WEBVTT NOTE Machine-generated transcript; not human-reviewed. NOTE Canonical transcript: https://opentheory.net/transcripts/thoughtforms-life-discussion-2/ 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.480 Today, I was interested in broaching a new topic and thinking a little bit more about consciousness. 2 00:00:13.860 --> 00:00:15.040 We've discussed this a little bit. 3 00:00:16.960 --> 00:00:20.600 We talked about vasocomputation last time. 4 00:00:22.500 --> 00:00:32.040 I guess what I want to say today is maybe a potential meet-the-middle approach or merging 5 00:00:33.920 --> 00:00:41.100 what I would say Michael Levin thought with Michael Johnson thought and see where that 6 00:00:41.100 --> 00:00:41.460 can go. 7 00:00:41.820 --> 00:00:42.280 Sure. 8 00:00:42.440 --> 00:00:42.920 That's great. 9 00:00:43.020 --> 00:00:43.560 Yeah, let's do it. 10 00:00:43.860 --> 00:00:44.920 Yeah, awesome. 11 00:00:45.040 --> 00:00:48.100 So, yeah, just a few. 12 00:00:48.100 --> 00:00:49.880 I just have some notes here. 13 00:00:50.600 --> 00:00:52.580 I'll just read from them. 14 00:00:53.980 --> 00:01:03.980 Just a few notes on my approach to consciousness, dealing a lot with formalism, structuralism, 15 00:01:04.710 --> 00:01:10.420 symmetry, valence, physics, and what I'm calling strong monism. 16 00:01:11.640 --> 00:01:19.680 And then vasocomputation as the neural system and the vasomuscular system coordinating on 17 00:01:20.600 --> 00:01:20.720 patterns. 18 00:01:21.640 --> 00:01:29.200 And I guess what I would say that a big theme is how do we get to a proper science of consciousness? 19 00:01:31.240 --> 00:01:38.140 And maybe there are certain levels of organization that have somewhat unique affordances for understanding 20 00:01:38.140 --> 00:01:38.500 consciousness. 21 00:01:41.320 --> 00:01:47.460 And then I think that to put some words in your mouth here. 22 00:01:48.200 --> 00:01:50.580 I think that I agree with Michael. 23 00:01:50.600 --> 00:01:51.140 I think that we have to be very, very careful about how we read your work. 24 00:01:51.200 --> 00:01:57.300 And it's like, there's this sort of beautiful, multi-scale approach to everything. 25 00:01:58.300 --> 00:02:05.660 And so collective intelligence and diverse systems having agents and goals, or agency 26 00:02:05.660 --> 00:02:06.060 and goals. 27 00:02:06.240 --> 00:02:14.300 So, TAME, and I've heard you mentioned polycomputing, and sort of everything is doing some sort 28 00:02:14.300 --> 00:02:15.700 of processing and whatnot. 29 00:02:16.840 --> 00:02:18.580 Stressors, surprising competencies. 30 00:02:19.900 --> 00:02:20.580 So, that's a good point. 31 00:02:20.600 --> 00:02:25.980 And then sort of diverse systems having predictive models of the world, predictive world models, 32 00:02:26.020 --> 00:02:28.360 and sort of this focus on emergence. 33 00:02:31.100 --> 00:02:34.660 So yeah, I want to pause here. 34 00:02:34.760 --> 00:02:36.460 Anything else that you would add? 35 00:02:38.700 --> 00:02:43.540 Well, we can also talk about some of the latest things that I've been talking about as far 36 00:02:43.540 --> 00:02:50.280 as the role of, for lack of a better word, platonic space and so on. 37 00:02:50.600 --> 00:02:55.880 And I think, you know, also, just to mention that I don't, the majority of my work is not 38 00:02:55.880 --> 00:02:57.040 about consciousness per se. 39 00:02:57.820 --> 00:02:59.920 I've been talking about it more recently. 40 00:03:00.060 --> 00:03:05.060 And in fact, just this morning, a new talk has gone up, which was a talk I gave at a 41 00:03:05.060 --> 00:03:07.160 consciousness conference of last week. 42 00:03:07.300 --> 00:03:11.940 So I've said a few things about it, but you know, I haven't made any strong claims about 43 00:03:11.940 --> 00:03:12.280 it really. 44 00:03:12.440 --> 00:03:19.000 And certainly, I don't yet have my own theory of consciousness to put out there, but I do 45 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:19.860 think about it a bit. 46 00:03:19.900 --> 00:03:20.420 So, yeah. 47 00:03:20.600 --> 00:03:24.680 I'm happy to, you know, sort of play off of whatever you want to say about it. 48 00:03:24.900 --> 00:03:25.400 Yeah. 49 00:03:25.520 --> 00:03:25.960 Great. 50 00:03:26.540 --> 00:03:31.460 So I guess I kind of want to talk about, are cells conscious? 51 00:03:32.580 --> 00:03:39.380 And so you've dug pretty deeply into the biochemistry and sort of electrical profile of cells. 52 00:03:40.340 --> 00:03:47.740 And it's sort of one claim that I'd make here is that there are a lot of different sort 53 00:03:47.740 --> 00:03:49.840 of theories of consciousness out there. 54 00:03:50.600 --> 00:03:58.140 You know, that approach, you know, do systems have a world model? 55 00:03:58.260 --> 00:04:00.160 Do systems have integrated information? 56 00:04:01.240 --> 00:04:04.320 Markup blankets, quantum coherence, quantum decoherence? 