Discussion with Michael Johnson 1

Transcript

00:00:00uh yeah so um i was thinking uh just kind of uh could have a conversation about um uh sort of intersections between your work and my work yeah um i think that uh like i'm i've been thinking so much about distributed stress minimization uh i think it's just an absolutely beautiful frame um and sort of the the various um fields of of the body we can say um and so i'm coming from

00:00:30the perspective of uh sort of uh this research into sort of formal research into consciousness we can say and then uh this frame of vasocomputation this idea that um tension in the vascular system essentially uh sort of holds bayesian priors about the the appropriate range of the neural system uh so yeah i guess uh to begin like i i

00:01:00i'd love to hear uh distributed stress minimization from uh directly from you uh what's what's going on there yeah yeah um so you know as you know we're interested in uh mechanism various cognitive mechanisms and really unconventional substrates and uh i've been thinking a lot about uh most most recently about um how to measure stress in unconventional systems

00:01:30and in particular the use of for for us uh the use of stress as a uh stress reduction as a driving variable for um anatomical homeostasis so the idea of cells and tissues having to adjust and uh both both anatomically but also transcriptionally and uh you know physiologically to instantiate specific goal states that that they have that then pulled you know and so this process pulls them along so um our latest our latest frame of

00:02:01still unpublished, but what's coming out now is that we can use various stress markers

00:02:07to identify, to basically show how these loops, in embryogenesis, you sort of go stage by

00:02:17stage and we can actually see the stress.

00:02:19So at the beginning, there's a particular target morphology and we study the one that's

00:02:25set by bioelectrics.

00:02:26There may be others, but we study the bioelectric one and the target morphology doesn't match

00:02:31the current anatomy at all.

00:02:32And so the stress goes up and it works like hell to get there.

00:02:35And when it does, it goes down.

00:02:36But by then the bioelectric state has moved on again.

00:02:38So it happens again and again and again, and it keeps pulling it along through all the

00:02:42stages and then eventually it sort of equalizes.

00:02:45And then we can talk about aging and things like that separately.

00:02:47But this is the kind of thing we study.

00:02:50And in particular, what I wanted to also discuss.

00:02:55First of all, I want to talk about the bioelectric.

00:02:56I've told everything that you've seen in the vascular system I want to hear about, but

00:02:58also how do we measure it in really weird systems that are not biologicals at all?

00:03:04So what does what the stress look like in the gene regulatory network?

00:03:07What does it look like in the physiological circuit?

00:03:09What does it look like in in other kinds of processes?

00:03:11Some sort of generic metric that we can apply across substrates?

00:03:15Right.

00:03:16Yeah, fascinating.

00:03:17So I was thinking yesterday about how sort of this there's this sort of distributed stress

00:03:23minimization they talk about.

00:03:26if a cell isn't in the right place, then there'll be stress and like cells kind of

00:03:29emergently coordinate to sort of get the cell into the right place. And kind of the bound of

00:03:36a system is the empathy of the cells in some sense. And I was thinking about how different

00:03:42systems may have sort of different currencies of stress. So first of all, I'm like, how does that

00:03:49work? And sort of what is stress in endothelial cells and what is stress in neurons and what is

00:03:57stress in glial cells and so on? And how do they communicate? And I guess I had the loose hypothesis

00:04:04that there's sort of an inter-system sort of stress exchange. And it would be interesting

00:04:13to see if one of the kind of core levers the body

00:04:19has to sort of adjust, we can say mood or strategy or Bayesian priors or whatnot, is sort of adjusting

00:04:27the exchange rate of stress between systems. Like maybe in a rest and digest mode, stress in the

00:04:37stomach gets weighted 5x normal. So it's like stress gets distributed, but the stress that the

00:04:44stomach is holding sort of gets pushed into other tissues, where maybe in a fight or flight mode,

00:04:50like that's reversed or something like that. So just a side note there. I can say that...

00:05:00think that you're touching on something that feels extremely important when you talk about the cognitive glue and things that bind the system together, we can say.

00:05:17And I would also say that, like, to sort of bring in vasocomputation, one kind of core hypothesis that I'm sort of trying to poke at is that it feels like it's kind of a very efficient compression to think of the vasculature as an agent.

00:05:44And, you know, we can say that vasculature is a very efficient compression.

00:05:46And I think that the body is kind of this amalgamation of agents, all kind of emergently cooperating.

00:05:53And I guess, like, I think of the vasculature as it's like, to what degree can you sort of ascribe different personalities to different agents of the body?

00:06:05I think it's a very interesting question.

00:06:08And so I guess I...

00:06:11So the sort of vasocomputation baseline is that...

00:06:17Vascular tension stabilizes local neural patterns.

00:06:21Or like whatever the sort of local substrate of compute is, we can say.

00:06:25That's the slightly more general frame.

00:06:29Vascular tension basically freezes the patterns there.

00:06:32And so it's sort of a neat way to sort of hold certain things as constants where there's tension.

00:06:41And then other things can be left as variables where there's not tension.

