As Matt was describing the continuum of agency, the relevance of Whiteheads theories in biology, my mind was taken back to that wonderful last paragraph of the amazing book, 'the rainbow and the worm'... "Reality is thus a shimmering presence of infinite planes, a luminous labyrinth of the active now connecting 'past' and 'future', 'real' with 'ideal', where potential unfolds into actual and actual enfolds to further potential through the free action and intention of the organism. It is a sea awash with significations, dreams and desires. This reality we carry with us, an ever-present straining towards the future. The act is the cause; it is none other than the creation of meaning, the realization of the ideal and the consummation of desire." Makes me tear up every time I read it. Excellent discussion.
@@canis_lupus_canus most people who do circuits repeat the same lectures nearly verbatim. I've watched almost all of his published TH-cam videos, he uses parts but always brings new ideas and sway to every interview. He's truly remarkable as a communicator
The mass exodus of which he is only 1 hasn't really got a choice? Surely the establishment is running a post truth era hidden university programme & just wants to close most physical universities so these people are being starved out the system & YT is the new Lab.
Thank you Karen, starting it now. Wonderful and Rich conversation, the group of three always seems to bring more out of each of the participants and increasing the depth of the conversation. Thank you all very much, Matthew, Michael and Karen. Peace P.S. Please remember to like video, the content found here we could have only dreamed about 20 years ago.
The pressure of constraint that was discussed I found to be a really powerful idea that was new to me. An animal for example can't spend huge amounts of resources keeping track of all the micro states on the level of behavior. So there is a tremendous evolutionary push towards developing abstraction hierarchies.
Good point, and can also see the parallels between that limited range of evolutionary 'possibilities' at the cellular level, and the 'conceptual' ones at the human cognitive level... regardless whatever forces helped 'shape' them. BTW, the idea of using non-human AI to help 'broaden' that conceptual field of possibilities is also a very provocative one... and 'yuge' kudos to Karen and her guests for such a stimulating exploration!
29:00 I agree with Michael that “the environment” is always radically underdetermined at least when we’re talking about the immediate environment (pond or Petri dish, etc.). But the broader environmental layers of social order (in Whitehead’s sense of “society”) including the stubborn habits of chemistry and physics and the background rhythms of tides and seasons, etc., all that constitutes a sort of cosmic memory informing every organism including xenobots.
That sounds a bit like Sheldrake’s Morphic resonance. I see you used the words habit and memory. I’ve been thinking lately about the confluence of habit, pattern and memory.
@@TheMeaningCode yes my understanding having spoken to Rupert about this is that his use of habit and memory stems from his reading of Bergson and Whitehead.
19:55 I should clarify that Plato’s universe included the life and motion of the world-soul and Aristotle’s dynamic sense of organic ontogeny, though essentialist, was hardly static. Indeed, contemporary biology desperately needs to recuperate some of his sense of the role of potentia in developmental processes.
I've been thinking about life and evolution as this entropy ratchet. Life creates this mechanism that orders the universe for brief periods of time while an organism is alive, and eventually succumbs to entropy in death. But life ultimately counteracts entropy through the preservation of information, primarily with genes, and later, evolutionarily, with language and symbolic representation. Ultimately life serves as this entropy ratchet that functions to preserve information between cycles of life & death to create negative entropy, or negentropy. People constantly ask why, I think the why is rather simple, we are the universe itself becoming self aware, a mirror with which the universe looks at itself. I really don't think it has to be more complicated than that, we are simply a product of the universe's attempt to witness itself. I think our sense of beauty and the ultimate joy that comes from recognizing beauty is an indication of this. The most joyful thing I personally have ever experienced is a sense of beauty, when the mirror reflects some truth about the immaculate complexity surrounding us we experience this feedback loop of joy, because in that state, we ARE the embodiment of the universe seeing itself. That's just my take.
Negentropy is syntropy! "Entropy is a measure of randomness" -- Roger Penrose. Syntropy is a measure of order. Making predictions to track targets, goals & objectives is a syntropy process -- teleological. Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics! Teleological physics (syntropy) is dual to non-teleological (entropy). Entropy is dual to evolution (syntropy) -- Janna Levin, astrophysicist. "Always two there are" -- Yoda.
If you are suggesting that syntropy is synonymous with evolution, and that that is a prediction process, that implies a need for a prior information, for any prediction requires a basis from which to predict. Or as Jordan Peterson would say, meaning precedes matter.
@@TheMeaningCode I don't personally believe that there has to be a predictive element to it, I believe it's emergent. Though it brings up a legitimate question, why don't we see more evidence of life in the universe? That would be the strongest argument against my theory.
@@TheMeaningCode If evolution has a purpose, meaning, goal or target then it is teleological or syntropic! Immanuel Kant talks about teleology in "The Critique of Judgement". Randomness (entropy) is dual to order (syntropy). Certainty (predictability, syntropy) is dual to uncertainty, entropy) -- the Heisenberg certainty/uncertainty principle. Integration (summation, syntropy) is dual to differentiation (differences, entropy) -- abstract algebra. Deductive inference (mathematics, rational) is dual to inductive inference (physics, empirical) -- Immanuel Kant. Inference or making predictions is dual according to Immanuel Kant.