57 00:04:05.060 --> 00:04:06.700 Are they sort of EM pockets? 58 00:04:07.740 --> 00:04:12.120 What is their shape in sort of space, I would say. 59 00:04:13.080 --> 00:04:19.320 I would say that cells are sort of this sort of interesting system where basically any, 60 00:04:20.600 --> 00:04:26.580 any theory of consciousness you come to the topic with, cells sort of check the box. 61 00:04:28.200 --> 00:04:30.060 So they're pretty interesting. 62 00:04:30.300 --> 00:04:36.340 Like I think that, like I think cells are conscious and I think you think cells are 63 00:04:36.340 --> 00:04:40.020 conscious and it would be interesting to sort of explore the biochemistry of that. 64 00:04:41.260 --> 00:04:41.780 Yeah. 65 00:04:41.900 --> 00:04:47.700 Well, I guess the first question we should talk about is, do you think that's a, is that 66 00:04:47.700 --> 00:04:50.560 a binary question that we're asking? 67 00:04:51.460 --> 00:04:54.420 In terms of things either are or are not conscious? 68 00:04:54.520 --> 00:05:00.000 Is that, how you're thinking about it or more of a continuum 69 00:05:00.100 --> 00:05:26.420 view? Right, right. Yeah. One second. I'm getting a little hot. I'll open the window here. Sure. Yeah, that's a good question. I think, you know, I think of 70 00:05:26.560 --> 00:05:27.960 InScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScript 71 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:34.520 linked to space-time and sort of as having boundaries in space-time. 72 00:05:36.840 --> 00:05:40.380 And this may be a difference in sort of how we approach this. 73 00:05:41.800 --> 00:05:50.060 And I think like my sort of kind of beat in the middle approach is like, I think that we, 74 00:05:50.240 --> 00:05:55.660 like both our sort of themes around consciousness would sort of identify the cell as sort of a 75 00:05:55.660 --> 00:06:03.580 plausible conscious system. And I think that like there's going to be like a lot of edge cases. 76 00:06:04.360 --> 00:06:12.340 And then like we can pretty confidently say, okay, like healthy neurons, 77 00:06:13.120 --> 00:06:14.660 like are generally pretty conscious. 78 00:06:17.620 --> 00:06:25.340 Yeah. So, so, you know, specifically, I think that it is, 79 00:06:25.340 --> 00:06:25.640 it is, 80 00:06:26.900 --> 00:06:36.820 I think the question is what kind and how much, and I suspect that, yeah, I mean, I do think that 81 00:06:37.780 --> 00:06:43.440 well, what, what, what we don't know yet is to what extent consciousness tracks intelligence. 82 00:06:43.740 --> 00:06:47.480 Are they, are they, they're not the same thing for sure. You know, 83 00:06:47.480 --> 00:06:50.680 Anil Seth has this diagram where they're pretty much orthogonal, you know, he's got two, 84 00:06:50.740 --> 00:06:56.600 two, two perpendicular axes before. I don't know if they're completely orthogonal or if they sort of, 85 00:06:56.660 --> 00:07:03.280 tend to tend to track each other. I suspect they do, but, but I, I think any, any system that 86 00:07:04.140 --> 00:07:08.820 has that has goal directedness and is putting forth effort to try to reach particular States, 87 00:07:08.940 --> 00:07:13.140 as opposed to other States is going to have an inner perspective that, that matters. 88 00:07:14.080 --> 00:07:18.940 And the way I, and then we'll, we'll get to, we'll get to the platonic space stuff later, 89 00:07:19.020 --> 00:07:24.980 I guess. But the way I like to think about it is that in certain kinds of systems, the, the, the, 90 00:07:26.660 --> 00:07:30.680 the way of looking at it at the world from its perspective is different. So if you have a bumpy 91 00:07:30.680 --> 00:07:37.120 landscape and you're looking and there's a bowling ball on this landscape, your view as an outside 92 00:07:37.120 --> 00:07:40.760 observer basically tells you everything you need to know. You can, you know, exactly what's going 93 00:07:40.760 --> 00:07:46.140 to happen as a third person observer. But if you have a mouse on that same landscape, your view of 94 00:07:46.140 --> 00:07:50.320 the landscape is kind of irrelevant. What matters is the mouse's view of that landscape, because it 95 00:07:50.320 --> 00:07:53.840 could be completely different. He might've been rewarded and punished at certain areas. He might 96 00:07:53.840 --> 00:07:56.640 have different, different attention, you know, all kinds of things. And so it's all very, very 97 00:07:56.660 --> 00:08:02.020 preference, whatever. So the degree to which you have to adopt the perspective of the agent in 98 00:08:02.020 --> 00:08:07.520 order to know what's going on is relevant to how much of a first person perspective they will have. 99 00:08:07.920 --> 00:08:13.000 And so, you know, I think being able to recognize that as a two way IQ test, 100 00:08:13.220 --> 00:08:18.200 you know, if we don't know how to take that first person perspective, and I think we're 101 00:08:18.200 --> 00:08:22.580 really bad at