Joscha Bach: belief

Transcript context

…Physical closeness or closeness broadly defined? With physical closeness is much easier to experience empathy with someone, right? I suspect it would be difficult for me to have empathy for you if you were in a different town also. How would that work? But if you are very close to someone, you pick up all sorts of signals from their body, not just via your eyes but with your entire body. And if the nervous system sits on the other side and the intercellular communication sits on the other side and is integrating over all these signals, you can make inferences about the state of the other, and it’s not just the personal self that does this by reasoning, but your perceptual system. And what basically happens is that your representations are directly interacting. It’s the physical resonant models of the universe that exist in your nervous system and in your body might go into resonance with others and start sharing some of their states. So you basically by, next to a big, next to somebody, you pick up some of their vibes, and feel without looking at them what they’re feeling in this moment. And it’s difficult for you if you’re very empathetic to detach yourself from it and have an emotional state that is completely independent from your environment. People who are highly empathetic are describing this. And now imagine that a lot of organisms on this planet have representations of the environment and operate like this and they are adjacent to each other and overlapping, so there’s going to be some degree in which there is basically some change interaction and we are forming some slightly shared representation and no relatively few neuroscientists who consider this possibility. I think big rarity in this regard is Michael Levin who is considering these things in earnest. And I stumbled on this train of thought mostly by noticing that the tasks of a neuron can be fulfilled by other cells as well that can send different typed chemical messages and physical messages to their adjacent cells and learn when to do this and when not, make this conditional and become universal function approximators. The only thing that they cannot do is telegraph information over axons very quickly, over long distances. So neurons in this perspective are especially adapted telegraph cell that has evolved, so we can move our muscles very fast, but our body is in principle able to also make models of the world just much, much slower. It’s interesting though that at this time, at least in human history, there seems to be a gap between the tools of science and the subjective experience that people report like you’re talking about with telepathy, and it seems like we’re not quite there?…

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