that you need a other before, uh, to be the self now. And, uh, so I, that's, that, that'd be the main idea. Is the reason for infantile amnesia when we don't access memories before too, usually."
},
{
"end_time": 4769.838,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4741.869,
"text": " Is the reason for that because we lack a model of self or is it because we lack language? So I push back against the idea that there is amnesia. So maybe there is no explicit recollection, but there is like an encoding in the body that which is really, really powerful and stays there. So children with nonverbal children, with abusive parents, there is a"
},
{
"end_time": 4776.63,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4770.435,
"text": " Memory stored in the body and how they move the body around which is clearly shows."
},
{
"end_time": 4804.241,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4777.244,
"text": " Going back again to the body is like they haven't forgot about it. It's just like a store at a different level and then you access it. Sometimes people say it's like when I walk, I walk past an old wall this way and then I realize why am I doing this? It's like people don't do that and then realize it somehow connects with certain patterns that they experienced when they were babies and stuff like that which is like kind of inconceivable to explicitly recollect"
},
{
"end_time": 4828.507,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4804.241,
"text": " But there is indirectly like storage because you need to keep track of those so there is no i don't think there is you know there is like this idea of this with switch on switch off right so it's like complete darkness and at a certain point boom with the language is like you become you know aware conscious aware i think we do have experience all the time as i said as uh fetuses uh sorry as babies and um"
},
{
"end_time": 4858.473,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4829.224,
"text": " I'm not sure."
},
{
"end_time": 4890.094,
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"text": " I would contest this idea that, as I said, it's like you have explicit memories on one hand and implicit memories on the others. I think there is really like a continuum and then you can access to different tools and languages, one of them. But you can access different feelings. I'm pretty sure you have this. It's just like sometimes accidentally do certain gesture and then you are triggering the different state and then you retrieve a feeling."
},
{
"end_time": 4919.684,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4890.538,
"text": " So now you're speaking directly to the audience. I want to know what are your parting words"
},
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"start_time": 4919.906,
"text": " And especially as we were speaking off air, you were referencing some of the ways that you were getting emails, eliciting new ideas and new connections that didn't occur to you before. Yeah, I think that some of the most interesting conversations take place across disciplines. And I've now had a number of amazing connections with people that are in psychiatry, trauma, of course, computer science and machine learning."
},
{
"end_time": 4975.606,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4946.527,
"text": " architecture, all kinds of deep history, all kinds of interesting fields where I don't have any expertise, but where people hear some of the stuff that I've been talking about and see interesting parallels to their work. So those kinds of connections, those kind of interdisciplinary projects and so on are some of the most interesting and valuable, I think, for the world going forward because I think the era of distinct"
},
{
"end_time": 5005.896,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4975.93,
"text": " And what message would you like to leave the audience with? And keep in mind that our audience comprises a large portion of researchers. So people who are prospective researchers and people who are in the field already of philosophy, computer science, AI, math and physics."
},
{
"end_time": 5032.329,
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"start_time": 5006.305,
"text": " Yeah, so I think I think my main message would be you need to be we need to be aware of the tools that we are using because the tools we're using changes basically the reality we're looking at. So for instance, like take language when you investigate things that others we take language and you have categories and conceptualization saccadic, you know, it's like one word after another. That's one way to map in reality. But"
},
{
"end_time": 5059.838,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5033.063,
"text": " I mean, reality is a continuum. I don't think we have the conceptual toolbox to map this like continuity. Uh, and also because we are using language as adults, we tend to think of this type of understanding through language as being like the pinnacle. What I want to say is like, perhaps you have more embodied way of understanding would not necessarily require this type of conceptualization, which are"
},
{
"end_time": 5089.77,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5060.418,
"text": " As smart as our high level abstract thinking at the moment, but that they are needed at that particular time when we need to develop it to the things. Yeah. So I think the take home messages be like to stop thinking very naively, like some sort of linear progression, you know, start with some very dump and achieve something like, like very smart, like the other thing. Yeah. I am on the contrary, I think we, um, life or nature call is what you want."
},
{
"end_time": 5118.865,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5090.23,
"text": " Give us the right tool at the right moment to get into the, um, into the flow, right? Like, like a continuity. So I think that's, that's important. So when we need to put back the humble roots into the spotlight with, um, the importance of an intelligence of the cells in terms of the body is not, it's not, so the body is not some sort of like mechanical thing, like a vehicle that is used to fuel and transport the mind, the smart."
},
{
"end_time": 5147.995,
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"start_time": 5119.582,
"text": " you know, in individual. On the contrary, I think what we call the mind is like, given that to make sure that this body is safe and survive for such a for a long period of time. Yeah. So it's a it's a it's a collaboration. Yeah, so to speak. And there is no continuity between being dumb to being very smart rather just like we have intelligence at"
},
{
"end_time": 5171.869,
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"start_time": 5148.729,
"text": " Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. It was great. Thank you so much."
},
{
"end_time": 5200.879,
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"start_time": 5173.865,
"text": " New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy, and consciousness. What are your thoughts?"
},
{
"end_time": 5213.097,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5201.288,
"text": " While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also, thank you to our partner, The Economist."
},
{
"end_time": 5237.722,
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"start_time": 5215.35,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,"
},
{
"end_time": 5248.899,
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"text": " Which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook, or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn"
},
{
"end_time": 5277.005,
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"text": " Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for Theories of Everything, where people explicate Toes, they disagree respectfully about Theories, and build as a community our own Toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in Theories of Everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts"
},
{
"end_time": 5285.213,
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"start_time": 5277.005,
"text": " I also read in the comments that hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify,"
},
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"text": " ever podcast."
},
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"text": " You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
}
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}No transcript available.