it. So people argue with me all the time, they say, you know, your liver can't be 102 00:08:22.580 --> 00:08:28.280 conscious, I'm conscious. And, you know, nobody actually has a story to tell why the electrical 103 00:08:28.280 --> 00:08:32.500 networks of the liver are somehow barred from the things that they think the electrical networks of 104 00:08:32.500 --> 00:08:36.880 the brain are doing, that there is no story like that. But everybody assumes there is. And they 105 00:08:36.880 --> 00:08:43.480 take their native, you know, certainty about these things, which just, you know, the priors that we 106 00:08:43.480 --> 00:08:48.020 got from our evolutionary history, they sort of people often mistake that from some kind of a good 107 00:08:48.020 --> 00:08:52.400 argument. So to the extent that sells, I think, 108 00:08:52.400 --> 00:08:52.560 absolutely. 109 00:08:52.580 --> 00:08:58.960 Absolutely navigate spaces with with valence and reward functions. And they have, you know, 110 00:08:58.980 --> 00:09:04.200 they have all the same mechanisms and the same evolutionary history and the same kinds of 111 00:09:05.400 --> 00:09:10.400 behavioral repertoires that we see complex organisms doing at least to a smaller extent, 112 00:09:10.520 --> 00:09:15.340 but a lot of the same stuff shows up. Yeah, I see. I see absolutely no, no, no reason why you 113 00:09:15.340 --> 00:09:19.340 wouldn't, you wouldn't think that they have a degree of consciousness. Now, personally, I think 114 00:09:19.340 --> 00:09:22.360 it goes far below that. I don't think you need to be alive or anything like a cell. 115 00:09:22.580 --> 00:09:25.460 I think you need to be alive or anything like a cell to be on that to get onto that spectrum. But 116 00:09:25.460 --> 00:09:29.240 but but anyway, the important thing is, I do think it's a it's a it's a spectrum. 117 00:09:29.920 --> 00:09:35.920 Yeah, nice. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that, um, like the sort of perspective of 118 00:09:35.920 --> 00:09:41.400 it's the perspective of the like, agent like process that matters. I think that's, that's very 119 00:09:41.400 --> 00:09:49.420 right. And I guess I'm, I think that there might be an opportunity to sort of figure out like, okay, 120 00:09:49.460 --> 00:09:50.940 what is the typology of 121 00:09:52.580 --> 00:09:59.080 a cells world model, like a cell state, world model, like what sorts of things cells might 122 00:09:59.080 --> 00:10:00.000 sense, and 123 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:12.140 overall metaphor that I'm going to is cells as qualia pixels in our canvas of experience. 124 00:10:12.980 --> 00:10:19.680 So much as we are sort of a conglomeration of cells, our experience is also a conglomeration 125 00:10:19.680 --> 00:10:30.860 of many cellular microstates. And so then you sort of can dig into, okay, what kind 126 00:10:30.860 --> 00:10:38.440 of values can these pixels take? And then what's happening when a cell depolarizes? 127 00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:48.000 And maybe the sort of intensity of the pixel is the B-mem of the cell. And then from sort 128 00:10:49.680 --> 00:10:50.280 of the 129 00:10:50.280 --> 00:10:57.340 cells are sort of faced with many, many informational imperatives, we can say, where like they 130 00:10:57.340 --> 00:11:05.260 had to understand, okay, like, is my environment dangerous? Is it acidic? And then like some 131 00:11:05.260 --> 00:11:10.780 cells like, you know, in an organism, some cells specialized in sort of detecting, you 132 00:11:10.780 --> 00:11:17.460 know, hydrogen ions in the environment. And they sort of turned into like sour taste buds. 133 00:11:18.760 --> 00:11:25.680 And likewise, you know, other cells specialized in, you know, is there umami in the environment? 134 00:11:25.840 --> 00:11:32.440 Is there like amino acids with hydrophilic side chains that could be useful, nutritious? 135 00:11:33.260 --> 00:11:40.960 So I guess I want to say that there's, it looks like to me that there's an interesting 136 00:11:40.960 --> 00:11:47.340 sort of typology of cell microstates. 137 00:11:47.340 --> 00:11:47.440 Yeah. 138 00:11:47.460 --> 00:11:55.720 And that's where, which could sort of very cleanly map potentially to micro sensations. 139 00:11:58.300 --> 00:12:08.960 Like if you took a, so basically if you just kind of categorized all the ways that sort 140 00:12:08.960 --> 00:12:16.440 of all the different cell types, you would get a list of different possible types of 141 00:12:16.440 --> 00:12:17.060 quality values. 142 00:12:17.860 --> 00:12:18.340 Yeah. 143 00:12:18.440 --> 00:12:18.960 Does that make sense? 