❶ Memories as Agents 0:00 Introduction 1:40 2024 Highlights from Levin Lab 3:20 Stress sharing paper summary 6:15 Paradox of change: Species persist don't evolve 7:20 Bow-tie architectures 10:00 🔥 Memories as messages from your past self 12:50 Polycomputing 16:45 Confabulation 17:55 What evidence supports the idea that memories are agential? 22:00 Thought experiment: Entities from earth's core ❷ Information Patterns 31:30 Memory is not a filing cabinet 32:30 Are information patterns agential? 35:00 🔥 Caterpillar/butterfly... sea slug memory transfer 37:40 Bow-tie architectures are EVERYWHERE 43:20 Bottlenecks "scary" for information ❸ Connections & Implications 45:30 🔥 Black holes/white holes as bow-ties (Lee Smolin) 47:20 What is confabulation? AI hallucinations 52:30 Gregg Henriques & self-justifying apes... all good agents storytellers 54:20 Information telling stories... Joseph Campbell's journey for a single cell 1:00:50 What comes next?
The temporary metabolic pattern that is Michael Levin! Time to pay attention. Thank you Carlos for bringing him on to talk through his memories paper and allowing special thoughts to think through him
Isn't is fascinating, this is exactly what is happening, science is catching up in a way wich makes it possible to integrate ancient science into modern times.
Unreal conversation. I had the same reaction as Carlos at 54:57 -- What a fascinating thought. Levin's work seems to be the start of a revolution in the way we think about biology and the nature of the world.
As a kid in the 1970's, I read an article in Science yearbook about memory transfer using plasmids. Fish were trained to avoid the blue part of an aquarium, fed (injected?) to other fish, which in turn avoided that part of the aquarium. This was 50 years before Glanzman.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie. Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological. Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines. Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology. Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual. Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data. Information is dual. The past is dual to the future -- time duality. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic! Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
16:45 The Confabulation Levin refers to is what Baudrillard called Simulacra and what they discussed in the anime "Ghost in the Shell" as a "Stand alone complex." These was a work of fiction that directly inspired the movie "The Matrix" which originally proposed humans as units of a computational substrate, not batteries. (but they knew audiences wouldn't follow) I wish I could get a hold of Levin because I can help identify relationships in physics that underpin the systems he's describing. I've long been chatting with Sungchul Ji at Rutgers who wrote "Cell Language Theory" which deals with intercellular communication, and I was personally cited in the paper "Binary oppositions, algebraic holography and stochastic rules in genetic informatics" for an article that explained holography in an intuitive manner. I really think I could provide him some valuable resources for his continued work.
Start a TH-cam. Start talking mad shit and start a beef he can't ignore? Fitness influencers, fighters, rappers, and celebrities do it all the time. Worth a try?
This resonates deeply with certain esoteric teachings. Wich makes it very interesting and part of the movement of modern science to ancient knowledge, differences are only a matter of labeling.
The implications of this are overwhelming and wonderful! I can see a path to formerly impossible communication between majesteria. Brains talking to tissues talking to cells talking to compounds to atoms and beyond. Words are obeyable(executable?) commands, perhaps this is how once in a while, words of blessing can cause healing. Could one train their mind to translate physical sensations in the body into English and vice versa? What a beautiful time to be alive❤️
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie. Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological. Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines. Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology. Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual. Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data. Information is dual. The past is dual to the future -- time duality. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic! Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
@@steveflorida5849 In physics everything is made out of energy (information). "Physics is what we know and metaphysics is what we do not know" -- Bertrand Russell. Mind (syntropy, synergy) is dual to matter (entropy, energy) -- Descartes or Plato's divided line. Action is dual to reaction -- Sir Isaac Newton or the duality of force. Attraction (sympathy) is dual to repulsion (antipathy), stretch is dual squeeze, push is dual to pull - forces are dual. If forces are dual then energy must be dual:- Energy = force * distance -- simple physics. Energy is duality, duality is energy. If energy is being conserved then duality is being conserved -- Generalized Duality or the 5th law of thermodynamics! Electro is dual to magnetic -- electro-magnetic energy is dual or photons are dual. Synergy or syn-ergy is converging energy and en-ergy is diverging energy. If your mind is made from synergy/energy then it is dual. If knowledge is dual then information must be dual. Cause is dual to effect -- causality. Duality creates reality!
Fascinating. The idea of memory-as-meme should be considered. Meme in the Dawkinsian sense; strong memories will crowd out the weak ones; memories adapt and survive, those that don't adapt to new conditions fade away and die off.
The one word I never heard was "metaphor". When our memories, or even the memories of an LLM go through a bottleneck, what passes through has been reduced down to a metaphor, which can be mapped on to help with new experiences.
Languages are dual. Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie. Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological. Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines. Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology. Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual. Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data. Information is dual. The past is dual to the future -- time duality. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic! Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
Why is it only people like us who seek knowledge to this level. Bipartisanship right? I love you all, anyone doing research seeking truth and knowledge to infinity and beyond human comfort.
41:13 I feel it is V=IR (Voltage = Current * Resistance), which is saying “[Your] Capacity is what [you] receive multiplied by [your] operations” which applies across all harmonic levels, from quantum to human to cosmos.
J. Krishnamurti says the thinker and the thought arise together. There is no thinker without the thought. This was in the context of how there is no center or self in the brain-mind. When this is seen, there is no more conflict from this false duality. Then by observing thought without the self, there is no resistance, thus obsession and other downward spirals of thought don’t occur.
Thanks for the great conversation! Your idea of a pattern of story reminds me of Brett Anderson's proposal about the process of complexification as the meta narrative (if I understand and recall correctly).
As a musician the part where he says that meaning is not hard coded makes complete sense. Its very evident in music that notes and phrases have no intrinsic meaning, not even an agreed / defined one. Yet many would report having had deeply meaningful experiences listening to music.
I wish we had high bandwidth instantaneous information sharing mechanisms so we could tie into some sort of efficient collective intelligence. Brilliant, both of you. Thank you for sharing this.
Remarkable discussion, in particular from here that of “memory as agential”. Pattern propagation using (for example) humans as a medium. Relates to exposure frequency and intensity of a particular pattern, ie. say my father expressed frequent disappointment, over a period of time that’s “internalized” and I become disappointed in myself. But a primary defense mechanism is projection and personal disappointment is therefore projected onto those around me in my own family. The pattern hides in the subconscious, neither of us sees the pattern (its defense is the fear engendered by honest introspection) and therefore it continues in us and in its ability to propagate further. Sounds very karmic, and shifts self concept.