00:06:46But the other thing is...

00:06:47Vascular muscle, of course, is a form of smooth muscle.

00:06:50And smooth muscle has this latch bridge mechanism.

00:06:53Where it can basically glue itself shut.

00:06:56Like the action of the myosin basically stops sliding and gets chemically glued.

00:07:02So then...

00:07:03This can persist.

00:07:06And like...

00:07:07I guess from...

00:07:08My expectation is that these sort of latches...

00:07:12When...

00:07:13When vascular muscle sort of engages this latch.

00:07:16bridge mechanism and these maybe it's sort of actively defended or actively repressed or

00:07:22there's some sort of like metadata from the body like we need that then I expect that this can last

00:07:31for you know anywhere between minutes to hours to potentially decades so kind of a very long-term

00:07:39prior and then of course it's like vascular tension is sort of gatekeeping the body's

00:07:49central currency blood flow and so if neurons don't get blood flow they just don't have the

00:07:56the like resources to adapt to rewire etc and so I've been you know thinking about that as sort of

00:08:08um

00:08:09kind of a backup or kind of a uh almost like a an RLHF uh system for the neurons that um if if some

00:08:19like big prediction error happens or whatnot uh the vasculature can kind of leap in and and say

00:08:26okay like that didn't work we're not gonna let that happen again if you get bitten by a dog or

00:08:30something and um it can kind of latch uh latch patterns into kind of a known safe mode or

00:08:37um

00:08:39um maybe bring in this active inference frame like tension as a prediction

00:08:44uh so you can say um you you latch a prediction that you will be safe in a certain situation

00:08:51but of course that reduces overall system dynamism uh you basically block out certain

00:08:59um parts of your dynamic range which which has downsides

00:09:06um so I guess like

00:09:09um the the story that I want to tell is that you know we're sort of this um amalgam amalgamation of

00:09:17systems and these systems are sort of amalgamations of smart parts as as you've described and then

00:09:24what I want to say is the vascular system or like people think of intelligence as uh sort

00:09:31of embedded in the neural system and I think your your critiques have been absolutely spot on that

00:09:36and like even neuroscience there shouldn't be any kind of

00:09:39maybe about neurons uh only um so I want to say that maybe but like neurons are sort of specialized

00:09:48for long-range communication um and I guess I would propose sort of looking at uh smooth

00:09:57muscle cells in like with fresh eyes

00:10:00are these cells? What are they doing? And what is their functional role? I guess I see them as playing neurotic protector to the neural system. If the neural system can't handle something, the basal muscular system jumps in and tries to make it that.

00:10:28Make it manageable.

00:10:30So I want to pause there.

00:10:32Does that make sense?

00:10:33Yeah, absolutely.

00:10:35Absolutely fascinating stuff.

00:10:37Really important, I think.

00:10:38Do you think...

00:10:40So I was thinking about something a little related recently in terms of gene expression.

00:10:47So you have 20,000 different genes or whatever, and you don't have the metabolic resources to transcribe them all.

00:10:54And so one way to think about it is that the cell is making decisions about what to transcribe, fine.

00:10:59But another way to think about it is that could the genes actually be in competition for the attention of the transcription machinery?

00:11:07Right?

00:11:07So if there is this obvious overseer that is going to decide who actually gets transcribed, you would think that there would be some forces to start to hack it, right?

00:11:19Where the genes are trying to get the attention of the system.

00:11:22So my question, and you can answer it.

00:11:24And this is your case, is do you think that neurons, in addition to doing whatever it is that they're doing, are actually trying to get the goodies from the vascular system?

00:11:36Is that a thing?

00:11:36Are they trying to hack the vascular cells at all?

00:11:39Yeah.

00:11:40I mean, they'd have to be, right?

00:11:42And I think that the powerful thing here is the vascular system is holding the purse strings.

00:11:52Yeah.

00:11:54like if the neurons don't get blood uh there's just a hard cap on sort of what they can do and

00:12:00i expect that they can i i expect that if we poke into neuron physiology we'll find that

00:12:06uh there will be like uh i'm not sure if it'll be continuous or discrete but they'll sort of drop

00:12:12into safe mode in a very clean elegant way like they're they're sort of designed to sort of uh

00:12:17go through metabolic winter uh we can say um that there was this um uh this sequence of papers um

00:12:26sort of starting with the the hemoneural hypothesis by by moran cow um and then moving into

00:12:33i think cognition is entangled with metabolism jacob at all and talking about how um

00:12:40like a couple of kind of crazy uh unexpected findings uh one being that um uh blood flow

00:12:47in in healthy tissue can vary by uh over a factor of 20. um so not 10 but 20x plus and so

00:12:58um we should expect sort of cells to behave like have different sort of modes of operation

00:13:04depending on that um and then the the second finding was that um actually changes in blood

00:13:11flow precede changes in neural activity um that it's not the neurons you know fire and use a bunch

00:13:17of uh you know uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh

00:13:18it's that um the blood changes like the blood comes and then neurons change um yeah so so you