Bergson proposed an inverse teleology: not finalistic, so not due to a pre-existing plan or project, already given (finalism is just an inversion of determinism, as in both cases everything is "already given", whether because it can be predicted, in theory, as per La Place's thought experiment, or because it's "written in the plan"). Bergson's alternative, which he expressed through the metaphor of the élan vital (mistaken for vitalism, which is not) is that there is an initial impetus behind life which triggers evolution, but evolution unfolds unpredictably because the future is open, undetermined. Matter offers the resistance, the constraint, against which the sprouting of life runs against, but it's also what allows life to concretise itself in specific individualities. At the core, this is a view of reality as a creative process of unfolding of novelty (lots of affinities with Whitehead). But Bergson also notes that this current sustained by the élan vital and running through matter is "psychical" in nature, it's consciousness ("for lack of a better word" he says), although not individual consciousness. And consciousness is freedom and creativity. The awakening of consciousness in a living organism is proportional to its possibility for choice and action. So living organisms range from near automatism in the most simple (those "closer to matter" so to speak), in which consciousness is essentially or nearly dorment, to capacity for invention and free agency in those where intelligence is most prevalent over instinct and consciousness is more "awake".
Matt 21:00 tipping plato on its side. love this analogy but maybe here is where Michael key to triangle, we have the two sides now dialectically building back up Plato forms
No conflict here. Rather, an openness to better understanding. Always fascinating to hear from Michael on his ground breaking work. Great JBP MOM interjections by you Karen. If only more people would read that incredible book. Strange how ‘TLC’ forgets so readily the sole reason for its’ existence. Interesting and thoughtful dialogue, with germane gems from Karen. Thank you.
I think it was probably appropriate that we approached these subjects the way we did historically. There was low hanging fruit to be plucked with the reductionist philosophy, and we plucked it very very well. Even in the early parts of the 20th century, we weren't really ready technologically to get into the kind of work Dr. Levin is doing, so... we did what we could, and we continued to learn. It now may be time to take a step back and reconsider.
51:50 While Newton’s God didn’t reach into nature to change the laws of physics, Newton admitted he had no other explanation for what allows gravitational action at a distance than God giving planets a push. Descartes was the more consistent mechanist (ie, space is not empty but a plenum of vortexes, allowing gravity to propagate in a medium).
Newton had to find a word for gravity from the existing language that had no word for his new finding, so he chose a word that has the meaning of hearth, which is the center of the home, much as it was said at the time that things fell because they were seeking the center of the earth. (added) I was at a conference this weekend with people of many different belief traditions where we were discussing the quest for a spiritual home. John Vervaeke posited that there is both a home range and a home base. The home range could be likened to the areas within your world where you feel "at home", a kind of revolving home dependent upon relationship, where home base is the home/hearth and that kind of home depends upon the center, the location. That caused me to think perhaps that is the relationship between Newton's gravity and Einstein's gravity. Newton's gravity, the classical picture, is all about being drawn to the center, the home/hearth, from which he took his new use of the word "gravity". In that picture of home, time and space are separate. Einstein's gravity, on the other hand, is based on a spacetime continuum, relational units revolving around one another and being affected by each other and by the weight of the greatest center of gravity in the area, moving through time and space in relationship. This is just a rough draft. I have to go back through my notes to clean up John's definitions of home range and home base, so my analogy might not be all that it could be right now. Just thinking.
michael was talking about latent spaces and the kind of out of the blue surprizes that can come from those possible spaces. the concept of the "adjacent possible" covers what might be less surprizing in new forms, but the concepts of entanglement and synchronicity provide explanations for how "distant possibles" may play a role in how genetic and molecular networks operate in multi-dimensional spaces, generating forms that are unpredictable and even unthinkable from previous forms. the structural-dynamic for this process by which the distant possible can come into play to create surprizes (at the physical, biological, neuronal, and even societal levels) is described in the essay "the quantum-semiotic kosmos", and "bohmian quantum mechanics and transdarwinian evolution" by joe corbett.
Robert Rosen in his book Life Itself uses Category Theory to model a living entity. In that work, he found that he needed to invoke Final Cause. He broke Final Cause into independent factors--Telos and Function. He asserted that he could do without Telos and use Function as the needed Final Cause.
Maybe the notion of representation and symbolic form are a significant part of the defining elements of form. Consciousness and perception are fundamental requirements of experience and understanding and in-form-ation is a hermenutic tool of representation and pattern establishment. Maybe consciousness itself provides the bedrock of form.
I believe that the interaction between organic biochemistry with the different waves that make up the sensory spectrum (audible, visible) of the physical world, generates a biological process of adaptation, giving rise to an organic structure capable of interpreting these physical waves, and understand it as the exterior world,
Was just curious about the statement about sky hooks as retro-causality. My very basic understanding of attractor states is that they seem to exert causal influence onto the past such that the attractor state comes into being.
The presumption of a chemical starting point and the presupposition that chemism and physics are necessary explanatory postulates of origin is baseless from an epistemological point of view. What is before this moment and what is the agency as organizing principle?
Yup. That’s the question. I didn’t want to get into that with them because of the time constraints, but I have six episodes on this issue in the category of the physics of life. I was joined by a mathematician/physicist/computer scientist to look at what would be required. You might find it interesting. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the mysteries of entropy.
From Deleuze, "Bergsonism": "When certain biologists invoke a notion of organic virtuality or potentiality and nonetheless maintain that this potentiality is actualized by simple limitation of its global capacity, they clearly fall into a confusion of the virtual and the possible. For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in the process of actualization - the difference between the virtual from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and also the difference between the complementary lines according to which actualization takes place."
Using Michael’s factual statements that he can see the system that’s creating the structure and that can be hacked. I would hypothesize that mental anguish in humans is the difference between the vision of ourselves, and what we’re seeing in our thermostats, checking a comparison against. It could be problems in our human systems in many areas, in terms of the expectations of ourselves, and the thermostat (perspective ) and what we are assessing. The awakening would be through this perspective of our own systems. Use the present moment to be the qualities that we want to be and then all potential expression of our form can occur through that being. Exciting times.
