Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, we’ll probably get to it. You’ve been doing recent work on looking at computational systems, even trivial ones like algorithms— … sorting algorithms- …and analyzing them in a behavioral kind of way, to see if there are minds inside those sorting algorithms. And, of course, let me make a pothead statement question here, that you could start to do things like trying to do psychedelics with a sorting algorithm. And what does that even look like? It looks like a ridiculous question that’ll get you fired from most academic departments, but it may be, if you take it seriously, you could try— …and see if it applies. If a thing could be shown to have some kind of cognitive complexity, some kind of mind, why not apply to it the same kind of analysis and the same kind of tools, like psychedelics, that you would to a human mind that’s a complex human mind? It at least might be a productive question to ask. You’ve seen spiders on psychedelics, more primitive biological organisms on psychedelics. Why not try to see what an algorithm does on psychedelics? Anyway. 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?…

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