00:13:30know that sounds like um you know it would be it would be really interesting and maybe it's

00:13:35already been done but it would be really interesting to do some kind of a a multi-scale

00:13:39neural network model where the cells are age where the the neurons are agents that also you know

00:13:48there's some there's some pressure to compute whatever it is but there's also right if you want

00:13:52to do the computation that you're supposed to do you also have to navigate your local environment

00:13:57and get get the purse strings uh so to speak to uh to feed you right yeah yeah um interesting and

00:14:06i guess i'm sort of pushing on that uh

00:14:10i do think that like a very interesting sort of near proxy for attention maybe blood flow uh sort

00:14:18of turning up uh more cow describe it as sort of turning up the sensitivity or the gain on

00:14:23networks um and it'd be interesting to see okay like how do neurons sort of compete for blood flow

00:14:31and how do the algorithms of the body sort of punish defectors on that um yeah fascinating um

00:14:41i think uh yeah i'm i i guess like the the like

00:14:48cooperation deflection dynamics uh get get pretty deep pretty quickly

00:14:54are there um by the way uh something else you said about the the different personalities

00:15:00of the body and everything.

00:15:02I just, just an hour ago, I had a conversation with Frank Putnam and Alexey Tolchinsky,

00:15:09and they were talking about this business of dissociative disorders and the different

00:15:15personalities that can live within one body and how they navigate their relationships.

00:15:19And, and one, one of the, one of the most interesting, the thing, interesting things

00:15:24that he said was that they have shifted clinically from, instead of trying to integrate, what

00:15:31they now do is provide, they, they, they literally have a, they, they make a bulletin board where

00:15:37the different personalities can leave each other messages.

00:15:39Wow.

00:15:40And so this is actually, it, it's, you know, you achieve this, it's, I mean, it's

00:15:44a stigmatic medium where you get to like leave these messages for each other and communicate

00:15:47that way.

00:15:49And so the collective becomes more, more functional and integrated towards goals, but

00:15:55it's not the thing where you hope the pieces disappear in favor of the, of the whole, right?

00:16:00Right.

00:16:01So I wonder, do you, do you see in these vascular networks, do you see, how many agents do you

00:16:08see?

00:16:08Do you see, you know, multiple agents at the, at the same level?

00:16:11I mean, of course there's multiple levels, but, but at the same level, are there regions?

00:16:14Are there, is the whole thing kind of tightly integrated?

00:16:18Has anybody done things like that?

00:16:19Like, like you know, any kind of causal emergence metrics on the data, that kind of stuff.

00:16:24Right.

00:16:26I haven't I haven't seen that.

00:16:28That'd be fascinating.

00:16:29My expectation is that a lot of this logic is local that and, and maybe may sort of have

00:16:38sort of local organs as kind of the big attractor or like kind of the, the sever semi-sovereign

00:16:45domain.

00:16:45I guess I would say.

00:16:47And then sort of the, the tissue.

00:16:51that domain. So the stomach being a domain and the heart being a domain, brain being a domain,

00:16:58and so on. So yeah, it'd be fascinating to dig into that. But the sort of mechanisms of how the

00:17:09muscle cells are organized are like the vasculature is not one big muscle. It's like a

00:17:15bunch of tiny muscles. So yeah. And I guess part of this thesis is that a lot of the challenges of

00:17:31being a human living in modernity is that sometimes these vascular clenches and latches,

00:17:42these sort of crystallized priors,

00:17:46they're too sticky. An absolute central challenge for humans is how do we release this tension?

00:17:58It's like not all of it gets properly garbage collected, we can say. And we can say, okay,

00:18:05no, I got to pick up my daughter from school. I'm going to remember that. And that's sort of

00:18:09instantiated with a prediction slash tension.

00:18:15certain part of my, my nervous system. Um, and, and, you know, the, the vasculature reaches

00:18:19everywhere, you know, anywhere there's blood flow there, anywhere there's neuron neurons,

00:18:24there's blood flow and anywhere there's blood flow, there's this, uh, this muscle, but, um,

00:18:31but, uh, you know, I, I suspect that as we go through, uh, our day making predictions,

00:18:37making active inference predictions, um, we sort of naturally like, uh, you know, uh, clench and

00:18:45it's kind of seamless, uh, but sometimes sort of cruft builds up that if we, if we look at this

00:18:53as kind of, um, a form of side channel memory, um, that, uh, of the, the proper dynamic range

00:19:00or like, you know, don't use a big part of the range or like, uh, remember this pattern,

00:19:06or whatnot, then, um, you know, over time you'll just naturally get, uh, situations where

00:19:14you're

00:19:15uh, the resources aren't released to the system. They're just, uh, you know, you, maybe,

00:19:22maybe you were interrupted in doing a task and like your, your body was sort of holding something

00:19:28and it never got the like task completed trigger such that it could release. Um, so my expectation

00:19:37is that, uh, this is a pretty clean description of, uh, first of all, um,

00:19:45what we can call trauma, uh, the sort of, you know, uh, shards of information sort of, uh,

00:19:52held by tension in your nervous system. And like, uh, I have a friend, uh, Warren winter

00:19:57who, um, described, like,

00:20:00explain what Wilson's affordance was.