144 00:12:19.920 --> 00:12:26.720 Yeah. Yeah. I see. And these, these, um, equalia values are qualia of the cell or, 145 00:12:26.740 --> 00:12:31.160 or when you say they're pixels, you think they, um, they somehow add up to the qualia 146 00:12:31.160 --> 00:12:34.380 of the animal that they're, that they're part of? 147 00:12:34.960 --> 00:12:39.740 Uh, I think the cell actually is conscious of that. Like that is what the cell 148 00:12:39.740 --> 00:12:45.860 feels like. And then we are sort of a super set of, uh, of these cells. 149 00:12:46.040 --> 00:12:47.360 I see. I see. I see. 150 00:12:48.140 --> 00:12:59.080 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, um, I, I, I think, I think it's, it's reasonable though. So certainly 151 00:12:59.080 --> 00:13:02.820 the first part is reasonable fit. Try trying to, trying to figure out what the world of 152 00:13:02.820 --> 00:13:08.320 a cell looks like based on the things that cares about in physiological space in the 153 00:13:08.320 --> 00:13:11.840 transcriptional space. I mean, there's a long history of this, this business of the 154 00:13:11.840 --> 00:13:16.080 umwelt, right. And trying to, trying to get inside a creature's head by, by asking yourself, 155 00:13:16.140 --> 00:13:17.420 what does it, you know, what, what does it do? What does it do? What does it do? What, 156 00:13:17.460 --> 00:13:22.980 what matters to it? I think that's reasonable. Um, I, I, so, so while, while I am a panpsychist 157 00:13:22.980 --> 00:13:28.940 in that sense, I don't actually think that we are trying to solve, uh, the combination 158 00:13:28.940 --> 00:13:32.920 problem here. That is, I don't think that our consciousness is some sort of aggregate 159 00:13:32.920 --> 00:13:40.880 or, or amalgam of our components consciousnesses. I think that we have this, this, the cells 160 00:13:40.880 --> 00:13:46.320 inside us have, have some degree of consciousness, the tissues and the organs do as well. And 161 00:13:46.320 --> 00:13:47.380 so do we, but, but. 162 00:13:47.460 --> 00:13:54.140 At every point, I don't think it's created by summing up the parts. I think the larger 163 00:13:54.140 --> 00:14:00.100 scale allows, it allows a better interface for an aggression of a more complicated consciousness 164 00:14:00.100 --> 00:14:05.000 that actually comes from this, this platonic space. Right. I think, I think our, our, our, 165 00:14:05.000 --> 00:14:12.420 our physical bodies, including embryos, you know, biobots, uh, whatever, um, robots, whatever 166 00:14:12.420 --> 00:14:17.320 are all sort of haunted by these patterns in the same way that triangular objects are 167 00:14:17.460 --> 00:14:22.600 haunted by the truths of mathematics that pertain to triangles and to, um, you know, 168 00:14:22.620 --> 00:14:25.820 prime numbers and then all of these kinds of things. It's, it's kind of like, it's like 169 00:14:25.820 --> 00:14:30.120 that, I think. So, so I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to do any kind of a summation of 170 00:14:30.120 --> 00:14:34.980 consciousness of the parts, but, but, but I do think that the cells have it in quite 171 00:14:34.980 --> 00:14:40.260 probably the components within the cells as well, actually, um, from, from what we can 172 00:14:40.260 --> 00:14:40.480 see. 173 00:14:41.260 --> 00:14:46.120 Sure. Nice. Yeah. Um, so I want to talk a little bit about the, the platonic realm. 174 00:14:46.380 --> 00:14:46.740 Uh, 175 00:14:47.680 --> 00:14:54.840 Although just to, to sort of, uh, close this loop. Um, I think that like my expectation 176 00:14:54.840 --> 00:15:00.000 is that the, the body sort of, if you look at it in four dimensions, 177 00:15:00.220 --> 00:15:02.020 sort of three dimensions plus time. 178 00:15:03.120 --> 00:15:12.040 Like consciousness is sort of, you know, these sort of, you know, probably dominantly affected 179 00:15:12.040 --> 00:15:13.680 by the EM field. 180 00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:17.480 And it may sort of... 181 00:15:19.900 --> 00:15:23.640 There's probably one sort of biggest chunk of consciousness. 182 00:15:23.740 --> 00:15:26.300 And then we call that our consciousness. 183 00:15:26.300 --> 00:15:31.800 consciousness. But there may be smaller chunks in four dimensions. And like, for example, 184 00:15:31.840 --> 00:15:38.680 the liver may have its own sort of pocket of consciousness, which we don't really have 185 00:15:38.680 --> 00:15:47.340 direct access to. And so we can interface with, but not really in control. So I guess 186 00:15:47.340 --> 00:15:53.380 I was thinking about the platonic mind hypothesis that, you know, we sort of are tapped into 187 00:15:53.380 --> 00:16:04.080 this sort of larger and almost more beautiful space of sort of dynamics of possibilities 188 00:16:04.080 --> 00:16:10.800 of these platonic forms of shapes. And you've written about this. And I guess I'm wondering, 189 00:16:11.960 --> 00:16:14.760 to what degree could they be considered symmetry groups? 