Michael Levin: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But there is such a thing? There may well be. We have to do experiments. I don’t know. Here’s an example. Somebody will say to me, “Well, you know, with your kind of panpsychist view, you probably think the weather is agential too.” It’s like, “Well, I can’t say that, but we don’t know, but have you ever tried to see if a hurricane has habituation or sensitization?” Maybe. We haven’t done the experiment. It’s hard, but you could, right? And maybe weather systems can have certain kinds of memories. I have no idea. We have to do experiments. So I don’t know what the entire human society is doing, but I’ll just give you a simple example of the kinds of tools, and we’re actively trying to build tools now to enable radically different agents to communicate. So we are doing this using AI and other tools to try and get this kind of communication going across very different spaces. I’ll just give you a very dumb example of how that might be. Imagine that you’re playing tic-tac-toe against an alien. So you’re in a room. You don’t see him. You draw the tic-tac-toe thing on the board, on the floor, and you know what you’re doing. You’re trying to make straight lines with Xs and Os, and you’re having a nice game. It’s obvious that he understands the process. Like, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It’s obvious. In that one little segment of activity, you guys are sharing a world. What’s happening in the other room next door? Well, let’s say the alien doesn’t know anything about geometry. He doesn’t understand straight lines. What he’s doing is he’s got a box, and it’s full of basically billiard balls, each one of which has a number on it. And all he’s doing is he’s looking through the box to find billiard balls whose numbers add up to 15. He doesn’t understand geometry at all. All he understands is arithmetic. You don’t think about arithmetic, you think geometry. The reason you guys are playing the same game is that there’s this magic square, right? That somebody constructed that basically is a three-by-three square, where if you pick the numbers right, they add up to 15. He has no idea that there’s a geometric interpretation to this. He is solving the problem that he sees, which is totally algebraic. You don’t know anything about that. But if there is an appropriate interface like this magic square, you guys can share that experience. You can have an experience. It doesn’t mean you start to think like him. It means that you guys are able to interact in a particular way. Okay, so there’s a mapping between the two different ways of seeing the world that allows you to communicate with each other.…

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