Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…I think is scaling is something I call the cognitive light cone, and the cognitive light cone is the size of the biggest goal state that you can pursue. This doesn’t mean how far do your senses reach. This doesn’t mean how far can you affect it. So the James Webb Telescope has enormous sensory reach, but that doesn’t mean that’s the size of its cognitive light cone. The size of the cognitive light cone is the scale of the biggest goal you can actively pursue, but I do think it’s a useful concept to enable us to think about very different types of agents of different composition, different provenance, you know, engineered, evolved, hybrid, whatever, all in the same framework. And by the way, the reason I use light cone is that it has this idea from physics that you’re putting space and time kind of in the same diagram, which I like here. So if you tell me that all your goals revolve around maximizing the amount of sugar in this, in this, you know, 10, 20 micron radius of space-time, and that you have, you know, 20 minutes memory going back and maybe five minutes predictive capacity going forward, that tiny little cognitive light cone, I’m going to say, probably a bacterium. And if you say to me that, “Well, I’m able to care about several hundred yards sort of scale, I could never care about what happens three weeks from now, two towns over, just impossible,” I would say you might be a dog. And if you say to me, “Okay, I care about really what happens, you know, the financial markets on Earth, you know, long after I’m dead, and this and that,” I’d say you’re probably a human. And if you say to me, “I care in the linear range, I actively, I’m not just saying it, I can actively care in the linear range about all the living beings on this planet,” I’m going to say, “Well, you’re not a standard human. You must be something else,” because humans, I don’t know, standard humans today, I don’t think can do that. You must be some kind of a bodhisattva or some other thing that has these massive cognitive light cones. So I think what’s scaling from zero, and I do think it goes all the way down. I think we can talk about even particles doing something like this. I think what scales is the size of the cognitive light cone. And so now this is an interesting… here, I’ll try for a definition of life or whatever, for whatever it’s worth. I spent no time trying to make that stick, but if we wanted to… I think we call things alive to the extent that the cognitive light cone of that thing is bigger than that of its parts. So in other words, rocks aren’t very exciting because the things it knows how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that. But living things are amazing at aligning their competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive light cone than the parts. I’ll give you a very simple example that comes up in biology and that comes up in our cancer program all the time. Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. What are their goals? parts. I’ll give you a very simple example that comes up in biology and that comes up in our cancer program all the time. Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. What are their goals? Well, they’re trying to manage pH, metabolic state, some other things. There are some goals in transcriptional space, some goals in metabolic space, some goals in physiological state space, but they’re generally very tiny goals. One thing evolution did was to provide a kind of cognitive glue, which we can also talk about, that ties them together into a multicellular system, and those systems have grandiose goals. They’re making limbs, and if you’re a salamander limb and you chop it off, they will regrow that limb with the right number of fingers. Then they’ll stop when it’s done; the goal has been achieved. No individual cell knows what a finger is or how many fingers you’re supposed to have, but the collective absolutely does. And that process of growing that cognitive light cone from a single cell to something much bigger, and of course the failure mode of that process, so cancer, right? When cells disconnect, they physiologically disconnect from the other cells. Their cognitive light cone shrinks. The boundary between self and world, which is what the cognitive light cone defines, shrinks. Now they’re back to an amoeba. As far as they’re concerned, the rest of the body is just external environment, and they do what amoebas do. They go where life is good. They reproduce as much as they can, right? So that cognitive light cone, that is the thing that I’m talking about that scales. And so when we are looking for life, I don’t think we’re looking for specific materials. I don’t think we’re looking for specific metabolic states. I think we’re looking for scales of cognitive light cone. We’re looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals in spaces that the parts could not comprehend. And so cognitive light cone, just to make clear, is about goals that you can actively pursue now. You said linear, like we’re within reach immediately.…

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