Also I think that Platos sense and importance of the aesthetic, adding richness and quality to form is important to understanding the science. I think that the emphasis by Aristotle on the purely material nature of form, misses the point. Maybe a case of the pupil not fully understanding the master.
About agency, I think it is better not to focus on the individual but where thoughts (information) comes from. For humans if it is the general body or the nervous system (mind) that provide the thoughts (information). The body makes hormones producing thoughts and the nervous system makes and controls thoughts (information). There is a most likely future and the concentration (quality and quantity) of thoughts gives a small capability of free will.
Could we think of Living systems as having a sense of "smell" of the density of possible future states? The greater the density of possibilities the greater the attraction for the systems to tend toward those states. This is similar to an Attractor.
I think that Latent space is an infinitely space, as I’ve been in the space where any possible form can be created, and it all seems like infinities. Imagination space Anything possible exists.
I really think following along the lines of Charles Hartshorne that this concept of the "feeler" is critical here and its relation to the nonhuman. Stopping shy maybe of full blown panpsychism the issue to my mind is the concept of "aesthetic growth" a la both Hartshorne and Whitehead. On the grounds that novel expression does exist among nonhuman entities and persons. I suspect, then, that Whitehead's contribution here in any kind of scientific way is him finding early on this merging of science and art (skillful artistry among both). Again not on the grounds of a "representational schema" but rather on the grounds of something much more creative by way of actual experience as it allowed for some speculation on the grounds of the nonhuman itself. I know many in the Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) school like Harman and maybe Morton, suggest, Whitehead does not go far enough in terms of leaving Kant's predicament behind with regards to the human being analytically cut-off from the world around them but Whitehead's concept of the "superject" is one area among others which I find has more in kind with their sentiments than some would believe (I think Harman would say about Whitehead that he was too close to what complexity theory later calls "self-organization and emergence"). All this is to say Whitehead's ontology is remarkably "flat" and so whether we are thinking of Latour here or others I think the "sociality of experience" among the nonhuman is worth being creative with etc. I applaud this conversation because it really shows a strong push toward integrating the disciplines even more etc. Finally, I suspect when Whitehead is the most vague and "poetic" in his writing it shows the limits of the weirdness in the world he is often trying to describe.
proleptic aspiration is a kind of leap of faith where you set goals that are course grained as well as novel and get refined as you move toward them. eg. I don't understand classical music but I want to learn to appreciate it.
Restraint is a great tool, or habit. In Jazz we refer to it as "less is more". Great discussion, thanks all. Personal note, i wish the hostess would've stuck with Plato's forms model, with humans trying to mimic them, instead of hoodwinking Jordan Peterson into this thing with ideals as judges - wich is really just Plato's forms. Nevertheless, good stuff...
Yes it really was weird and completely inappropriate. It was great to hear one of Peterson's totally incorrect ideas get shot down by someone who knows what he's talking about though. Anyone that thinks Peterson is intelligent or insightful, should try reading Dr Iain McGilchrist instead.
Good stuff, good stuff. Thanks for posting. About an hour and 19 minutes in... Levin makes a statement of research interest. Not interested in philosophical arguments. Interested in cognitive tools for improved engineering. As if ideas have a utility function... that can be found, and known. More unified understanding, More compact understand, Better prevention and control. If you zero an ability function, i.e. memory ability, the force function goes to zero too. Who'da thought, who'da thought, :) Physics of sentience, and sentience of physics. So much here. So much here.
@The Meaning Code , I should would! I've been thinking about stuff like this on my own for a long time. I haven't watched a lot of your channel, but I've been impressed with your skill at recognizing relevant ideas and thinkers. Your comment about the relationship between concepts and precepts being one example that impressed me. This may sound weird but I think I want to be like Galileo and before I die take out a "100 year social loan" on my reputation regarding some aspect of science and culture that i feel needs a strong negative feedback signal. Whatever that means, I may never know. I would love to share inspirational ideas about emotional machine designs such as gyroscopes, potholes, siphons, etc. Just not sure how to do so most effectively.
The words of duality, know Thyself, therein lays the keys to Freedom. Always begin one's inquiry from a spaciousness of not knowing, unencumbered by past knowledge inherent or accumulated. Love of Truth is what Philosophy is about, Science is search for that Truth in diverse fields, yet still all the Whole. The ego, discets, behaviour, in all fields of science, politics, religions, belief systems... In the scientific field we have discovered more efficient ways to kill, control, subjugate our fellows, psychologically we have not evolved , look at history, 6000 years of wars, violence, crulty, enslavement. Know Thyself. Namaste 🙏
how is the mind different than the lowliest hunger?....it seeks it attains it consumes it digests it expresses.....maybe separate one's ego from one's mind.....the evolution of intelligence does not need a divine justification.....but an ego does
All very interesting, not that I really understand it. I like Pageau better and Vervaeke too talks about emergence and emanation. Without God as part of the puzzle not all the pieces fit together.
Neurogenesis 1.0 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Levin _"each of us was once a little blob of chemistry!"_ That is a huge *FAIL* right at the start trying to address the question of the existence of *mind* from a long outdated idea of a living cell.
@@TheMeaningCode Even extreme anti-theists like Dawkins accepts and states _"at the heart of all life is information"_ and Prof Paul Davies on the subject says _"any theory of the chemical origin of life is absurd"_ (The matter Myth). Materialists like Levin must then re-define information to equal any meaningless gibberish which is the consensus of the naturalists in science today when any 7 year old could tell them a page of gibberish without meaning is not information! But for them to admit that truth is tantamount to admitting God created all life which he obviously did but Levin cannot conclude that not because of science but because of his philosophy of naturalism.
