#486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life

The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, his second time on the podcast. He is one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists and scientists I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. He and his labs at Tufts University study and build biological systems that help us understand the nature of intelligence, agency, memory, consciousness, and life, in all of its forms here on Earth and beyond. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com slash sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for selling stuff online, code rabbit for AI-powered code review, element for electrolytes, uplift desk for my favorite office desks that I'm sitting behind right now. Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team and masterclass for learning stuff from incredible people. Choose wise my friends and now onto the full ad reads. 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Please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Levin. You write that the central question at the heart of your work from biological systems to computational ones is how do embodied minds arise in the physical world? And what determines the capabilities and properties of those minds? Can you unpack that question for us and maybe begin to answer it? Well, the fundamental tension is in both the first person, the second person, and third person descriptions of mind. So in third person, we want to understand how do we recognize them and how do we know looking out into the world, what degree of agency there is and how best to relate to the different systems that we find and our intuitions any good when we look at something and it looks really stupid and mechanical versus it really looks like there's something cognitive going on there. How do we get good at recognizing them? Then there's the second person which is the control and that's both for engineering but also for regenerative medicine when you want to tell the system to do something. What kind of tools are you going to use? And this is a major part of my framework is that all of these kinds of things are operational claims that you're going to use the tools of hardware, rewiring, of control theory and cybernetics, of behavior science, of psychoanalysis and love and friendship, like what are the interaction protocols that you bring? Right. And then in first person, it's this notion of having an inter perspective and being a system that has valence and cares about the outcome of things makes decisions and has memories and tells a story about itself and the outside world. And how can all of that exist and still be consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry and various other things that we see around us? So that I find to be maybe the most interesting and the most important mystery for all of us to well on the science and also on the personal level. So that's what I'm interested. So your work is focused on starting at the physics, going all the way to friendship and love and psychoanalysis. Yeah, although actually I would turn that upside down. I think that pyramid is backwards and I think it's behavior science at the bottom. I think it's behavior science all the way. I think in certain ways, even math is the behavior of a certain kind of being that lives in a latent space and physics is what we call systems that at least look to be amenable to a very simple low agency kind of model and so on. But that's what I'm interested in is understanding that and developing applications because it's very important to me that what we do is transition deep ideas and philosophy into actual practical applications that not only make it clear whether we're making any progress or not, but also allow us to relieve suffering and make life better for all sentient beings and and enable to enable us and others to reach their full potential. So these are these are very practical things, I think. Behavioral science is supposed to be more subjective and mathematics and physics is more objective. That'd be the clear difference. The idea basically is that where something is on that spectrum and I've called it the spectrum of persuadability, you could call it the spectrum of intelligence or agency or something like that. I like the notion of the spectrum of persuadability because it's an engineering approach. It means that these are not things you can decide or have feelings about from a from a philosophical armchair. You have to make a hypothesis about which tools which interaction protocols you're going to bring to a given system and then we all get to find out how that worked out for you. So you could be wrong in many ways in both directions. You can guess too high or too low or wrong in various ways and then we can all find out how that's working out. And so I do think that the behavior of certain objects is well described by specific formal formal rules and we call those things that's the subject of mathematics and then there are some other things whose behavior really requires the kinds of tools that we use in behavioral cognitive neuroscience and those are other kinds of minds that we think we study in biology or in psychology or other sciences. Why are you using the term persuadability? Who are you persuading and of what? Well, in this context. Yeah. The beginning of my work is very much in regenerative medicine in in bioengineering things like that. So for those kinds of systems, the the question is always how do you get the system to do what you want it to do? So there are cells, there are molecular networks, there are materials, there are organs and tissues and synthetic beings and bio bots and whatever. And so the idea is if I want your cells to regrow a limb, for example, if you're injured and I want your cells to regrow a limb, I have many options. Some of those options are I'm going to micromanage all of the molecular events that have to happen. And there's an incredible number of those or maybe I just have to micromanage the cells and the stem cell kinds of signaling factors or maybe actually I can give the cells a very high level prompt that says you really should build the limb and convince them to do it. And so where what what which of those is possible? I mean, clearly people have a lot of intuitions about that. If you ask standard people in regenerative medicine and molecular biology, they're going to say, well, that convincing thing is crazy. What we really should be doing is talking to the cells or better yet the molecular networks. And in fact, all the excitement of the biological sciences today are at you know, single molecule approaches and big data and genomics and all of that. The assumption is that going down is where the action is going to be going down and scale. And I think that's I think that's wrong. But the but the thing that we can say for sure is that you can't guess that you have to do experiments and you have to see because you don't know where any given system is on that spectrum of persuadability and it turns out that every time we look and we take tools from behavioral science. So learning different kinds of training, different kinds of models that are used in active inference and surprise minimization and perceptual multistability and visual illusions and all these kinds of interesting thing, you know, stress perception and memory, active memory reconstruction, all these interesting things. When we apply them outside the brain to other kinds of living systems, we find novel discoveries and novel capabilities actually being able to get the material to do new things that nobody had ever found before. And precisely because I think that people didn't didn't look at it from those perspectives, they assume that it was a low level kind of thing. So when I see persuadability, I mean different types of approaches, right? And we all know if you want to persuade you are wind up clock to do something, you're not going to argue with it or make it feel guilty or anything, you're going to have to get in there with a wrench and you're going to have to tune it up and do whatever. If you want to do that same thing to a cell or a thermostat or an animal or a human, you're going to be using other sets of tools that we've given other names to. And so that's now, now of course that spectrum, the important thing is that as you get to the right of that spectrum, as the agency of the system goes up, it is no longer just about persuading it to do things. It's a bidirectional relationship. What Richard Watson would call a mutual vulnerable knowing. So the idea is that on the right side of that spectrum, when systems reach the higher levels of agency, the idea is that you're willing to let that system persuade you of things as well. You know, in molecular biology, you do things, hopefully the system does what you want to do, but you haven't changed. You're still exactly the way you came in. But on the right side of that spectrum, if you're having interactions with even cells, but certainly dogs, other animals, maybe other creatures soon, you're not the same at the end of that interaction as you are going it. It's a mutual bidirectional relationship. So it's not just you persuading something else. It's not you pushing things. It's a mutual bidirectional set of persuasions, whether those are purely intellectual or other kinds. So in order to be effective at persuading an intelligent being, you yourself have to be persuadable. So the closer in intelligence you are to the thing you're trying to persuade, the more persuadably you have to become. Hence the mutual vulnerable knowing what a term. Yeah, Richard, yeah, you should talk to Richard as well. He's an amazing guy and he has got some very interesting ideas about the intersection of cognition and evolution. But I, you know, I think what you bring up is very important because there has to be a kind of impedance match between what you're looking for and the tools that you're using. I think the reason physics always sees mechanism and not minds is that physics uses low agency tools. You've got voltmeters and rulers and things like this. And if you use those tools as your interface, all you're ever going to see is mechanisms and those kinds of things. If you want to see minds, you have to use a mind, right? You have to have to have to be some degree of resonance between your interface and the thing you're hoping to find. You've said this about physics before. Can you just link on that like expand on it? What do you mean? Why physics is not enough to understand life, to understand mind, to understand intelligence? You make a lot of controversial statements with your work. That's one of them because there's a lot of physicists that believe they can understand life, the emergence of life, the origin of life, the origin of intelligence using the tools of physics. In fact, all the other tools are a distraction to those folks. If you want to understand fundamental anything, you have to start a physics to them. And you're saying no, physics is not enough. Here's the issue. Everything here hangs on what it means to understand. For me, because understand doesn't just mean have some sort of pleasing model that seems to capture some important aspect of what's going on. It also means that you have to be generative and creative in terms of capabilities. And so for me, that means if I tell you this is what I think about cognition and cells and tissues, it means, for example, that I think we're going to be able to take those ideas and use them to produce new regenerative medicine that actually helps people in various ways. Right? It's just an example. So if you think as a physicist, you're going to have a complete understanding of what's going on from that perspective of fields and particles and then, you know, who knows what else is at the bottom there. Does that mean then that when somebody is missing a finger or has a psychological problem or has these other high-level issues that you have something for them that you're going to be able to do something because my claim is that you're not going to. And even if you have some theory of physics that is completely compatible with everything that's going on, it's not enough. That's not specific enough to enable you to solve the problems you need to solve. In the end, when you need to solve those problems, the person you're going to go to is not a physicist. It's going to be either a biologist or a psychiatrist or who knows, but it's not going to be a physicist. And the simple example is this, you know, let's say someone comes in here and tells you a beautiful mathematical proof. Okay, it's just really, you know, deep and beautiful. And there's a physicist nearby and he says, well, I know exactly what happened. There were some air particles that moved from that guy's mouth to your ear. I see what goes on. It moved your the silia in your ear and the electrical signals went up to your brain. I mean, we have a complete accounting of what happened, done and done. But if you want to understand what's the more important aspect of that interaction, it's not going to be found in the physics department. It's going to be found in the math department. So that's my only claim is that physics is an amazing lens with which to view the world, which are capturing certain things. And if you want to stretch to sort of encompass these other things, it's just we just don't call that physics anymore. We call that something else. Okay, but you're kind of speaking about the super complex organisms. Can we go to the simplest possible thing where you first take a step over the line, the Cartesian cut as you've called it from the non-mind to mind, from the non-living to the simplest possible thing. Isn't that in the realm of physics to understand? How do I understand that first step where you're like, that thing is no mind, probably non-living, and here's a living thing that has a mind, that line. I think that's a really interesting line. Maybe you can speak to the line as well, and can physics help us understand it. Yeah, let's talk about well, first of all, of course, it can mean it can help, meaning that I'm not saying physics is not helpful. Of course, it's helpful. It's a very important lens on one slice of what's going on in any of these systems. But I think the most important thing I can say about that question is, I don't believe in any such line. I don't believe any of that exists. I think there is a continuum. I think we as humans like to demarcate areas on that continuum and give them names because it makes life easier, and then we have a lot of battles over, so-called category errors when people transgress those categories. I think most of those categories at this point, they may have done some good service at the beginning of when the scientific method was getting started and so on. I think at this point, they mostly hold back science. Many, many categories that we can talk about are at this point very harmful to progress, because what those categories do is they prevent you from porting tools. If you think that living things are fundamentally different from non-living things, or if you think that cognitive things are at least like advanced brainy things that are very different from other kinds of systems, what you're not going to do is take the tools that are appropriate to these cognitive systems. The tools that have been developed in behavioral science and so on, you're never going to try them in other contexts because you've already decided that there's a categorical difference that it would be a categorical error to apply them. People say this to me all the time. You're making a category error. As if these categories were given to us from on high, and we have to obey them forever more, the categories should change with the science. I don't believe in any such line. I think a physics story is very often a useful part of the story, but for most interesting things, it's not the entire story. There's no line. It's still useful to talk about things like the origin of life. One of the big open mysteries before us as a human civilization as scientifically minded, curious, homo sapiens, how did this whole thing start? Are you saying there is no start? Is there a point where you could say that invention right there was the start of it all on earth? My suggestion is that much better than trying to, in my experience, much better than trying to define any kind of a line because inevitably I've never found people try to, we play this game all the time, when I make my continuum claim, then people try to come, what about this? What about this? I haven't found one yet that really shoots that down, that you can't zoom in and say, okay, but right before then this happened, and if we really look close, here's a bunch of steps in between. Pretty much everything ends up being a continuum, but it's just what I think is much more interesting than trying to make that line. I think what's really more useful is trying to understand the transformation process. What is it that happened to scale up? And I'll give you a really dumb example. We always get into this because people often really, really don't like this continuum view. The word adult, right? Everybody is going to say, look, I know what a baby is, I know what an adult is, you're crazy to say that there's no difference. Not saying there's no difference, what I'm saying is the word adult is really helpful in court because you just need to move things along. We've decided that if you're 18, you're an adult. However, what it hides is what it completely conceals is the fact that, first of all, nothing happens on your 18th birthday. That's special. Second, if you actually look at the data, the car rental companies actually have a much better estimate because they actually look at the accident statistics, and they'll say it's about 25, is really what you're looking for. There's a little better, it's less arbitrary. But in either case, what it's hiding is the fact that we do not have a good story of what happened from the time that you were an egg to the time that you're the supposed adult. And what is the scaling of repersonal responsibility, decision-making judgment? These are deep, fundamental questions. Nobody wants to get into that every time somebody has a traffic ticket. So we've just decided that this is a adult idea. And of course, it does come up in court because then somebody has a brain tumor or somebody's eaten too many twinkies or something has happened. You say, look, that wasn't me. Whoever did that, I was on drugs. Well, why did you take the drugs? Well, that was yesterday, me. Today, this is... So we get into these very deep questions that are completely glossed over by this idea of an adult. So I think once you start scratching the surface, most of these categories are like that. They're convenient and they're good. I get into this with neurons all the time. I'll ask people, what's a neuron? What's really a neuron? And yes, if you're in neurobiology 101, of course, you just say, look, these are what neurons look like. Let's just study the neuron anatomy and we're done. But if you really want to understand what's going on, well, neurons develop from other types of cells. And that was a slow and gradual process. And most of the cells in your body do the things that neurons do. So what really is a neuron? So once you start scratching this, this happens. And I have some things that I think are coming out of our lab and others that are, I think, very interesting about the origin of life. But I don't think it's about finding that one boom like this is, yeah, there'll be... There are innovations, right? There are innovations that allow you to scale in an amazing way for sure. And lots of people that study those, right? So things that thermodynamic kind of metabolic things and all kinds of architectures and so on. But I don't think it's about finding a line. I think it's about finding a scaling process. The scaling process. But then there's more rapid scaling and there's slower scaling. So innovation, invention, I think is useful to understand. So you can predict how likely it is on other planets, for example, or to be able to describe the likelihood of these kinds of phenomena happening in certain kinds of environments, against specifically in answering how many alien civilizations there are. That's why it's useful. But it's also useful on a scientific level to have categories, not just because it makes us feel good and fuzzy inside. But because it makes conversation possible and productive, I think. If everything is a spectrum, it becomes difficult to make concrete statements, I think. But we even use the terms of biology and physics. Those are categories. Technically, it's all the same thing. Really, fundamentally, it's all the same. There's no difference in biology and physics. But it's a useful category. If you go to the physics department and the biology department, those people are different in some kind of categorical way. So somehow, I don't know what the chicken or the egg is with the categories. Maybe the categories create themselves because of the way we think about them and use them in language. But does seem useful. Let me make the opposite argument. They're absolutely useful. They're useful specifically when you want to gloss over certain things. The categories are exactly useful when there's a whole bunch of stuff. And this is what's important about science is the art of being able to say something without first having to say everything, right? Which should make it impossible. So categories are great when you want to say, look, I know, there's a bunch of stuff hidden here. I'm going to ignore all that and we're just going to, like, let's get on with this particular thing. And all of that is great as long as you don't lose track of the stuff that you glossed over. And that was what I'm afraid is happening in a lot of different ways. And in terms of look, I'm very interested in life beyond earth and all of these kinds of things, although we should also talk about what I call SUTI, the search for unconventional terrestrial intelligences, I think I think we got much bigger issues than actually recognizing aliens off earth. But I'll make this claim. I think the categorical stuff is actually hurting that search because if we try to define categories with the kinds of criteria that we've gotten used to, we are going to be very poorly set up to recognize life in novel embodiments. I think we have a kind of mind blindness. I think this is really key. It's much to me, to me, the cognitive spectrum is much more interesting than the spectrum of life. I think really what we're talking about is the spectrum of cognition. And it's, I know it's weird as a biologist to say, I don't think life is all that interesting in category. I think the categories of different types of minds, I think, is extremely interesting. And to the extent that we think our categories are complete and are cutting nature at its joints, we are going to be very poorly placed to recognize novel systems. So for example, a lot of people will say, well, this is intelligent and this isn't, right? And there's a binary thing. And that's useful in occasionally. That's useful for some things. I would like to say, instead of that, let's make us, let's, let's admit that we have a spectrum. But instead of just saying, all look, everything's intelligent, right? Because if you do that, you're right. You can't, you can't do anything after that. What I'd like to say instead is, no, no, you have to be very specific as to what kind and how much. In other words, what problem space is it operating in? What kind of mind does it have? What kind of cognitive capacity does it have? You have to actually be much more specific. And we can even name, right? That's fine. We can name different types of, I mean, this is doing predictive processing. This can't do that, but it can't form memories. What kind? Well, habituation and sensitization, but not as always here of conditioning. Like it's fine to have categories for specific capabilities, but it's, it's, it actually, I think it actually makes, makes for much more rigorous discussions because it makes you say, what is it that you're claiming this thing does? And it works in both directions. So, and so some people will say, well, that's a, that's a cell that can't be intelligent. And say, well, that's be very specific. Here are some claims about here is some problems all that it's doing. Tell me why that doesn't, you know, why it doesn't that match? Or in the opposite direction, somebody comes to me and says, you're right, you're right. You know, the whole solar system, and it's just like this amazing, like, okay, what is it doing? Like tell me tell me what tools of cognitive and behavioral science are you using to reach that conclusion? And so I think, I think it's actually much more productive to take this operational stance and