00:20:02Like, as we perceive something, we don't see it as it is.

00:20:08We see the object in terms of what I can do to the object and what that object can do

00:20:16to me.

00:20:18So if, you know, if you see a dog, maybe you see, oh, like, I could pet that dog.

00:20:24But also, oh, that dog could bite me.

00:20:27And of course, if something bad happens, then kind of the negative sort of Wilson affordance

00:20:33might get latched into the system.

00:20:37But yeah, I guess, like, I see it as kind of a neat explanation of trauma, which would

00:20:45be pretty exciting if, you know, this is kind of the home system where that lives.

00:20:50But also, just in terms of, you know, I've been kind of, you know, I've been kind of

00:20:55trying to dig into the Buddhist frame for a while.

00:20:59And it feels like, you know, what they what is talked about in terms of sort of, you know,

00:21:07there's sort of this self, this sort of immutable, you know, set of constants that sort of prevent

00:21:15maybe a wider aperture on reality, you could say, that this might be a particularly good

00:21:24way to explain that as well.

00:21:25And that it's, it's not that, you know, if we had a magic wand, and we could open all

00:21:30your vascular attention, like good things would automatically happen, like, probably

00:21:34some of it is very load bearing.

00:21:37But I do expect that, you know, if, if we sort of, like, if we were to track the sort

00:21:47of fine vascular tension of meditators, as they kind of go through the path, we'd see

00:21:53some sort of

00:21:55opening where maybe some networks that were sort of latched when you were two,

00:22:01when you were three, et cetera, may reopen. And sort of you get this much wider sense of

00:22:10possibility. So those are the two applications that I would be very excited about.

00:22:17Yeah. Yeah. You know, Eric Hull in our center has been developing some more recent new metrics

00:22:26for things like uncovering new levels of causality and so on. I wonder,

00:22:35presumably there are lots of data that this could be applied to, yeah,

00:22:39to see what is actually going on in that system as far as integration and so on.

00:22:46Yeah. I've been...

00:22:47I've been a huge fan of Eric. I think his EC 2.0 looks really good. So yeah,

00:22:55I'll have to think about that.

00:23:01And, you know, another interesting thing to look at maybe, and I don't know how hard or easy it is

00:23:08to do these in humans, but... And also there's not that many of these patients, but there are

00:23:13some really interesting exceptional human cases where people have

00:23:17very, very high levels of causality. And so I think that's a really interesting thing to look at.

00:23:17Very diminished brain, brain volume, and yet normal, normal cognition. And I would be

00:23:24interested to know what's going on, right, in the vasculature and the muscle in those, in that,

00:23:29in that case, is it like taking over some of the processing? Does it matter?

00:23:35Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, one question that seems like it's at the intersection of what I'm

00:23:43looking at and your work is this idea of...

00:23:48distributed stress minimization between types of contractile tissue in the body and also neurons.

00:23:56So, I mean, I do have the expectation, first of all, that like this system is trying to minimize

00:24:04net expected stress. I mean, if you see a tiger and like your stomach clenches up and, you know,

00:24:12it's like it is a high stress state, but it's lower stress than being eaten.

00:24:19And so I think like it's kind of trying to multiply stress across, you know, we can say

00:24:26Bayesian futures or whatever and trying to sort of minimize total stress. But I guess I have.

00:24:36Hmm.

00:24:40Oh, I lost my train of thought.

00:24:46Yeah, I mean, you know, Richard, Richard, Richard Watson and and Chris Buckley and those folks have

00:24:54done some models. I don't know how much of it is published, but they've done some models on

00:24:59the

00:25:00computation in networks of springs and the physical stress dynamics and how they allow the network to compute.

00:25:12So I think that's very interesting.

00:25:15And I think this intersection of stress as it's understood in cognitive science, stress

00:25:23as it's understood in biology and physics, and also in mathematics, right?

00:25:30So geometric frustration and so on.

00:25:33I think it would be very, very interesting and helpful to actually connect all of those

00:25:39because I guess the null hypothesis is that those are all different things that we just

00:25:43call it stress.

00:25:45But my suspicion is that it actually is all under...

00:25:47I mean, I think geometric frustration is real frustration.

00:25:50So on the very end of the cognitive spectrum, like I think it's actually, right?

00:25:54That's alignment, misalignment of your parts is probably a fundamental aspect of stress

00:26:01and frustration in composite cognitive systems.

00:26:03Yeah, absolutely.

00:26:05And so I remembered what I was going to say, but just a quick note.

00:26:13So in...

00:26:15In 2016, I wrote just a short book, Principle Equality, that laid out what I call the symmetry

00:26:24theory of balance, and this idea that if we have kind of a formalism for an experience,

00:26:31and I mean, this is a hard thing to construct, but if we sort of had a perfect mathematical

00:26:36representation of what it feels like to you or what it feels like to me, then the symmetry

00:26:43of this mathematical representation, it's really important.