When it is about technology, you should check out French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who nailed the concept of allagmatics, that is, the science of operations. He came to that concept as a both his critique of hylemorphism and his critique of von Neumann’s cybernetics. The key idea at the core of the concept of Allagmatics is the relationship of convertibility between operations and structures. Such a relationship of convertibility between structures and operations can be circular or recursive.
people go for narrative structure as generational info transfer and that "meta"-thinking ,that info condensation thru layers to store memory and recalling/reconstructing memory "produces" symbolical thinking as they have huge bandwidth in interpretation of past data...consistency preferred ,somewhat risk averse....on some tail end podcast pops out and we are informed that butterflys are allready there but smaller .... ty all,good night and gl
Another practical example of the bowtie encoder decoder structure. Zip (encoder) large file into a much smaller file and unzip (decoder) to retrieve the original data back. So basically data compression and uncompression. The expectation is that the information transfer is 'loss-less', meaning no information gets lost during the compression.
things are clicking right now. ive previously defined life as a self regulating pattern in space that (momentarily) persists through time (even that feels like its leaving out a lot) and i defined any individual lifeform as being a collection of life with a unified goal of self persistence, but that brings up the obvious question presented at 7:00, but since humans and all identified life we know exist in a sort of 3.5 dimensional space (3 axis of spacial movement and a "constant" direction through time) its clear that we behave very differently in one of the 4 axis we exist on and therefore maybe a definition of life should include one rule for specification through space and another separate rule for specification through time. whether life can exist at all without movement through time is sort of a complicated question but maybe the word life here would better be swapped out with "intelligence" in some places but ill be doing some thinking on this for sure. so glad i discovered michael levins research last night and now my homepage is flooded with him lmao glad someones seeking the answers to so many of the questions ive been asking
rarely do i ask a question to which the answer is simply that i was wrong. this video has taught me that this question is all wrong and i will continue to do more thinking
It's so gratifying to see someone else talking about the fascinating fabrications that were constructed on the fly by patients in the split brain experiments. I feel like that's so telling in terms of how our conscious experience could just be a story we tell ourselves to make up for the - often imperfect - data set we're given. I feel like the link with LLMs is a bit more profound than you touched on. I see a lot of parallels between the confident fabrications of the split hemisphere patients and LLMs. I don't think it suggests a deficit of LLMs in principle as i think was suggested, but just a lack of live data set upon which they can update their assumptions. We're a collection of conscious agents fighting it out in a sack. I think it stands to reason that AI would be a similar collection of specialised agents working together to create a cohesive entity
@@treesareafewofmyfavoritethings awesome point! The instant justification, story creation is SO TELLING. We planned to chat about AI in our next conversation, so I held back a bit on LLMs. But I also came in mistaken about confabulation in AI.
Thank you @Michael Levin for your mentioning "Transpersonal Psychology" as brief as it was! I have been surprised and confused by how & why this branch of psychology seems to completely unknown/ignored, or even outright rejected, mocked or at least disregarded as being silly, invalid, complete pseudoscience, merely anecdotal, or just utterly "bananas"/absurd/preposterous...
Maybe the best word to describe the "personality" of sub-atomic particles would be schema. It applies in psychology as an algorithm for interpreting and responding to emotional information. Schema, sharing etymology with schematics, would be an apt means to assign an algorithmic environmental interaction pattern.
The nice thing about being a human, is you can use writing technique, to change your past, and live a better life. Writing helps link to the memories or information, that is bad, and so you can learn to forget/unlearn/unlink the poor activity.
Fascinating. Let's think further about Turing. What if the data controls the machine, not the other way around? It's time to put our understanding of computation to the test.
I love when you can look at things that seem simple in nature or fundamental and then start to question it. The transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly is one of the first things we learn in life, but that is actually crazy that is happens. @ separate lives lived in one entity. Is the caterpillar dead? The transition is so dramatic that the butterfly would remember it as a pasted life or dream. I stopped the video at 3:46, gonna dive back in!!!
It's interesting hearing concepts known for decades in memory studies being applied to biology. I just hesitate to agree to the concept of "genetic memory" because that opens the door to racializing certain behaviors...
Verry interesting video. Many thanks! @4:55. Michael refers to learned caterpillar traits being found also in the butterfly. Is he attributing this continuity to matter or something beyond matter? I hope it is the second option because the data shows that the first position is untenable due to the change of matter continusously occuring in the body of both the caterpillar and the butterfly.
Maybe someone should be investigating what the Qi Masters have said for eons: that that which we think of as 'information' is a component of what we have thought of as insubstantial 'Qi'. Qi comprises mass, information, and 'energy' and is the basic building block of everything in the manifest Universe. Consequently, the Qi of a caterpillar contains the taught/learned information, and although the Qi is then rearranged to appear as a butterfly (through activation of inherent, species defined information during metamorphosis), so too is the taught/learned information carried forward into the same unique individual, albeit a flying form... In other words, to only be thinking of 'substance' or material, at the level of what our senses or technology can observe/measure, is why your point can be made. Information continues/is constant at a much deeper level in all organisms, humans included - hence cancers returning years later after being 'cured'. The 'physical' issue was removed but the information based cause, persisted.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie. Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological. Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines. Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology. Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual. Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data. Information is dual. The past is dual to the future -- time duality. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic! Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
Memories only appear persistent because they are a consequence of entanglement, or the formation of knots in the field of experience. The field is coding for mind states of image, physiological states of emotion, and physical states of feeling. When these 3 sources of information are weighed highly by our perception all at once, they form a knot. A mind that is in a constant state of survival is constantly forming knots, hence is dense with memories, leading to a heightened state of inflammation in the brain (probably the cause of many brain degeneration disorders, mismanagement of cognitive faculties?). Memories are not agents. Memories are lingering disturbances in the field of perception. Only the field is persistent, and only the field is agential. The lingering patterns are a consequence of our inability to let go of the past and live in the moment. To mistake the patterns that emerge from disturbances on the surface of the medium for the medium itself is to ignore the existence of the medium. Our ignorance of this field, upon which memories ought to be mere ripples--but have rather become knots, is the reason we are so confused about our biology as a species to begin with. A mind that does not operate from memory is a mind that is clear, present, and accessible to awareness. To perceive the resonances as they are, as opposed to holding onto created constructs and frameworks, is the way to disentangle all image, symbol, thought, emotion, and feeling one believes oneself to have in relation to something other than oneself. We should be striving to look at our biology and computational pursuits from an expanded perspective that looks at the agency of awareness.
Really interesting perspective. What you write resonates with ideas that came to my mind very recently while writing my thesis. I'd love to deep dive into the underlying theories. Do you have some sources to share? At the same time, Levin's conclusion doesn't seem so far off from yours. After establishing that "Selves are simultaneously a construct in the mind of an observer(/observers), including itself, and real, causally important agents that live, suffer, die, strive, and matter." (p.14), he writes: "the lesson to take from this is to embrace the dizzying freedom of breaking away from the goals and structures handed down to us from our evolutionary and personal past, and take on the responsibility of writing our own, improved somatic and mental patterns and values for the future." (p.15) Perceiving "the resonances as they are" from "an expanded perspective that looks at the agency of awareness", as you say, requires exactly such an observer consciousness capable of improvisational malleability responsive to and in tune with the present.
@achrononalive Not academic sources, but if you are interested, I can recommend the Sri Vijnana Bhairava Tantra and most other published works of the Bihar Yoga School. It is honestly through Eastern philosophy that the mind has already been jailbroken and we need only read the texts to infer the genius of their insight as it corresponds to contemporary cognitive science. Responsiveness is key, and a mind operating from collected memories is incapable of responsiveness. The tradeoff is that a memory ridden mind is in a constant state of reactivity. A mind composed of an underlying structure of unconscious memory complexes is a mind that suffers endlessly. It is only a mind that can be held in such a state that it neither forms thoughts nor stores memories that it can operate totally responsively. This requires a sense of total disregard for safety, which is another tradeoff, and which is why as human beings, we are capable of such great heights and destruction at once. They come as a package. If we want to be completely honest about the mind, we must admit that all our planning and memorizing have been a waste of time, and instead, we should be focused on experiencing totally and truly. That is what leads to a healthy mind, one that has clarity and operates from wisdom rather than collected information.
@Marie-rd1sethat phrasing stood out to me as well. I think he might be referring to internal states of arousal resulting from emotional responses to our thoughts, versus physical sensations caused by external stimuli?