say, tell me what protocols you think you can deploy with this thing that would lead you to, to use these terms. To have a bit of a meta conversation about the conversation, I should say that part of the persuadability argument that we two intelligent creatures are doing is me playing devil's advocate once in a while and you did the same, which is kind of interesting, taking the opposite view and see what comes out. Because you don't know the result of the argument until you have the argument. And it seems productive to just take the other side of the argument. For sure. It's a very important thinking aid to, first of all, you know, what they call steel manning, right, to try to make the strongest possible case for the other side and to ask yourself, okay, what are all the places that I'm sort of glossing over because I don't know exactly what to say? And where are all the, where are all the holes in the argument and what would, what would, what would a, you know, a really good critique really look like? Yeah. Sorry to go back there. Just to link on the term because it's so interesting persuadability. Did I understand correctly that you mean that it's kind of synonymous with intelligence? So it's an engineering centric view of an intelligent system because of its persuadable, you're more focused on how can I steer the goals of the system, the behaviors of the system, which meaning an intelligent system maybe is a goal oriented, goal driven system with agency. And when you call it persuadable, you're thinking more like, okay, here's an intelligent system that I'm interacting with that I would like to get it to accomplish certain things, but fundamentally they're synonymous or correlated persuadability and intelligence. They're definitely correlated. So, so let me, I want to, I want to preface this with one thing. When I say it's an engineering perspective, I don't mean that the standard tools that we use in engineering and this idea of enforced control and steering is how we should view all of the world. I'm not saying that at all, and I want to be very clear on the, because, because, because people do email me and say, that is engineering thing, you're going to drain the, you know, the life and the majesty out of these high-end, like human conversation. My whole point is not that at all. It's that, of course, at the right side of the spectrum, it doesn't look like engineering anymore, right? It looks like, it looks like friendship and love and psychoanalysis and all these other tools that we have. But here's what I want to do. I want to be very specific to my colleagues in regenerative medicine and just imagine if I, you know, if I, if I went to a bioengineering department or a genetics department and I started talking about high-level, you know, cognition and psychoanalysis, right? They didn't want to hear that. So, so I bring my, I focus on the engineering approach because I want to look, this is not a philosophical problem. This is not a linguistics problem. We are not trying to define terms in different ways to make anybody feel fuzzy. What I'm telling you is, if you want to reach certain capabilities, if you want to reprogram cancer, if you want to regrow new organs, you want to defeat aging, you want to do these specific things, you are leaving too much on the table by making an unwarranted assumption that the low-level tools that we have, so these are the rules of chemistry and the kind of remolecular rewiring, that those are going to be sufficient to get to where you want to go. It's a, it's an assumption only and it's an unwarranted assumption. And actually, we've done experiments now. So, so not philosophy, but real experiments, that if you take these other tools, you can in fact persuade the system in ways that has never been done before. And, and we can, we can unpack all that. But it is, it is absolutely correlated with intelligence. So, let me flesh that out a little bit. What I think is scaling in all of these things, right? Because I keep talking about the scaling. So, what is it that scaling? What I think is scaling is something I call the cognitive light cone. And the cognitive light cone is the size of the biggest goal state that you can pursue. This doesn't mean how far do your senses reach, this doesn't mean how far can you affect it. So, the James Webb telescope has enormous sensory reach, but that doesn't mean that's, that's the size of its cognitive light cone. The size of the cognitive light cone is the scale of the biggest goal you can actively pursue. But I do think it's a useful concept to enable us to think about very different types of agents of different composition, different provenance, you know, engineer devolved, hybrid, whatever, all in the same framework. And by the way, the reason I use light cone is that it has this idea from physics that you're putting space and time kind of in the same diagram, which is, which I like here. So, if you tell me that all your goals revolve around maximizing the amount of sugar, the amount of sugar in this, you know, 10, 20 micron radius of space time, and that you have, you know, 20 minutes memory going back and maybe five minutes predict the capacity going forward, that tiny little cognitive light cone, I'm going to say probably a bacteria. And if you say to me that, well, I, I'm able to care about several hundred yards the sort of scale, I could never care about what happens three weeks from now, two towns over, just impossible. I'm saying you might be a dog. And if, and if you say to me, okay, I care about really what happens, you know, the financial markets on earth, the, you know, long after I'm dead, and this and that, say you're probably a human. And if you say to me, I care in the linear range, I actively, not, I'm not just saying that I can actively care in the linear range about all the living beings on this planet. I'm going to say, well, you're not a standard human. You must be something else because humans, I don't know, you standard humans today. I don't think I can do that. You, you must be some kind of a body sad for some other thing that has these massive cognitive icons. So I think what's scaling from zero, and I do think it goes all the way down. I think we can talk about, even, even particles doing something like this. I think what scales is the size of the cognitive icon. And so now this is an interesting here. I'll, I'll try for a definition of life for whatever, for whatever it's worth. I spent no time trying to make that stick, but if we wanted to, I think we call things alive to the extent that the cognitive icon of that thing is bigger than that of its parts. So in other words, rocks aren't very exciting because the things it knows how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that. But living things are amazing at aligning their, but they're competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive icon than the parts. I'll give you a very simple example that comes up in biology and it comes up in our cancer program all the time. Individual cells have little tiny cognitive icons. They, what are their goals? Well, they're trying to manage pH, metabolic state, some other things. There are some goals in transcriptional space, some goals, metabolic space, some goals, and physiological state space, but they're generally very tiny goals. One thing evolution did was to provide a kind of cognitive glue, which we can also talk about, that ties them together into a multicellular system. And those systems have grandiose goals. They're making limbs. And if you're a salamander limb and you chop it off, they will regrow that limb with the right number of fingers. Then they'll stop when it's done. The goal has been achieved. No individual cell knows what a finger is or how many fingers you're supposed to have, but the collective absolutely does. And that process of growing that cognitive icon from a single cell to something much bigger. And of course, the failure mode of that process, so cancer, right? When cells disconnect, they physiologically disconnect from the other cells, their cognitive lichen shrinks, the boundary between self-unworld, which is what the cognitive lichen defines. Shrinks, now they're back to an amoeba, as far as they're concerned, the rest of the body is just an external environment. And they do what amoeba is to do. They go where life is good. They reproduce as much as they can, right? So that cognitive lichen, that is the thing that I'm talking about that scales. And so when we're looking for life, I don't think we're looking for specific materials. I don't think we're looking for specific metabolic states. I think we're looking for scales of cognitive lichen. We're looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals in spaces that the parts could not comprehend. And so cognitive lichen just to make clear as about goals that you can actually pursue now. He said linear, like within reach immediately. No, I didn't, sorry, I didn't mean that. First of all, the goal necessarily is often removed in time. So in other words, when you're pursuing a goal, it means that you have a separation between current state and target state at minimum, your thermostat, right? There's just think about that. There's a separation in time because the thing you're trying to make happen so that the temperature goes to a certain level is not true right now. And all your actions are going to be around reducing that error, right? That basic homestatic loop is all about closing that gap. When I met, when I said linear range, this is what I meant. If I say to you, this terrible thing happened to 10 people and you have some degree of activation about it. And then I say, no, no, actually it was under 10,000 people. You're not a thousand times more activated about it. You're somewhat more activated, but it's not a thousand. And if I say, oh my god, it was actually 10 million people, you're not a million times more activated. You don't have that capacity in the linear range or you're sort of, if you think about that curve, we reach a saturation point. I have some amazing colleagues in the Buddhist community with whom we've written some papers about this. The radius of compassion is like, can you grow your cognitive system to the point that, yeah, it really isn't just your family group. It really isn't just the hundred people you know in your circle. Can you grow your cognitive liquef to the point where, no, no, we care about the whole, whether it's all of humanity or the whole ecosystem or the whole whatever, can you actually care about that the exact same way that we now care about a much smaller set of people? That's what I mean by linear range. But you said separated by time like a thermostat, but a bacteria, I mean, if you zoom out far enough, a bacteria could be formulated to have a goal state of creating human civilization. Because if you look at the bacteria, has a role to play in the whole history of Earth. So if you anthropomorphize the goals of bacteria enough, I mean, it has a concrete role to play in the history of the evolution of human civilization. So you do need to, when you define a cognitive liquef, you're looking at directly short term behavior. Well, no, how do you know what the cognitive liquef of something is? Because as you've said, it could be almost anything. The key is you have to do experiments. And the way you do experiments is you put barrier, you have to do interventional experiments. You have to put barriers between it and its goal. And you have to ask what happens. And intelligence is the degree of ingenuity that it has in overcoming barriers between it and its goal. Now, if it were to be that, no, this is the, this is, I think, totally doable, but impractical and very expensive experiment. But you could imagine setting up a scenario where the bacteria were blocked from becoming more complex. And you can ask if they were trying to find ways around it. Or whether it's actually, now their goals are actually metabolic. And as long as those goals are met, they're not going to actually get around your barrier. This business of putting barriers between things and their goals is actually extremely powerful. Because we've deployed it in all kinds of, and I'm sure I'm sure we'll get to this later, but we've deployed it in all kinds of weird systems that you wouldn't think are gold driven systems. And what it allows us to do is to get beyond just the, the, the, what you call the anthropomorphizing claims of saying, you know, saying, oh, yeah, I think, you know, I think this is thing is trying to do this or that. The question is, let's do the experiment. And one other thing I want to say about anthropomorphizing is people, people say this to me all the time. I don't think that exists. I think that's kind of like, you know, uh, and I'll tell you why. I think it's like heresy or like other other terms that aren't really a thing. Because if you, if you want packet, here's, here's what anthropomorphism means. Humans have a certain magic, and you're making a category error by attributing that magic somewhere else. My point is, we have the same magic that everything has. We have a couple of interesting things besides the cognitive icon and some other stuff. And it isn't that you have to keep the humans separate because there's some bright line. It's just, it's, it's that same old, uh, all, all I'm, all I'm arguing for is the scientific method. Really? That's really all this is. All I'm saying is you can't just make pronouncements such as the humans are this and let's not, uh, sort of push that. You have to do experiments after you've done your experiments. You can say either I've done it and I found, look at that. That thing actually can predict the future for the next, you know, 12 minutes. Amazing. Or you say, you know what? I've tried all the things in the behaviorist handbook. They just don't help me with this. It's a very low level of like, that's it. It's a, it's a very low level of intelligence fine, right? Done. So that's really all I'm arguing for is an empirical approach. And then things I can't throw more of a phism go away. It's just the matter of have you done the experiment and what did you find? And that's actually one of the things you're saying that, uh, if you remove the categorization of things, you can use the tools of one discipline on everything. You can try to try and then see that's the underpinnings of the criticism anthropomorphization because, uh, what is that? That's like psychoanalysis of another human could technically be applied to, to robots, AI systems, to more primitive biological systems and so on. Try. Yeah. We've used everything from basic habituation conditioning all the way through anxiolytic hallucinogens, all kinds of cognitive modification on the range of things that you wouldn't believe. And by the way, I'm not the first person to come up with this. So there was a guy named Bose, well over a hundred years ago, who was studying how anesthesia affected animals and animal cells and drawing specific herbs around electrical excitability. And he then went and did it with plants and saw some very similar phenomena and being the genius that he was, he then said, well, I don't know when to stop, but there's no, you know, everybody thinks we should have stopped long before plants because people made fun of them for that. And he's like, yeah, but the science doesn't tell us where to stop. The tool is working. Let's keep going. And he showed interesting phenomena on materials, metals and, and, and other kinds of materials, right? And so, uh, the interesting thing is that, yeah, there is no, there is no, uh, you know, generic rule that tells you when, uh, when do you need to stop? We make those up. Those are completely made up. You have to just, you have to do the science and find out. Yeah, you, uh, we'll probably get to it. Uh, you've been doing recent work on looking at computational systems, even trivial ones like algorithms, sorting algorithms, and analyzing the behavior of kind of ways, if they're minds inside those sorting algorithms. And it, of course, let me make a podhead statement question here that you can start to do things like, uh, trying to do psychedelics with a sorting. Yeah. And what does that even look like? Yeah. It looks like a ridiculous question. It'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. Yeah. If it has, 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 do a human mind. It's a complex human mind. At least might be a productive question to ask what, because you've seen like spiders on psychedelics like more primitive biological organisms on psychedelics. Why not try to see what an algorithm does on psychedelics? 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 end of one example on earth and we kind of know what to expect from cells, snakes, primates, but we really don't. We don't have, and this is what we'll get into more of the stuff on the platonic space. But our intuitions around that stuff is so bad that to really think that we know enough not to try things at this point is I think really shortsighted. Before we talk about the platonic space, let's lay it out some foundations. I think useful one comes from the paper, technological approach to mind everywhere, and 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, don't you all network down to set of skeleton, don't you genetic network, and then there's layers of biological systems from ecosystem down to swarmed on the organism tissue and finally cell. So can you explain this figure and can you explain the tame so-called framework? So this is the version 1.0 and there's a there's a kind of updated 2.0 that I'm writing at the moment and trying to formalize in a careful way all the things that we've been talking about here. And in particular, this notion of having to do experiments to figure out where any given system is on a continuum. And we can let's just start with figure two maybe for a second and we'll come back to figure one. And first just to unpack the acronym. I like the idea that it spells out tame because the central focus of this is interactions and how do you interact with a system to have a productive interaction with it and the idea is that cognitive claims are really protocol claims. When you tell me that something has some degree of intelligence, what you're really saying is this is the set of tools I'm going to deploy and then we can all find out how that worked out for you. And so technological because I wanted to be clear with my colleagues that this was not a project in just philosophy. They said very specific empirical implications that are going to play out in engineering and regenerative medicine and so on. Technological approach to mind everywhere. This idea that we don't know yet where different kinds of minds are to be found and we have to empirically figure that out. And so what you see here in figure two is basically this idea that there is a spectrum and I'm just showing four waypoints along that spectrum. And as you move to the right of that spectrum, a couple of things happen. Persuadeability goes up meaning that the systems become more reprogramble, more plastic, more able to do different things than whatever they're standardly doing. So you have more ability to get them to do new and interesting things. The effort needed to exert influence goes down. That is autonomy goes up into the extent that you are good at convincing or motivating the system to do things. You don't have to sweat the details as much. And this also has to do with what I call engineering, a gentle materials. So when you engineer wood metal plastic things like that, you are responsible for absolutely everything because the material is not going to do anything other than hopefully hold its shape. If you're engineering active matter or you're engineering computational materials or better yet, a gentle materials like living live a matter, you can do some very high level prompting and let the system then do very complicated things that you don't need to micromanage. And we all know that that increases when you're starting to work with intelligent systems like animals and humans and so on. And the other thing that goes down as you get to the right is the amount of mechanism or physics that you need to exert the influence goes down. So if you know how your thermostat is to be set as far as its set point, you really don't need to know much of anything else. You just need to know that it is a homeostatic system and that this is how I change the set point. You don't need to know how the cooling and heating plant works in order to get it to do complex things. By the way, a quick pause just for people who are listening, let me describe what's in the figure. So there's four different systems going up the scale of persuadability. So the first system is a mechanical clock. Then it's a thermostat that it's a dog that gets rewards and punishments. Pavlov's dog. And then finally, a bunch of very smart looking humans communicate with each other and arguing persuading each other using hashtag reasons. And then there's arrows below that showing persuadability going up as you go up these systems from the mechanical clock to a bunch of Greeks arguing and then going down as the effort needed to exert influence. And once again, going down as mechanism knowledge needed to exert that influence. Yeah, I'll give you an example about that panel C here with the dog. Isn't it amazing that humans have been training dogs and horses for thousands of years knowing zero neuroscience? Also amazing is that when I'm talking to you right now, I don't need to worry about manipulating all of the synaptic proteins in your brain to make you understand what I'm saying and hopefully remember it. You're going to do that all on your own. I'm giving you very thin in terms of information content, very thin prompt. And I'm counting on you as a multi-scale agential material to take care of the chemistry underneath. So you don't need a wrench to convince me. Correct. I don't need and I don't need physics to convince you and I don't need to know how you work. Like I don't need to understand all of the steps. What I do need to have is trust that you are a multi-scale cognitive system that already does that for for yourself. And you do like this is an amazing thing. I don't people don't think about this enough. I think when you wake up in the morning, and you have social goals, research goals, financial goals, whatever whatever is that you have, in order for you to act on those goals, sodium and calcium and other ions have to cross your muscle membranes. Those incredibly abstract goals states ultimately have to make the chemistry dance in a very particular way. Right. Your entire body is a transducer of very abstract things. And by the way, not just our brains, but other, you know, our organs have anatomical goals and other things that we can talk about because all of this plays out in regeneration and development and so on. But the scaling, right, of all of these things, the way you regulate yourself is not by, oh my god, you don't have to sit there and think, wow, I really have to push some sodium across this membrane. All of that happens automatically. And that's the that's the incredible benefit of these multi-scale materials. So what I'm trying to do in this paper is a couple of things. All of these were by the way drawn by Jeremy Gay, who's this amazing graphic artist that works with me. First of all, in panel A, which is the spiral I was trying to point out is that at every level of biological organization, like we all know we're sort of nested dolls of, you know, organs and tissues and cells and molecules and whatever. But what I'm trying to point out is that this is not just structural. Every one of those layers is competent and is doing problem solving in different spaces and spaces that are very hard for us to imagine. We humans are because of our own evolutionary history. We are so obsessed with movement and three-dimensional space that even even in AI, you see this all the time, they say, well, this thing doesn't have a robotic body. It's not embodied. Yeah, it's not embodied by moving around in 3D space, but biology has embodiments and all kinds of spaces that are hard for us to imagine, right? So your cells and tissues are moving in high dimensional physiological state spaces and in transgenic expressions, state spaces and anatomical state spaces, they're doing that perception decision-making action loop that we do in 3D space when we think about robots wandering around your kitchen. They're doing those loops in these other spaces. And so the first thing I was trying to point out is that yeah, every layer of your body has its own ability to solve problems in those spaces. And then on the right, what I was saying is that this distinction between, you know, people say, well, there are living beings and then there are engineered machines and then they often follow up with all the things machines are never going to be able to do and whatever. And so what I was trying to point out here is that it is very difficult to maintain those kind of distinctions because life is incredibly interoperable. Life doesn't really care if the thing it's working with was evolved through random trial and error or was engineered with a higher degree of agency because at every level within the cell, within the tissue, within the organism, within the collective, you can replace and substitute engineered systems with the naturally evolved systems. And that question of, is it really, you know, is it biology or is it technology? I don't think it's a useful question anymore. So I was trying to warn people up with this idea that what we're going to do now is talk about minds in general, regardless of their history or their composition. It doesn't matter what you're made of. It doesn't matter how you got here. Let's talk about what you're able to do and what your inner world looks like. That was the goal of that. Is it useful as a thought experiment? As an experiment of radical empathy to try to put ourselves in the space of the different minds at each stage of the spiral. It's like what? Stay space is human in civilization as a collective embodied. What is it operating? So humans, individual organisms operating in 3D space. That's what we understand. But when there's a bunch of us together, what are we doing together? It's really hard and you have to do experiments which at larger scales are really difficult. But there is such a thing. There may well be. We have to do experiments. I don't know. There's an example. Somebody will say to me, well, you know, with your kind of panpsychist view, you might as you probably think the weather is is is a gentle too. Well, I can't say that, but we don't know, but have you ever tried to see if a hurricane has habituation or sensitization? Maybe we haven't done the experiments. It's hard, but you could. Maybe weather systems can have certain kinds of memories. I have no idea. We have to do experiments. I don't know what the entire human society is doing, but I'll just give you a simple example of the kinds of tools. We're actively trying to build tools now to enable radically different agents to communicate. We are doing this using AI and other tools to try and get this kind of communication going across very different spaces. I'll just give you a very dumb example of how that might be. Imagine that you're playing Tic Tac Toe against an alien. You're in a room. You don't see him. So you draw the Tic Tac Toe thing on the floor. You know what you're doing. You're trying to make straight lines with Xs and O's. And you're having a nice game. It's obvious that he understands the process. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It's obvious. In that one little segment of activity you guys are sharing a world, what's happening in the other room next door? Well, let's say the alien doesn't know anything about geometry. He doesn't understand straight lines. What he's doing is he's got a box and it's full of basically billiard balls, each one of which has a number on it. And all he's looking at is doing is he's looking through the box to find a billiard balls whose numbers add up to 15. He doesn't understand geometry at all. All he understands is arithmetic. You don't think about arithmetic. You think geometry. The reason you guys are playing the same game is that there's this magic square. That somebody could construct it. That basically is a three by three square where if you pick the numbers right, they add up to 15. He has no idea that there's a geometric interpretation to this. He is solving the problem that he sees, which is totally algebra. You don't know anything about that. But if there is an appropriate interface like this magic square, you guys can share that experience. You can have an experience. It doesn't mean you start to think like him. It means that you guys are able to interact in a particular way. Okay, so there's a mapping between the two different ways of seeing the world that allows you to communicate with the world. Seeing a thin slice of the world. Thin slice of the world. How do you find that mapping? So you're saying we're trying to figure out ways of finding that mapping for different kinds of systems. What's the process for doing that? The process is twofold. One is to get a better understanding of what the system, what space is the system navigating? What goals does it have? What level of ingenuity does it have to reach those goals? For example, xenobots. We make xenobots. These are biological systems that have never existed on Earth before. We have no idea what their cognitive properties are. We're learning. We found some things, but you can't predict that from first principles because they're not at all what their past history would inform you of. Can you actually explain briefly what it's done about is and what an answer about is? One of the things that we've been doing is trying to create novel beings that have never been here before. The reason is that typically when you have a biological system, an animal or a plant, and you say, hey, why does it have certain forms of behavior, certain forms, of anatomy, certain forms of physiology? Why does it have those? The answer is always the same. Well, there's a history of evolutionary selection, and there's a long history going back of adaptation, and there are certain environments, and this is what's survived, and so that's why it has. What I wanted to do was break out of that mold and to basically force us as a community to dig deeper into where these things come from, and that means taking away the crutch where you just say, well, it's evolutionary selection. That's why it looks like that. We have to make artificial synthetic beings now. To be clear, we are starting with living cells, so it's not that they had no evolutionary history. The cells do. They had evolutionary history in frogs or humans or whatever, but the creatures they make and the capabilities that these creatures have were never directly selected for, and in fact, they never existed. So you can't tell the same kind of story. And what I mean is we can take epithelial cells off of an early frog embryo, and we don't change the DNA, no synthetic biology circuits, no material scaffolds, no nano materials, no weird drugs, and none of that. What we're mostly doing is liberating them from the instructive influences of the rest of the cells that they were in in their bodies. And so when you do that, normally these cells are bullied by their neighboring cells into having a very boring life. They become a two-dimensional outer covering for the embryo, and they keep out the bacteria, and that's that. So you might ask, well, what are these cells capable of when you take them away from that influence? So when you do that, they form another little life form we call a xenobot, and it's this self-motai little thing that has a silia covering its surface. The silia are coordinated, so they row against the water, and then the thing starts to move and has all kinds of amazing properties. It has different gene expression, so it has its own novel transcriptome. It's able to do things like kinematic self-replication, meaning they make copies of itself from loose cells that you put into its environment. It has the ability to respond to sound, which normal embryos don't do. It has these novel capacities, and we did that, and we said, look, here are some amazing features of this novel system. Let's try to understand where they came from. And some people said, well, maybe it's a frog-specific thing, you know? Maybe this is just something unique to frog cells. And so he said, okay, what's the furthest you can get from frog embryonic cells? How about human adult cells? And so we took cells from adult human patients who were donating tracheal apathelia for biopsies and things like that. And those cells, again, no genetic change, nothing like that. They self-organized into something we call anthropods. Again, self-motai little creature, 9,000 different gene expressions. So about half the genome is now different. And they have interesting abilities. For example, they can heal human neural wounds. So in vitro, if you plate some neurons and you put a big scratch through it so you damage them, anthropods can sit down and they will try, they will spontaneously without having us having to teach them to do it. They will spontaneously try to knit the neurons across the body. What is the, the world can I hear? So this is an anthropod. So often when I give talks about this, I show people this video and I say, what do you think this is? And people will say, well, it looks like some primitive organism you got from the bottom of a pond somewhere. And I'll say, what do you think the genome would look like? And is it well, the genome would look like some primitive creature? Right. If you sequence that thing, you'll get 100% homo sapiens. And that doesn't look like any stage of normal human development. It doesn't act like any stage of human development. It has the ability to move around. It has, as I said, over 9,000 differential gene expressions. Also interestingly, it is younger than the cells that it comes from. So it actually has the ability to roll back its age. And we can, we can talk about that and what the implications that are. But to go back to your original question, what we're doing with these kinds of systems, try and talk to it. We're trying to talk to it. That's exactly right. And not just to this, we're trying to talk to molecular networks. So we found a couple of years ago, we found that gene regulatory networks never mind the cells, but the molecular pathways inside of cells can have several different kinds of learning, including Pavlovian conditioning. And what we're doing now is trying to talk to it. The biomedical applications are obvious. Instead of a Hey Siri, you want Hey liver. Why do I feel like crap today? And you want an answer? Well, you know, your potassium levels are this and that and that. I don't feel, you know, I don't feel good for these reasons. And you should be able to talk to these things. And there should be able to be an interface that allows us to communicate. Right. And I think AI is going to be a huge component of that interface of allowing us to talk to these systems. It's a, it's a tool to combat our mind blindness to help us see diverse other very unconventional minds that are all around us. Can you generalize that? Let's say we meet an alien or an unconventional mind here on earth. Think of it as a black box. You show up. What's the procedure for trying to get some hooks into a communication protocol with the thing? Yeah, that is exactly the mission of of my lab. It is, it is to enable us to develop tools to recognize these things, to learn, to communicate with them, to ethically relate to them. And in general, to expand our ability to, to do this in the, in the, in the world around us, I specifically chose these kinds of things because they're not as alien as proper aliens would be. So we have some hope. I mean, we're made of them. We have many things in common. There's some hope of understanding them. You talk about xenobots and xenobots and heterobots and cells and everything else. But they're alien in a couple of important ways. One is the space they live in is very hard for us to imagine what space do they live in. Well, your body, your body cells, long before we had a brain that was good for navigating three dimensional space was navigating the space of anatomical possibilities. It was going from, you start as an egg and you have to become, you know, a snake or a, or, you know, a giraffe or what a, or a human, whatever, whatever we're going to be. And I specifically am telling you that this, this, this general idea when people modeled that with, kind of cellular automata type of ideas, this open loop kind of thing where, well, everything just follows local rules and eventually the complex city and, and, and here you go. Now, now you've got, now you've got a giraffe or a human. I'm specifically telling you that that model is totally insufficient to grasp what's actually going on. What's actually going on. And there have been many, many experiments on this is that the system is navigating a space. It is navigating a space of anatomical possibilities. If you try to block where it's going, it will try to get around you. If you try to challenge it with things it's never seen before, it will try to come up with a, with a solution. If you, if you really, defeat its ability to do that, which you can, you know, they're not infinitely intelligent. So you can, you can defeat them. You will either get birth defects or you will get creative problem solving such as what you're seeing here with Zenobots and Anthrobots. If you can't be a human, you'll be some, you can, you'll find another way to be in. You can be an Anthrobot, for example. You'll be something else. Just to clarify, what's the difference between cellular automata type of action where you're just responding to your local environment and creating some kind of complex behavior and operating in the space of anatomical possibilities. Sure. So there's a kind of goal, I guess you're, to do. There is some kind of thing. There's a will to X something. The will thing, let's put that aside. Well, it's fine. I go into provide. That's just always love to quote Nietzsche. So yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying, I don't have data for that one, but I'll tell you the stuff that I'm quite certain of. There are a couple of different formalisms that we have in control theory. One of those formalisms is open loop complexity. In other words, I've got a bunch of subunits like a cellular automaton. They follow certain rules. And you turn the crank. Time goes forward. Whatever happens happens. Now clearly you can get complexity from this. Clearly you can get some very interesting looking things, right? So the game of life, all those kinds of cool things, right? You can get complexity. No, no, no problem. But the idea that that model is going to be sufficient to explain and control things like morphogenesis is a hypothesis. It's it's okay to make that hypothesis, but we know we know it's false. Despite the fact that what we learn in basic cell biology and developmental biology classes, when the first time you see something like this inevitably, especially if you're an engineer in those classes, you're aging and go, it has a node to do that. How does it know four fingers instead of seven? What they tell you is it doesn't know anything. Make sure that's very clear. They all insist that when we learn these things, they insist nothing here knows anything. There are rules of chemistry. They roll forward and this is what happens. Okay. Now that model is testable. We can ask, does that model explain what happens? Here's where that model falls down. If you have that model and situations change either either there's damage or something in the environment that happened, those kind of open loop models do not adjust to give you to give you the same goal by different means. This is William James's definition of intelligence is same goal by different means. And in particular, working them backwards, let's say you're in regenerative medicine and you say, okay, but this is the situation now. I want it to be different. What should the rules be? It's not reversible. So the thing with those kind of open loop models is they're not reversible. You don't know what to do to make the outcome that you want. All you know how to do is roll them forward. Now in biology, we see the following. If you have a developmental system and you put barriers between, so I'm going to give you two pieces of evidence that suggest that there is a goal. One piece of evidence is that if you try to block these things from the outcome that they normally have, they will do some amazing things, sometimes very clever things, sometimes not at all the way that they normally do it. So this is William James's definition by different means, by following different trajectories, they will go around various local maxima and minimum to get to where they need to go. It is navigation of a space. It is not blind to turn the crank and wherever we end up as where we end up. That is not what we see experimentally. And more importantly, I think what we've shown, and this is something that I'm particularly happy with in our lab, over the last 20 years, we've shown the following. We can actually rewrite the goal states because we found them. We have shown through our work on bioelectric imaging and bioelectric reprogramming. We have actually shown how those goal memories are encoded, at least in some cases. We certainly haven't got them all, but we have some. If you can find where the goal state is encoded, read it out, reset it, and the system will now implement a new goal based on what you just reset. That is the ultimate evidence that your goal directed model is working. Because if there was no goal, that shouldn't be possible. Once you can find it, read it, interpret it, and rewrite it, it means that by any engineering standard, it means that you're dealing with a homeostatic mechanism. How do you find where the goal is encoded? So through lots and lots of hard work. The barrier thing is part of that, creating barriers and observing. The barrier thing tells you that you should be looking for a goal. Step one, when you approach an agentic system is greater barrier of different kinds until you see how persistent it is that pursuing the thing it seemed to have been pursuing originally. Then you know, okay, cool. This thing has agency, first of all, and then second of all, you started to build an intuition about exactly which goal it's pursuing. Yes. The first couple of steps are all imagination. You have to ask yourself, what space is this thing even working in? You really have to stretch your mind because we can't imagine all the spaces that systems work in. So step one is what space is it? Step two, what do I think the goal is? And let's not mistake, step two, you're not done just because you have made a hypothesis that doesn't mean you can say, well, they are, I see it doing this, therefore that's the goal. You don't know that. You have to actually do experiments. Now, once you've made those hypotheses, now you do the experiments. It's okay. If I want to block it from reaching its goal, how do I do that? And this, by the way, is exactly the approach we took with the sorting algorithms and with everything else. You hypothesize the goal, you put a barrier in, and then you get to find out what level of ingenuity it has. Maybe what you see is, well, that derailed everything. So probably this thing isn't very smart. Or you see, wow, it can go around and do these things. Or you might see, wow, it's taking a completely different approach using its affordances in novel ways. That's a high level of intelligence. You will find out what the answer is. Another part I had a question is, is it possible to look at speaking of our conventional organisms and going to wish your dog, for example, with memes, is it possible to think of things like ideas? Like how weird can we get? Can we look at ideas as organisms, then creating barriers for those ideas, and seeing are the ideas themselves? If you take the actual individual ideas and trying to empathize and visualize what kind of space they might be operating in, can they be seen as organisms that have a mind? Yeah. If you want to get really weird, we can get really weird here. Think about the caterpillar butterfly transition. So you got a caterpillar soft body kind of creature as a particular controller that's suitable for running a soft body robot. It has a brain for that task, and then it has to become this butterfly hard body creature flies around. I'm drawing the process a metamorphosis. Its brain is basically ripped up and rebuilt from scratch. Now what's been found is that if you train the caterpillar, so you give it a new memory, meaning that if the caterpillar sees this color or disc, then it crawls over and eats some leaves. Turns out the butterfly retains that memory. Now the obvious question is how the held you retain memories when the medium is being refactored like that. Let's put that aside. I'm going to get somewhere even weirder than that. There's something else that's even more interesting than that. It's not just that you have to retain the memory. You have to remap that memory onto a completely new context because guess what? The butterfly doesn't move the way the caterpillar moves and it doesn't care about leaves. It wants nectar from flowers. If that memory is going to survive, it can't just persist. It has to remap into a novel context. Now here's where things get weird. We can take a couple of different perspectives here. We can take the perspective of the caterpillar facing some crazy singularity and say, my God, I'm going to cease to exist. I'll be reborn in this new higher-dimensional world where I'll fly. That's one thing. We can take the perspective of the butterfly and say that, well, here I am, but I seem to be saddled with some tendencies and some memories. I don't know where the hell they came from. I don't remember exactly how I got them. They seem to be a core part of my psychological makeup and they come from somewhere. I don't know where they come from. You can take that perspective. There's a third perspective that I think is really interesting and useful. The third perspective is that of the memory itself. If you take a perspective of the memory, what is a memory? It is a pattern. It is an informational pattern that was continuously reinforced within one cognitive system. Here I am on this memory. What do I need to do to persist into the future? Well, now I'm facing the paradox of change. If I try to remain the same, I'm gone. There's no way the butterfly is going to retain me in the original form that I'm in now. What I need to do is change, adapt, and morph. Now, you might say, well, that's kind of crazy. How you taking the perspective of a pattern within an excitable medium, right? Agents are physical things. You're talking about the, you know, talking about information. So let me tell you another quick science fiction story. Imagine that some creatures come out from the center of the earth. They live down in the core. They're super dense. They're incredibly dense because they live down in the core. They have gamma ray vision for, you know, for, and so on. So they come out to the surface. What do they see? Well, all of this stuff that we're seeing here, this is like a thin plasma to them. They are so dense. None of this is solid to them. They don't see any of this stuff. So they're walking around, you know, they're the planet is sort of, you know, covered in this like thin gas, you know, and one of them is a scientist and he's taken measurements of the gas and he says to the others, you know, I've been watching this gas and there are like little whirlpools in this gas. And they almost look like agents. They almost look like they are doing things. They're moving around. They kind of hold themselves together for a little bit and they're trying to make stuff happen. And the others say, well, that's crazy. Patterns in the gas can't be agents. We are agents. We're solid. This is just patterns in an excitable medium. And by the way, how long do they hold together? These is well about a hundred years. Well, that's crazy. Nothing, you know, no, no real agent can can exist to be that dissipate that fast. Okay. Well, 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 to here. So, so one of the things that we've been trying to dissolve. And this is like 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 can talk about what what that is. And they can spawn off others. And now you can have a really interesting spectrum. Here's the here's the spectrum. You can have fleeting thoughts, which are like waves in in in the ocean when you throw a rock in, you know, they sort of they sort of go through the excitable medium and then they're gone. They pass through and they're gone, right? So those are those are kind of fleeting 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 case they stick around for a little while. They often do a little bit of niche construction. So they change the actual brain to have to make it easier to have more of those thoughts, right? Like that's so that's a thing. And so they they they stay around longer. Now what's what's further than that? Well, fragments personality fragments of a dissociative personality disorder. They're more more stable and they're not just on autopilot. They have goals and they can do things. And then pass that as a full blown human personality. And who the hell knows what's past that? Maybe some sort of transhuman trans personal like I don't know, right? But 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 these 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 experiences that have memories. Does it have goal states. Does it you know, what what can it do? Right? Does it have language. So so coming back to then you're in the original question. Yeah, we can definitely apply this methodology to ideas and concepts and and and social, you know, whatever's what you've got to do the experiment. That's such a challenging thought experiment of like thinking about memories and the catapillar to the butterflies and organism. I think at the very basic level intuitively, we think of organisms as hardware. Yeah. And softwares 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 when you do the testing avoid how persistent is it how goal oriented is it and there's certain kind 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 like consciousness. You can there's really no boundary to where you can imagine probably really, really wild things could be could be minds. Yeah, stay tuned. I mean, this is exactly what we're doing. We're getting progressively like more and more unconventional. I mean, so this so this whole distinction between software and hardware, I think 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 in the following way. And again, I want to point out, so I'll tell you 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 touring machine. So one thing you can say is the machines of the agent, it has passive data and it operates on the data. And that's it. The story of agencies, the story of whatever that machine 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 stigmaurgic 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 our program in bioelectrics and agent. 