00:26:46would uh would sort of correspond to like exactly correspond to the pleasantness of the experience

00:26:52so basically it's kind of a formal mathematical uh way of saying harmony in the mind is the thing

00:27:00that feels good um and so yeah i what you say about uh geometric frustration uh definitely

00:27:12so so what do you think about uh

00:27:19systems you know simple systems in which everything is is aligned and harmonious so

00:27:24you know a magnet or something where everything is nicely nicely aligned um what's the you know

00:27:32is that is that for that minimal system is that can we say that it's somehow maximally that it

00:27:37has surveillance at that point right uh well

00:27:40i would say that um there's going to be a couple requirements um so uh one being the system has to

00:27:48be conscious uh so this like the symmetry theory of valence is not a theory of consciousness

00:27:53um it's a theory of valence um so if we if we can point to a conscious system then sort of

00:28:01um and then kind of construct a formalism for for what it feels like to be that system then I do

00:28:09think that symmetry and

00:28:10formalism corresponds like there's like an identity relation with uh with valence

00:28:16um but um yeah uh just kind of a simple magnet may not uh sort of may or may not uh lead to

00:28:26uh consciousness um I would also say that uh so I mean uh Eric uh studied with tony and like one of

00:28:35tony's frames is that um you need integrated information for consciousness

00:28:40um and sort of I do expect that there to be an interesting trade-off between

00:28:46um sort of enough complexity such that you have some integrated information

00:28:54and then enough simplicity such that everything is like nice and symmetrical and harmonious so

00:29:00um yeah that's that's maybe worth noting

00:29:08yeah um

00:29:10um in back in on the the sort of distributed stress minimization uh frame um I am uh I'm

00:29:19reminded of sort of the different types of muscles and uh I I'm a big fan of like um Joe Bullock's

00:29:27work on sort of maybe like muscles are a little bit different than we when we think they are and

00:29:32so on um and uh like I I do suspect that there's going to be this interesting sort of

00:29:40uh we could say leakage of stress from one muscle type to another muscle type

00:29:46um and uh so like if if you have like a lot of skeletal muscle stress maybe some of your smooth

00:29:54muscle um also sort of picks up some of that tension and and so on and that this

00:30:00may be like computationally interesting in a lot of ways, especially in so far as

00:30:06Michael Johnson, contractile tissue that's not sort of finely regulating the neural system bleeds into this vascular muscle that I think is finally regulating the neural system.

00:30:21Title, Zuzalu, and there's also fascia, which it's kind of a wildcard topic. A lot of people describe very interesting properties to fascia. I think it's very interesting that it's so electrically active. It's very conductive.

00:30:39Title, Zuzalu, and I guess one thing that I've been sort of wondering, and I'm really curious what your instincts say.

00:30:48Title, Zuzalu, So fascia can't exactly latch, but it can be a very conductive property.

00:30:53It's much sort of slower than VSMCs.

00:30:57VSMCs can operate on the scale of hundreds of milliseconds, whereas fascia maybe a minute or so to contract.

00:31:07But once contracted, they can sort of rewire, and that's the new default.

00:31:12And I guess I'm wondering, I suspect that VSMCs might have this fine regulatory effect on neurons, but what do you think fascia regulate?

00:31:27And what do you think contractions in fascia might sort of, quote unquote, latch?

00:31:34Yeah, boy, that's an interesting question.

00:31:36I don't know.

00:31:41Yeah.

00:31:42I don't know.

00:31:44It's really, I think, you know, one area that might be relevant to this is acupuncture.

00:31:52So I've seen some good, Elaine Alange-Van in Vermont has these really interesting experiments.

00:31:59She's got this full thickness skin tissue model where she puts the needle in and, you know,

00:32:04you get this lateral view of all the layers of the fibroblasts and everything, and you put the needle in and you sort of twiddle it.

00:32:08And what she shows is that the fibroblasts grab onto the needle.

00:32:12And then by twisting it, you're pulling, you're basically making these tensile forces that spread very long range.

00:32:20So I'm not an expert on any of that connective tissue, but it's almost certainly there's going to be some kind of mechanical computation there.

00:32:27Right.

00:32:27I don't know what the endpoint is, but there's got to be.

00:32:29I would assume nature is using it.

00:32:32I mean, one thing that Josh Mongard and I have been developing recently is this idea of poly computation, where the body is a collection of observable tissue.

00:32:42that is interpreting each other and all the physical events in every which way, right?

00:32:46So I would be shocked if a dynamic like that had no observers paying attention to it.

00:32:53Right. Interesting.

00:32:55Yeah. But I don't know what exactly, I mean, I don't know which processes exactly

00:32:58would are tuned into it, but I'm sure something's watching it.

00:33:03Yeah. Yeah. Nice. That's great. Oh, so one thing that comes to mind also,

00:33:10I think you're one of the experts, if not the expert on sort of the electric fields of the body.