@Marie-rd1se I agree that we are missing a clear distinction between emotion and feeling and most other words in the English language for that matter, and I will try my best to clarify what I mean. Feeling is the response to the sense of touch, or physical stimuli, as in, it feels cold/smooth/sharp etc. Feelings are collected at the boundary of the agent, and they are image constructs whose geometries are exotic, hence our image-making faculties (thought) struggle to perceive these geometries in mental space. Instead, we unconsciously compress the geometries into strings of data, such as states of reaction to heat and cold. Emotion is the physiological synthesis of past physiological stimuli. Emotion covers a much wider gamut than feeling, though how sensitively one feels does determine the quality of an emotional state. Emotion is the unconscious synthesis of thought and feeling. I feel the mug is hot, I think the mug is hot, and I have a physiological response that reaffirms my feeling and thought, and that response is emotion in action. For many people, this synthesis is occurring outside the purview of their immediate experience. It is, in fact, possible to distinguish clearly between the feeling it is hot and thought it is hot. An emotional state that is the product of feeling or thought in isolation is an unstable emotional state, and this is what is ongoing in most peoples' experience. This is why they assume their emotion and feeling are indistinguishable. Because they have never experienced otherwise. Those thoughts and feelings are assigned (unconsciously) coefficients of influence on each other and on the mind as a whole, leading to individual interpretation. Every thought, feeling, and emotion is weighed as such. It is best to think of them as stars, planets, and moons captured in each other's orbits. Each body has its own mass, rotational velocity, tilt and wobble, etc. The stability of the system determines its longevity, hence its ability to synthesize new ideas and deeper emotional states. Thought is represented by the Sun and is associated with fire. Thought is the generation and discarding of ideas, just as the Sun generates and blasts off energy. Excessive thought leads to implosion or burnout, as immense energy is exhausted in the process. No thought leads to infinite density with minimum volume, or a black hole, which represents a transition point between two phases. Feeling is represented by the Moon and is associated with water. Feeling generates and discards boundaries in cycles of fullness and emptiness around the center of synthesis. Feeling is what gives you the sense that you have a body. Being out of sync with the natural cycles of gravitational and electromagnetic influences around us leads to lack of sensitivity. When sensitivity is low, feeling is dull, leading to negative emotional experience. Emotion is represented by the Earth and is associated with air. Emotion synthesizes ideas with feelings by indiscriminately dissolving boundaries. This removal of boundaries is what allows life to emerge and evolve with favorable conditions and to hibernate and involve when conditions are otherwise. Emotion is the basis of all unconscious evolution and involution. There is a fourth aspect, which is a synthesis of thought, feeling, and emotion, and which represents conscious evolution and involution. When emotional depth increases, it is then possible to discard all sensation of boundaries consciously. This is akin to removing all coefficients of influence at once. The Sun and Moon tug at the Earth, each exerting their influence over time. To decouple from the influence of one or the other and experience the effect of being outside of time is one way to access this fourth aspect experientially. The implication is such. One is capable of thinking of and feeling one's own emotional states directly. One is also capable of not thinking nor feeling consciously, thereby experiencing a total emotional state of void. One is also capable of increasing the depth of thought and feeling by exercising these faculties to their fullest, thereby leading to an experience of totality. These qualitatively different experiences constitute a fourth perspective, one where synthesis becomes a totally conscious process that can be exercised by one's own will.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie. Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological. Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines. Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology. Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual. Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data. Information is dual. The past is dual to the future -- time duality. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic! Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
50:00 I noticed some people in my life are able to laugh but can't tell a joke or funny story. So I asked why you laughed? The answer was because everyone else was, so it triggers a laugh. They never understood any joke.
Somewhere between engrams and re inflation and analog and creation 15:15 and Newt Kidney tubules- Im wondering if your work will inform work and creation of a bio active artificial kidney? Also you touched on Confabulation being a developmentally necessary feature across species- all very interesting.
59:00 Yeah. Feynman diagrams are basically little cartoons you can draw that, if you follow the rules, allows you to forgo solving a bunch of gnarly differential equations.
archetypes are so simple and interpret-able in so many ways that no specific story is more important than other as nr of possible scenarios is endless, it's coming close to jungian dreaming, where interpreter can come up with something credible or utter lunacy, that's a shaky ground where roving anything scientifically is impossible as there are no concrete, objective laws to obey but there are clear basic metapatterns as the hero journey as to not take any new action without resistance - it's risky in evolutionary context - saving energy and continuing known patterns first then if resistance is broken by strong enough reasoning, need, force to do it the way to change is accepted and system changes state and is getting ready to allocate resources then probably come things as: if stimuli is repeated enough times to create a lasting effect, when fatigue is too high to tolerate, assesing is the change was benefitting or traumatic enough to remember to not repeat it ever again, and how it fits in environment around, other specimen actions
Incredible conversation! When Michael started talking about the general pattern, that trys to adapt to the Environment and expand, it sounded a lot like the hypothesis from the selfish gene. It seems he uses this concept of a meme and connects it to memories and information in general. I wonder what he thinks the differences between his and Dawkins' model are.
I want to know if there is optimization in systems for the "narrowness" in the information bottleneck of the "bowtie" structures, and if that optimization is consistent across different scales and architectures. Also, I'm curious how it is effected by the relative "sizes" of the inflow and outflow processes.
Main take away: "We are not waiting to die, we are waiting to be born." How attached are you to the micro details? Wise people I know have learned not to be attached to outcomes (or specific "blame" memories). Our task is to seek and retain wisdom (or general memories/heuristics) which produce good outcomes. What remains of you (and me) after death will not be the same self (or species) we now know... think of the butterfly, for example. On the other side of the "bow-tie" (death) our general memory will persist, it can still be accessed and reinterpreted The code written by the body can we decoded even without the body -- perhaps by a new body. I always thought that when the body dies, the ego must die with it... after watching this I have to reconsider. Our views, desires, and fears (our ego constructions) may be retained in some form of 'general memory' we can interrogate in the next life as we do our sense-making. This general pattern (the ghost code) will be reinterpreted by the new self in novel ways. NOTE TO SELF: pay attention to what you pay attention too, and let go of blame and drop your ego attachment. "Train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he not deter from it." That wisdom, it seems, applies to how we prepare for our Afterlife. "The old you is not going to be here, but you can effect that ought come."
Being able to transfer memories without transferring the neurons means the actual information persists outside the neuron and the neuron is interpreting that externally stored information. A neuron is not equivalent to a information bit. It is equivalent to a analog proccesing sub core unit. I would love to know how the actual information is stored, retrieved and processed.
Is the "RNA" extract actually memory written digitaly by a neuron for later use? How many copies are made? and is the information truly destroyed then reencoaded when accessed? Do the same type of neurons encode RNA memory and decode RNA memories? And how is the RNA stored locally within a neuron or is it moving somewhere else?
I lived this a few years ago when I went full schizo, I don't know a if that counts as evidence, or if I'm glad there could be research supporting the experience
Hey guys, Karouli Shankar darbar has unlocked this memories dichotomy knowledge and is practicing the same from last two decade for human beings wellness.
I absolutely love Levin’s work and I think this is an amazing interview, but does anyone else notice that the audio has been mixed in a way that makes their voices sound too deep? It’s very distracting, I’m familiar with Mike’s voice from other podcasts…
As dumb as you'll think this sounds: PLEASE learn hypnosis and, specifically, talk to the Parts. This does 2 things: 1.) you'll see that you can go back in time and see surprising amounts of details (I've had a client read things on the blackboard in elementary school. That said: Is it actually real? Some details -- although not that one -- can be confirmed or denied by parents, etc. Regardless, is the EMOTION real -- a.k.a. the "distilled interpretation" that he spoke of around 8:00? YES. Emotions act as the switchboard and you then get routed to the Party Line of the same-feeling memories). 2.) Parts are like little humans with distinct jobs and personalities. They "come around" during one event and "start doing their job" at the next same-feeling event. There's more to it than that (like some will overcompensate for other things, some will silence others so they can't do their job, etc). Parts, it seems, are the self-improvising auto-encoders he speaks of ~7:00. But it'll help further this work with this whole memories and symbolism thing.