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 and atomical 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. The existing embryogenesis during regeneration, during resistance to aging. We can see them. We can visualize them. One thing you can imagine is find 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 data, reinforce the memories, reinforce the pattern memories. That's one 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 and whatever else, that is the agent. And that what they're doing in the brain are the side effects of the patterns working themselves out. And those side effects might be to fire off some muscles and some glands and some other things. From that perspective, maybe what's actually happening is maybe the agent's finding it harder and harder to be embodied in the physical world. Why? Because the cells might get less responsive. In other words, the cells of sluggish, the patterns are fine. They're having a harder time making the cells do what they need to do. And that maybe what you need to do is not reinforce the memories. Maybe what you need to do is make the cells more responsive to them. And that is a different research agenda, which we are also doing. We have evidence for that as well, actually now. And then we published it recently. And so my point here is when we tell these crazy sci-fi stories, the only worth to them and the only reason I'm talking about them now, and I hadn't been up a year ago, I wasn't talking about this stuff is because these are now actionable in terms of specific experimental research agendas that are heading to the clinic, I hope, in some of these biomedical approaches. And so now here we can go beyond this and we can say, okay, so up until now, we've considered what are disease states? Well, we know there's organic disease. Something is physically broken. We can see the tissue is breaking down. There's this damage in the joint, you know, what the deliver is doing with it. You know, we can see these things. But what about disease states that are not physical states, they're physiological states or informational states or cognitive problems. So in other words, in all of these other spaces in the you can start to ask, what's a barrier in gene expression space? What's a local minimum that traps you in physiological state space? And what is a stress pattern that keeps itself together moves around the body, causes damage, tries to keep itself going, right? What level of agency does it have? This suggests an entirely different set of approaches to biomedicine. And you know, anybody who's, let's say in the alternative medicine community is probably yelling at the screen at life saying, we've been saying this for hundreds of years. And yeah, but and I'm well aware, these are not, the ideas are not new. What's new is being able to now take this and make them actionable and say, yeah, but we can image this now. I can now actually see the bioelectric patterns and why they go here and not there. And we have the tools that now hopefully will get us to therapeutics. So this is this is very actionable stuff. And it all leans on not assuming we know minds when we see them because we don't. And we have to do experiments to turn back to the software hardware distinction. You're saying that we can see the software as the organism and the hardware is just the scratch bad. Or you can see the hardware as the organism and the software as the thing that the hardware generates. And in so doing, we can decrease the amount of importance we assign to something like the human brain, where it could be the activations, it could be the electrical signals that are the organisms. And the brain is scratch bad. And by saying scratch bad, I don't mean it's not important. When we get to talking about the platonic space, we have to talk about how important the interface actually is. It's the scratch bad isn't an important scratch bad is critical. It's just that my only point is that when we have these formalisms of software of hardware of other things, the way we map those formalisms onto the world is not obvious. It's not given to us. We get used to certain things, right? But who's the hardware? Who's the software? Who's the agent? And who's the excitable medium is to be determined? So that's the good place to talk about the increasingly radical, weird ideas that you've been writing about. You've mentioned it a few times, the platonic space. So there's this ingressing minds paper where you describe the platonic space. You mentioned there's an asynchronous conference happening, which is a fascinating concept because as they synchretis people just contributing asynchronously. So what happened was this crazy notion, which I'll describe momentarily, I have given a couple of talks on it. I then found a couple papers in the machine learning community called the platonic representation hypothesis. And I said, that's pretty cool. These guys are climbing up to the same point where I'm getting out of from biology and philosophy and whatever. They're getting there from computer science and machine learning. We'll take a couple hours. I'll give a talk. They'll give a talk. We'll talk about it. I thought there were going to be three talks at this thing. Once I started reaching out to people for this, everybody sort of said, I know somebody who's really into this stuff, but they never talk about it because there's no audience for this. So I reached out to them. And then they said, yeah, I know this mathematician or I know this economist, whatever, who has these ideas and there's nowhere we can ever talk about them. So I got this whole list and it became completely obvious that we can't do this in a normal, you know, we're now booked up through December. So every week in our center, somebody gives a talk. We kind of discussed it. It all goes on this thing. I'll give you a link to it. And then there's a huge running discussion after that. And then in the end, we're all going to get together for a natural real-time discussion section and talk about it. But there's going to be probably 15 or so talks about this from all kinds of disciplines. It's blown up in a way that I didn't realize how much under-accurrent of these ideas had already existed that were ready, like now is the time. And I think this is like I've been thinking about these things for, I don't know, 30 plus years. I never talked about them before because they weren't actionable before. There wasn't a way to actually make empirical progress with this now. You know, this is something that Pythagoras and Plato didn't probably many people before them talked about. But now we're to the point where we can actually do experiments and they're making a difference in our research program. You guys just look at up Platonic Space Conference. There's a bunch of different fascinating talks. Yours first on the patterns of forms of behavior. Beyond emergence, then radical Platonism and radical empiricism from Joe Dietz and patterns and explanatory gaps in psychotherapy. Does God play dice from Alexi Tolchinsky and so on? So let's talk about it. What is it? And it's fascinating that the origins of some of these ideas are connected to the ML people thinking about representation space. Yeah. The first thing I want to say is that while I'm currently calling it the Platonic Space, I am in no way trying to stick close to the things that Plato actually thought about. In fact, to whatever extent we even know what that is, I think I depart from that in some ways. And I'm going to have to change the name at some point. The reason I'm using the name now is because I wanted to be clear about a particular connection to mathematics, which a lot of mathematicians would call themselves Platonists because what they think they're doing is discovering, not inventing as a human construction, but discovering an structured, ordered space of truth. Let's put it this way. In biology, as in physics, there's something very curious that happens that if you keep asking why, then something interesting goes on. Let's give you two examples. First of all, imagine cicadas. So let's cicadas come out at 13 years and 17 years. And so if you're biologists, then you say, so why is that? And then you get this explanation for well, it's because they're trying to be off cycle from their predators because if it was 12 years, then every two year, every three year, every four year, every six year predator would eat you when you come on right. So and you say, okay, okay, cool. That makes sense. What's special about 13 and 17? Oh, they're prime. And why are they prime? Well, now you're in the math department. You're no longer in the biology department. You're no longer in the physics department. You've now, you're now in the math department to understand why the distribution of primes is what it is. Another example, and I'm not a physicist, but what I see is every time you talk to a physicist and you say, hey, why do the leptons do this or that or the fermions they're doing whatever? Eventually, the answer is, oh, because there's this mathematical, you know, this SU-8 group or whatever the heck it is and it has certain symmetries and these certain structures. Yeah, great. Once again, you're in the math department. So something interesting happens is that there are facts that you come across. Many of them are very surprising. You don't get to design them. You get more out than you put in in a certain way because you make very minimal assumptions and then certain facts are thrust upon you. For example, the value of Fyke and Baum's constant, the value of natural logarithm E, these things you sort of discover, right? And the salient fact is this, if those facts were different, then biology and physics would be different, right? So they matter. They impact, instructively functionally, they impact the physical world. If the distribution of primes with something else, well, then that's okay. There's what have been coming out at different times. But the reverse is in true. What I mean is there is nothing you can do in the physical world to change E, as far as I know, to change E or to change Fyke and Baum's constant. You could have swapped out all the constants at the Big Bang, right? You can change all the different things. You are not going to change those things. So this, I think Plato and Pythagoras understood very clearly that there is a set of truths which impact the physical world, but they themselves are not defined by and determined by what happens in the physical world. You can't change them by things you do in the physical world, right? And so I'll make a couple of claims about that. One claim is I think we call physics, those things that are constrained by those patterns. When you say, hey, why is this the way it is? I, it's because this is how symmetry symmetries are, or you know, topology or whatever. Biology are the things that are enabled by those. They're free lunches. They're biology exploits these kinds of truths. And really, it enables biology and evolution to do amazing things without having to pay for it. I think there's a lot of free free lunches going on here. And so I show you a Zenubot or an Atherod. And I say, hey, look, here are some amazing things they're doing that tissue has never done before in their history. First of all, where did that come from? And when did we pay the computational cost for it? Because we know when we paid the computational cost to design a frog or a human, it was for the eons that the genome was bashing against the environment getting selected, right? So we paid the computational cost there. There's never been any answer bots. There's never been any Zenubots. When did we pay the computational cost for designing kinematic self replication and, you know, all these things that they're able to do? So there's two things people say, one is, well, it's sort of, you got it at the same time that they were being selected to be good humans and good frogs. Now, the problem with that is it kind of undermines the point of evolution. The point of evolutionary theory was to have a very tight specificity between what how you are now and the history of selection that got you here, right? The history of environments that got you to this point. If you say, yeah, okay, so this is what your environmental history was. And by the way, you got something completely different. You got these other skills that you didn't know about that. That's really strange, right? And so then people, what people say as well, it's emergent. And they say, what's that? What does that mean? And they say, besides the fact that you got surprised, right? Emergence is often just means I didn't see it coming. You know, it was something happened. I didn't know what was going to happen. So there's, it was, I mean, it's emergent and people say, well, and there are many emergent things like this. For example, the fact that gene regulatory networks can do associative learning. Like, that's amazing. And you don't need evolution for that, even random genetic regulatory networks can do associative learning. I say, why, why, why is that happen? And he said, well, it's just the fact that holds in the world, just the fact that holds. So now you have a, you have an option. And you can go one of two ways. You can either say, okay, look, I like my sparse ontology. I don't want to think about weird platonic spaces. I'm a physicalist. I want it to physical world. Nothing more. So what we're going to do is when we come across these crazy things that are very specific, like, you know, anthropologists have four specific behaviors that they switch around. Why, why four? Why not 12? Why not one? Like four? Why four? When we come across these things, just like when we come across the value of E or phi again, bounds number or whatever, what we're going to do is we're going to write it down in our big book of emergence. And that that that's it. We're just going to have to live with it. This is this is what happens. We're just, you know, there's some cool surprises. You know, when we come across them, we're going to write them down great. It's a random grab bag of stuff. And when we come across them, we'll write them down. That's that's one. The upside is you get to be a physicalist, then you get to keep your, your sparse ontology. The downside is I find it incredibly pessimistic and mysterious because you're basically then just willing to make a catalog of these of these amazing patterns. Why not instead? And this is why I started with this with this platonic terminology. Why not do what the mathematicians already do? A huge number of them say we are going to make the same optimistic assumption that science makes that there's an underlying structure to that latent space is not like random grab bag of stuff. There's a space to it, which where these patterns come from. And by studying them systematically, we can get from one to another. We can map out the space. We can we can find out the relationships between them. We can get an idea of what's in that space. And we're not going to assume that it's just random. We're going to assume this and kind of structure to it. And you'll see all kinds of people. I mean, you know, well, no mathematicians will talk about this stuff. You know, penrose and then lots of other people who will say that, yeah, there's another space physically and it has spatial structure. It has components to it and so on. We can traverse that space in various ways. And then there's the physical space. So I find I find that much more appealing because it suggests a research program, which we are now undergoing in our lab. The research program is everything that we make cells, embryos, robots, language models, simple machines, all of it. They are interfaces. They are all physical things are interfaces to these patterns. You build an interface. Some of those patterns are going to come through that interface, depending on what you build. Some patterns versus others are going to come through. The research program is mapping out that relationship between the physical pointers that we make and the patterns that come through it, right? Understanding what is the structure of that space, what exists in that space and what do I need to make physically to make certain patterns come through? Now, when I say patterns, now we have to ask what kinds of things live in that space? Well, the mathematicians will tell what we already know. We have a whole list of objects. You know, they amplify to hydrons and all this crazy stuff that lives in that space. Yeah, I think that's one layer of stuff that lives in that space. But I think those patterns are the lower agency kinds of things that are basically studied by mathematicians. What also lives in that space are much more active, more complex, higher agency patterns that we recognize as kinds of minds. That behavioral scientists would look at that pattern and say, well, I know what that is. That's the competency for delayed gratification or problem solving of certain kinds or whatever. And so what I end up with right now is a model in which that latent space contains things that come through physical objects, so simple, simple patterns. So facts about triangles and fibonacci patterns and fractals and things like that. But also, if you make more complex interfaces such as biologicals and importantly, not just biologicals, but let's say cells and embryos and tissues, what you will then pull down is much more complex patterns that we say, ah, that's a mind. That's a human mind or that's a snake mind or whatever. So I think the mind-brain relationship is exactly the kind of thing that the math physics relationship is. That in some very interesting way, there are truths of mathematics that become embodied and they kind of haunt physical objects, right, in a very specific functional way. And in the exact same way, there are other patterns that are much more complex, higher agency that basically inform, inform, living things that we see as obvious embodied minds. Okay, given how weird and complicated this we describing is, we'll talk about it more, but you got an ELI-5, the basics to a person has never seen this. So again, you mentioned things like pointers. So the physical object themselves or the brain is a pointer to that platonic space. What is in that platonic space? What is the platonic space? What is the embodiment? What is the pointer? Yeah, um, okay, let's try it this way. There are certain facts of mathematics. So the distribution of prime numbers, right, that if you map them out, they make these nice spirals and there's an image that I often show which is a very particular kind of fractal. And that fractal is the Halli map, which is, it's pretty awesome that it actually looks very organic. It looks very biological. So if you look at that thing, that image, which has a very specific complex structure, it's a map of a very compact mathematical object. That formula is like, you know, Z cube plus seven. It's something like that. That's it. So now, so now you look at that structure and you say, where does that actually come from? It's definitely not packed into the Z cube plus seven. It's not, there's not enough bits in that to give you all of that. There's no fact of physics that determines this. There's no evolutionary history. It's not like we selected this based on some, you know, from a larger set over time. Where does this come from? Or, or the fact that I think about, think about the way the biology exploits these things. Imagine imagine a world in which the highest fitness belonged to a certain kind of triangle, right? So evolution cranks a bunch of generations and it gets the first angle, right? And cranks a bunch more generations gets a second angle, right? Now there's now there's something amazing that happens. It doesn't need to look for the third angle because you already know if you know too, you get this magical free gift from geometry. That's why I already know what the third one should be. You don't have to go look for it. Or as evolution, if you invent a voltage gated ion channel, which is basically a transistor, right? And you can make a logicate, then all the truth tables and the fact that NAND is special and all these other things, you don't have to weave all those things. You get those for free. You inherit those. Where do all those things live? These mathematical truths that you come across that you don't have any choice about you can't you know, once you've committed to certain axioms, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that is now just it is what it is. And so what I'm saying is and this is this is what what what Pythagoras was saying, I think that there is a whole space of these kinds of truths. Now he was focused on mathematical ones, but but he was embodying them in music and in geometry and then things like that. There are the space of patterns and and they make a difference in the physical world to machines to sound to things like that. What I'm extending it and what I'm saying is yeah, and so far we've only been looking at the low agency inhabitants of that world. There are other patterns that we would recognize as kinds of minds and that you don't see them in this space until there's an interface until there's a way for them to come through the physical world that interface the same the same way that you have to make a triangular object before you can actually see the rule with you know what what you're going to gain right out of the rules of geometry and whatever or you have to actually do the computation on the fractal before you actually see that pattern. If you want to see some of those minds you have to build an interface right at least at least if you're going to interact with them in the physical world the way we normally do science. As Darwin said mathematicians have their own new sense and like a different sense than the rest of us and so that's right you know mathematicians can can perhaps interact with these patterns directly in that space but for the rest of us we have to make interfaces and when we make interfaces which might be cells or robots or you know embryos or whatever what we are pulling down are minds that are fundamentally not produced by physics so I don't believe that I don't know if we're going to get into the whole consciousness thing but I don't believe that we create consciousness whether we make babies or whether we make robots nobody's creating consciousness which will create as an interface a physical interface through which specific patterns which we call kinds of minds are going to ingress right and and consciousness is what it looks like from that direction looking out into the world it's what we call the view from the perspective of the platonic patterns. Just to clarify what you're saying is a pretty radical idea here so if there's a mapping from mathematics to physics okay that's understandable intuitive as you described but what you're suggesting is there's a mapping from some kind of abstract mind object to an embodied brain that we think of as a mind yeah as those fellow humans what is that what exactly because you said interface you've also said pointer so the brain and I think you said somewhere a thin interface a thin client yeah the brain that brain is a thin client