Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, yeah, because, you see, the thing to remember is we don’t have a magic sense or really good intuition for what the mapping is between the embodiment of something and the degree of intelligence it has. We think we do because we have an N of one example on Earth and we kind of know what to expect from cells, snakes to, you know, primates, but we really don’t. We don’t have, and this is, we’ll get into more of the stuff on the Platonic space, but our intuitions around that stuff are so bad that to really think that we know enough not to try things at this point is, I think, really short-sighted. Before we talk about the platonic space, let’s let’s lay out some foundations. I think one useful one comes from the paper, Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere. An experimentally grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds. Could you tell me about this framework, and maybe can you tell me about figure one from this paper that has a few components? One is the tiers of biological cognition that goes from group to whole organism to whole tissue organ, down to neural network, down to cytoskeleton, down to genetic network, and then there’s layers of biological systems from ecosystem, down to swarm, down to organism, tissue, and then finally cell. So can you explain this figure and can you explain the TAME, so-called, framework? So this is the version 1.0, and there’s a kind of update, a 2.0, that I’m writing at the moment, trying to formalize in a careful way all the things that we’ve been talking about here, and in particular, this notion of having to do experiments to figure out where any given system is on a continuum, and we can… let’s just start with figure two maybe for a second, and then we’ll come back to figure one. And first, just to unpack the acronym, I like the idea that it spells out TAME, because the central focus of this is interactions and how do you interact with a system to have a productive interaction with it, and the idea is that cognitive claims are really protocol claims. When you tell me that something has some degree of intelligence, what you’re really saying is, “This is the set of tools I’m going to deploy, and we can all find out how that worked out for you.” And so technological, because I wanted to be clear with my colleagues that this was not a project in just philosophy. This had very specific, empirical implications that are going to play out in engineering and regenerative medicine and so on. Technological approach to mind everywhere, this idea that we don’t know yet where different kinds of minds are to be found and we have to empirically figure that out. And so what you see here in figure two is basically this idea that there is a spectrum, and I’m just showing four waypoints along that spectrum, and as you move to the right of that spectrum, a couple things happen: persuadability goes up, meaning that the systems become more reprogrammable, more plastic, more able to do different things than whatever they’re standardly doing, so you have more ability to get them to do new and interesting things. The effort needed to exert influence goes down; that is, autonomy goes up. And to the extent that you are good at convincing or motivating the system to do things, you don’t have to sweat the details as much, right? And this also has to do with what I call engineering agential materials. So when you engineer wood, metal, plastic, things like that, you are responsible for absolutely everything because the material is not going to do anything other than hopefully hold its shape. If you’re engineering active matter, or you’re engineering computational materials, or better yet, agential materials like living matter, you can do some very high-level prompting and let the system then do very complicated things that you don’t need to micromanage, and we all know that that increases when you’re starting to work with intelligent systems like animals and humans and so on. And the other thing that goes down as you get to the right is the amount of mechanism, or physics, that you need to exert the influence goes down.…

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