@25:00 "The point of all of that is to re-remember and to remind ourselves that we are actually also temporary patterns" - and then the lights dimmed for some strange reason? 🤯😂
As above, so below? Is agency all the way up - from the weather to the magnetosphere to the sun to the galaxy to the universe itself - and all the way down - to the organs, tissues, cells, organelles, molecules, atoms, parts of the atom, fields and forces?
I have always conceived of the structures of living creatures akin to biological circuits, with the electric signals(also read as spirit) expressing itself through the limits of the given circuit. Nikola Tesla is quoted as saying that somehow the way we interface with electricity is out of sync with nature. There must exist some quality to electricity that we have yet to assign a spectrum with reliable measurability. There must be some fundamental difference to the electric pulse beating my heart and cascading across neurons that make me, me, and not you, that is beyond the physical form it excites. The ability to discern this quality would be the basis for science of the spirit.
A cell is an aqueous chemical computer that constantly modifies its biomolecular hardware, as ordered by its bioelectrical software. The mainstream paradigm in biology is that the propagation of genetic information constitutes the primary objective of living systems, all other phenomena of life being tributary to that end. Genes are obviously vital to life as we know it, but my thoughts over the past couple of years have led me to consider that this mainstream paradigm might be a mirror image of what's really happening. Is the primary objective of life the propagation of genetic information or the propagation of bioelectric computation? Are genes conserved because they confer a survival advantage upon themselves, or because they confer a survival advantage upon the bioelectric programs that make use of their products? Genes come and go, but bioelectric programs remain. Just as two Turing-complete computers can have different architectures yet run the same program, organisms can have different genomes yet exhibit the same behavior. If two distantly related species inherited a behavior from their common ancestor, yet practically every gene has been altered since, then what was actually preserved? If a cell in a multicellular organism loses its connection to the bioelectric collective of its fellow clones and becomes cancerous -behaving as a unicellular parasite- then was it really the genome that defined the organism? Consider especially that cells from two distantly related species can be forced to bioelectrically associate, forming a chimeral organism, with each cell having one of two highly divergent genomes. Take away a cell's DNA, and it doesn't immediately die. Stop a cell's bioelectric activity, and it's immediately dead. Are genes the objective of life or merely at the core of its mechanisms?
@GIGADEV690 The integrated circuits we manufacture are very inadequate. We have certain types of software that can adapt to various problems on known hardware, but that hardware can't be commanded to rebuild itself in accordance with the needs of the software using it. I think what's really going on here is a misunderstanding of terminology. Computation is commonly used as a synonym for calculation, but I use computation in a much broader sense of processing information. Computation doesn't have to be discreet arithmetic carried out on transistors. We know that's not how biological systems work, but we still see information being processed by living things - constantly. Adaptation certainly requires very sophisticated systems of computation. Even the best general artificial intelligences don't yet perform well compared to practically any metazoan, but I'd suggest looking into neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, and other A.I. tools. You'd be surprised how many of them just copy what nature does.
This describes the relationship between the left and right hemisphere of the brain. The cns-rna-dna chain means memory is encoded in genes from lived experience.
Michael Levin, Thomas Seyfried, Dr Casey Means, and Dr Ken Berry should at least be offered senior ranking roles in the public health authority… hopefully RFK will get them in.
@@Jsior1 ahh. some memory is preserved or persists from cat. to .fly forms. so, this lead me to think the same might be true for us. information is not destroyed, if the generators that created us and the patterns are still there, and might persist in some form in the medium.
@@marcalimarianif Materialistic Neurologists do Not know the source of human Consciousness, then Materialism can Not definitely say with scientific certainty that there Is or Is Not an afterlife of consciousness.
@@steveflorida5849 true, its at least a bit of proof to me that we can imagine it at all. and usually, what we imagine, we build in some form or another.
The underlying pattern that appears the most clear to me is that the universe requires novelty at any cost. Perhaps that is the only way it can survive as a super organism.
@@Trapezoideris thanks for the love! I’ve recorded a few in 1080p using Riverside.fm, but most guests prefer Zoom and they cap the recording quality. I’ve updated some settings to try and get the next few looking better. Thanks for the feedback!
it cannot be absolutely true, because then nothing would ever be an error… just felt like that was a bit under communicated. It might be a good idea to highlight the part where «the meaning has to make sense» and therefore is bounded by the bigger system.
❶ Memories as Agents
0:00 Introduction
1:40 2024 Highlights from Levin Lab
3:20 Stress sharing paper summary
6:15 Paradox of change: Species persist don't evolve
7:20 Bow-tie architectures
10:00 🔥 Memories as messages from your past self
12:50 Polycomputing
16:45 Confabulation
17:55 What evidence supports the idea that memories are agential?
22:00 Thought experiment: Entities from earth's core
❷ Information Patterns
31:30 Memory is not a filing cabinet
32:30 Are information patterns agential?
35:00 🔥 Caterpillar/butterfly... sea slug memory transfer
37:40 Bow-tie architectures are EVERYWHERE
43:20 Bottlenecks "scary" for information
❸ Connections & Implications
45:30 🔥 Black holes/white holes as bow-ties (Lee Smolin)
47:20 What is confabulation? AI hallucinations
52:30 Gregg Henriques & self-justifying apes... all good agents storytellers
54:20 Information telling stories... Joseph Campbell's journey for a single cell
1:00:50 What comes next?
I really appreciate the extra detail of your two-level breakdown here 🙏
@ thank you!
Mr. Levin’s pure and continuous logic/language is much-much more than remarkable: true treasure and really worth to learn, share, spreads!!!👍👌✌️
INTJ
The temporary metabolic pattern that is Michael Levin! Time to pay attention. Thank you Carlos for bringing him on to talk through his memories paper and allowing special thoughts to think through him
This talk is going in path of Eastern ways in a very technical and detailed way
Isn't is fascinating, this is exactly what is happening, science is catching up in a way wich makes it possible to integrate ancient science into modern times.
Unreal conversation. I had the same reaction as Carlos at 54:57 -- What a fascinating thought. Levin's work seems to be the start of a revolution in the way we think about biology and the nature of the world.
As a kid in the 1970's, I read an article in Science yearbook about memory transfer using plasmids. Fish were trained to avoid the blue part of an aquarium, fed (injected?) to other fish, which in turn avoided that part of the aquarium. This was 50 years before Glanzman.
Uhm maybe it was David Glanzman?
I love Micheal Levin , his work is incredibly inspiring to more people than he could ever imagine. Great guest!
Mr. Levin continually puts my mind in a bowtie.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie.
Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological.
Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines.
Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology.
Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual.
Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data.
Information is dual.
The past is dual to the future -- time duality.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic!
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
@@hyperduality2838 Structured ambiguity to encode orders of magnitude greater than Shannon limits of information...
Bow ties are cool
He has reached the metaphysical/occult perspective it’s not matter doing the work but self serving vibrations
Awesome to see someone covering esoteric scientific topics like this in depth and nuance
Esoteric? Seems like you didnt understand
OMG we're just the recording medium. 😮 Every time this man speaks my reality shifts.
16:45 The Confabulation Levin refers to is what Baudrillard called Simulacra and what they discussed in the anime "Ghost in the Shell" as a "Stand alone complex." These was a work of fiction that directly inspired the movie "The Matrix" which originally proposed humans as units of a computational substrate, not batteries. (but they knew audiences wouldn't follow)
I wish I could get a hold of Levin because I can help identify relationships in physics that underpin the systems he's describing. I've long been chatting with Sungchul Ji at Rutgers who wrote "Cell Language Theory" which deals with intercellular communication, and I was personally cited in the paper "Binary oppositions, algebraic holography and stochastic rules in genetic informatics" for an article that explained holography in an intuitive manner.