yeah thin client okay so you're a brain is a thin client to this other world yeah can you just lay out very clearly how radical the idea is sure because you're kind of dancing around I think you also point to Donald Hoffman and kind of who speaks of an interface to a world so we've only interact with the quote unquote real world through an interface what is the connection here yeah okay a couple of things first of all when you said it makes sense for physics I want to show that it's not as simple as it sounds because what it means is that even in Newton's boring sort of classical universe long before quantum anything Newton's world physicalism was already dead in in in Newton's world I mean think about what that means this is this is nuts because because already he knew perfectly well I mean Pythagoras and Plato knew that even in a totally classical deterministic world already you have the ingression of information that determines what happens in what's possible and what's not possible in that world from a space that is itself not physical in other words it's something like the natural logarithm e right nothing in Newton's world is set to the value of e there is nothing you could do to set the value of e in that world and yet that fact that it was that and not something else governed all sorts of properties of things that happened his way that classical world was already haunted by patterns from outside that world that's this this should be like this is this is this is wild this is this is not saying that okay everything was was cool physicalism was great up until you know maybe we got quantum interfaces or we got you know consciousness or whatever but but originally it was fine no this is saying that it was that that world view was already impossible really since from from a very long time ago we already knew that there are non-physical properties that matter in the physical world this is chickener or the egg question you're saying newtons laws are creating the physical world that is that that is a very deep follow on question that that I we will we'll come back to in a minute what I all I was saying about Newton is that in the law you don't need quantum anything you don't need to think about consciousness already long before you get to any of that as as Pythagoras I think knew already we have the idea that this physical world is being strongly impacted by truths that do not live in the physical world and which truth to refer to we talk about Newton's law like mathematical questions mathematical mathematical facts so for example the actual value of E or oh like very primitive mathematical facts yeah I mean some of them are you know I mean if you if you ask Don Hoffman there's this like amplitude heater and thing that that is a set of mathematical objects that determines all the scattering amplitudes of the particles and whatever they don't have to be simple I mean the old ones were simple now they're like crazy I can't I can't imagine this amplitude heater and thing but maybe they can but but all of these are mathematical structures that explain and determine facts about the physical world right if you ask physicists hey why you know this many of this type of particle because this mathematical thing has these symmetries that's why so Newton is discovering these things they're not he's not inventing this is very controversial right and there are of course physicists and mathematicians who who disagree with what I'm saying for sure but what I'm leading on is simply this I don't know of anything you can do in the physical world at the big you're around at the big bang you get to set all the constants should set physics however you want can you change E can you change Fiegenbaum's constant I don't think you can is that an obvious statement I don't even know what it means to change the parameters at the start of the big bang so physicists do this they'll say okay you know if we made the if we made the the ratio between the the you know the gravitation and and the electromagnetic force different would we have matter would we how many dimensions would we have would there be inflation would there be this or that right you can you can imagine playing with there there are however many unitless constants of physics these are the kind of like knobs on the universe that that that you could have could in theory be different and then you'd have different physics you'd have different to have different physical properties using that's not going to change the axiomatic systems of that mathematics as what I'm not saying is that every alien everywhere is going to have the exact same math that we have that's not what I'm claiming although maybe but that's not what I'm claiming what I'm saying is you get more out than you put in once you've made a choice and maybe some alien somewhere made a different choice of how they're going to do their math but once you've made your choice then you get saddled with a whole bunch of new truths that you discover that you can't do anything about they are given to you from somewhere and you can say their random or you can say no there's a space of these facts that they're pulled from there's a latent space that of options that they come from so when you get so when your e is exactly 2.718 and so on there is nothing you can do in physics to change it and you're seeing that space is immutable it's I'm not saying it's immutable so so I think I played O'May or May or may not have thought that these forms are eternal and unchanging that's one place we differ I actually think that space has some action to it maybe even some computation to it but we're we're just pointers okay that's well so so let's okay so so I'll circle I'll circle back around to that to that whole thing so so the the only thing I was trying to do is blow up the idea that we're cool with how it works in physics no problem there like I don't like I think that's a much bigger deal than than people normally think it is I think already there you have this weird haunting of of the physical world by patterns that are not coming from the physical world the reason I emphasize this is because now what I'm going to when I amplify this into biology I don't think it's sort of jumps as a new thing I think it's just a much more I think what we call biology is our systems that exploit the hell out of it I think physics is constrained by it but we call biology those things that make make use of those kinds of things and and run with it and so I again I just think it's a scaling I don't think it's a brand new thing that happens I think it's a it's a scaling right so what I'm saying is we already know from physics that there are non physical patterns and these are generally patterns of form which is why I call them low agency because they're like fractals that stand still and they're like prime number distributions although there's a mathematician that's talking in our symposium that's telling me that actually I'm too showvinistic even there actually even those things have more more warmth than even I gave them credit for which I which I love so so what I'm saying is those kind of static patterns are things that we typically see in physics but they're not the full extent of what lives in that space that space is also home to some patterns that are very high agency and if we give them a body if we build a body that they can inhabit then we get to see different behavioral competencies that the behavior scientists say oh I know what that looks like that's a this this kind of behavioral you know this kind of mind or that kind of mind in a certain sense I mean yes what I'm saying is extremely radical but it is a very whole idea it's an old idea of a dualistic worldview right where the mind was not in the physical body and that it in some way interacted with the physical brain so I should be clear I'm not claiming that this is fundamentally a new idea this has been around forever however it's mostly been discredited and it's a very unpopular view nowadays there are very few people in the for example cognitive science community or or anywhere else in science that like this kind of you primarily an already day card was getting getting crap for this when he first tried it out as this interaction problem right so the idea was okay well if you have this non physical mind and then you have this brain that presumably obeys conservation of mass energy and things like that how are you supposed to you know how are you supposed to interact with it there are many other problems there so what I'm trying to point out is that first of all physics already had this problem you didn't have to wait until you had biology and and cognitive science to to ask about it and what I think is happening in the way the way we need to think about this is coming back to the my point that I think the mind brain relationship is basically of the same kind as the math physics relationship the same way that non physical facts of physics haunt physical objects is basically how I think different kinds of patterns that we call kinds of minds are manifesting through our to interfaces like brains how do we prove or disprove the existence of that world because it's a pretty radical one because this physical world can poke there it feels like all the incredible things that consciousness and cognition and all the goal oriented behavior and agency all seems to come from this 3d entity yeah I mean so like we can test it we can poke it go ahead with the stick yeah sort of noises sort of I mean the what so so they got got some stuff wrong I think but one thing that he did get right the fact that yeah actually you don't know what you can poke and what you can't poke the only thing you actually know are the contents of your mind and everything else might be in in fact what we know from a Neil Seth and Don Hoffman and various other people it's definitely a construct you might be on drugs and you might wake up tomorrow and say my god I had the craziest dream of beinglex read amazing it's a nightmare yeah that's right right but but you see I you know it's it's not clear at all that the that the that the physical poking is your primary reality that's not clearing me at all I don't know that's a obvious thing that a lot of people can show is true to take a step to the the cart I think therefore I am that's the only thing you know for sure and everything else could be an illusion or a dream that's already a leap I think from a basic caveman science perspective the repeatable experiment is the one that most of intelligence comes from here the reality is exactly as it is to take a step towards the the Donald Hoffman worldview takes a lot of guts and imagination and stripping away of the ego and all these kinds of processes I think you can get there more easily by synthetic by engineering in the following in the following sense do you feel a lack of x ray perception do you feel blind in the x ray spectrum or or in the ultraviolet I mean you don't you have absolutely no clue that stuff is there and all of your your your reality as you see it is shaped by your evolutionary history it's shaped by the cognitive structure that you have right there are tons of stuff going on around us right now that we of which we are completely oblivious there's equally all kinds of other stuff which we construct and this is just this is just modern cognitive science that says that a lot of what we think is going on is is a total fabrication constructed by us so I think this is not a I don't think this is a philos I mean they card got there from a philosophical point that's not what I'm that's not the leap I'm asking us to make I'm saying that depending on your embodiment depending on your interface and this is in this is increasingly going to be more relevant as we make for first augmented humans that have sensory substitution you're going to be walking around your friends going to be like oh man I have this primary perception of the solar weather in the stock market because I got those implants and what do you see well I see the you know the traffic at the internet through the you know a trans-Pacific channel we're all going to be living in some of different worlds that's the first thing the second thing is we're going to become better attuned to other beings whether they be cells tissues you know what's what's it like to be a cell living in a 20 000 dimensional transcriptional space okay to novel beings that have never been here before that have all kinds of crazy spaces that they live in and that might be a eyes it might be cyborgs it might be hybrids it might be all sorts of things so this idea that we have a consensus reality here that's independent of some very specifically chosen aspects of our brain and our interaction we're going to have to give that up no matter what to relate to these other beings I think the tension is and absolutely in this idea that you're talking about sort of almost I think you've termed a cognitive prosthetics which is different ways of perceiving and interacting with the world but I guess the question is is our human experience the direct human experience is that just a slice of the real world or is it a pointer to a different world that that's what I'm trying to figure out because the claim you're making is a really fascinating one compelling one there's a pretty strong one which is there's another world into which our brain is an interface to which means you could theoretically map that world systematically which is exactly what we're trying to do I mean but it's not clear that that world exists yeah yeah okay I mean so that's the beautiful part about this and this is why I'm talking about this now where I wasn't you know well about a year ago up until a year ago I was never talking about this because I think this is now actionable so there's this diagram let's call the map of mathematics and they basically try to show how all the different pieces of math link together and this is a bunch of different versions of it so there's two features to this one is that what is it a map of well it's a map of various truths it's a map of facts that are that are thrust on you you don't have a choice once you've picked some axioms you just you know the here's some surprising facts that they're just going to be given to you but the other key thing about this is that it has a metric it's not just the random heap of facts they are all connected to each other in a particular way they they literally make a space and so when I say it's a space of patterns what I mean is it is not just a random bag of patterns such that when you have one pattern you're no closer to finding any other pattern I'm saying that there's a some kind of a metric to it so that when you find one others are closer to it and then you can get there so that's the claim and obviously this is not everybody buys this and and so on this is one idea now how do we know that this exists well I'll say a couple of things if that didn't exist what is that a map of if there is no space if if if you don't want to call it a space that's okay but you can't get away from the fact that as a matter of research there are patterns that relate to each other in a particular way what what what's you know what's you know the final step of calling it a space is minimal the bigger the bigger issue is what the hell is it a map of then if it's not a space so that's that's the first thing now that that's that's how would place out I think in math and physics now in biology here's here's how we're going to know if this makes any sense what we are doing now is trying to map out that space by saying look we took we we we know that that the frog genome maps to one thing and that's a frog turns out that exact same genome if you if you just if you just take a take the slightest step with the exact same genome which you just take some cells out of that environment they can also make zenibots with very specific different transcriptomes very specific behaviors very specific shapes it's not just all well you know they do whatever and they have very specific behaviors just like the frog had very specific properties we can start to map out what all those are right make that late make basically try to try to draw the latent space of from which those things are pulled and one of two things is going to happen in the future and so this is you know come back in 20 years and we'll and we'll see how this worked out one thing that could happen is that we're going to see oh yeah just like the map of mathematics we we we made that we made a map of the space and we know now that if I want a system that acts like this and this here's the kind of body I need to make for it because those are the patterns that exist the anthropods have four different behaviors not seven and not one and so that's what I can pull from these are the options I have is there is it possible that there's varying degrees of grandeur to the space to thinking about mapping meaning it could be just just like with the space of mathematics might it strictly be just the space of biology versus a space of like mines which feels like it can encompass a lot more than the just biology yeah except that I don't see how I don't see how it would be separate because I'm not just talking about an anatomical shape and transcriptional profile I'm also talking about behavioral competencies so when we make something and we find out that okay it does habituation sensitization it does not do Pavlovian conditioning and it does do delay gratification and it doesn't have language that is a very specific cognitive profile that's a region of that space and there's another region that looks different because I don't make a sharp distinction between biology and cognition if you want to explain behaviors they are drawn from some distribution as well so I think in 20 years or however long it's going to take one of two things will happen either we and other people who are working on this are going to actually produce a map of that space and say here's why you've gotten systems that work like this and like this and like this but you've never seen any that work like that right or we're going to find out that I'm wrong and that basically it's not worth calling it a space because it is so random and so jumbled up that there is we've been able to make zero progress in linking the embodiments that we make to the patterns that come through yeah just just to be clear I mean from your blog post on this from the paper I mean we're talking about space that includes a lot of stuff yeah yeah includes human what is it meditating Steve hello my name is Steve AI systems all the space of computational systems objects biological systems concepts includes everything well it includes specific patterns that we have given names to some of those patterns we've named mathematical objects some of those patterns we made we've named anatomical outcomes some of those patterns we've made psychological types 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 the 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 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 specifically tonic 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 you know 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 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 are free lunches in some sense we we did not make them calling them emergent does nothing for a research program okay that just means you got surprised I I think I think it's much better if you say if you make the optimistic assumption that they come from a structured space that we have a prayer and 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 between like can we one day prove the existence of this world is and is there a difference between it being a really effective model for connecting things explaining things versus like an actual place where the information about these distributions that were sampling actually exists that we can hit with a stick you can yeah you can you can try to make that distinction yeah but I think I think modern cognitive neuroscience will tell you that whatever you think this is at at most it is a very effective model for predicting the future experiences you're going to have so all of this the way thing about is physical reality is just as a nice to be a model I mean that's not me that's predictive processing and and active in for like that's modern neuroscience telling you this that that this isn't anything that I that I'm particularly coming up with all I'm saying is the distinction the distinction you're trying to make which is like an old school like realist you know kind of view that is it is it is it is it metaphorical or is it real all we have in science or metaphors I think and the only question is how good are your metaphors and I think as agents act living in a world all we have are models of what we are and what the outside world is that's it and the question is how good is it a model and and and my claim about this is in some small number of decades either this will either give rise to a very enabling mapping of the space for for AI for bioengineering for you know biology whatever or we are going to find out that it really sucks because it really is a random grab bag of stuff and we tried the optimistic research program it failed and we're just going to have to live with surprise I mean I doubt that's going to happen but it's a possible outcome but do you think it's there is some place where the information is stored about these distributions that are being sampled through the thin interfaces like actual place places weird because it isn't the same as our physical space time okay I don't think it's that so calling it a place is a little a little bit like physics general relativity described as space time could other physics theories be able to describe this other space or information is stored that we can apply maybe different but in the same spirit laws about yes information I definitely think they're going to be systematic laws I don't think they're going to look anything like physics you can call it physics if you want but I think it's going to be so different that that probably just you know cracks the word and whether information is going to survive that I'm not sure but I definitely think that it's going to be there are going to be laws but I think they're going to look a lot more like aspects of psychology and cognitive science and they're going to look like physics that's my guess so what does it look like to prove that world exists what it looks like is a successful research program that explains how you pull particular patterns when you need them and why some patterns come in others don't and show that they come from an ordered space across a large number of organisms it well it's not just organisms I mean I think I think it's going to end up and I mean you can talk to the machine learning people about how they got to this point again because this is this is not just me there's a bunch of there are a bunch of different disciplines that are converging on this now simultaneously you're going to you're going to find again just like in mathematics where from from from from different directions everybody sort of is looking at different things and oh my god this is one underlying structure that seems still like in a form all of this so in physics in mathematics in computer science machine learning possibly in economics certainly in biology possibly in you know cognitive science we're going to find these structures it was already obvious in Pythagoras this time that that there are these patterns the only remaining question is are they part of an ordered structured or you know space and are we up to the task of mapping out the relationship between on what we build and the patterns that come through it so from the machine learning perspective is it then the case that the even something that suppose LLMs are sneaking up onto this world the representations that they form are sneaking up to it when I've given I've given this talk to to to some audiences and especially in the organisist community people like the first part where it's like okay now there's an idea for what the magic quote-unquote is that's that's special about the living things and and so on now now if we could just stop there we would have dumb machines that just do what the algorithm says and we have these magical living interfaces that can be the recipient for these ingressions cool right we can cut up the world in this way unfortunately or fortunately I think that's not the case and I think that even even simple minimal computational models are to some extent beneficiaries of these free lunches I think that the theories we have and this goes back to the to the thin client interface kind of idea the theories we have of both of physics and computation so theory of algorithms you know touring machines all all that good stuff those are all good theories of the front end interface and they're