00:33:19And I appreciated your somewhat recent tweet about, it's really hard to measure fields and it's often,

00:33:29you can measure VVAM, the membrane potential and so on. But so caveats about,

00:33:39it's,

00:33:40sort of hard epistemologically to approach this topic. But I'm really wondering sort of

00:33:48what's sort of the basic electrical layout of the body. So, you know, as I understand it,

00:33:55you know, you have cells have a strong membrane where there's, I guess like the

00:34:03charge density of the membrane is equivalent to like a lightning. So it's like, it's like,

00:34:10very small, but very potent for its size. And then mitochondria have even stronger cell

00:34:15membranes or mitochondrial membranes. And then you also have things like

00:34:23fascia, which conduct electricity. I understand that bone is essentially calcified fascia. So

00:34:30that's also very electrically conductive. You have things like, you know, wound healing seems,

00:34:40or like wounds generate a stronger electrical field, such that, you know, maybe that helps

00:34:47things kind of reorganize and heal. But I guess I'm wondering, like, from the perspective of

00:34:58consciousness research,

00:35:00where I sort of like electromagnetism is a sort of particularly

00:35:06interesting sort of way to sort of describe the organism and like whether or not consciousness

00:35:17sort of lives in the EM field you know that's that's a rabbit hole but I'm looking at this

00:35:23in terms of Wolfram's branchial space where sort of an object's true shape lives in this branching

00:35:33space of possible ways to decohere and so if like I guess I have the idea that a mind is kind of

00:35:44a shape in branchial space and I'm very curious what the body's shape in branchial space could be

00:35:54and I guess it's my expectation that the EM fields of the body

00:36:02would say a lot about what our sort of true shape is our our shape and branchientease

00:36:08so you know I don't exactly know the questions to ask you but yeah that's kind of the setup

00:36:16yeah so so I haven't I haven't yet figured out the relationship between my model and

00:36:23and Wolfram's model of that space.

00:36:27I think that what I currently think is similarly

00:36:30that there is a basically,

00:36:34what used to be called a platonic space of forms, right?

00:36:38And that what we are building when we make cells, embryos,

00:36:45biobots, AI's, whatever, is we're making interfaces.

00:36:48Yeah, we're making interfaces to specific patterns

00:36:51in that space.

00:36:53And so, in the cellular,

00:36:55it looks like the bioelectric circuits

00:36:58are very sort of versatile in that way.

00:37:02And they can pull down lots of different patterns.

00:37:04So in the body, you have a huge number of these things.

00:37:07So you have static forces among the molecules.

00:37:10So you have different distributions of static charges,

00:37:13and then you have voltage gradients

00:37:15across intracellular membranes.

00:37:17So Golgi, ER, nuclear, envelope, of course, mitochondria,

00:37:20all of those things have a voltage gradient.

00:37:22Then the cell itself,

00:37:23has a voltage gradient across the membrane,

00:37:25but even that isn't one gradient.

00:37:27A typical cell has many different voltage domains

00:37:30across its surface.

00:37:31It's like a soccer ball of different domains.

00:37:34And then the cells come together into tissues and epithelia.

00:37:38We will have an epithelial,

00:37:41a trans-epithelial potential across them on top of that.

00:37:45Then some people, I mean, Becker and other people,

00:37:48measured this weird longitudinal electrical potential,

00:37:51which is, you know,

00:37:53basically body scale voltage differences, right?

00:37:56You got a very, very long, very long range.

00:37:59And those are all the static electric things.

00:38:03And then on top of that,

00:38:04you've got the electromagnetic components,

00:38:07which some of the voltages change very slowly.

00:38:10So the induced magnetic field is very low,

00:38:13but there are other events that produce natural EMFs

00:38:16coming off of living tissue

00:38:18and going into the ultra weak photon range, right?

00:38:22So UV photons.

00:38:23So it's sort of like just an enormous amount

00:38:27of these kinds of things going on at different scales,

00:38:30at different frequencies, all the way from DC,

00:38:33which is what we studied to light basically.

00:38:36And all of those are kind of interpenetrating

00:38:40at the same time.

00:38:41And the cells and other systems

00:38:44are trying to make sense of all of it.

00:38:45You know, they're kind of swimming in the soup of signals.

00:38:49Yeah, fascinating.

00:38:50And yeah, I guess like,

00:38:53I'm cognizant that I'm sitting with the expert here.

00:39:00And like what to you has been the most surprising

00:39:05in kind of studying this system?

00:39:09Interesting question.

00:39:12Well, I guess the most surprising thing to me so far

00:39:19has been first of all,

00:39:21just how plastic it all is.