I really think I could provide him some valuable resources for his continued work.
Email is best.
@@LilyGazou It didn't work. Seems like it never works anymore.
Start a TH-cam. Start talking mad shit and start a beef he can't ignore? Fitness influencers, fighters, rappers, and celebrities do it all the time. Worth a try?
Yes, it is possible you are Levin's agentic memory trace. It is time to emerge from your latency
I see Michael Levin, I watch it 🫡
Same friend, same. 🫡
Good call.
Ev
Ry
Time
Why?
His material view, the blasphemous dna or stamcell research
@@swerremdjee2769 learn to write in English first, so that others can understand you
Levin discovers the principles of life itself - freaking amazing
Where did he do that?
@swerremdjee2769 while hiking in the Himilayas with his spirit guide
@@ginogarcia8730 what spirit guide, he is the most materialist person Ive ever seen, atleast his work and the way he talks about is
@@swerremdjee2769 whoosh
This resonates deeply with certain esoteric teachings. Wich makes it very interesting and part of the movement of modern science to ancient knowledge, differences are only a matter of labeling.
the ancient knowledge was encoded in such a way that it could be unpacked appropriately in the present. (The Sufis describe it similarly).
The implications of this are overwhelming and wonderful! I can see a path to formerly impossible communication between majesteria. Brains talking to tissues talking to cells talking to compounds to atoms and beyond. Words are obeyable(executable?) commands, perhaps this is how once in a while, words of blessing can cause healing. Could one train their mind to translate physical sensations in the body into English and vice versa? What a beautiful time to be alive❤️
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie.
Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological.
Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines.
Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology.
Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual.
Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data.
Information is dual.
The past is dual to the future -- time duality.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic!
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
@@hyperduality2838great the biological effects, but where/what is the conscious source/cause?
@@steveflorida5849 In physics everything is made out of energy (information).
"Physics is what we know and metaphysics is what we do not know" -- Bertrand Russell.
Mind (syntropy, synergy) is dual to matter (entropy, energy) -- Descartes or Plato's divided line.
Action is dual to reaction -- Sir Isaac Newton or the duality of force.
Attraction (sympathy) is dual to repulsion (antipathy), stretch is dual squeeze, push is dual to pull - forces are dual.
If forces are dual then energy must be dual:-
Energy = force * distance -- simple physics.
Energy is duality, duality is energy.
If energy is being conserved then duality is being conserved -- Generalized Duality or the 5th law of thermodynamics!
Electro is dual to magnetic -- electro-magnetic energy is dual or photons are dual.
Synergy or syn-ergy is converging energy and en-ergy is diverging energy.
If your mind is made from synergy/energy then it is dual.
If knowledge is dual then information must be dual.
Cause is dual to effect -- causality.
Duality creates reality!
It's re-membering. Putting a memory back together, each time you recall it.
Whoa. 🤯
Fascinating. The idea of memory-as-meme should be considered. Meme in the Dawkinsian sense; strong memories will crowd out the weak ones; memories adapt and survive, those that don't adapt to new conditions fade away and die off.
That's a cool concept!
Thank you Carlos and Mike! Awesome discussion!
The one word I never heard was "metaphor". When our memories, or even the memories of an LLM go through a bottleneck, what passes through has been reduced down to a metaphor, which can be mapped on to help with new experiences.
Languages are dual.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie.
Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological.
Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines.
Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology.
Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual.
Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data.
Information is dual.
The past is dual to the future -- time duality.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic!
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
Why is it only people like us who seek knowledge to this level.
Bipartisanship right?
I love you all, anyone doing research seeking truth and knowledge to infinity and beyond human comfort.
New Thinking Allowed is my other go-to channel.
Rupert Sheldrake is engaging on this as well - good episode ; thank you
Mike is always on step from psychology and how we constitute ourselves every passing second and I’m here for all of it ❤
Bring him back for the other papers that were only mentioned !!! This is incredible stuff
41:13 I feel it is V=IR (Voltage = Current * Resistance), which is saying “[Your] Capacity is what [you] receive multiplied by [your] operations” which applies across all harmonic levels, from quantum to human to cosmos.
Operations and structures= Reuptaking.
God Bless.
Well that was pretty fascinating. Thank you.
J. Krishnamurti says the thinker and the thought arise together. There is no thinker without the thought. This was in the context of how there is no center or self in the brain-mind. When this is seen, there is no more conflict from this false duality. Then by observing thought without the self, there is no resistance, thus obsession and other downward spirals of thought don’t occur.
Just incredible
thank you so much Carlos for facilitating and asking such brilliant questions! 🙏🙏
Thank you for this discussion 😊 I am learning a lot. I think some of my thoughts are much smarter than me 😅
Great interview with many interesting cutting edge concepts on biology and intelligence.
I enjoyed this podcast, thanks :)
And I followed, because you seem really into it and interested in Michael's ideas.
Brilliant interview!
facinating , great epizode
Thanks for the great conversation! Your idea of a pattern of story reminds me of Brett Anderson's proposal about the process of complexification as the meta narrative (if I understand and recall correctly).
Yay! I've been considering butterflies for days and really needed this.
I’m with you. Maybe magic is just science we haven’t discovered yet.
Amazing insights throughout! thanks for the inspiration
Thanks 🙏👍 for valuable insights on circular agency of planar memory. 😊❤
As a musician the part where he says that meaning is not hard coded makes complete sense. Its very evident in music that notes and phrases have no intrinsic meaning, not even an agreed / defined one. Yet many would report having had deeply meaningful experiences listening to music.
I wish we had high bandwidth instantaneous information sharing mechanisms so we could tie into some sort of efficient collective intelligence. Brilliant, both of you. Thank you for sharing this.
we do
Thank you - i love these interviews
Remarkable discussion, in particular from here that of “memory as agential”. Pattern propagation using (for example) humans as a medium. Relates to exposure frequency and intensity of a particular pattern, ie. say my father expressed frequent disappointment, over a period of time that’s “internalized” and I become disappointed in myself. But a primary defense mechanism is projection and personal disappointment is therefore projected onto those around me in my own family. The pattern hides in the subconscious, neither of us sees the pattern (its defense is the fear engendered by honest introspection) and therefore it continues in us and in its ability to propagate further. Sounds very karmic, and shifts self concept.
Thanks, I agree! It's so easy to get caught in these cycles...
Wow here we go further in exclamation point mind-blowing
Always amazing.
I am 100% here for the hero’s journey of the cell / the hyperorganism of life on earth
But what is the source of Life?
@ open question
@@SB324 Abiogenesis is a magical fantasy and Not the source of Life.
Life is Not intrinsic in mechanistic pattern Atoms.
@@steveflorida5849 the One Consciousness that is the fabric of reality itself
The Levin legend
Such a privilege to be able to live here now!
When it is about technology, you should check out French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who nailed the concept of allagmatics, that is, the science of operations. He came to that concept as a both his critique of hylemorphism and his critique of von Neumann’s cybernetics. The key idea at the core of the concept of Allagmatics is the relationship of convertibility between operations and structures. Such a relationship of convertibility between structures and operations can be circular or recursive.
Convertibility= Reuptaking
God Bless.