not complete theories of the whole thing they capture the front end which is why they get surprised which is why these things are surprising when they happen I think that when we see embryos of different species we are pulling from well-trodden familiar regions of that space and we know what to expect from you know this snake whatever when we make cyborgs and hybrids and biobots we are pulling from new regions of that space that look a little weird and they're unexpected but you know we can still kind of get our get our mind around them when we start making a eyes like proper a eyes we are now fishing in a region of that space that we may that that may never have had bodies before it may have never been embodied before and what we get from that is going to be extremely surprising and the final thing I just to mention on that is that because of this because of the inputs from this platonic space some of the really interesting things that artificial constructs can do are not because of the algorithm they're in spite of the algorithm they are filling up the spaces in between there's what the algorithm is forcing you to do and then there's the other cool stuff it's doing which is nowhere in the algorithm and if that's true and we think it's true even of very minimal systems then this whole business of of of language models and ayes in general watching the language part maybe a total red herring because the language is what we force them to do the question is what what what else are they doing that we are not we are not good at noticing and this is you know this this is something that we are I think as a as a kind of a existential step for humanity is to is to become better at this because we are not good at recognizing these things now you got to tell me more about this behavior that is observable that is unrelated to the explicitly stated goal of a particular algorithm so you looked at a simple algorithm of sorting can you explain what was done sure first just the goal of the study there are two things that people generally assume one is that we have a pretty good intuition about what kind of systems are going to have competencies so from observing biologicals we're not terribly surprised when biology does interest things everybody always says well it's biology of course it does all this cool stuff and yet but but do we have these machines and the whole point of having machines and dumb and algorithms and so on as they do exactly what you tell them to do right and and people feel pretty strongly that that's a binary distinction and that that's what that's that we we can carve up the world in that way so I wanted to do two things I wanted to first of all explore that and hopefully break the assumption that we're good at seeing this because I think we're not and I think it's extremely important that we understand very soon that we need to get much better at at knowing when to when to expect these things and the other thing I wanted to do was to find out you know most mostly people assume that you need a lot of complexity for this so when somebody says well the capability is in my mind are not properly encompassed by the rules of biochemistry everybody is like yeah that makes sense where you know you're very complex and okay you're you know your mind does things that that you can't you could you didn't see that coming from the rules of biochemistry right like we know that so mostly people think that has to do with complexity and and what I would like to find out is as as part of understanding what kind of interfaces give rise to what kind of ingressions is it really about complexity how much complexity do you actually need is there some threshold after which this happens is it really specific materials is it biological is it something about evolution like what is it about these kinds of things that allows this this this surprise right allows this idea that we are more than the sum of our parts and so and and I had a strong intuition that none of those things are actually required that this is this kind of magic so to speak seeps into pretty much everything and and so to to look at that I wanted also to have an example that had significant shock value because the thing with biology is there's always more mechanism to be discovered right like there's infinite depth of what the materials are doing what that you know somebody will always say what is that there's a mechanism that you haven't found it yet so I wanted an example that was simple transparent so you could see all the stuff there was nowhere to hide I wanted it to be deterministic because I don't want it to be something around unpredictability or stochasticity and and I want it to be something familiar to people minimal and I wanted to use it as a model system for honing our abilities to take a new system and looking at it with fresh eyes and that's because the sorting algorithms have been studied for over 60 years we all think we know what they do and what their properties are the algorithm itself is just a few lines of code you know you can you can see exactly what's there it's deterministic and that's it so that that's why that's why right I wanted I wanted the most shock value out of a system like that if we were to find anything and to use it as an example of taking something minimal and and seeing what can be gotten out of it so I'll describe two interesting things about it and then we have lots of other work coming in the next in the next year about even simpler systems it's actually crazy so the so the very first thing is this the standard sorting so let's let's take bubble sort right and and and all these sorting algorithms you know what you're starting out with is an array of jumbled up digits okay so integers it's an array of mixed up integers and what the algorithm is designed to do is to eventually arrange them all into order and what it does generally is compare some pieces of that array and and based on which one is larger than which it swaps them around and you can imagine that if you just keep doing that and you just keep comparing and swapping then eventually you can get all the digits in the same order so the first thing I decided to do and this is this is the work of my student taining Zhang and then Adam Goldstein on this paper this goes back to our original discussion about putting a barrier between it and its goals and the first thing I said okay how do we put a barrier in well how about this the traditional algorithm assumes that the hardware is working correctly so if you have a seven and then a five and you tell them to swap the lines of swap the swap the five and the seven and then you go on you never check did it swap because you assume that that that it's reliable hardware okay so what we decided to do is to break one of the digits so that it doesn't move when you tell it to move doesn't move we don't change the algorithm that's really key we do not put anything new in the algorithm that says what do you do if the damn thing didn't move okay just run it exactly the same way what happens turns out something very interesting happens it still works it's still so it's still sorts it but it it eventually sorts it by moving all the stuff around the broken number okay it makes sense but here's something interesting suppose we suppose we plot at any given moment we plot the degree of sortedness of the string as a function of time if you run the normal algorithm and so it gets it's guaranteed to get where it's going that's the you know it's got it's got a sort and it will always reach the end but when it encounters one of the broken digits what happens is the actual sortedness goes down in order to then recoup and get better order later what it's able to do is to go against the thing that it's trying to do to go around in order to meet its goal later on now if I didn't if if if I showed this to a behavior scientist and I didn't tell him what this what system was doing is they will say well we know what this is this is delayed gratification this is the ability of a system to go against its gradient and get what it needs to do now imagine two magnets imagine you take two magnets you put a piece of wood between them and they're like this what the magnet is not going to do is to go around the barrier and get to its goal all the two the do not smart enough to go against their gradient they're just gonna like keep doing this some animals are smart enough right they'll go around and the sorting algorithm is smart enough to do that but the trick is there are no steps in the algorithm for doing that you could stare at our algorithm all day long you would not see that this thing can do delayed gratification it isn't there now there's two ways to look at this on the one hand you could say so the the reductionist physics approach you could say did it did it follow all the steps in the algorithm is yeah I did well then uh well there's nothing to see here there's no magic this is you know it does what it does it didn't it didn't disobey the algorithm right I'm not claiming that this is a miracle I'm not saying it disobey's the algorithm I'm saying it's not failing to sort I'm saying it's not doing some sort of you know crazy quantum thing not saying any of that what I'm saying is other people might call it emergent what it has is our properties that are not complexity not unpredictability not perverse instantiation as in sometimes in in a life what it has are unexpected competencies recognizable by behavioral scientists meaning meaning different types of cognition primitive but well we wanted primitive so there you go it's simple uh that you didn't have to code into the algorithm that's very important you get more than you start with you then you put it and you didn't have to do that you get the surprising behavioral competencies not just complexity that's the first thing the second thing which which is also crazy but it requires a little bit of a little bit of explanation the second thing that we said is okay what if instead of in the typical sorting algorithm you have a single controller top down I'm I'm sort of godlike looking down at the numbers and I'm swapping them according to the algorithm what if and this goes back to actually the title of the paper talks about a general data self sorting algorithms this is back to like what's who's the pattern and who's the agent right you said what if we give the numbers a little bit of agency here's what we're gonna we're not gonna have any kind of top down sort every single number knows the algorithm and he's just gonna do whatever the algorithm says so if I'm a five I'm just gonna execute the algorithm and the algorithm will try to make sure that to my right is the six and to my left is a four that's that's it so every digit is so it's like a distributed as you know it's like an ant colony there is no central planner everybody just does their own algorithm okay well just gonna do that once you've done that and by the way one of the values of doing that is that you can simulate biological processes because in biology you know if I have like a frog face and I scramble it with all the different organs every every tissue is gonna rearrange itself so that ultimately you have you know nose eyes head you know you're gonna have an order right so you can do that but okay fine but you can do something else cool once you've done that you can do something cool that you can't do with a standard algorithm you can make a chimera calc or what I mean is not all the cells have to follow the same algorithm some of them might follow bubble source some of them might follow selection sort it's like in biology what we do when we make chimera is we make frog allotels so frog allotels have some frog cells they have some axelotel cells what is that gonna look like somebody know what a frog allotel is gonna look like it's actually really interesting that despite all the genetics and the and the developmental biology you have the genomes you have the frog genome you have the axel allot genome nobody can tell you what a frog allotel is gonna look like even though you have you have this is this is the this is the back to your question about physics and chemistry like yeah you can know everything there is to know about how you know how the physics and the genetics work but the decision making right is like baby baby axelotels have legs I'm tap those don't have legs so frog a lot of gonna have legs right I can you predict that from from understanding the physics of transcription and all of that anyway so so we made some so you see this is like an intersection of biology physics cognition so we made chimera calc rhythms and we said okay half the digits randomly we assign them randomly so half the digits are randomly doing bubble sort half the digits are randomly doing that selection sort of but that once you choose bubble sort that digit is sticking it's sticking we haven't done the thing where you they can swap between no with their stick into it right you label them and they're sticking to it the first thing we learned is that the first thing we learned is that distributed sorting still works it's amazing you don't need a central planner when every when every number is doing its whole thing still gets sorted that's cool the second thing we found is that when you make a chimera calc rhythm where actually the algorithms are not even matching that works too is the thing still gets sorted that's cool but the most amazing thing is when we looked at something that had nothing to do with sorting and that is we asked the following question we defined Adam Goldstein actually named this property and I think it's well-known we define the elbow type of a single cell it's not the genotype it's not the phenotype it's the alga type the alga type is simply this what algorithm are you following which one are you are you a you a selection sort or bubble sort right that's it there's two alga types and we simply asked the following question during that process of sorting what are the odds that whatever alga type you are the guys next to you are your same type it's it's not the same as asking how the numbers are sorted because there's got nothing to do with the numbers it's actually it's just whatever type you are it's more about clustering and sorting clustering what that's exactly what we call it we call it clustering and at first so so now think of what happens and that's and you can see this on that graph it's the red you start off the clustering is at 50 percent because I told you we assign the alga types randomly so the odds that the guy next to you is the same as you is half 50 percent right this is only two alga types in the end it is also 50 percent because the thing that dominates is actually the sorting algorithm and the sorting element doesn't care what type you are you've got to get the numbers in order so by the time you're done you're back to random alga types because because you have to get the numbers sorted but in between in between you get some amount of increased very significant because look at look at the control is in the middle the pink is in the middle in in between you get significant amounts of clustering meaning that certain alga types like to hang out with their buddies for as long as they can now now here's here's the one more thing and then I'll kind of give a philosophical significance to this and so we saw this and I said that's not because the algorithm doesn't have any provisions for asking what alga type of my what alga type is my is my neighbor if we're not the same I'm going to move to be next to like if you wanted to implement this you would have to write a whole bunch of extra steps there would have to be a whole bunch of observations that you would have to take of your neighbor to see how he's acting then you would infer what alga type he is then you would go stand next to the one that seems to have the same alga type as you you would have to take a bunch of measurements to say wait is that guy doing bubble sorted is he doing selections or I like if you want to implement this it's a whole bunch of algorithmic steps none of that exists in our algorithm you don't have any way of knowing what alga type you are or what anybody else is okay we didn't have to pay for that at all so notice notice a couple of interesting things the first interesting thing is that this was not at all obvious from the from the algorithm itself the algorithm doesn't say anything about alga types second thing is we paid computationally for all the steps needed to have the number sorted right because we know you know you pay you pay for certain computation cost the clustering was free we didn't pay for that at all there were no extra steps so this gets back to your other question of how do we know there's a play tonic space and this is kind of like one of the craziest things that we're doing I actually suspect we can get free compute out of it I suspect that one of the things that we can do here is use these ingressions in a useful way that don't require you to pay cost to pay physical cost right like we know every every bit has a total energy cost that you have to get the clustering was free nothing extra with stone yeah just uh... the this plot would be before just listening on the x-axis is the percentage of completion of the sorting process the y-axis is the sortedness of the list of numbers and then also in the red line is basically the degree to which they're clustered and uh you're saying that there's this unexpected competence of clustering and I should comment that I'm sure there's a theoretical computer scientist listening to this saying I can model exactly what is happening here improve that the clustering increasing decreases so taking the specific instantiation of the thing you've experimented with them and and prove certain properties of this but the point is that there's a more general pattern here of probably other than you haven't discovered unexpected competencies that emerge from this that you can could get free computation out of this thing so let's go back to the very first thing you said about uh physicists thinking that physics is enough you're 100% correct that somebody could look at this and say well I see exactly why this is happening we can track we can track through the algorithm yeah you can there's no miracle going on here right I'm the hardware isn't doing some crazy thing that it wasn't supposed to do the point is that despite following the algorithm to do one thing it is also at the same time doing other things that are neither prescribed nor forbidden by the algorithm it's the space between between uh the chance and necessity which is how a lot of people you know see these things it's that it's that free space we don't really have a good vocabulary for it where the interesting things happen and to whatever extend it's doing other things that are useful that stuff is is computationally without extra cost now there's one other cool thing about this and this is the beginning of a lot of thinking that I've done about this this relates to AI and stuff like that intrinsic motivations the sorting of the digits is what we forced it to do the clustering is an intrinsic motivation we didn't ask for it we didn't expect it to happen we didn't uh we didn't explicitly forbid it but we didn't you know we didn't know this is a great definition of the intrinsic motivation of a system so when people say oh that's a machine it only does what you programmed it to do I you know I as a human have intrinsic motivation you know uh I'm creative and I have intrinsic motivation machines to do that even even even this minimal thing has a minimal kind of intrinsic motivation which is something that is not forbidden by the algorithm but isn't prescribed by the algorithm either and I think I think that's an important you know third thing besides chance in necessity something something else that's that's fun about this is when you think about intrinsic motivations think think about a child if you make them sit in math class all day you're never going to know what the other intrinsic motivations are that he might be doing right my who knows what else he might be interested in so we so I wanted to ask this question when I said if we let off the pressure on the sorting what would happen now that's hard because because if you mess with the algorithm now it's no longer the same algorithm so you don't want to do that so we did something that I think was was kind of clever we allowed repeat digits so if you allow repeat digits in your in your array you can still have all the fives can still be after all the fours and after all the sixes but you can keep them as cluster as you want so this thing at the end where they have to get declustered in order for the sorting to happen we thought maybe we could let off the pressure a little bit if you do that all you do is allow some extra repeat digits the clustering gets bigger it will cluster as much as you let it the clustering is what it wants to do the sorting is what we're forcing it to do and my only point is if the if the bubble saw which has been gone over and gone over how many times has these kinds of things that we didn't see coming what about the a i's the language model everything else not because not because they talk not because they say that they're you know have an inter perspective or any of that but just from the fact that this thing is even even the most minimal system surprises with what happens and I frankly when I see this tell me if this doesn't sound like all of our existential story for the brief time that we're here the universe is going to grind us into dust eventually but until then we get to do some cool stuff that is intrinsically motivating to us that is neither forbidden by our by the laws of physics nor determined by the laws of physics but eventually it kind of comes to an end so I think that that aspect of it right that there are spaces even in algorithms there are spaces in which you can do other new things not just random stuff not just complex stuff but things that are easily recognizable to a behavior scientist you see that's the point here and I think that kind of intrinsic motivation is what's telling us that this idea that we can carve up the world we can say okay look biology is complex cognition who knows what's responsible for that but at least we can take a chunk of the world aside and we can we can cut it off and we can say these are the dumb machines these are just this algorithms whereas we know the rules of biochemistry don't explain everything we want to know about how psychology is going to go but at least the rules of algorithms tell us exactly what the machines are going to do right we have we have some hope that we've carved off a little part of the world and everything is nice and simple and it is exactly what we said it was going to be I think that failed I think it was a good try I think we have good theories of interfaces but even even the simplest algorithms have have these kinds of things going on and so that's that's why I think something like this is significant do you think that there is going to be in all kinds of systems of varying complexity things that the system wants to do and things that is forced to do so are there these unexpected competencies to be discovered in basically all algorithms and all systems that's my suspicion and I think that is extremely important for us as humans to have a research program to learn to recognize and predict and recognize we make things never mind something as simple as this we make we make you know social structures financial structures Internet of things robotics say I said we make all this stuff and we think that the thing we make it do is the main show and I think it is very important for us to learn to recognize the kind of stuff that that sneaks in into the spaces what would it's a very counterintuitive notion by the way I like the word emergent I hear your criticism and it's a really strong one that emergent is like you toss your hands up but I don't know the the process but it's just a beautiful word because it is I guess it's a synonym for surprising and I mean this is very surprising but just because it's surprising doesn't mean there's not a mechanism that explains it. Mechanism and explanation are both not all they're cracked up to be in the sense that you know anything you and I do we could we could come up with the most beautiful theory we paint a painting anything we do somebody could say well I was watching the biochemistry and the and the Schrodinger equation playing out and it was totally described everything that was happening you didn't break you didn't break even a single law of biochemistry nothing to see here nothing to see right like okay you know consistent with the with the low level rules you can do the same thing here you can look at the machine code and say yeah this thing is just executing machine code you can go further and say oh it's quite