I know what you mean. You might enjoy this one where these guys are grappling with the biggest questions, especially Watson. I think it starts around 30:00. th-cam.com/video/gjArtj5PIU8/w-d-xo.html
I find this whole incessant harping on continuity lopsided! In my view you are both continuous and discrete at the same time. Those two things are not contradictory as might seem. You are continuous with the "nonliving" and the lowest level of matter, because your body is constituted by matter. But you are also discrete, in the sense that you don't care what that one particular skin cell in your left pinky is doing. (You don't care because I think you even can't care - I'd even perhaps push it further - if you cared you'd not get very far in the world.) To see this by way of analogy, consider a monotonically increasing graph of a continuous function that exhibits sudden rapid changes in certain parts of its domain. These refer to the phase change/punctuated equilibrium notions from other fields. You could imagine this as a complexification scale having a stair-like quality, where on each step you have a stabilized level of organization. Now, I argue that the different levels of organization are not commensurate with each other. I further argue that on each level of organization you have a privileged landscape of affordances that is inaccessible to the other levels (above and below). So now you end up with continuum of incommensurate realities. These are the nodes / the "nature's joints". They matter! They are real! For this reason, I think that both Mike and Matt are caught up in false dichotomies.
Your thoughts inspired me to consider that certain dynamic intelligent reactions might be able to be made at one level, but not another, due to energy differences, but that some dynamical systems may change this “you can’t get there from here“ decision making paradigm that would have require another level to make the decision… Just more food for thought
I' not sure if we're thinking the same thing, but when you said that each level has affordances that are inaccessible to the other levels, I think there is one access point. You described the structure as a " continuum of incommensurate realities... the nodes / the "nature's joints". I have envisioned our slice of irreducible complexity/domains of human knowledge as levels of quantum physics, classical physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc., as being connected levels similar to the levels that comprise a chip where the complexity has become too great for one "story" and the excavated silicon has many "stories" or "levels" or "cities" each connected only by a via so that information can flow from one to the other. Part of my channel's purpose has been to discover/uncover the connecting point(s). I started out believing the connecting point is beauty and have not found a verifiable argument against that as of yet.
I think you may be misunderstanding what they mean by continuity. Segall is not claiming that everything is connected to everything as obviously our relational fields only extend so far. The key notion for Segall is plurality, that nothing exists without relationality and, by consequence, nothing is discontinuous as everything connects up with at least something else. Continuity is the notion that no thing exists in a “real” vacuo, that is, every actual occasion cannot be cut from the field of relations from which it was birthed. And as far as your point on us caring about the lower levels of complexity, Michael Levin’s work deals precisely with the dissonance between the drives of lower systems (cells) and higher systems (organs, executive consciousness). He doesn’t at all discount the fact that systems have different purposive trends. It’s important to note that these systems are only “discontinuous” insofar as we can imagine them having greater unity, just as we can imagine two distant land masses merging into one though in fact they are geographically separate. The land masses not being unified is not a property of their “being”, but only a speculative possibility of what they might or could otherwise be. Because land masses are engaged in the same differential network as everything else that exists, they are continuous with everything without being related to everything. The two landmasses are not afflicted with a property of discreteness by not being one landmass, rather, it’s only that the plural evolution of the universe has resulted in one land mass having a certain set of relations and the other having a different set of relations, both caught up in an interconnected-but not theoretically/imaginatively COMPLETE-web.
Saying necessity is the same thing as natural selection which is what Darwin pegged The thing about describing genetic adaptation, we use metaphors that enable us to understand the what, how, & why of adaptations as see if they were done intentionally & intelligently to a blueprint created by an intelligent designer although nothing occurred as such chronologically Often, these metaphors confuse people's understanding natural selection. Ordinarily, evolutionary biologists won't be confused, unless they accidentally confuse themselves with heir own metaphors
I dont think of determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, perhaps you are a proportion of determinism, and that technically makes you a free agent... you just arent what you think you are. The closer you get to 50/50 benefit the closer your own internal determinism (as opposed to exterior determinism) takes over to make that decision. And that lack of certainty reverberates within the total goal state (between sub goals) to make it more even more internally determined... I think inevitably this makes you need to think of yourself as a subset of subsets, within a subset, in a set etc, and that the external determinism that is involved in those uncertain actions is in a sense part of a greater self. You are both the thing that wants to eat, and a proportion of the thing that made you evolve to want to eat.
As Matt was describing the continuum of agency, the relevance of Whiteheads theories in biology, my mind was taken back to that wonderful last paragraph of the amazing book, 'the rainbow and the worm'... "Reality is thus a shimmering presence of infinite planes, a luminous labyrinth of the active now connecting 'past' and 'future', 'real' with 'ideal', where potential unfolds into actual and actual enfolds to further potential through the free action and intention of the organism. It is a sea awash with significations, dreams and desires. This reality we carry with us, an ever-present straining towards the future. The act is the cause; it is none other than the creation of meaning, the realization of the ideal and the consummation of desire." Makes me tear up every time I read it. Excellent discussion.
I think Michael Levin is trying to break a record for most prolific podcast guest on youtube.
I’m loving it.
I'm drafting a letter right now to invite him to another 😅
@@starxcrossed same. I watch him all the time.
@@canis_lupus_canus most people who do circuits repeat the same lectures nearly verbatim. I've watched almost all of his published TH-cam videos, he uses parts but always brings new ideas and sway to every interview. He's truly remarkable as a communicator
The mass exodus of which he is only 1 hasn't really got a choice? Surely the establishment is running a post truth era hidden university programme & just wants to close most physical universities so these people are being starved out the system & YT is the new Lab.
Thank you Karen, starting it now. Wonderful and Rich conversation, the group of three always seems to bring more out of each of the participants and increasing the depth of the conversation. Thank you all very much, Matthew, Michael and Karen. Peace
P.S.
