Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…Well, that free gift from math, I think, is extremely useful in biology. When you have small entities forming networks, hierarchy that builds more and more complex organisms. That’s obvious. I mean, this speaks to embryogenesis, which I think is one of the coolest things in the universe. In fact, you acknowledge its coolness in the “Ingressing Mind” paper, writing, quote, “Most of the big questions of philosophy are raised by the process of embryogenesis. Right in front of our eyes, a single cell multiplies and self-assembles into a complex organism, with order on every scale of organization and adaptive behavior. Each of us takes the same journey across the Cartesian cut, starting off as a quiescent human oocyte, a little blob thought to be well-described by chemistry and physics.” Gradually, it undergoes metamorphosis and eventually becomes a mature human with hopes, dreams, and a self-reflective metacognition that can enable it to describe itself as not a machine, that’s more than its brain, body, and underlying molecular mechanisms,” and so on. What, in all of our discussion, can we say as the clear intuition of how it’s possible to take a leap from a single cell to a fully functioning organism full of dreams and hopes and friends and love and all that kind of stuff? In everything we’ve been talking about which has been a little bit technical, how do we understand? ‘Cause that’s one of the most magical things the universe is able to create, perhaps the most magical. From simple physics and chemistry, create this, us two talking about ourselves. I think we have to keep in mind that physics and chemistry are not real things. They are lenses that we put on the world; they are perspectives where we say, “We are, for the time being, for the duration of this chemistry class or career or whatever, we are going to put aside all the other levels, and we’re going to focus on this one level.” And what is fundamentally going on during that process is an amazing positive feedback loop of collective intelligence for the interface. It’s the physical interface scaling its cognitive light cone that it can support, so it’s going from a molecular network… The molecular network can already do things like Pavlovian conditioning. You don’t start with zero. When you have a simple molecular network, you are already hosting some patterns from the platonic space that look like Pavlovian conditioning. You’ve already got that starting out. That’s just the molecular network. Then you become a cell, and then you’re many cells. And now you’re navigating anatomical amorphous space, and you’re hosting all kinds of other patterns. And eventually you… And I think again, I think there’s then this is like what all this stuff that we’re trying to work out now. There’s a consistent feedback between the ingressions you get and the ability to have new ones, which again I think is this positive feedback cycle, where the more of these free gifts you pull down, they allow you physically to develop to ways where, “Oh, look, now we’re suitable for more and higher ones. ” And this continuously goes and goes and goes until you’re able to pull down a full human set of behavioral capacities. What is the mechanism of such radical scaling of the cognitive cone? Is it just this kind of… The same thing that you were talking about with the network of chemicals being able to learn?…

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