Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…Well, so I’ll circle back around to that whole thing. So the only thing I was trying to do is blow up the idea that we’re cool with how it works in physics. No problem there. I think that’s a much bigger deal than people normally think it is. I think already there, you have this weird haunting of the physical world by patterns that are not coming from the physical world. The reason I emphasize this is because now what I’m going to… when I amplify this into biology, I don’t think it sort of jumps as a new thing. I think it’s just a much more… I think what we call biology are systems that exploit the hell out of it. I think physics is so constrained by it, but we call biology those things that make use of those kinds of things and run with it. And so, again, I just think it’s a scaling. I don’t think it’s a brand new thing that happens. I think it’s a scaling, right? So what I’m saying is we already know from physics that there are non-physical patterns, and these are generally patterns of form, which is why I call them low agency, because they’re like fractals that stand still, and they’re like prime number distributions. Although there’s a mathematician that’s talking in our symposium that’s telling me that actually I’m too chauvinistic even there. That actually, even those things have more oomph than even I gave them credit for, which I love. So what I’m saying is those kinds of static patterns are things that we typically see in physics, but they’re not the full extent of what lives in that space. That space is also home to some patterns that are very high agency. And if we give them a body, if we build a body that they can inhabit, then we get to see different behavioral competencies that the behavior scientists say, “Oh, I know what that looks like.” That’s this kind of behavioral, you know, this kind of mind or that kind of mind. In a certain sense, I mean, yes, what I’m saying is extremely radical, but it is a very old idea. It’s an old idea of a dualistic worldview, right? Where the mind was not in the physical body, and that it in some way interacted with the physical brain. So, I just want to be clear. I’m not claiming that this is fundamentally a new idea. This has been around forever. However, it’s mostly been discredited, and it’s a very unpopular view nowadays. There are very few people in the, for example, cognitive science community or anywhere else in science that like this kind of view. Primarily, and already Descartes was getting crap for this when he first tried it out as this interaction problem, right? ive science community or anywhere else in science that like this kind of view. Primarily, and already Descartes was getting crap for this when he first tried it out as this interaction problem, right? So the idea was, okay, well, if you have this non-physical mind and then you have this brain that presumably obeys conservation of mass energy and things like that, how are you supposed to interact with it? And there are many other problems there. So what I’m trying to point out is that first of all, physics already had this problem. You didn’t have to wait till you had biology and cognitive science to ask about it. And what I think is happening and the way we need to think about this is coming back to my point that I think the mind-brain relationship is basically of the same kind as the math-physics relationship. The same way that non-physical facts of physics haunt physical objects is basically how I think different kinds of patterns that we call kinds of minds are manifesting through our… through interfaces like brains. How do we prove or disprove the existence of that world? ‘Cause it’s a pretty radical one. ‘Cause this physical world, we can poke. It’s there. It feels like all the incredible things like consciousness and cognition and all the goal-oriented behavior in agency all seems to come from this 3D entity.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.