Please remember to like video, the content found here we could have only dreamed about 20 years ago.
Amazing that these conversations happen and get shared!
They'd not if the beginning of the end of physical university hadn't happened
The pressure of constraint that was discussed I found to be a really powerful idea that was new to me. An animal for example can't spend huge amounts of resources keeping track of all the micro states on the level of behavior. So there is a tremendous evolutionary push towards developing abstraction hierarchies.
Good point, and can also see the parallels between that limited range of evolutionary 'possibilities' at the cellular level, and the 'conceptual' ones at the human cognitive level... regardless whatever forces helped 'shape' them. BTW, the idea of using non-human AI to help 'broaden' that conceptual field of possibilities is also a very provocative one... and 'yuge' kudos to Karen and her guests for such a stimulating exploration!
I work in a field where I see high levels of self destructive behavior ,a death drive unconscious?
Fantastic clarity from all three of you. Thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish.
It was clear. Rather clueless but at least clear.
What troubled you?@@cameroncameron2826
29:00 I agree with Michael that “the environment” is always radically underdetermined at least when we’re talking about the immediate environment (pond or Petri dish, etc.). But the broader environmental layers of social order (in Whitehead’s sense of “society”) including the stubborn habits of chemistry and physics and the background rhythms of tides and seasons, etc., all that constitutes a sort of cosmic memory informing every organism including xenobots.
That sounds a bit like Sheldrake’s Morphic resonance. I see you used the words habit and memory. I’ve been thinking lately about the confluence of habit, pattern and memory.
@@TheMeaningCode yes my understanding having spoken to Rupert about this is that his use of habit and memory stems from his reading of Bergson and Whitehead.
@Footnotes2Plato
Thank you again. ❤
"the sentience of physics" if ever a sentence sends a chill up the spine it has to be that
19:55 I should clarify that Plato’s universe included the life and motion of the world-soul and Aristotle’s dynamic sense of organic ontogeny, though essentialist, was hardly static. Indeed, contemporary biology desperately needs to recuperate some of his sense of the role of potentia in developmental processes.
Thank all of you for these discussions. ❤
I've been thinking about life and evolution as this entropy ratchet.
Life creates this mechanism that orders the universe for brief periods of time while an organism is alive, and eventually succumbs to entropy in death. But life ultimately counteracts entropy through the preservation of information, primarily with genes, and later, evolutionarily, with language and symbolic representation.
Ultimately life serves as this entropy ratchet that functions to preserve information between cycles of life & death to create negative entropy, or negentropy.
People constantly ask why, I think the why is rather simple, we are the universe itself becoming self aware, a mirror with which the universe looks at itself. I really don't think it has to be more complicated than that, we are simply a product of the universe's attempt to witness itself. I think our sense of beauty and the ultimate joy that comes from recognizing beauty is an indication of this.
The most joyful thing I personally have ever experienced is a sense of beauty, when the mirror reflects some truth about the immaculate complexity surrounding us we experience this feedback loop of joy, because in that state, we ARE the embodiment of the universe seeing itself. That's just my take.
Negentropy is syntropy!
"Entropy is a measure of randomness" -- Roger Penrose.
Syntropy is a measure of order.
Making predictions to track targets, goals & objectives is a syntropy process -- teleological.
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
Teleological physics (syntropy) is dual to non-teleological (entropy).
Entropy is dual to evolution (syntropy) -- Janna Levin, astrophysicist.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
If you are suggesting that syntropy is synonymous with evolution, and that that is a prediction process, that implies a need for a prior information, for any prediction requires a basis from which to predict. Or as Jordan Peterson would say, meaning precedes matter.
@@TheMeaningCode I don't personally believe that there has to be a predictive element to it, I believe it's emergent.
Though it brings up a legitimate question, why don't we see more evidence of life in the universe? That would be the strongest argument against my theory.
@@TheMeaningCode If evolution has a purpose, meaning, goal or target then it is teleological or syntropic!
Immanuel Kant talks about teleology in "The Critique of Judgement".
Randomness (entropy) is dual to order (syntropy).
Certainty (predictability, syntropy) is dual to uncertainty, entropy) -- the Heisenberg certainty/uncertainty principle.
Integration (summation, syntropy) is dual to differentiation (differences, entropy) -- abstract algebra.
Deductive inference (mathematics, rational) is dual to inductive inference (physics, empirical) -- Immanuel Kant.
Inference or making predictions is dual according to Immanuel Kant.
Bergson proposed an inverse teleology: not finalistic, so not due to a pre-existing plan or project, already given (finalism is just an inversion of determinism, as in both cases everything is "already given", whether because it can be predicted, in theory, as per La Place's thought experiment, or because it's "written in the plan").
Bergson's alternative, which he expressed through the metaphor of the élan vital (mistaken for vitalism, which is not) is that there is an initial impetus behind life which triggers evolution, but evolution unfolds unpredictably because the future is open, undetermined. Matter offers the resistance, the constraint, against which the sprouting of life runs against, but it's also what allows life to concretise itself in specific individualities. At the core, this is a view of reality as a creative process of unfolding of novelty (lots of affinities with Whitehead).
But Bergson also notes that this current sustained by the élan vital and running through matter is "psychical" in nature, it's consciousness ("for lack of a better word" he says), although not individual consciousness. And consciousness is freedom and creativity.
The awakening of consciousness in a living organism is proportional to its possibility for choice and action. So living organisms range from near automatism in the most simple (those "closer to matter" so to speak), in which consciousness is essentially or nearly dorment, to capacity for invention and free agency in those where intelligence is most prevalent over instinct and consciousness is more "awake".