10:58 damn that gives me goosebumps and almost like spiritual love and appreciation
0:08 Just awesome Levin and Carlos 😊😊😊,🙏🙏🙏
🪼🧬 🧠
Measured enough for a topic verging heavily on esoterics.
people go for narrative structure as generational info transfer and that "meta"-thinking ,that info condensation thru layers to store memory and recalling/reconstructing memory "produces" symbolical thinking as they have huge bandwidth in interpretation of past data...consistency preferred ,somewhat risk averse....on some tail end podcast pops out and we are informed that butterflys are allready there but smaller .... ty all,good night and gl
Another practical example of the bowtie encoder decoder structure. Zip (encoder) large file into a much smaller file and unzip (decoder) to retrieve the original data back. So basically data compression and uncompression. The expectation is that the information transfer is 'loss-less', meaning no information gets lost during the compression.
@@buzzbear absolutely!
Worth the listen. Thanks. ❤
All roads eventually lead Levin.
things are clicking right now. ive previously defined life as a self regulating pattern in space that (momentarily) persists through time (even that feels like its leaving out a lot) and i defined any individual lifeform as being a collection of life with a unified goal of self persistence, but that brings up the obvious question presented at 7:00, but since humans and all identified life we know exist in a sort of 3.5 dimensional space (3 axis of spacial movement and a "constant" direction through time) its clear that we behave very differently in one of the 4 axis we exist on and therefore maybe a definition of life should include one rule for specification through space and another separate rule for specification through time. whether life can exist at all without movement through time is sort of a complicated question but maybe the word life here would better be swapped out with "intelligence" in some places but ill be doing some thinking on this for sure. so glad i discovered michael levins research last night and now my homepage is flooded with him lmao glad someones seeking the answers to so many of the questions ive been asking
rarely do i ask a question to which the answer is simply that i was wrong. this video has taught me that this question is all wrong and i will continue to do more thinking
It's so gratifying to see someone else talking about the fascinating fabrications that were constructed on the fly by patients in the split brain experiments. I feel like that's so telling in terms of how our conscious experience could just be a story we tell ourselves to make up for the - often imperfect - data set we're given.
I feel like the link with LLMs is a bit more profound than you touched on. I see a lot of parallels between the confident fabrications of the split hemisphere patients and LLMs. I don't think it suggests a deficit of LLMs in principle as i think was suggested, but just a lack of live data set upon which they can update their assumptions.
We're a collection of conscious agents fighting it out in a sack. I think it stands to reason that AI would be a similar collection of specialised agents working together to create a cohesive entity
@@treesareafewofmyfavoritethings awesome point! The instant justification, story creation is SO TELLING.
We planned to chat about AI in our next conversation, so I held back a bit on LLMs. But I also came in mistaken about confabulation in AI.
Thank you @Michael Levin for your mentioning "Transpersonal Psychology" as brief as it was!
I have been surprised and confused by how & why this branch of psychology seems to completely unknown/ignored, or even outright rejected, mocked or at least disregarded as being silly, invalid, complete pseudoscience, merely anecdotal, or just utterly "bananas"/absurd/preposterous...
Maybe the best word to describe the "personality" of sub-atomic particles would be schema. It applies in psychology as an algorithm for interpreting and responding to emotional information. Schema, sharing etymology with schematics, would be an apt means to assign an algorithmic environmental interaction pattern.
Schema might be a Reuptaking.
God Bless.
The nice thing about being a human, is you can use writing technique, to change your past, and live a better life. Writing helps link to the memories or information, that is bad, and so you can learn to forget/unlearn/unlink the poor activity.
I’ve found that too - writing can be a potent tool for (un)linking the past from the present.
Fascinating. Let's think further about Turing. What if the data controls the machine, not the other way around? It's time to put our understanding of computation to the test.
I love when you can look at things that seem simple in nature or fundamental and then start to question it. The transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly is one of the first things we learn in life, but that is actually crazy that is happens. @ separate lives lived in one entity. Is the caterpillar dead? The transition is so dramatic that the butterfly would remember it as a pasted life or dream. I stopped the video at 3:46, gonna dive back in!!!
It's interesting hearing concepts known for decades in memory studies being applied to biology. I just hesitate to agree to the concept of "genetic memory" because that opens the door to racializing certain behaviors...
Verry interesting video. Many thanks! @4:55. Michael refers to learned caterpillar traits being found also in the butterfly. Is he attributing this continuity to matter or something beyond matter? I hope it is the second option because the data shows that the first position is untenable due to the change of matter continusously occuring in the body of both the caterpillar and the butterfly.
Maybe someone should be investigating what the Qi Masters have said for eons: that that which we think of as 'information' is a component of what we have thought of as insubstantial 'Qi'.
Qi comprises mass, information, and 'energy' and is the basic building block of everything in the manifest Universe. Consequently, the Qi of a caterpillar contains the taught/learned information, and although the Qi is then rearranged to appear as a butterfly (through activation of inherent, species defined information during metamorphosis), so too is the taught/learned information carried forward into the same unique individual, albeit a flying form...
In other words, to only be thinking of 'substance' or material, at the level of what our senses or technology can observe/measure, is why your point can be made. Information continues/is constant at a much deeper level in all organisms, humans included - hence cancers returning years later after being 'cured'. The 'physical' issue was removed but the information based cause, persisted.
Indeed. Here we see the essential choice we have to make, namely remain a material monist or move beyond to a higher monism.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie.
Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological.
Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines.
Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology.
Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual.
Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data.
Information is dual.
The past is dual to the future -- time duality.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic!
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
This seems so applicable to case law; i.e., interpreting cases from hundreds of years ago.
Memories only appear persistent because they are a consequence of entanglement, or the formation of knots in the field of experience. The field is coding for mind states of image, physiological states of emotion, and physical states of feeling. When these 3 sources of information are weighed highly by our perception all at once, they form a knot. A mind that is in a constant state of survival is constantly forming knots, hence is dense with memories, leading to a heightened state of inflammation in the brain (probably the cause of many brain degeneration disorders, mismanagement of cognitive faculties?).
Memories are not agents. Memories are lingering disturbances in the field of perception. Only the field is persistent, and only the field is agential. The lingering patterns are a consequence of our inability to let go of the past and live in the moment. To mistake the patterns that emerge from disturbances on the surface of the medium for the medium itself is to ignore the existence of the medium. Our ignorance of this field, upon which memories ought to be mere ripples--but have rather become knots, is the reason we are so confused about our biology as a species to begin with.
A mind that does not operate from memory is a mind that is clear, present, and accessible to awareness. To perceive the resonances as they are, as opposed to holding onto created constructs and frameworks, is the way to disentangle all image, symbol, thought, emotion, and feeling one believes oneself to have in relation to something other than oneself. We should be striving to look at our biology and computational pursuits from an expanded perspective that looks at the agency of awareness.
Really interesting perspective. What you write resonates with ideas that came to my mind very recently while writing my thesis. I'd love to deep dive into the underlying theories. Do you have some sources to share?
At the same time, Levin's conclusion doesn't seem so far off from yours. After establishing that "Selves are simultaneously a construct in the mind of an observer(/observers), including itself, and real, causally important agents that live, suffer, die, strive, and matter." (p.14), he writes: "the lesson to take from this is to embrace the dizzying freedom of breaking away from the goals and structures handed down to us from our evolutionary and personal past, and take on the responsibility of writing our own, improved somatic and mental patterns and values for the future." (p.15)
Perceiving "the resonances as they are" from "an expanded perspective that looks at the agency of awareness", as you say, requires exactly such an observer consciousness capable of improvisational malleability responsive to and in tune with the present.
@achrononalive Not academic sources, but if you are interested, I can recommend the Sri Vijnana Bhairava Tantra and most other published works of the Bihar Yoga School. It is honestly through Eastern philosophy that the mind has already been jailbroken and we need only read the texts to infer the genius of their insight as it corresponds to contemporary cognitive science.