190 00:16:16.580 --> 00:16:17.180 Yeah. 191 00:16:19.680 --> 00:16:35.780 Well, my current model and all of this is up for grabs, of course, but my current model is that platonic space has levels or domains, parts of which are occupied by things that we recognize from math. 192 00:16:36.640 --> 00:16:43.360 So this is where like the low agency version of things like the truths of number theory and things like that live there. 193 00:16:43.360 --> 00:16:57.820 And then there are similar regions for things, more abstract things like symmetry groups, possibly, you know, the kinds of things that Plato and others talked about, you know, beauty and things like that, right, that may be related. 194 00:16:58.840 --> 00:17:09.020 And then there are regions that are also occupied by more complex dynamic forms that we would typically recognize as behavioral propensities or kinds of minds. 195 00:17:09.540 --> 00:17:12.660 And, you know, are they the same as symmetry groups? 196 00:17:12.800 --> 00:17:13.340 I don't know. 197 00:17:13.360 --> 00:17:16.840 I probably wouldn't think so, but we don't know. 198 00:17:17.680 --> 00:17:19.660 How do you see it? 199 00:17:20.380 --> 00:17:20.840 Yeah. 200 00:17:21.300 --> 00:17:31.620 I mean, I think that past a certain point, you get to sort of this, you know, a lot of things work out to be equivalent. 201 00:17:33.080 --> 00:17:39.320 So like the platonic shapes, you know, are equivalent to like some sort of mathematical classes and so on. 202 00:17:40.520 --> 00:17:43.180 So I don't know whether to sort of anchor this. 203 00:17:43.360 --> 00:17:46.680 To symmetry groups or to sort of a more general platonic frame. 204 00:17:47.840 --> 00:17:57.620 I guess to touch, like to take this back to the sort of sensation stuff, you know, I'm, I know is I'm in awe of chemistry. 205 00:17:58.900 --> 00:18:10.620 That there's this, this sort of, we can say mesoscale structure where it's, you know, chemistry is not necessarily sort of inherently in the laws of physics. 206 00:18:10.860 --> 00:18:12.880 It's emergent from the laws of physics. 207 00:18:13.980 --> 00:18:27.020 And, you know, one of your colleagues, Eric, he all has this wonderful causal emergence 2.0 paper just kind of talking about how real our, our various things. 208 00:18:28.080 --> 00:18:32.940 And sort of can the whole be more real than the sum of its parts and so on. 209 00:18:33.120 --> 00:18:36.740 And I guess I would just observed that chemistry is surprisingly real. 210 00:18:37.900 --> 00:18:43.340 That, you know, okay, maybe what really exists is like electrons or something like that. 211 00:18:43.360 --> 00:18:49.400 or fields, or strings, or strands, or, you know, there's many sort of approaches in physics 212 00:18:49.400 --> 00:18:59.920 to sort of what really exists. But chemistry is surprisingly real. It's sort of a way of 213 00:18:59.920 --> 00:19:11.520 course-gaining reality that is surprisingly sturdy, stable, predictive, descriptive. And 214 00:19:13.360 --> 00:19:20.040 I was looking for, okay, what could analogous structures look like in consciousness? And 215 00:19:20.460 --> 00:19:30.660 so how can we course-grain sensations in a similar way? You know, I've thought about, 216 00:19:30.780 --> 00:19:35.940 okay, is there like a periodic table of qualia to be found and so on. But you know, it's 217 00:19:36.460 --> 00:19:41.260 the periodic table is based on this harmonic structure and valence shells and so on. But 218 00:19:42.380 --> 00:19:43.340 I guess like, you know, I'm not sure if I can answer that question. But I think it's 219 00:19:43.360 --> 00:19:51.120 like, the move that I would want to make is something like maybe sort of these atomic 220 00:19:51.120 --> 00:19:58.820 sensations that we have as humans, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, 221 00:19:59.120 --> 00:20:02.020 smell of citrus. 222 00:20:02.720 --> 00:20:12.420 I think David Guinty has written about 15 to 18 different types of touch receptors and done some great work there. 223 00:20:13.760 --> 00:20:24.960 And, you know, can we understand each sort of, each of these as a different sort of symmetry group or symmetry breaking event? 224 00:20:24.960 --> 00:20:43.260 And then if we could do that, I feel like then we could sort of slowly build up this basic alphabet of human sensation based on sort of what's happening in the cells themselves. 225 00:20:45.360 --> 00:20:53.520 Yeah, interesting. Do you know if, have any aspects of chemistry or chemical reactions 226 00:20:53.880 --> 00:20:54.800 been analyzed? 227 00:20:54.960 --> 00:20:59.980 For example, from the perspective of causal information theory or anything like that? 228 00:21:00.080 --> 00:21:03.900 Because we just did something like that that's coming out in a couple weeks. 229 00:21:04.160 --> 00:21:06.500 But have you seen anything like that? 230 00:21:06.940 --> 00:21:08.680 Nice. No, I haven't. 231 00:21:09.140 --> 00:21:16.080 Yeah, I hadn't either. But what we did was, this is Federico Pagosi's work in my group. 