it's quantum foam it's just doing the thing that quantum foam does that that you're saying that's what this is miss and I'm not saying they're unaware of that I mean there generally a pretty sophisticated bunch I just think they've picked a level and they're going to discover what is to be seen at that level which is a lot and my point is the stuff that the the behavior scientists are interested in shows up at a much lower level than you think how often you think there's a misalignment of this kind between the thing that a system is forced to do and what it wants to do and it's particularly I'm thinking about various levels of complexity of AI systems so right now we've looked at like five other systems that's a small n okay but but just looking at that I would find it very surprising if bubble sort was able to do this and then there was some sort of valley of death where nothing showed up and then blah blah living things like I can't imagine that I I'm going to say that if something and we and we actually have a system that's even simpler than this which is one decelior automata that's doing some weird stuff if if these things are to be found in this kind of simple system I mean they just have to be showing up in in these other more complex AI and things like that the only thing what what we don't know but we're going to find out is to what extent there is interaction between these so so I call these things side quests you know it's like it's like like like like in a game you know whether it's the main thing you're supposed to do and then as long as as long as you still do it the thing about this is you have to sort yet yet you have to sort there's no miracle you're going to sort but but but as long as you can do other stuff while you're sorting it's not forbidden and what we don't know is to what extent are the two things linked so if you do have a system that's very good at language are the are the others the the the side quests that it's capable of do they have anything to do with language whatsoever the the we don't know the answer that the answer might be no in which case all of the stuff that we've been saying about the language models because of what they're saying all of that could be a total red herring and not really important and the really exciting stuff is what we never looked for or in complex systems maybe those things become linked in biology they're linked in biology evolution makes sure that that the things are capable of have a lot to do with what you've actually been selected for in these things I don't know and so we might find out that that they actually do give the language some sort of leg up or we might find that the language is is just yeah that's not that's not the interesting part also it is an interesting question of this intrinsic motivation of clustering is this a property of the particular sorting algorithms is this a property of all sorting algorithms is this a property of all algorithms operating on lists on numbers how big is it so for example with LLM's is it a property of any algorithm that's trying to model language or is it very specific to transformers and that's all to be discovered we're doing all that we're doing out we're testing we're testing the stuff in other algorithms we're looking for we're developing suites of code to look for other properties we you know to some extent it's very hard because we don't know what to look for but we do have a behaviorist handbook which tells you what the all kinds of things to look for the delay gratification the you know problem solving like we have all that I'll tell you an end of one of an interesting biological intrinsic motivation because because people so so in like the alignment community and stuff there's a lot of discussion about what are the intrinsic motivations going to be of a i's what are their goals going to be right do well what are they going to want to do just just as an end of one observation anthropods the very first thing we checked for so this is not experiment number 972 out of a thousand things this is the very first thing we checked for we put them on a plate of neurons with a big wound through them a big scratch first thing they did was heal the wound okay so ten end of one but I I like the fact that the first intrinsic motivation that we noticed that of that system was benevolent and healing I thought that was pretty cool and we don't know maybe that you know maybe the next 20 things we find are going to be some sort of you know damaging effects I can't tell you that but but the first thing that we saw was was kind of a positive one and and I don't know that makes me feel better what was the thing you mentioned with the anthropods that they can reverse aging there's a procedure called an epigenetic clock where what you can do is look at a particular epigenetic states of cells and compare to a curve that was built from humans of known age you can guess you can guess what the age is okay so so we can take now and this is a Steve Havrath's work and many other people that when you take a set of cells you can guess what their biological age is okay so we make the anthropods from cells that we get from human tracheal epithelium we collaborated with with the Steve's group the clock foundation we sent them a bunch of cells and we saw that if you if you check the the anthropods themselves they are roughly 20% younger than the cells they come from and so that's amazing and I can I can give you a theory of why that happens although we're still investigating and then I could tell you the implications for longevity and things like that my theory for why it happens I call this I call this age evidencing and I think that what's happening here like with a lot of biology is that cells have to update their priors based on experience and so I think that they come from an old body they have a lot of priors about how many years they've been around and all that but their new environment screams I'm an embryo basically there's no other cells around you're being bent into a pretzel they actually express some embryonic genes they say you're an embryo and I think it doesn't it's not enough new evidence to roll them like all the way back but it's enough to update them to about 28% back yes it's similar to like when older adult gives birth to a child so you're saying you can just fake it till you make it with with age like the environment convinces the cell that is young well first of all yes yes and that's that's that's my fun this isn't we have a whole bunch of research being done on this there was a study where they went into a an old age home and they redid the decor like 60 style when all these folks were really young and they they found all kinds of improvements in blood chemistry and stuff because they say was sort of mentally taking them back to when you know when they were the way they were at that time I think this is a basal version of that that basically if if you're finding yourself in an embryonic environment what's more plausible that you're young or what what you know what like I think I think this is this is the basic feature of of biology is to update priors based on experience do you think that's actually actionable for longevity like you can convince cells that they're younger and they're biics than the lifespan this is what we're trying to do yeah could it be as simple as that why that's not well I'm not claiming it simple that that is in no way simple but because because again you have to all all of this all of the regenerative medicine stuff that we do balances on one key thing which is learning to communicate to the system we have to if you're going to convince that system you know so when we make a gut tissue into an eye you have to convince those cells that their priors about we are we are gut precursors those priors are wrong and you should adopt this new world view that you're going to be you know you're going to be an eye so being convincing and figuring out what what kind of messages are convincing to to cells and how to speak the language and how to make them take on new new beliefs literally is is at the root of all of these future advances in birth defects and regenerative medicine and cancer and that's that's what's going on here so I'm not saying it's simple but I can see the I can see the path going back to the platonic space I have to ask if if our brains are indeed thin client interfaces to that space what does that mean for our mind like can we upload the mind can we copy it can we ship it or to other planets like well how what does that mean for exactly where the mind is stored yeah a couple of things so we so we are now beyond anything that I can say with any certainty this is total total conjecture okay so because we don't know yet the whole point of this is we actually don't really understand very well the relationship between the interface and the thing you're currently working on is to map correct and we're and we are beginning to map it but you know this is this is a massive effort so so so I'll a couple of a couple of conjectures here one is that I strongly suspect that the majority of what we think of as the mind is is the pattern in that space okay and one of the interesting predictions from that model which is not a prediction of modern neuroscience is that there should be cases where there is very minimal brain and yet normal IQ function this has been seen clinically we just the Karina Kaufman and I reviewed this in a paper recently a bunch of cases of humans where there's very little brain tissue and they have normal or in though sometimes above normal intelligence now things are not simple because that obviously doesn't happen all the time right most of the time that doesn't happen so so what's going on we don't understand but it is a very curious thing that is not a prediction of I'm not saying I'm not saying it can't you know you can take modern neuroscience and sort of bend it into a pretzel to accommodate it you can say well there are these you know kind of redundancies and things like this right so you can accommodate it but it doesn't predict this so there are these incredibly curious cases now do I think you can copy it no I don't think you can because what you're going to be copying is the is the interface the front end the the brain or the the whatever the action the action is actually the pattern the platonic space you're going to be able to copy that I doubt it but what you could do is produce another interface through which that particular pattern is going to come through I think that's probably possible I can't say anything at this point about what that would take but my guess is that that's possible is your guess your gut is that that process if possible is different than copying like it looks more like creating a new thing versus copying for the interface so if you could so so so so here's my prediction for Star Trek transporter for whatever reason right now your brain and body are very attuned and attractive to a particular pattern which is your set of psychological propensities if we could if we could rebuild that exact same thing somewhere else I don't see any reason why that same pattern wouldn't come through it the same way it comes through this one that's that would be a guess you know so so I think what you what you will be copying is the physical interface and hoping to maintain whatever it is about that interface that was appropriate for that pattern we don't really know what that is at this point so when we've been talking about mind in this particular case it's the most important to me because I'm a human the self come along with that this the feeling like this mind belongs to me yeah so that come along with all minds the the subjective not the subjective experience the subjective experience is important to cautious those but like the ownership I suspect so and I think so because of the way we come into being so 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 and 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 what 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 so now you're now it's executing an algorithm how did you get from from physics to executing an algorithm like what what what 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 of becoming a being yeah if the fascinating question through embryogenesis at which point is the are you booting on yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly you have a hope of an answer to that well I think I think so I think so in in in two ways the first thing is just physically what what happens so I think that the your your first task as as a as a being and and again I don't think this is a binary thing I think this is a positive feedback loop that sort of cranks on up up and up your first task as a being coming into this world is to tell a very compelling story to your parts as a biological you are made of a general parts those parts need to be aligned literally into a goal they have no comprehension of they if you're going to move through anatomical space by means of a bunch of cells which only know physiological and you know metabolic spaces and things like that you are going to have to develop a model and give them a bend their action space you're going to have to deform their option space with signals with behavior shaping cues with rewards and punishments whatever you got your job as a as an agent is ownership of your parts is a line meant of your parts I think that fundamentally is going to give rise to this this this ability now now that also means having a boundary saying okay this is the stuff I control this is me this other stuff over here is outside world I have to figure out you don't know where that is by the way you have to figure it out and in embryo genesis it's really cool you can as a as a as a grad student I used to do this experiment with duck embryos with flat a blast it is you can take a needle and and put some scratches into it and every every island you make for a while until they heal up things it's the only embryo there's nothing else around so it becomes an embryo and eventually you get twins and triplets and quadruplets and things like that but each one of them at the border you know they're joined well where do I end and where does where does he begin you have to you know you have to know what your what your borders are so um that action that action of aligning your parts and coming to be this this this uh I mean I'm even going to say this emergence we just not have a good vocabulary for it this this this emergence of a model that aligns all the parts is really critical to keep that thing going there's something else that's really interesting and uh I was thinking about this in the context of of of this question of like like you know these these beautiful um kind of ideas you know that uh there's this amazing thing that we found and this is largely the work of Federico Pagosi in my group so a couple of years ago we saw that networks of chemicals um can learn they have five or six different kinds of learning that they can do and so what I asked them to do was to calculate um the causal emergence of those networks while they're learning and what I mean by that is is this if you're a rat and you learn to press a lever and get a reward there's no individual cell that had both experiences the set right the cells that you're at your Pag had to touch the lever the cells in your gut got the delicious reward no individual cell has that both experiences who owns that associative memory well the rat so that means you have to be integrated right if you're going to learn associative memories from different parts you have to be an integrated agent that can do that and so we can measure that now with metrics of causal emergence like phi and then things like that so we know that in order to learn you have to have significant phi but I wanted to ask the opposite question what does learning do for your phi level does it do anything for your degree of being an agent that is more than the sum of its parts so we train the networks and sure enough some of them not all of them but some of them as you train them the their their phi goes up okay and so basically what we were able to find is that there is this uh positive feedback loop between every time you learn something you become more of an integrated agent and every time you do that it becomes easier to learn yeah and so it's this the virtuous cycle it's a virtuous cycle it's in a symmetry that points upwards for agency and intelligence and now back to our platonic space stuff where does that come from doesn't come from evolution you don't need to have any evolution for this evolution will optimize the crap out of it for sure but you don't need evolution to have this doesn't come from physics it comes from the rules of information to the causal information theory and the behavior of networks the mathematical objects it has it's this is not anything that uh that was you know was was given to you by physics or by a history of selection it's a free gift from math and the and and those two free gift free gifts from math locked together into a spiral that I think causes simultaneously arise in intelligence and arise in collective agency and I think that's just you know that's been you know just just amazing to think about well that free gift from I think is extremely useful biology when you have small entities forming networks hierarchy that builds more and more complex organisms that's that's obvious I mean this speaks to embryogenesis which I think is one of the coolest things in the universe uh and in fact you acknowledge its coolness in ingressing minds 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 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 medic ignition that can enable it to describe itself as a not a machine it'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 how is possible to take a leap from a 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 like how what how do we understand because 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 to 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 that 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 that 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 is scaling it's the 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 and starting out that's that's just a molecular network then you become a cell and then your many cells and now you're navigating anatomical morph of space and you're hosting all kinds of other patterns and eventually you and and I think again I think there's and this is like what you know all the 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 it's this like for a positive feedback cycle where the more of these free gifts you pull down they allow you physically to develop to ways where all look now now now we're suitable for for more and higher ones and this continuously goes and goes and goes until you know 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 is it just this kind of the same thing that you were talking about with the network of chemicals being able to learn I'll give you to to mechanisms that we found but again just to be clear these are mechanisms of the physical interface the what what we haven't gotten is a mature theory of how they map onto the space that's just like just beginning but I'll tell you what the what the physical side of things look like the first one has to do with stress propagation so imagine that you got a bunch of cells and there's a cell down here that needs to be up there okay all of these cells are exactly where they need to go so they're happy their stress is low this cell the now now let's imagine stress is basically a it's a it's a it's a physical implementation of the error function it's basically the amount of stress is basically the delta between where you are now and where you need to be not necessarily in physical position this could be an anatomical space and physiological space and in transcriptional space whatever right it's just it's just the delta from your set point so so your stressed out but these guys are happy they're not moving you can't get past them now imagine if what you could do is you could leak your stress whatever your stress molecule is and the cool thing is that evolution is actually conserve these highly so these are all and we're studying all of these things they're they're actually highly conserved if you start leaking your stress molecules then all of this stuff around here starting to get stressed out when things get stressed starting to stress out their temperature in the not not physical temperature but in the sense of like simulated annealing or something right there their ability to their plasticity goes up because because they're feeling stressed they need to relieve that stress and because all the stress molecules are the same they don't know it's not their stress they are equally irritated by them as if it was their own stress so they become a little more plastic they become ready to kind of you know adopt different fates you get up to where you're going and then everybody's stress can draw so so notice what can happen by a very simple mechanism just be leaky for your own stress my problems become your problems not because you're altruistic not because you actually care about my problems no mechanism for you actually care about my problems but just that simple mechanism means that far away regions are now responsive to the needs of other regions such that complex rearrangements and things like that can happen it's a it's it's alignment of everybody to the same goal through this very dumb simple stress sharing thing the leaky stress leaky stress right so there's another one there's another one which I call memory anonymization so imagine here two cells and imagine something happens to this cell and it sends a signal over to this cell traditionally you send a signal over this cell receives it it's very clear that it came from outside so this cell can do many things it could ignore it it could believe you know it could take on the information it could just ignore it it could reinterpret it could do whatever but it's very clear that came from outside now imagine the kind of thing that we study which is called gap junctions these are electrical synapses that that could directly link the internal milliars of two cells if something happens to this cell it gets let's say it gets poked and there's a calcium spike or something that propagates through the gap junction here this cell now has the same information but this cell has no idea wait a minute was that is that my memory or is that his memory because it's the same right it's the same it's the same components and so what you're able to do now is to have a mind melt you can have a mind melt between the two cells where nobody's quite sure whose memory it is and when you share memories like this it's harder to say that I'm separate from you if we share the same memories we're kind of a and I don't mean every single memories right so they still have some identity but to a large extent they have a little bit of a mind melt and there's many complexities you can you can you can lean on top of it but what it means is that if you have a large group of cells they now have joint memories of what happened to us as opposed to you know what happened to you and I know what happened to me and that enables a higher cognitive like home because you have greater computational capacity you have a greater area of concern of things you want to manage I don't just want to manage my tiny little memory states because I'm getting your memories now I know I got to manage this this whole thing so so both of these things end up scaling the size of things you care about and that is a major ladder for cognition is scale the degree of you know the size of concern that you have if you're fascinated to be able to engineer that scaling probably applicable to AI systems how do you rapidly scale the cognitive cone yeah we have some collaborators in a company called softmax that's that we're working with to do some of that stuff in biology that that's our cancer therapeutic which is that what you see you see in cancer literally is cells electrically disconnect from their neighbors when they were part of a giant memory that was working on making a nice organ well now they can't remember any of that now they're just amoebas and the rest of the body is just external environment and what we found is if you've then physically reconnect them to the to the network you don't have to fix the DNA you don't have to kill the cells with chemo you can just reconnect them and they go back to because they're now part of this larger collective they go back to what they were working on and so yeah the way I think we can intervene at that at that scale let me ask you more explicitly on the search the study the search for unconventional terrestrial intelligence what do you hope to do there how do you