Responsiveness is key, and a mind operating from collected memories is incapable of responsiveness. The tradeoff is that a memory ridden mind is in a constant state of reactivity. A mind composed of an underlying structure of unconscious memory complexes is a mind that suffers endlessly. It is only a mind that can be held in such a state that it neither forms thoughts nor stores memories that it can operate totally responsively. This requires a sense of total disregard for safety, which is another tradeoff, and which is why as human beings, we are capable of such great heights and destruction at once. They come as a package. If we want to be completely honest about the mind, we must admit that all our planning and memorizing have been a waste of time, and instead, we should be focused on experiencing totally and truly. That is what leads to a healthy mind, one that has clarity and operates from wisdom rather than collected information.
@Marie-rd1sethat phrasing stood out to me as well. I think he might be referring to internal states of arousal resulting from emotional responses to our thoughts, versus physical sensations caused by external stimuli?
@Marie-rd1se I agree that we are missing a clear distinction between emotion and feeling and most other words in the English language for that matter, and I will try my best to clarify what I mean.
Feeling is the response to the sense of touch, or physical stimuli, as in, it feels cold/smooth/sharp etc. Feelings are collected at the boundary of the agent, and they are image constructs whose geometries are exotic, hence our image-making faculties (thought) struggle to perceive these geometries in mental space. Instead, we unconsciously compress the geometries into strings of data, such as states of reaction to heat and cold.
Emotion is the physiological synthesis of past physiological stimuli. Emotion covers a much wider gamut than feeling, though how sensitively one feels does determine the quality of an emotional state. Emotion is the unconscious synthesis of thought and feeling. I feel the mug is hot, I think the mug is hot, and I have a physiological response that reaffirms my feeling and thought, and that response is emotion in action. For many people, this synthesis is occurring outside the purview of their immediate experience. It is, in fact, possible to distinguish clearly between the feeling it is hot and thought it is hot. An emotional state that is the product of feeling or thought in isolation is an unstable emotional state, and this is what is ongoing in most peoples' experience. This is why they assume their emotion and feeling are indistinguishable. Because they have never experienced otherwise.
Those thoughts and feelings are assigned (unconsciously) coefficients of influence on each other and on the mind as a whole, leading to individual interpretation. Every thought, feeling, and emotion is weighed as such. It is best to think of them as stars, planets, and moons captured in each other's orbits. Each body has its own mass, rotational velocity, tilt and wobble, etc. The stability of the system determines its longevity, hence its ability to synthesize new ideas and deeper emotional states.
Thought is represented by the Sun and is associated with fire. Thought is the generation and discarding of ideas, just as the Sun generates and blasts off energy. Excessive thought leads to implosion or burnout, as immense energy is exhausted in the process. No thought leads to infinite density with minimum volume, or a black hole, which represents a transition point between two phases.
Feeling is represented by the Moon and is associated with water. Feeling generates and discards boundaries in cycles of fullness and emptiness around the center of synthesis. Feeling is what gives you the sense that you have a body. Being out of sync with the natural cycles of gravitational and electromagnetic influences around us leads to lack of sensitivity. When sensitivity is low, feeling is dull, leading to negative emotional experience.
Emotion is represented by the Earth and is associated with air. Emotion synthesizes ideas with feelings by indiscriminately dissolving boundaries. This removal of boundaries is what allows life to emerge and evolve with favorable conditions and to hibernate and involve when conditions are otherwise. Emotion is the basis of all unconscious evolution and involution.
There is a fourth aspect, which is a synthesis of thought, feeling, and emotion, and which represents conscious evolution and involution. When emotional depth increases, it is then possible to discard all sensation of boundaries consciously. This is akin to removing all coefficients of influence at once. The Sun and Moon tug at the Earth, each exerting their influence over time. To decouple from the influence of one or the other and experience the effect of being outside of time is one way to access this fourth aspect experientially.
The implication is such. One is capable of thinking of and feeling one's own emotional states directly. One is also capable of not thinking nor feeling consciously, thereby experiencing a total emotional state of void. One is also capable of increasing the depth of thought and feeling by exercising these faculties to their fullest, thereby leading to an experience of totality. These qualitatively different experiences constitute a fourth perspective, one where synthesis becomes a totally conscious process that can be exercised by one's own will.
Convergence (syntropy, encoder) is dual to divergence (entropy, decoder) -- Bowtie.
Making models or predictions is a syntropic process -- teleological.
Synchronic points/lines are dual to enchronic points/lines.
Structure (syntax) is dual to function (semantics) -- protein folding in biology.
Protein shape or structure determines function -- protein folding is dual.
Syntax is dual to semantics -- languages, communication, information or data.
Information is dual.
The past is dual to the future -- time duality.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Bowties are dual -- synchronic is dual to enchronic!
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
That first image saved me several minutes. Thank you /moving on. LLMS =/= not how memories work.
50:00 I noticed some people in my life are able to laugh but can't tell a joke or funny story. So I asked why you laughed? The answer was because everyone else was, so it triggers a laugh. They never understood any joke.
@@mavrosyvannah laughter is a funny thing.
Somewhere between engrams and re inflation and analog and creation 15:15 and Newt Kidney tubules- Im wondering if your work will inform work and creation of a bio active artificial kidney?
Also you touched on Confabulation being a developmentally necessary feature across species- all very interesting.
59:00 Yeah. Feynman diagrams are basically little cartoons you can draw that, if you follow the rules, allows you to forgo solving a bunch of gnarly differential equations.
archetypes are so simple and interpret-able in so many ways that no specific story is more important than other as nr of possible scenarios is endless,
it's coming close to jungian dreaming, where interpreter can come up with something credible or utter lunacy,
that's a shaky ground where roving anything scientifically is impossible as there are no concrete, objective laws to obey
but there are clear basic metapatterns as the hero journey
as to not take any new action without resistance - it's risky in evolutionary context - saving energy and continuing known patterns first
then if resistance is broken by strong enough reasoning, need, force to do it the way to change is accepted and system changes state and is getting ready to allocate resources
then probably come things as: if stimuli is repeated enough times to create a lasting effect, when fatigue is too high to tolerate, assesing is the change was benefitting or traumatic enough to remember to not repeat it ever again, and how it fits in environment around, other specimen actions
Incredible conversation! When Michael started talking about the general pattern, that trys to adapt to the Environment and expand, it sounded a lot like the hypothesis from the selfish gene. It seems he uses this concept of a meme and connects it to memories and information in general. I wonder what he thinks the differences between his and Dawkins' model are.
How does skill gain effect agential perception of self in memory?
'If you change enough you are no longer what you used to be' ( 37:14) seems to connect with some fundamental dichotomy between Vedanta and Buddhism.
Daddy Levin Goated 🙏🏾
I want to know if there is optimization in systems for the "narrowness" in the information bottleneck of the "bowtie" structures, and if that optimization is consistent across different scales and architectures. Also, I'm curious how it is effected by the relative "sizes" of the inflow and outflow processes.
Чертовски интересно. Спасибо!
Convertibility= Reuptaking
God Bless.
Main take away: "We are not waiting to die, we are waiting to be born."
How attached are you to the micro details? Wise people I know have learned not to be attached to outcomes (or specific "blame" memories). Our task is to seek and retain wisdom (or general memories/heuristics) which produce good outcomes. What remains of you (and me) after death will not be the same self (or species) we now know... think of the butterfly, for example.
On the other side of the "bow-tie" (death) our general memory will persist, it can still be accessed and reinterpreted The code written by the body can we decoded even without the body -- perhaps by a new body. I always thought that when the body dies, the ego must die with it... after watching this I have to reconsider.