232 00:21:16.140 --> 00:21:23.680 It's really, really wild. Basically, well, I'll take a step back. 233 00:21:23.700 --> 00:21:24.540 You know, when 234 00:21:24.960 --> 00:21:28.920 you have a rat and let's say you do some associative conditioning. 235 00:21:29.140 --> 00:21:31.720 So if the rat presses the lever, it gets the reward. 236 00:21:32.000 --> 00:21:35.560 Well, we know that no individual cell has both experiences, right? 237 00:21:35.640 --> 00:21:40.100 So the foot of the rat touches the lever, the gut gets the delicious sugar. 238 00:21:40.340 --> 00:21:46.460 But you know, in order to have that associative memory, you have to be a collective intelligence. 239 00:21:46.660 --> 00:21:51.340 You have to have an integration that allows the rat to know things that none of the individual cells know. 240 00:21:51.740 --> 00:21:52.140 Yeah. 241 00:21:52.660 --> 00:21:53.360 Clear enough. 242 00:21:53.720 --> 00:21:54.940 What I wanted to know was, what are the things that the rat can do to help the individual cells? 243 00:21:54.960 --> 00:21:58.500 Does it work in the opposite direction? That is, if you train something, 244 00:21:58.820 --> 00:22:02.860 does it become more of an integrated agent by virtue of being trained? 245 00:22:03.040 --> 00:22:07.600 In other words, does forming new memories raise your causal emergence? 246 00:22:08.280 --> 00:22:12.200 And so we looked at it in the context of models of gene regulatory networks. 247 00:22:12.480 --> 00:22:16.520 So this is just chemistry. There's no cell. There's no, you know, there's nothing. 248 00:22:16.840 --> 00:22:23.380 All there is, is a set of differential equations that control how certain chemicals turn other 249 00:22:23.380 --> 00:22:24.860 chemicals on or off. That's it. 250 00:22:25.220 --> 00:22:30.320 And previously, we have a few papers previously showing that when you have a system like that, 251 00:22:30.380 --> 00:22:34.280 it can learn. It can do about six different kinds of learning. It can do habituation, 252 00:22:35.080 --> 00:22:40.740 sensitization, associative Pavlovian conditioning, and so on. So what Federico did was he looked at 253 00:22:40.740 --> 00:22:48.640 a measure of Phi D, of causal emergence as we train these things. And he found that these networks 254 00:22:49.720 --> 00:22:54.680 divide into several different categories. We don't have a good name for it yet. 255 00:22:55.260 --> 00:23:00.940 But in some of these categories, so not all networks, but some and many, 256 00:23:01.540 --> 00:23:04.260 the more you train them, the higher the causal emergence goes. 257 00:23:05.260 --> 00:23:06.140 Oh, wow. 258 00:23:07.260 --> 00:23:13.660 Yeah, it's pretty wild. They do become, I wrote a blog post about it. And at the end, 259 00:23:13.680 --> 00:23:18.840 I have a diagram of Pinocchio. And, you know, he was told, if you want to be a real boy, 260 00:23:18.940 --> 00:23:22.920 you got to go to school. And that's the thing, right? It like reifies the process of learning 261 00:23:22.920 --> 00:23:24.940 new things as a collective. Right? So, yeah, that's a good point. I think that's a good point. 262 00:23:24.960 --> 00:23:29.880 reifies the agent as a collective intelligence. And you can quantitatively, you can watch it 263 00:23:29.880 --> 00:23:36.620 happen. And there's some other interesting aspects to it. But, yeah, I mean, chemistry, apparently, 264 00:23:37.160 --> 00:23:43.340 does already have these features, you don't need to be a cell to do this. And, yeah, we have some 265 00:23:43.340 --> 00:23:50.080 other stuff that isn't public yet, that it takes it one step further, and, you know, the origin of 266 00:23:50.080 --> 00:23:54.940 these things, and so on. So, yeah, yeah, I agree with you, chemistry is already, you know, I don't 267 00:23:54.960 --> 00:24:00.080 know, I don't know what we could do below that, if there's anything, anything, you know, in the at 268 00:24:00.080 --> 00:24:04.360 the particle level that could be analyzed this way, but the chemistry is already doing it. 269 00:24:04.680 --> 00:24:09.280 Right. Nice. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like you're, you're sort of putting some 270 00:24:09.280 --> 00:24:18.580 optimization pressure on, on the integration term. And I guess what comes to mind is like, 271 00:24:19.080 --> 00:24:24.940 Zurich has this quantum Darwinism brain that like, even at physics, like physics is the product of, 272 00:24:24.960 --> 00:24:30.060 of some natural selection for patterns that can persist and copy themselves into the environment. 273 00:24:31.880 --> 00:24:38.040 When he says physics, does he mean specific physical phenomena? Or does he mean the laws 274 00:24:38.040 --> 00:24:42.580 of physics? Like, is he talking about a small and kind of multiple universes thing that's Darwinian? 275 00:24:42.660 --> 00:24:50.640 Or does he mean, within our universe, the patterns are the physical instances are trying to persist? 