I think Michael Levin is trying to break a record for most prolific podcast guest on youtube.

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.

Amazing that these conversations happen and get shared!

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 sentience of physics" if ever a sentence sends a chill up the spine it has to be that

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.

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.

Fantastic clarity from all three of you. Thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very interesting combination, looking forward to the second listen.

great! thank you

Thank all of you for these discussions. ❤

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.

This is becoming more and more interesting💓

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

Big up the cross over... love your fuckin podcast you get the best people to talk to each other keep this shit up.

Fantastic conversation.

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.

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."

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,

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.

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).

Love the library setting for the guests

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.

INCREDIBLE

awesome discussion!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Astounding

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?

Really great video, but really weird how you keep bringing up Jordan B Peterson lol

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.

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...

Form = Consciousness | Changing Consciousness = Intelligence

Russellian Cosmology explains the Universe completely. Study Walter Russell and find these questions have already been answered.

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 🙏

Traces differentiate the past and the future

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.

David Deutsch says the reach of reason is unbounded

10:00 I mean a phd is a doctorate of philosophy

Apparently quantum physics is probabilistic which I find amazing.

25:42 what about chaos theory attractors?

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

The ants find the shortest rout, too

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.

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.

Is Michael suggesting that determinism can't account for proleptic aspiration and personal transformation?

i dunno. michael levin seems to be descending down a grifter/pseudoscience path.. i'm losing faith

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.

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.