Very interesting combination, looking forward to the second listen.
Matt 21:00 tipping plato on its side. love this analogy
but maybe here is where Michael key to triangle, we have the two sides now dialectically building back up Plato forms
No conflict here. Rather, an openness to better understanding. Always fascinating to hear from Michael on his ground breaking work. Great JBP MOM interjections by you Karen. If only more people would read that incredible book. Strange how ‘TLC’ forgets so readily the sole reason for its’ existence.
Interesting and thoughtful dialogue, with germane gems from Karen. Thank you.
This is becoming more and more interesting💓
I think it was probably appropriate that we approached these subjects the way we did historically. There was low hanging fruit to be plucked with the reductionist philosophy, and we plucked it very very well. Even in the early parts of the 20th century, we weren't really ready technologically to get into the kind of work Dr. Levin is doing, so... we did what we could, and we continued to learn. It now may be time to take a step back and reconsider.
51:50 While Newton’s God didn’t reach into nature to change the laws of physics, Newton admitted he had no other explanation for what allows gravitational action at a distance than God giving planets a push. Descartes was the more consistent mechanist (ie, space is not empty but a plenum of vortexes, allowing gravity to propagate in a medium).
Newton had to find a word for gravity from the existing language that had no word for his new finding, so he chose a word that has the meaning of hearth, which is the center of the home, much as it was said at the time that things fell because they were seeking the center of the earth. (added) I was at a conference this weekend with people of many different belief traditions where we were discussing the quest for a spiritual home. John Vervaeke posited that there is both a home range and a home base. The home range could be likened to the areas within your world where you feel "at home", a kind of revolving home dependent upon relationship, where home base is the home/hearth and that kind of home depends upon the center, the location. That caused me to think perhaps that is the relationship between Newton's gravity and Einstein's gravity. Newton's gravity, the classical picture, is all about being drawn to the center, the home/hearth, from which he took his new use of the word "gravity". In that picture of home, time and space are separate. Einstein's gravity, on the other hand, is based on a spacetime continuum, relational units revolving around one another and being affected by each other and by the weight of the greatest center of gravity in the area, moving through time and space in relationship. This is just a rough draft. I have to go back through my notes to clean up John's definitions of home range and home base, so my analogy might not be all that it could be right now. Just thinking.
michael was talking about latent spaces and the kind of out of the blue surprizes that can come from those possible spaces. the concept of the "adjacent possible" covers what might be less surprizing in new forms, but the concepts of entanglement and synchronicity provide explanations for how "distant possibles" may play a role in how genetic and molecular networks operate in multi-dimensional spaces, generating forms that are unpredictable and even unthinkable from previous forms. the structural-dynamic for this process by which the distant possible can come into play to create surprizes (at the physical, biological, neuronal, and even societal levels) is described in the essay "the quantum-semiotic kosmos", and "bohmian quantum mechanics and transdarwinian evolution" by joe corbett.
Thanks! I’ll look into it.
Love the library setting for the guests
Robert Rosen in his book Life Itself uses Category Theory to model a living entity. In that work, he found that he needed to invoke Final Cause. He broke Final Cause into independent factors--Telos and Function. He asserted that he could do without Telos and use Function as the needed Final Cause.
That seems so utilitarian and sad.
great! thank you
Maybe the notion of representation and symbolic form are a significant part of the defining elements of form. Consciousness and perception are fundamental requirements of experience and understanding and in-form-ation is a hermenutic tool of representation and pattern establishment. Maybe consciousness itself provides the bedrock of form.
I believe that the interaction between organic biochemistry with the different waves that make up the sensory spectrum (audible, visible) of the physical world, generates a biological process of adaptation, giving rise to an organic structure capable of interpreting these physical waves, and understand it as the exterior world,
That’s a really interesting theory…
Big up the cross over... love your fuckin podcast you get the best people to talk to each other keep this shit up.
25:42 what about chaos theory attractors?
I looked into them quite a bit a few years ago. What in particular were you thinking?
Was just curious about the statement about sky hooks as retro-causality. My very basic understanding of attractor states is that they seem to exert causal influence onto the past such that the attractor state comes into being.
The presumption of a chemical starting point and the presupposition that chemism and physics are necessary explanatory postulates of origin is baseless from an epistemological point of view. What is before this moment and what is the agency as organizing principle?
Yup. That’s the question. I didn’t want to get into that with them because of the time constraints, but I have six episodes on this issue in the category of the physics of life. I was joined by a mathematician/physicist/computer scientist to look at what would be required. You might find it interesting. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the mysteries of entropy.
From Deleuze, "Bergsonism":
"When certain biologists invoke a notion of organic virtuality or potentiality and nonetheless maintain that this potentiality is actualized by simple limitation of its global capacity, they clearly fall into a confusion of the virtual and the possible. For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in the process of actualization - the difference between the virtual from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and also the difference between the complementary lines according to which actualization takes place."
Thanks for that reference!
Using Michael’s factual statements that he can see the system that’s creating the structure and that can be hacked.
I would hypothesize that mental anguish in humans is the difference between the vision of ourselves, and what we’re seeing in our thermostats, checking a comparison against.
It could be problems in our human systems in many areas, in terms of the expectations of ourselves, and the thermostat (perspective ) and what we are assessing.
The awakening would be through this perspective of our own systems. Use the present moment to be the qualities that we want to be and then all potential expression of our form can occur through that being.
Exciting times.
Also I think that Platos sense and importance of the aesthetic, adding richness and quality to form is important to understanding the science. I think that the emphasis by Aristotle on the purely material nature of form, misses the point. Maybe a case of the pupil not fully understanding the master.
