Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…tle bit, and they’re trying to make stuff happen.” And the others say, “Well, that’s crazy. Patterns in a gas can’t be agents. We’re agents. We’re solid. This is just patterns in an excitable medium.” And by the way, how long do they hold together? He says, “Well, about 100 years.” “Well, that’s crazy. Nothing… You know, no real agent can exist to dissipate that fast.” Okay. We are all metabolic patterns, among other things, right? And so one of the things that… And so you see what I’m warming up to here. So one of the things that we’ve been trying to dissolve, and this is some work that I’ve done with Chris Fields and others, is this distinction between thoughts and thinkers. So all agents are patterns within some excitable medium, we could talk about what that is, and they can spawn off others. And now you can have a really interesting spectrum. Here’s the spectrum. You can have fleeting thoughts, which are like waves in the ocean when you throw a rock in. You know, they sort of go through the excitable medium and then they’re gone. They pass through and they’re gone, right? So those are kind of fleeting thoughts. Then you can have patterns that have a degree of persistence, so they might be hurricanes or solitons or persistent thoughts or earworms or depressive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of. They stick around for a little while. They often do a little bit of niche construction, so they change the actual brain to make it easier to have more of those thoughts, right? Like, that’s a thing. And so they stay around longer. Now what’s further than that? Well, fragments, personality fragments of a dissociative personality disorder, they’re more stable, and they’re not just on autopilot. They have goals and they can do things, and then past that is a full-blown human personality. And who the hell knows what’s past that? Maybe some sort of trans-human, you know, trans-personal, like, I don’t know, right? But this idea, again, I’m back to this notion of a spectrum. It’s there is not a sharp distinction between, you know, we are real agents and then we have these thoughts. Yeah, patterns can be agents too, but again, you don’t know until you do the experiment. So if you want to know whether a soliton or a hurricane or a thought within a cognitive system is its own agent, do the experiment. See what it can do. Does it, can it learn from experience? Does it have memories? Does it have goal states? What can it do, right? Does it have language? So coming back to your original question, yeah, we can definitely apply this methodology to ideas and concepts and social whatevers, but you’ve got to do the experiment. That’s such a challenging thought experiment of thinking about memories, from the caterpillar to the butterfly as an organism. I think at the very basic level, intuitively, we think of organisms as hardware… …And software as not possibly being able to be organisms, but… …what you’re saying is that it’s all just patterns in an excitable medium, and it doesn’t really matter what the pattern is. We need to… and what the excitable medium is. We need to do the testing of how persistent is it? How goal-oriented is it? And there are certain kinds of tests to do that, and you can apply that to memories. You can apply that to ideas. You can apply that to anything, really. I mean, you could probably think about consciousness. You could… There’s really no boundary to what you can imagine. Probably really, really wild things could be minds. Yeah. Stay tuned. I mean, this is exactly what we’re doing. We’re getting progressively more and more unconventional. I mean, so this whole distinction between software and hardware, I think it’s a super important concept to think about. And yet, the way we’ve mapped it onto the world, I would like to blow that up in the following way. And again, I want to point out what the practical consequences are, because this is not just, you know, fun stories that we tell each other. These have really important research implications. Think about a Turing machine. So one thing you can say is the machine’s the agent. It has passive data, and it operates on the data, and that’s it. The story of agency is the story of whatever that machine can and can’t do. The data is passive, and it moves it around. You can tell the opposite story. You can say, “Look, the patterns on the data are the agent. The machine is a stigmergic scratch pad in the world of the data doing what data does.” The machine is just the consequences, the scratch pad of it working itself out. And both of those stories make sense depending on what you’re trying to do. Here’s the biomedical side of things. So our program in bioelectrics and aging, okay? One model you could have is the physical organism is the agent and the cellular collective has pattern memories, specifically what I was saying before, goals, anatomical goals. If you want to persist for 100 plus years, your cells better remember what your correct shape is and where the new cells go, right? So there are these pattern memories. They exist during embryogenesis, during regeneration, during resistance to aging. We can see them. We can visualize them. One thing you can imagine is, fine, the physical body, the cells, are the agent. The electrical pattern memories are just data, and what might happen during aging is that the data might get degraded. They might get fuzzy. And so what we need to do is reinforce the memories, reinforce the pattern memories. That’s one specific research program, and we’re doing that. But that’s not the only research program, because the other thing you might imagine is that, what if the patterns are the agent in exactly the same sense as we think in our brains? It’s the patterns of electrophysiological computations, whatever else, that is the agent, right?…

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