Michael Levin: belief

Transcript context

…So when we’ve been talking about mind, in this particular case, it’s the most important to me because I’m a human. Does self come along with that? Does the feeling, like, this mind belongs to me? Does that come along with all minds? The subjective… Not the subjective experience. The subjective experience is important too, consciousness, but like the ownership. I suspect so, and I think so because of the way we come into being. So one of the things that I should be working on is this paper called “Booting Up the Agent,” and it talks about the very earliest steps of becoming a being in this world. Kind of like you can do this for a computer, right? Before you switch the power on, it belongs to the domain of physics, right? It obeys the laws of physics. You switch the power on, some number of nanoseconds, microseconds, I don’t know, later, you have a thing that, oh look, it’s taking instructions off the stack and doing them, right? So now it’s executing an algorithm. How did you get from physics to executing an algorithm? Like, what was happening during the boot-up exactly before it starts to run code or whatever, right? And so we can ask that same question in biology. What are the earliest steps of becoming a being? Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. Through embryogenesis, at which point are you booting on? Do you have a hope of an answer to that?…

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