Our views, desires, and fears (our ego constructions) may be retained in some form of 'general memory' we can interrogate in the next life as we do our sense-making. This general pattern (the ghost code) will be reinterpreted by the new self in novel ways. NOTE TO SELF: pay attention to what you pay attention too, and let go of blame and drop your ego attachment. "Train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he not deter from it." That wisdom, it seems, applies to how we prepare for our Afterlife.
"The old you is not going to be here, but you can effect that ought come."
I say it on every video, Levin is scary smart
Being able to transfer memories without transferring the neurons means the actual information persists outside the neuron and the neuron is interpreting that externally stored information.
A neuron is not equivalent to a information bit. It is equivalent to a analog proccesing sub core unit.
I would love to know how the actual information is stored, retrieved and processed.
Is the "RNA" extract actually memory written digitaly by a neuron for later use? How many copies are made? and is the information truly destroyed then reencoaded when accessed?
Do the same type of neurons encode RNA memory and decode RNA memories? And how is the RNA stored locally within a neuron or is it moving somewhere else?
Thank you 🦋
I lived this a few years ago when I went full schizo, I don't know a if that counts as evidence, or if I'm glad there could be research supporting the experience
Hey guys, Karouli Shankar darbar has unlocked this memories dichotomy knowledge and is practicing the same from last two decade for human beings wellness.
Is it true that RNA memories move between host animals via virus exchange through the digestive system via the vagus nerve rout?
crazy to see this, henri bergson had this idea like 100 years ago
I absolutely love Levin’s work and I think this is an amazing interview, but does anyone else notice that the audio has been mixed in a way that makes their voices sound too deep? It’s very distracting, I’m familiar with Mike’s voice from other podcasts…
Is this slowed or pitched down? Levin's voice is deeper than usual here.
As dumb as you'll think this sounds: PLEASE learn hypnosis and, specifically, talk to the Parts. This does 2 things: 1.) you'll see that you can go back in time and see surprising amounts of details (I've had a client read things on the blackboard in elementary school. That said: Is it actually real? Some details -- although not that one -- can be confirmed or denied by parents, etc. Regardless, is the EMOTION real -- a.k.a. the "distilled interpretation" that he spoke of around 8:00? YES. Emotions act as the switchboard and you then get routed to the Party Line of the same-feeling memories).
2.) Parts are like little humans with distinct jobs and personalities. They "come around" during one event and "start doing their job" at the next same-feeling event. There's more to it than that (like some will overcompensate for other things, some will silence others so they can't do their job, etc). Parts, it seems, are the self-improvising auto-encoders he speaks of ~7:00.
But it'll help further this work with this whole memories and symbolism thing.
Do molecules have agency and individual identity across chemically 'identical' species?
Hola Carlos; parto por asumir que hablas español. Te felicito por el contenido de tu canal. Me gustaría saber que formación académica tienes.
@25:00 "The point of all of that is to re-remember and to remind ourselves that we are actually also temporary patterns" - and then the lights dimmed for some strange reason? 🤯😂
As above, so below? Is agency all the way up - from the weather to the magnetosphere to the sun to the galaxy to the universe itself - and all the way down - to the organs, tissues, cells, organelles, molecules, atoms, parts of the atom, fields and forces?
I have always conceived of the structures of living creatures akin to biological circuits, with the electric signals(also read as spirit) expressing itself through the limits of the given circuit. Nikola Tesla is quoted as saying that somehow the way we interface with electricity is out of sync with nature. There must exist some quality to electricity that we have yet to assign a spectrum with reliable measurability. There must be some fundamental difference to the electric pulse beating my heart and cascading across neurons that make me, me, and not you, that is beyond the physical form it excites. The ability to discern this quality would be the basis for science of the spirit.
Fascinating, the ability to understand the "spirit" as distinct from the physical, but with its own measurable qualities...
A cell is an aqueous chemical computer that constantly modifies its biomolecular hardware, as ordered by its bioelectrical software.
The mainstream paradigm in biology is that the propagation of genetic information constitutes the primary objective of living systems, all other phenomena of life being tributary to that end.
Genes are obviously vital to life as we know it, but my thoughts over the past couple of years have led me to consider that this mainstream paradigm might be a mirror image of what's really happening.
Is the primary objective of life the propagation of genetic information or the propagation of bioelectric computation? Are genes conserved because they confer a survival advantage upon themselves, or because they confer a survival advantage upon the bioelectric programs that make use of their products?
Genes come and go, but bioelectric programs remain. Just as two Turing-complete computers can have different architectures yet run the same program, organisms can have different genomes yet exhibit the same behavior.
If two distantly related species inherited a behavior from their common ancestor, yet practically every gene has been altered since, then what was actually preserved?
If a cell in a multicellular organism loses its connection to the bioelectric collective of its fellow clones and becomes cancerous -behaving as a unicellular parasite- then was it really the genome that defined the organism?
Consider especially that cells from two distantly related species can be forced to bioelectrically associate, forming a chimeral organism, with each cell having one of two highly divergent genomes.
Take away a cell's DNA, and it doesn't immediately die. Stop a cell's bioelectric activity, and it's immediately dead. Are genes the objective of life or merely at the core of its mechanisms?
Everything isn't a computer computer's don't adapt.
@GIGADEV690 The integrated circuits we manufacture are very inadequate. We have certain types of software that can adapt to various problems on known hardware, but that hardware can't be commanded to rebuild itself in accordance with the needs of the software using it.
I think what's really going on here is a misunderstanding of terminology. Computation is commonly used as a synonym for calculation, but I use computation in a much broader sense of processing information.
Computation doesn't have to be discreet arithmetic carried out on transistors. We know that's not how biological systems work, but we still see information being processed by living things - constantly.
Adaptation certainly requires very sophisticated systems of computation. Even the best general artificial intelligences don't yet perform well compared to practically any metazoan, but I'd suggest looking into neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning, and other A.I. tools. You'd be surprised how many of them just copy what nature does.
This is fantastic - I've never thought of it this way before!
This describes the relationship between the left and right hemisphere of the brain. The cns-rna-dna chain means memory is encoded in genes from lived experience.
Michael Levin, Thomas Seyfried, Dr Casey Means, and Dr Ken Berry should at least be offered senior ranking roles in the public health authority… hopefully RFK will get them in.
This suggested to me some potentially huge implications for the death and afterlife mystery.
How so?
@@Jsior1 ahh. some memory is preserved or persists from cat. to .fly forms. so, this lead me to think the same might be true for us. information is not destroyed, if the generators that created us and the patterns are still there, and might persist in some form in the medium.
@@marcalimarianif Materialistic Neurologists do Not know the source of human Consciousness, then Materialism can Not definitely say with scientific certainty that there Is or Is Not an afterlife of consciousness.
@@steveflorida5849 true, its at least a bit of proof to me that we can imagine it at all. and usually, what we imagine, we build in some form or another.
@ interesting. I this theory of yours, would a body incinerated after death destroy it completely?
The underlying pattern that appears the most clear to me is that the universe requires novelty at any cost. Perhaps that is the only way it can survive as a super organism.
@@thezzach check out Terrence McKenna’s Novelty theory. 😀
Well good chance you’re already familiar!
Its imposdible to follow ehat he's saying!
Brother, its 2024. Please record in 1080p. Love the pod but its insane you dont have this in 1080p lol
@@Trapezoideris thanks for the love! I’ve recorded a few in 1080p using Riverside.fm, but most guests prefer Zoom and they cap the recording quality.
I’ve updated some settings to try and get the next few looking better. Thanks for the feedback!
it cannot be absolutely true, because then nothing would ever be an error… just felt like that was a bit under communicated. It might be a good idea to highlight the part where «the meaning has to make sense» and therefore is bounded by the bigger system.