actually find try to find unconventional intelligence all around us first of all do you think on earth there is all kinds of incredible intelligence we haven't yet discovered I mean guaranteed we've we've already seen in our own bodies and I don't just mean that we are host to a bunch of microbiome or any of that I mean that you're cells and we have all kinds of work on this every day they traverse these alien spaces 20,000 dimensional spaces and other spaces they solve problems I think they they they have they suffer when they fail to meet their goals they have stress reduction when they meet their goals these things are inside of us they are all around us I think that we are we have an incredible degree of mind blindness to all of the very alien kinds of minds around us and I think that you know looking for aliens off off the earth is awesome and whatever but if we can't recognize the ones that are inside our own bodies what what chance do we have to really you know to really recognize the ones that are out there. Did you think that could be a measure like IQ for uh for mind what would it be not mindedness but intelligence that's broadly applicable to the unconventional minds that's generalizable to unconventional minds where we could even quantify like holy shit this discovery is incredible because it has this IQ. Yeah I yes and no um the the yes part is that what as we have shown you can take existing IQ metrics I mean literally existing kinds of ways that that people used to measure intelligence of animals and humans or whatever and you can apply them to very weird things if you have the imagination to make the interface you can do it and we've done it and we've shown creative problem solving and and all this kind of stuff like so so so yes however we have to be humble about these things and recognize that all of those IQ metrics that we've come up with so far were derived from an end of one example of the evolutionary lineage here on earth and so we are probably missing a lot of them so I would say we have plenty to start we have we have so much to start with we could keep you know tens of thousands of people busy just testing things now but we have to be aware that we're probably missing a lot of important ones what do you think has more interesting intelligent unconventional minds inside our body the human body or like we were talking off Mike the Amazon jungle like nature natural systems outside of like the sophisticated biological systems were aware of yeah we don't know because it's really hard to do experiments on larger systems it's a lot easier to go down than it is to go up but my suspicion is you know like the Buddha say innumerable sentient beings I think by the time you get to that degree of infinity it kind of doesn't matter to compare I suspect there's just massive numbers of them yeah I think it really matters which kind of systems are amenable to our current methods of scientific inquiry I mean I've spent quite a lot of hours just staring at ants what was in the Amazon and such a mysterious wonderful collective intelligence I don't know how amenable it is to research I've seen some folks try you could simulate you can I feel like we're missing a lot I'm sure we are but but one of my favorite things about that kind of work if you see in that there's at least three or four papers showing that ant colonies fall for the same visual illusions that we fall for not they not the ants the colonies so if you lay out food in particular patterns they'll do things like complete lines that aren't there and like all the same shit that we fall for they fall so so you know I don't think it's hopeless but I do think that we need a lot of work to develop tools do you think all the the tooling that we develop and the mapping that we've been discussing will help us do the setty part finding aliens out there I think it's essential I think it's essential I we are so parochial in what we expect to find in terms of life that we are going to be just completely missing a lot of stuff if we can't even if we can't even agree on nevermind definitions of life but you know what's actually important I I let a paper recently where I asked whatever 65 or so modern working scientists for a definition of life and and we had we had so many different definitions across so many different dimensions we have to use AI to make a morphous space out of it and and there was zero consensus about what actually is important you know and if if we are not good at recognizing it here I just don't see how we're going to be good at recognizing it somewhere else so given how miraculous life is here on earth so it's clear to me that we have so much more to do that said would that be exciting to you if we find life on other planets in the solar system like what would you do with that information or is that just another another life form that we don't understand I would be very excited about it because it would give us some more unconventional embodiments to think about right a data point that's pretty far away from our existing data points at least in the solar system so that'd be cool I'd be very excited about it but I must admit that my my level of my my set point for surprise has been pushed so high at this point that it would have to you know it would have to be something really weird to make me shocked I mean I the things that we see every day is just yeah I think you've mentioned a few places that like you wrote that the ingressing mind's papers not the weirdest thing you plan to write yeah um how weird are you gonna get can you hit maybe a better question is like in which direction of weirdness do you think you will go in your in your life in which direction of the weird over-till window or are you going to expand yeah well the kind of a background to this is simply that I've I've had a lot of weird ideas for many many decades and my general policy is not to talk about stuff until it becomes actionable and the amazing thing I mean I'm really kind of shocked is that in my lifetime the empirical work like I really didn't think we would get this far and the knob I have this like mental mental knob of what percentage of the weird things I think do I actually say in public right and and every few years when the when the empirical work moves forward I sort of turn that knob a little right as we keep going so I have no idea if we'll continue to be that fortunate or how long I can keep doing this or however like I don't know but just to give you just to give you a direction for it it's going to be in the direction of what kinds of things do we need to take seriously as other beings with with which to relate to so I've already pushed it you know so like we knew brainy things and and then we said well it's not just brains and then we said well it's not just so so you know it's not just in physical space and it's not just biologicals and it's not just complexity there's a couple of other steps to take that I'm pretty sure are there but but we're going to have to do the the actual work to make it actionable before you know before we really talk about it so that that direction I think it's fair to say you're one of the more unconventional humans scientists out there so the interesting question is what's your process of idea generation once you process of discovery from you've done a lot of really incredibly interesting like you said actionable but interesting out there ideas that you've actually engineered with xenobots and antibodies these kinds of things like what when you go home to not go to the lab what's the process I'm just sheet of paper when you're thinking through it well the mental part is a lot of it much like funny enough much like making xenobots you know we make xenobots by releasing constraints right we don't do anything to them we just release them from the constraints they already have and then we see so a lot of it is releasing the constraints that mentally have been placed on us and and part of it is my my education has been a little weird because I was a computer scientist first and and only later biology and so by the time I heard all the biology things that we typically just take on board I was already a little skeptical and thinking a little differently but a lot of it comes from releasing constraints and I very specifically think about okay this is what we know what would things look like if we were wrong or what would it look like if I was wrong what are we missing what is our worldview specifically not able to see right whatever model I have or another way I often think is I'll take two things that are considered to be very different things and I'll say let's just imagine those as two points on a continuum what what does that look like what does the middle of that continuum look like what's the what's the symmetry there what's the what's the parameter that I can you know what's the knob I can turn from to get from here to there so those kinds of I look for symmetries a lot I'm gonna like okay this thing is like that way in what way what's the what's the fewest number of things I would have to move to make this map on to that right so so these so those are you know those are kind of mental mental tools the physical process for me is basically I mean obviously I'm fortunate to have a lot of discussions with very smart people and so so in my in my group there are something I fired some amazing people so we of course have a lot of discussions and some stuff comes out of that my process is I do pretty much pretty much every morning or I do I'm outside for sunrise and I walk around in nature this is not really anything anything better than it is than as inspiration right than the nature I do I do I do photography and I find that it's a good meditative tool because it keeps your hands and brain just busy enough like you don't have to think too much but you know you're sort of twiddling and looking and doing some stuff and it keeps your brain off of the linear like logical careful train of thought enough to release it so that you can ideate a little more while while your hands are busy so it's not even the the thing you're photographing is the mechanical process of doing the photography and mentally right so I because I'm not walking around thinking okay let's see so for this experiment we got a you know I got to get this piece of equipment and this like that goes away and it's like okay what's the lighting and what's the what am I looking at and during that time when you're not thinking about that other stuff then then they say well yeah I gotta get I gotta know book it I'm like look at it this is this is what we need to do so that that kind of stuff and the actual idea writing down stuff is a notebook is a computer uh are you super organized thinking or is it just like random words here and there were drawings and I would if and also like what is the space of thoughts you have in your head is this sort of amorphous things that aren't very clear that you visualizing stuff uh is there is there something you can articulate there I tend to leave myself a lot of voicemails because as I'm walking around I'm like oh man this this idea and so I'll just call my office and leave myself a voicemail for later to to to transcribe I don't have a good enough memory to remember any of these things and so what I keep is a mind map so I have I have an enormous mind map one piece of it hangs in my in my lab so that people can see like these are the ideas this is how they link together here's everybody's project I'm working on this how the hell does this attach to everybody else's so they can track it the thing that hangs in the lab is about nine feet wide it's a silk sheet and I you know it's it's out of date within a couple of weeks of of my of my printing it because new stuff keeps moving around um and and and then there's more that isn't you know isn't for anybody else's view but um yeah I tried I tried to be very organized because otherwise otherwise I forget so so everything is in the mind map things are in manuscripts I have something like at the right now probably 163 62 open manuscripts that are in process of being written at various stages and and when things come up I stick them in the right manuscript in the right place so that when I'm finally ready to finalize then then I'll put words around it whatever but there's like outlines of everything so I try to be organized because I can't I don't have to you know so there's a wide front of manuscripts of worth is being done and it's continuously like pushing towards completion be not clear where yeah it's going to be finished when and how you know that's I mean that's yes and but that's just the that's just the theoretical philosophical stuff the empirical work that we're doing with in the lab I mean those are we know exactly you know it's more focused as we know this is this is you know anthropod aging this is limb regeneration this is the new cancer paper this is whatever yeah those things are very linear what do you think ideas come from when you're taking a walk that eventually materialize in a voicemail where's that what is that from you is that you know a lot of really some of the most interesting people feel like they're channeling from somewhere else I mean I hate to bring up the platonic space again but but I mean if you talk to any creative that's basically what they what they'll tell you right and and certainly that's been my experience so I feel I feel like it's a the way the way it feels to me is a collaboration so the collaboration is I need to bust my ass and be be prepped in in one a to to to work hard to be able to recognize the idea when it comes and be to actually have an outlet for it so that when it does come we have a lab and we have people who can who can help me do it and then we can actually get it out right so that's that's that's my part is you know be be up at 4 30 a.m. doing your thing and be ready for it but the other side of the collaboration is that yeah when you do that like amazing ideas come and you know to say that it's me I don't think would be would be right I you know I think it's it's definitely coming from from other places what advice would you give the scientists PG CUNES grad students young scientists they're trying to explore the space of ideas given that very unconventional non-standard unique set of ideas you've explored in your life career um let's see well the first and most important thing I've learned is not to take too much advice and so I don't like to give too much advice but but I do have one technique that I found very useful and this isn't for everybody but there's a specific demographic is a lot a lot of unconventional people reach out to me and I try to respond and and help them and so on this is a technique that I think is useful for some people all right describe it you need to it's it's it's it's the act of bifurcating your mind and you need to have two different regions one region is the practical region of impact in other words how do I get my idea in out into the world so that other people recognize it what should I say what are people hearing what are they able to hear how do I pivot it what parts do I not talk about what which journal am I going to publish is in this at time now do I wait two years for this like all the practical stuff that is all about how it looks from the outside right all the stuff that I can't say this or I should say this differently or this is going to freak people out or this is uh you know this community wants to hear this so I can pivot it this way like all that practical stuff it's got to be there otherwise you're not going to be in a position to follow up any of your ideas you're not going to have a career you can't you're not going to have resources to do anything but it's very important that can't be the only thing you need another part of your mind that ignores all that shit completely because this other part of your mind has to be pure it has to be I don't care what anybody else thinks about this I don't care whether this is publishable describable I don't care if anybody gets it I don't care if anybody thinks it's stupid this is this is what I what I think and why and and give it space to to sort of grow right and if you keep the if you try to mush them if you try to mush them together I found that impossible because because the practical stuff poisons the other stuff if you're if you're too much if you're too much on the creative and you can be an amazing thinker it's just nothing ever materializes but if you're very practical it tends to poison the other stuff because the more you think about how to present things so that other people get it it it constrains and it and it bends how you start to think and you know uh what I tell my students and others is there's two kinds of advice there's very practical specific things like somebody says well you forgot this control or this isn't the right method or you shouldn't be that stuff is gold and you should take that very seriously and you should use it to to improve your craft right and that's like super important but then there's the meta advice where people like that's not a good way to think about it don't work on this this isn't that that stuff is is garbage and even very successful people often give very constraining terrible advice like one of my one of my reviewers in a paper years ago said I love this Freudian slip he said he's going to give me constrictive criticism right and that's exactly what he gave me was constrictive criticism that's awesome that's a great typo it was very true I mean that that's exactly the bifurcation of the mind that's beautifully put I do think some of the most interesting people I've met are sometimes uh fall short on the on the normy side on the practical how do I have any emotional intelligence of how to communicate this with people that have a very different world view that are more conservative and more conventional and more kind of fit into the norm you have to be able to have the skill to fit in and then you have to again beautifully put be able to shut that off when you go on your own and think and having two skills is very important I think a lot of radical thinkers think that they're sacrificing something by learning the skill of fitting in but I think if you want to have impact if you want ideas to resonate actually lead to first of all be able to build great teams that help bring your ideas to life and second of all for your ideas to have impact and to scale and to resonate with a large number of people you have to have that skill and those are those are very different those are very different yeah let me ask a particular question you already spoke about it but what to you is one of those beautiful ideas that you've encountered in your various explorations maybe maybe not just beautiful but one that makes you happy to be a scientist to be able to be a curious human's exploring ideas I mean I must say that you know I sometimes think about these these ingressions from this from this space as a kind of stegonography you know so so stegonography is when you hide data and messages within the the bits of another pattern that don't matter right and the rule of stegonography is you can't mess up the main thing you know it's a picture of a cat or whatever you got to keep the cat but if there's bits that don't matter you can kind of stick stuff so I feel like I feel like all these ingressions are a kind of universal stegonography that there's this like these patterns seep into everything everywhere they can and they're kind of they're kind of shy meaning that they're very subtle not invisible if you work hard you can catch them but but they're not invisible but but they're hard to see and the fact that the fact that I think they also affect quote-unquote machines as much as they certainly affect living living organisms I think is incredibly incredibly beautiful and I personally am happy to be part of that same spectrum and the fact that that that magic is sort of applicable to everything I a lot of people find that extremely disturbing and that's that's some of the some of the hate mail I get is like yeah we were with you you know on the majesty of life thing until you got to the fact that machines get it too and now now like like terrible right you're you know I'm kind of devaluing the the the majesty of life and I don't I don't know I I the idea that we're now catching these patterns and we're able to do meaningful research on the on the interfaces and all that is just to me absolutely beautiful and that there's all one spectrum I think to me is is amazing I'm I'm I'm enriched by it I agree with you I think it's incredibly beautiful I lied there's any more ridiculous question so it seems like we are progressing towards possibly creating a super intelligent system and a GI and ASI if I had one gave it to you put you in the room what would be the first question you ask it maybe the first set of questions like there's so many topics that you worked on and you're interested in is there a first question you really just if you can get an answer solid answer well the first thing I would ask is how much should I even be talking to I'm for sure because it's not clear to me at all that getting somebody to tell you an answer in the long run is optimal it's the difference between when you're a kid learning math and having an older sibling that'll just tell you the answers right like sometimes it's just like come on just give me the answer let's move on with this you know cancer protocol and whatever like great but in the long run the process of discovering it yourself how much of that are we willing to give up and by getting a final answer how much of we missed of stuff we might have found along the way now I don't know what the the thing is I you know I don't think it's correct to say don't do that at all you know take take the time and all the blind alleys and like that that may not be optimal either but we don't know what the optimal is we don't know how much we should be stumbling around versus having somebody tell us the answer that actually a brilliant question ask a GI that I mean if it's really that's really an AGI yeah if it's really an AGI I'm like tell me what the balance is like how much should I be talking to you versus stumbling around in the lab and making all my you know all my own mistakes it was at 70 30 you know 10 90 I don't know so that would be that would be the first. I will say you shouldn't be talking to me it may well be it the it may say what the hell did you make me for in the first place you guys are screwed like that's possible yeah you know the second question I would ask is what's the what's the answer I should be I what's the question I should be asking you that I probably am not smart enough to ask you that's the other thing I would say I just really complicated that's a really really strong question but again there the answer might be you wouldn't understand the question and it proposes most likely so I think for me I would probably assuming you can get a lot of questions I will probably go for questions where I would understand the answer like it would uncover some small mystery that I'm super curious about is if you ask big questions like you did which is really strong questions I just feel like I wouldn't understand the answer if you ask it what question should I be asking you it would probably say something like you'll say something like what is the shape of the universe and you know like what why is that important right you you'll be very confused by the question and proposes yeah I would probably want to it would just be nice for me to know straight up first question how many living intelligent alien civilizations are in the observable universe yeah that would just be nice yeah to know if is it zero or is it a lot I just want to know that and then had an unfortunate might answer it might it might be a give me a my 11 answer that's what I was about to say is that my guess is you it's gonna be exactly the problem you said which is it's gonna say oh my god I mean right in this room you got you know yeah yeah yeah everything you need to know about alien civilizations is right here in this room in fact it's inside your own body thank you for starters AGI thank you all right Michael do you want one of my favorite scientists one of my favorite humans thank you for everything you do in this world thank you so much truly truly fascinating work and keep going for all of us thank you thank you so much it's great to see you like always always a good discussion yet thank you so much I appreciate this thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Levin to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me ask questions get feedback and so on and now let me leave you some words from Albert Einstein the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious it is the source of all true art and science thank you for the thing i hope to see you next time