276 00:24:51.160 --> 00:24:54.820 I believe his work deals with the patterns in 277 00:24:54.960 --> 00:25:00.000 our universe. So kind of motifs in the, I guess the formal term would be like motifs in the Hamiltonian. 278 00:25:00.280 --> 00:25:26.600 I wouldn't want to define that. Nice. Interesting. One thing that comes to mind here, there's always these questions of everything can be multiscale. And then the next question 279 00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:45.140 is, what are the sweet spots to coarse-grain the system on? To say, okay, this is a really interesting phenomenon that doesn't necessarily happen in the same way at other scales, but it does happen at this scale. 280 00:25:45.140 --> 00:26:14.380 And so I guess my sort of attention on the cell is this sort of ping pong between hyperpolarization and depolarization. I mean, neurons and muscle cells and some obscure immune system cells and so on, they sort of obsolete between a polarized and depolarized state. 281 00:26:16.140 --> 00:26:16.420 And so I'm sort of imagining sort of a 282 00:26:17.300 --> 00:26:17.620 sort of 283 00:26:17.620 --> 00:26:25.780 computational thing. And there are like cool things to do with how muscles move and how 284 00:26:25.780 --> 00:26:33.580 neurons fire. So movement and communication sort of arise from this dance between the 285 00:26:33.580 --> 00:26:40.540 sort of really charged state and the state which happens when that charge kind of gets 286 00:26:40.540 --> 00:26:52.980 released and collapses. And the question that I'm looking at right now is sort of what 287 00:26:52.980 --> 00:27:04.980 happens to the cell's internal structure when it depolarizes. And I guess to just say a 288 00:27:04.980 --> 00:27:10.280 few words there, I'm looking at depolarization as a symmetry breaking. 289 00:27:10.540 --> 00:27:17.920 So, you know, you pump energy into it and you sort of create some symmetries and that's 290 00:27:17.920 --> 00:27:24.760 sort of, we can say the, for most cell types, that's the neutral state. And then you break 291 00:27:24.760 --> 00:27:33.500 that symmetry and it sort of, maybe physically, but more so electrically, it sort of collapses 292 00:27:33.500 --> 00:27:40.520 into a more high entropy, more directional state. And I'm just wondering, like, what 293 00:27:40.540 --> 00:27:49.840 your intuitions are in terms of, like, if there's some sort of origami, like cells origami, 294 00:27:49.980 --> 00:27:56.360 and if you pump up their energy, they sort of unfold. And then when you release the energy, 295 00:27:56.440 --> 00:28:00.000 they sort of collapse. What's that look like? 296 00:28:00.960 --> 00:28:07.900 Yeah, that's an interesting way of thinking about it. You know, what we see from our work in 297 00:28:07.900 --> 00:28:10.520 non-neural cells is that, you know, we're not going to be able to see the energy that's going to 298 00:28:10.580 --> 00:28:13.840 voltage change is slow and gradual. Now, all 299 00:28:13.840 --> 00:28:16.440 be coming out of the cell. All of these things are relative because it has a unit associated 300 00:28:16.440 --> 00:28:22.720 with it. So they seem slow or not to us, but it's all relative, of course, but slower than what you 301 00:28:22.720 --> 00:28:30.180 see and much slower than what you see in neuroscience. And the symmetry breaking that we see is spatial 302 00:28:30.180 --> 00:28:36.040 at the level of a multicellular collective. So you have an initial homogenous pattern 303 00:28:36.040 --> 00:28:43.700 of cells and you've got these, just for example, you could set up these local amplification 304 00:28:43.840 --> 00:28:49.920 long range inhibition loops that basically symmetry will break a certain cell will well 305 00:28:49.920 --> 00:28:54.080 let's say depolarize and become an organizer or something and it will automatically tell everybody 306 00:28:54.080 --> 00:28:59.200 else basically you you don't do it i'm doing it it will suppress everybody else right so that's a 307 00:28:59.200 --> 00:29:07.020 that's an example um of uh of that kind of thing and and but but in any case much like with touring 308 00:29:07.020 --> 00:29:12.780 patterns you can have uh symmetry breaking and spontaneous pattern formation in electrical 309 00:29:14.120 --> 00:29:18.900 with with no underlying hardware differences you know so purely at the level of the physiology 310 00:29:18.900 --> 00:29:25.460 that can happen so so yeah so so we see that as a multi-scale a kind of thing uh well one one thing 311 00:29:25.460 --> 00:29:30.160 that i've always wanted to do and i have a student that's actually gonna gonna try it finally is uh 312 00:29:30.580 --> 00:29:38.260 do some of the voltage mapping uh okay we've already found we've already mapped in in within 313 00:29:38.260 --> 00:29:42.840 individual cells the voltage is not homogeneous so we already know there are patterns within single 314 00:29:42.840 --> 00:29:43.760 cells but but 315 00:29:43.840 --> 00:29:49.860 most single cells are kind of featureless in the plane so we so what i want to do is work um examine 316 00:29:49.860 --> 00:29:54.660 some some very highly patterned cells so some ciliates you know we're talking paramecium 317 00:29:54.660 --> 00:29:59.700 luckily you know this this kind of thing that has that has very very uh very complex patterns 318 00:30:00.640 --> 00:30:06.580 yeah, so what does the voltage look like, right, within a single cell? Are there regions? 