About agency, I think it is better not to focus on the individual but where thoughts (information) comes from. For humans if it is the general body or the nervous system (mind) that provide the thoughts (information). The body makes hormones producing thoughts and the nervous system makes and controls thoughts (information). There is a most likely future and the concentration (quality and quantity) of thoughts gives a small capability of free will.
Could we think of Living systems as having a sense of "smell" of the density of possible future states? The greater the density of possibilities the greater the attraction for the systems to tend toward those states. This is similar to an Attractor.
Fantastic conversation.
Thanks for listening!
I think that Latent space is an infinitely space, as I’ve been in the space where any possible form can be created, and it all seems like infinities.
Imagination space Anything possible exists.
Form = Consciousness | Changing Consciousness = Intelligence
I really think following along the lines of Charles Hartshorne that this concept of the "feeler" is critical here and its relation to the nonhuman. Stopping shy maybe of full blown panpsychism the issue to my mind is the concept of "aesthetic growth" a la both Hartshorne and Whitehead. On the grounds that novel expression does exist among nonhuman entities and persons.
I suspect, then, that Whitehead's contribution here in any kind of scientific way is him finding early on this merging of science and art (skillful artistry among both). Again not on the grounds of a "representational schema" but rather on the grounds of something much more creative by way of actual experience as it allowed for some speculation on the grounds of the nonhuman itself.
I know many in the Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) school like Harman and maybe Morton, suggest, Whitehead does not go far enough in terms of leaving Kant's predicament behind with regards to the human being analytically cut-off from the world around them but Whitehead's concept of the "superject" is one area among others which I find has more in kind with their sentiments than some would believe (I think Harman would say about Whitehead that he was too close to what complexity theory later calls "self-organization and emergence").
All this is to say Whitehead's ontology is remarkably "flat" and so whether we are thinking of Latour here or others I think the "sociality of experience" among the nonhuman is worth being creative with etc. I applaud this conversation because it really shows a strong push toward integrating the disciplines even more etc.
Finally, I suspect when Whitehead is the most vague and "poetic" in his writing it shows the limits of the weirdness in the world he is often trying to describe.
awesome discussion!
10:00 I mean a phd is a doctorate of philosophy
We are the thermostat of ourselves There’s a good thermostat in us to try to be as similar as , and I think it’s our soul./higher self
Is Michael suggesting that determinism can't account for proleptic aspiration and personal transformation?
Could you clarify a bit? I'm not able to understand the connection.
proleptic aspiration is a kind of leap of faith where you set goals that are course grained as well as novel and get refined as you move toward them. eg. I don't understand classical music but I want to learn to appreciate it.
INCREDIBLE
Restraint is a great tool, or habit. In Jazz we refer to it as "less is more". Great discussion, thanks all. Personal note, i wish the hostess would've stuck with Plato's forms model, with humans trying to mimic them, instead of hoodwinking Jordan Peterson into this thing with ideals as judges - wich is really just Plato's forms. Nevertheless, good stuff...
Really great video, but really weird how you keep bringing up Jordan B Peterson lol
Yes it really was weird and completely inappropriate. It was great to hear one of Peterson's totally incorrect ideas get shot down by someone who knows what he's talking about though. Anyone that thinks Peterson is intelligent or insightful, should try reading Dr Iain McGilchrist instead.
Good stuff, good stuff. Thanks for posting.
About an hour and 19 minutes in... Levin makes a statement of research interest.
Not interested in philosophical arguments.
Interested in cognitive tools for improved engineering.
As if ideas have a utility function... that can be found, and known.
More unified understanding,
More compact understand,
Better prevention and control.
If you zero an ability function, i.e. memory ability, the force function goes to zero too.
Who'da thought, who'da thought, :)
Physics of sentience, and sentience of physics.
So much here. So much here.
So much in what you said, the only way to unpack it would be to have a conversation. Would you be interested in being on the channel?
@The Meaning Code , I should would! I've been thinking about stuff like this on my own for a long time. I haven't watched a lot of your channel, but I've been impressed with your skill at recognizing relevant ideas and thinkers. Your comment about the relationship between concepts and precepts being one example that impressed me.
This may sound weird but I think I want to be like Galileo and before I die take out a "100 year social loan" on my reputation regarding some aspect of science and culture that i feel needs a strong negative feedback signal. Whatever that means, I may never know.
I would love to share inspirational ideas about emotional machine designs such as gyroscopes, potholes, siphons, etc. Just not sure how to do so most effectively.
@@NolanManteufel email me at klwong43atgmaildotcom and let me know your availability and time zone.
David Deutsch says the reach of reason is unbounded
The words of duality, know Thyself, therein lays the keys to Freedom.
Always begin one's inquiry from a spaciousness of not knowing, unencumbered by past knowledge inherent or accumulated.
Love of Truth is what Philosophy is about, Science is search for that Truth in diverse fields, yet still all the Whole. The ego, discets, behaviour, in all fields of science, politics, religions, belief systems... In the scientific field we have discovered more efficient ways to kill, control, subjugate our fellows, psychologically we have not evolved , look at history, 6000 years of wars, violence, crulty, enslavement.
Know Thyself.
Namaste 🙏
Russellian Cosmology explains the Universe completely. Study Walter Russell and find these questions have already been answered.
Traces differentiate the past and the future
Astounding
Anything in particular?
how is the mind different than the lowliest hunger?....it seeks it attains it consumes it digests it expresses.....maybe separate one's ego from one's mind.....the evolution of intelligence does not need a divine justification.....but an ego does
Interesting thought. Could you say more about how the ego requires a divine justification?
Apparently quantum physics is probabilistic which I find amazing.