00:39:23is. And, and the idea that evolution apparently has really

00:39:31spent most of its effort on creating a system that is able

00:39:36to creatively interpret the memories that it has, whether

00:39:41those are genetic, genetic memories, or behavioral

00:39:44memories. You know, I've been I've been playing with us with

00:39:46this bow tie architecture thing where basically, at any given

00:39:49poem moment, you don't have access to the past to but but

00:39:53you're aimed forward in prediction and, and you have to

00:39:56take the prompts that you've been given, whether those are

00:39:58your genes or your n grams

00:40:00from previous experiences or whatever they are and you have to construct the story right and so just just the ability of every day we see these amazing things that have no evolutionary precedent as such but what you're seeing is

00:40:12the evidence that that uh basically living living things are these amazing um sense making uh

00:40:19systems at multiple scales and they're using all of these computational uh affordances all the

00:40:25different layers of the body to to to tell coherent stories that may or may not bear any

00:40:30relationship to the previous story they were they were given right fascinating wow uh this kind of

00:40:36reminds me of uh sort of looking at the the vessel muscular system and sort of this idea that maybe

00:40:44in sort of some ideal idealized setup um uh the the nervous system is kind of this uh

00:40:52i think of it like a set of wind chimes and like as sensations kind of come in and hit it

00:40:59then sort of by the the presence or absence of certain sort of homes you can build a model of

00:41:06your environment your environment um and then you have these uh these sort of latches these sort of

00:41:14uh tiny areas of chronic tension and like the the resolution on these uh it's like between you know

00:41:22100

00:41:22to 400 micrometers so um that would say just in the brain uh you could have somewhere between

00:41:2921 million to 1.3 billion um i'm calling them vascular addressable units yeah um of

00:41:36differential tension uh and so like these can kind of save save patterns and over time we sort

00:41:44of accumulate uh these sort of little points of tension uh which sort of become a predictive story

00:41:52um they sort of not only encode uh what we expect from our environment descriptively but what we

00:42:02expect from our environment prescriptively uh that we they're sort of very sort of active inferency

00:42:09uh like i will i will make my environment into this uh not just i i'll like expect this uh to

00:42:17happen um and so like over time it does seem like it's a very very very very very very very very

00:42:23sort of begin to live in this story. Yeah. And sometimes, like, I guess, part of the Buddhist

00:42:32critique is that, actually, this is bad in some ways. And that it's actually hard to not live in

00:42:42a story. Yeah. And this, I think it's interesting, hearing you, you say this, that, you know, you

00:42:53are doing something that feels very similar. And that there are stories upon stories in a lot of

00:43:00systems. And this is right. And this relates to, I'm working on something I jokingly have

00:43:06provisionally titled Femto Buddhism, where, you know, you sort of asked the question, and I've had

00:43:13this discussion with, you know, the Buddhist scholars and say, well, so all living beings,

00:43:17right, under delusion, then must be liberated and all that. Yes. So, cells, right? So,

00:43:23right. Okay, yeah, I guess so. So, molecular networks inside of cells, like, what does it mean?

00:43:29Right, you know, chemistry, presumably doesn't make mistakes, developmental biology definitely

00:43:34makes mistakes. And so, is there a point in which you say, and I mean, I think people's typical

00:43:41intuitions is that, no, no, no, that stuff doesn't, it doesn't accrue karma, it doesn't get liberated,

00:43:45it just kind of does what it does. But then you have this amazing living stuff, and it has these

00:43:49issues of, right. But actually, can you actually take this all the way back to the beginning?

00:43:53Right? So, I'm interested in taking some of these concepts of what it means to be in delusion about

00:44:01your environment, and what does it mean to be in a flow state, and, you know, and have sort of more

00:44:07or less direct access to this, you know, to this information, as opposed to sort of painstakingly

00:44:14and mistakenly, often we're trying to work it out. And how does that relate to kind of least action

00:44:19laws, you know, when you have a photon that doesn't have to worry about calculating all the different

00:44:23things, right? And then you have this, you know, this, this kind of always goes in the right in the

00:44:25least action path, and what's happening, right? So, so from there, we sort of dip into this, as from

00:44:31from from the particles, we dip into this place where we as living beings have to work really hard

00:44:36to, you know, we fight for, for, for, for information, and for trying to figure out what to do.

00:44:41And then, you know, some of us, some of the geniuses, or the, the exceptional people, then

00:44:45they get into the flow state, and they're like, like the photon again. So what, what, you know,

00:44:49what does that, what does that curve look like? I think, I think, I think there's,

00:44:53there's a lot to be said about what, what, what chemistry is doing from, from, from that,

00:44:57you know, from, from that perspective. And

00:45:00the other thing that um uh i think now now i'm thinking having talked to you about this i think we uh we have something coming out with um where we took xenobots which are these like novel frog based constructs we introduced a nervous system and we wanted to see what does a nervous system look like in a being that has never had evolution shape the structure of its nervous system. Right. But we don't have a

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00:45:24And so now I'm thinking maybe the next thing we gotta do

00:45:27is we gotta introduce some vasculature

00:45:29and see what that looks like.

00:45:32Amazing.

00:45:33There's something else I wanted to show you

00:45:35before we break.

00:45:37Yeah, please.

00:45:37You wanna see a really weird vascular hydraulic computer?

00:45:43Absolutely.

00:45:43I don't know if you've ever seen this.

