Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, given how weird and complicated what you’re describing is, we’ll talk about it more, but you gotta ELI5 the basics to a person who’s never seen this. So again, you mentioned things like pointers. So the physical object themselves or the brain is a pointer to that platonic space. What is in that platonic space? What is the platonic space? What is the embodiment? What is the pointer? Yeah, okay. Let’s try it this way. There are certain facts of mathematics. So the distribution of prime numbers, right, that if you map them out, they make these nice spirals. And there’s an image that I often show, which is a very particular kind of fractal. And that fractal is the Hally map, which is, it’s pretty awesome that it actually looks very organic. It looks very biological. So if you look at that thing, that image, which has very specific complex structure, it’s a map of a very compact mathematical object. That formula is like, you know, Z cubed plus seven. It’s something like that. That’s it. So now you look at that structure and you say, “Where does that actually come from?” It’s definitely not packed into the Z cubed plus seven. It’s not, there’s not enough bits in that to give you all of that. There’s no fact of physics that determines this. There’s no evolutionary history. It’s not like we selected this based on some, you know, from a larger set over time. Where does this come from? Or the fact that… Think about the way that biology exploits these things. Imagine a world in which the highest fitness belonged to a certain kind of triangle, right? So evolution cranks a bunch of generations and it gets the first angle right, then cranks a bunch more generations, gets a second angle right. Now there’s something amazing that happens. It doesn’t need to look for the third angle because you already know. If you know two, you get this magical free gift from geometry that says, “Well, I already know what the third one should be.” You don’t have to go look for it. Or as evolution, if you invent a voltage-gated ion channel, which is basically a transistor, right, and you can make a logic gate, then all the truth tables and the fact that NAND is special and all these other things, you don’t have to evolve those things. You get those for free. You inherit those. Where do all those things live? These mathematical truths that you come across that you don’t have any choice about. You know, once you’ve committed to certain axioms, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that is now just what it is. And so what I’m saying is, and this is what Pythagoras was saying, I think, that there is a whole space of these kinds of truths. Now, he was focused on mathematical ones, but he was embodying them in music and in geometry and in things like that. There are the space of patterns and they make a difference in the physical world, to machines, to sound, to things like that. I’m extending it, and what I’m saying is, yeah, and so far we’ve only been looking at the low agency inhabitants of that world. There are other patterns that we would recognize as kinds of minds, and that you don’t see them in this space until there’s an interface, until there’s a way for them to come through the physical world. That interface, the same way that you have to make a triangular object before you can actually see the rule of what you’re going to gain, right? re’s a way for them to come through the physical world. That interface, the same way that you have to make a triangular object before you can actually see the rule of what you’re going to gain, right? Out of the rules of geometry and whatever. Or you have to actually do the computation on the fractal before you actually see that pattern. If you want to see some of those minds, you have to build an interface, right? At least if you’re going to interact with them in the physical world, the way we normally do science. As Darwin said, “Mathematicians have their own new sense, like a different sense than the rest of us.” And so that’s right. You know, mathematicians can perhaps interact with these patterns directly in that space. But for the rest of us, we have to make interfaces. And when we make interfaces, which might be cells or robots, you know, embryos or whatever, what we are pulling down are minds that are fundamentally not produced by physics. So I don’t believe that—I don’t know if we’re going to get into the whole consciousness thing—but I don’t believe that we create consciousness, whether we make babies or whether we make robots. Nobody’s creating consciousness. What you create is an interface, a physical interface through which specific patterns, which we call kinds of minds, are going to ingress, right? And consciousness is what it looks like from that direction looking out into the world. It’s what we call the view from the perspective of the platonic patterns.…

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