You might find this interesting. Chris Fields often works with Michael Levin. th-cam.com/video/UxFzB_r1CMA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=TvlCGQpyj3Lods1A
All very interesting, not that I really understand it. I like Pageau better and Vervaeke too talks about emergence and emanation. Without God as part of the puzzle not all the pieces fit together.
The ants find the shortest rout, too
i dunno. michael levin seems to be descending down a grifter/pseudoscience path.. i'm losing faith
He has succumb to hubris. The left brain has LOCKED IN for Dr Levin. He’s never been that humble tbh
Neurogenesis 1.0
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Levin _"each of us was once a little blob of chemistry!"_ That is a huge *FAIL* right at the start trying to address the question of the existence of *mind* from a long outdated idea of a living cell.
How could you offer him a different perspective?
@@TheMeaningCode Even extreme anti-theists like Dawkins accepts and states _"at the heart of all life is information"_ and Prof Paul Davies on the subject says _"any theory of the chemical origin of life is absurd"_ (The matter Myth). Materialists like Levin must then re-define information to equal any meaningless gibberish which is the consensus of the naturalists in science today when any 7 year old could tell them a page of gibberish without meaning is not information! But for them to admit that truth is tantamount to admitting God created all life which he obviously did but Levin cannot conclude that not because of science but because of his philosophy of naturalism.
I know what you mean. You might enjoy this one where these guys are grappling with the biggest questions, especially Watson. I think it starts around 30:00.
th-cam.com/video/gjArtj5PIU8/w-d-xo.html
I find this whole incessant harping on continuity lopsided! In my view you are both continuous and discrete at the same time. Those two things are not contradictory as might seem. You are continuous with the "nonliving" and the lowest level of matter, because your body is constituted by matter. But you are also discrete, in the sense that you don't care what that one particular skin cell in your left pinky is doing. (You don't care because I think you even can't care - I'd even perhaps push it further - if you cared you'd not get very far in the world.)
To see this by way of analogy, consider a monotonically increasing graph of a continuous function that exhibits sudden rapid changes in certain parts of its domain. These refer to the phase change/punctuated equilibrium notions from other fields. You could imagine this as a complexification scale having a stair-like quality, where on each step you have a stabilized level of organization. Now, I argue that the different levels of organization are not commensurate with each other. I further argue that on each level of organization you have a privileged landscape of affordances that is inaccessible to the other levels (above and below). So now you end up with continuum of incommensurate realities. These are the nodes / the "nature's joints". They matter! They are real!
For this reason, I think that both Mike and Matt are caught up in false dichotomies.
Your thoughts inspired me to consider that certain dynamic intelligent reactions might be able to be made at one level, but not another, due to energy differences, but that some dynamical systems may change this “you can’t get there from here“ decision making paradigm that would have require another level to make the decision… Just more food for thought
I' not sure if we're thinking the same thing, but when you said that each level has affordances that are inaccessible to the other levels, I think there is one access point. You described the structure as a " continuum of incommensurate realities... the nodes / the "nature's joints". I have envisioned our slice of irreducible complexity/domains of human knowledge as levels of quantum physics, classical physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc., as being connected levels similar to the levels that comprise a chip where the complexity has become too great for one "story" and the excavated silicon has many "stories" or "levels" or "cities" each connected only by a via so that information can flow from one to the other. Part of my channel's purpose has been to discover/uncover the connecting point(s). I started out believing the connecting point is beauty and have not found a verifiable argument against that as of yet.
I think you may be misunderstanding what they mean by continuity.
Segall is not claiming that everything is connected to everything as obviously our relational fields only extend so far.
The key notion for Segall is plurality, that nothing exists without relationality and, by consequence, nothing is discontinuous as everything connects up with at least something else. Continuity is the notion that no thing exists in a “real” vacuo, that is, every actual occasion cannot be cut from the field of relations from which it was birthed.
And as far as your point on us caring about the lower levels of complexity, Michael Levin’s work deals precisely with the dissonance between the drives of lower systems (cells) and higher systems (organs, executive consciousness). He doesn’t at all discount the fact that systems have different purposive trends.
It’s important to note that these systems are only “discontinuous” insofar as we can imagine them having greater unity, just as we can imagine two distant land masses merging into one though in fact they are geographically separate. The land masses not being unified is not a property of their “being”, but only a speculative possibility of what they might or could otherwise be.
Because land masses are engaged in the same differential network as everything else that exists, they are continuous with everything without being related to everything. The two landmasses are not afflicted with a property of discreteness by not being one landmass, rather, it’s only that the plural evolution of the universe has resulted in one land mass having a certain set of relations and the other having a different set of relations, both caught up in an interconnected-but not theoretically/imaginatively COMPLETE-web.
omg these 2 wordcels, poor micheal
Saying necessity is the same thing as natural selection which is what Darwin pegged
The thing about describing genetic adaptation, we use metaphors that enable us to understand the what, how, & why of adaptations as see if they were done intentionally & intelligently to a blueprint created by an intelligent designer although nothing occurred as such chronologically
Often, these metaphors confuse people's understanding natural selection. Ordinarily, evolutionary biologists won't be confused, unless they accidentally confuse themselves with heir own metaphors
10/10 more please Mr Levin!
I dont think of determinism and free will as mutually exclusive, perhaps you are a proportion of determinism, and that technically makes you a free agent... you just arent what you think you are.
The closer you get to 50/50 benefit the closer your own internal determinism (as opposed to exterior determinism) takes over to make that decision. And that lack of certainty reverberates within the total goal state (between sub goals) to make it more even more internally determined...
I think inevitably this makes you need to think of yourself as a subset of subsets, within a subset, in a set etc, and that the external determinism that is involved in those uncertain actions is in a sense part of a greater self. You are both the thing that wants to eat, and a proportion of the thing that made you evolve to want to eat.