00:45:45This is something Naorosh and Murugan worked in my lab

00:45:49on this.

00:45:49This is physarum, the slime mold.

00:45:51And you know, physarum, it does mazes and things like that.

00:45:55I wanna show you one particular thing

00:45:58that you might appreciate.

00:46:00So here's a branch of the slime mold.

00:46:03Here's another branch.

00:46:04This thing has been injected with these little,

00:46:06they're fluorescent beads, basically.

00:46:09Okay, and so we're just gonna track the fluorescent beads.

00:46:11So, okay.

00:46:12And so what you can see here is,

00:46:15right now it's just acting like a Y splitter in a hose.

00:46:20Right?

00:46:21But each one of these little things

00:46:23is independently addressable.

00:46:25Because you can see that it like shut this off.

00:46:27This thing's still going crazy.

00:46:28This one's completely shut off.

00:46:30So this amazing fractal thing that has just tons and tons

00:46:34of these branch points,

00:46:37if all of them are independently addressable,

00:46:40first of all, what network is controlling

00:46:43which things get turned on and off, right?

00:46:45And then, and you can even see like sometimes

00:46:48it goes backwards.

00:46:48And so I don't know if there's directionality,

00:46:51to the actual synapses here,

00:46:53but there's synapses basically,

00:46:55because you can easily imagine a mechanism where,

00:46:57based on prior experience,

00:46:59this thing gets turned on or off, right?

00:47:01Right.

00:47:02That's beautiful.

00:47:03So I thought that was kind of cool.

00:47:04And like, what the heck are they computing, first of all?

00:47:07And what, again, there should be these kind of two,

00:47:10at least two overlapping systems

00:47:12where there's the hydraulic system.

00:47:13But on top of that, something has to be guiding the,

00:47:16you know, the opening of the branch points

00:47:18and the kind of the,

00:47:21yeah, the decision-making there.

00:47:22Yeah, absolutely.

00:47:24Super relevant.

00:47:25And I mean, it does also kind of call into question,

00:47:27like how do you figure out the causality

00:47:29between the systems?

00:47:31I mean, everything is regulating everything else,

00:47:33but can we sort of say, you know,

00:47:35this is the dog and that's the tail or like,

00:47:38and you know, whether it's grandeur causality or,

00:47:41you know, there are different metrics.

00:47:43And I think Eric's work would be relevant.

00:47:44Yeah, for sure.

00:47:46For sure.

00:47:47Yeah, super interesting.

00:47:49Yeah, amazing.

00:47:51Thank you so much.

00:47:51I love your work.

00:47:52I think it really opens a new, you know,

00:47:54a whole new avenue of all this stuff.

00:47:56And I think, yeah, I think we really need to,

00:47:59A, start just looking more carefully

00:48:01at the vasculature and the muscle,

00:48:05but also this kind of broadens and helps us

00:48:08to try to define metrics of stress that,

00:48:11in systems that are not, you know,

00:48:13directly mappable onto each other.

00:48:16Yeah, likewise.

00:48:17I mean, I'm such a Mike Eleven fan.

00:48:21I think it's just, what you're doing is just amazing.

00:48:23So yeah, thanks.

00:48:25Yeah, thanks so much.

00:48:26I think, you know, I think at some point it would be cool.

00:48:28I'd love to, we're all full for this semester,

00:48:31but maybe in the fall,

00:48:32if you could give a talk to our center,

00:48:33I think that would be really awesome.

00:48:35That'd be amazing.

00:48:36You know, I think people would love to,

00:48:38I think they need to know about this stuff.

00:48:41So yeah, thank you.

00:48:42Let's keep chatting.

00:48:43If you have any thoughts on kind of general definitions

00:48:46of stress in diverse models, and things like that,

00:48:51in general, I would love to talk some more about it.

00:48:53Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:54And just to inject one more kind of observation that,

00:48:59I think that like this idea of boundary conditions

00:49:04in physics, in biology, it's sort of very important.

00:49:08And I think that you have kind of this very fresh perspective

00:49:12on sort of what defines the boundary

00:49:14and sort of what defines the boundary of cooperation

00:49:17or morphological boundary and so on.

00:49:21And I guess like one of the big core challenges

00:49:27in consciousness research is determining the boundary

00:49:31of a conscious system.

00:49:32Yes.

00:49:33And that I think that your work definitely seems relevant.

00:49:38And I would also say that, you know,

00:49:40from my bias perspective,

00:49:42that this sort of branchial space view,

00:49:45this sort of viewing objects as sort of shapes

00:49:50in branchial space, you know, is a very important part of it.

00:49:52like the true shape lives in branchial space perspective.

00:49:55And that I do expect that understanding

00:50:00your work in terms of what determines boundaries in organisms, biological systems, and then does that lead to a natural boundary condition in branchial space?

00:50:15This seems very… I don't know how to solve that, but maybe you do.

00:50:23Yeah, very interesting. Okay, well, it sounds like, yeah, let's… we should… we'll have another conversation about the boundary, the whole boundary thing. I think it's super, super important.