Michael Levin: prediction

Transcript context

…So every entry in an encyclopedia, old-school Britannica, is a pointer to this space. There is a set of things that I feel very strongly about because the research is telling us that’s what’s going on, and then there’s a bunch of other stuff that I see as hypotheses for next steps that guide experiment. So what I’m about to tell you, I don’t, you know, these are things I don’t actually know. These are just guesses that, you know, you need to make some guesses to make progress. I don’t think that there are specific, or I don’t know, but it doesn’t mean that there are going to be specific Platonic patterns for, “This is the Titanic, and this is the sister of the Titanic, and this is some other kind of boat. ” This is not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, in some way that we absolutely need to work out, when we make minimal interfaces, we get more than we put in. We get behaviors. We get shapes. We get mathematical truths, and we get all kinds of patterns that we did not have to create. We didn’t micromanage them. We didn’t know they were coming. We didn’t have to put any effort into making them. They come from some distribution that seems to exist that we don’t have to create. And exactly whether that space is sparse or dense, I don’t know. So, for example, if there is, you know, some kind of a Platonic form for the movie, The Godfather, if it’s surrounded by a bunch of crappy versions and then crappier versions still, I have no idea, right? I don’t know if the space is sparse or not. I, you know, I don’t know if it’s finite or infinite. These are all things I don’t know. What I do know is that it seems like physics, and for sure biology and cognition, are the benefits of ingressions that are free lunches in some sense. We did not make them. Calling them emergent does nothing for a research program, okay? That just means you got surprised. I think, I think it’s much better if you make the optimistic assumption that they come from a structured space, that we have a prayer in hell of actually exploring. And in some decades, if I’m wrong, and it says, “You know what? We tried. It looks like it really is random. Too bad.” Fine. Is there a difference? Like, can we one day prove the existence of this world? And is there a difference between it being a really effective model for connecting things, explaining things, versus an actual place where the information about these distributions that we’re sampling actually exists, that we can hit with a stick?…

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