319 00:30:06.780 --> 00:30:12.140 I'm almost certain. We did a little bit of Stentor, I think, in an old Danny Adams paper from my group 320 00:30:12.140 --> 00:30:15.820 like a while back, but there needs to be a lot more of this done. 321 00:30:16.380 --> 00:30:24.040 Nice, nice. Yeah, that seems really interesting. And I think like one question that comes up in 322 00:30:24.040 --> 00:30:31.380 thinking about this a lot is like, you know, how do you proxy the internal structure of the cell? 323 00:30:33.720 --> 00:30:34.520 Like, you 324 00:30:34.520 --> 00:30:40.700 And what do we even mean by sort of internal structure? So, just in terms of like 325 00:30:42.400 --> 00:30:49.600 cell membrane polarity, Nick Lane has some great pieces. I think he gave a talk about what is a 326 00:30:49.600 --> 00:30:54.020 feeling in biophysical terms and like talked about sort of different, like, 327 00:30:54.040 --> 00:30:59.400 what are the different places on the membrane would be the configuration of the electrical 328 00:30:59.400 --> 00:31:05.740 membrane would correspond to sort of how the cell might feel. And I thought that was a really clever 329 00:31:05.740 --> 00:31:18.840 approach. Another sort of cluster of ideas, and I know that, so I've been speaking with Ben Anderson 330 00:31:18.840 --> 00:31:20.800 and his team. 331 00:31:20.800 --> 00:31:24.040 and a friend. 332 00:31:24.040 --> 00:31:29.380 Yeah, I've been talking to a friend, Nick Ford, about this a lot. And it's basically this idea of 333 00:31:30.320 --> 00:31:37.900 is the water within the cell structured? And this, you know, gets into Gilbert Ling's work, 334 00:31:38.080 --> 00:31:46.460 Albert St. Georgi and so on. And like this could be like an interesting proxy for what 335 00:31:46.460 --> 00:31:53.000 else is happening in the cell, but it also could be sort of causal in this, in a sense. But anyway, 336 00:31:53.120 --> 00:31:54.020 it should be a very sensitive topic. And I think that's a really good point. I think it's a really 337 00:31:54.040 --> 00:32:02.740 sensitive thing. And so I guess, have you spent much time thinking about what could be happening 338 00:32:03.280 --> 00:32:07.880 with like the water and the hydration shells around proteins and so on and so on? 339 00:32:08.540 --> 00:32:12.720 No, I haven't. I mean, it's certainly an interesting thing. You know, Jerry Pollack has 340 00:32:12.720 --> 00:32:18.840 written about this kind of stuff a lot. I'm sure there's something to it. We have not studied it 341 00:32:18.840 --> 00:32:20.660 much. We have not. Okay. 342 00:32:20.920 --> 00:32:21.400 Yeah. 343 00:32:24.340 --> 00:32:29.700 Yeah. It's just beyond, you know, I've got my hands full at this point with all the stuff we do, 344 00:32:29.760 --> 00:32:34.600 and I don't have any expertise in that anyway. But there are a number of people looking at it, 345 00:32:34.620 --> 00:32:36.460 and I'm sure there's something there. 346 00:32:37.060 --> 00:32:45.480 Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I mean, Martin Picard has also written about sort of Christie alignment. I 347 00:32:45.480 --> 00:32:49.960 might be pronouncing it wrong, but basically how mitochondria in the cell kind of align or 348 00:32:50.380 --> 00:32:51.860 can get disordered as well. 349 00:32:54.040 --> 00:33:02.840 I guess like my optimistic hope here is that a lot of these metrics might sort of overlap. 350 00:33:03.340 --> 00:33:08.100 That, you know, if you can measure Christie alignment, you're also proxying water structure, 351 00:33:08.320 --> 00:33:13.440 and you're also proxying EM fields, you're also proxying, you know, anything that sort of matters. 352 00:33:15.340 --> 00:33:17.160 But that's very weakly held. 353 00:33:20.880 --> 00:33:21.440 Yeah. 354 00:33:21.440 --> 00:33:32.140 Yeah. Yeah. I tend to think that pretty much all the materials inside a cell are A, being hacked by 355 00:33:32.140 --> 00:33:35.680 all the stuff around them. They're being used as a memory medium. They're being manipulated 356 00:33:36.240 --> 00:33:41.620 and conversely have their own, some degree of an agenda of what they're going to do in terms of 357 00:33:43.400 --> 00:33:47.620 various ends to the goal states they're trying to achieve. I would think that water was probably 358 00:33:47.620 --> 00:33:49.120 part of that. 359 00:33:50.180 --> 00:33:51.420 Right. Right. Yeah. 360 00:33:53.120 --> 00:34:01.240 Yeah. I guess like to sort of put a... 361 00:34:06.200 --> 00:34:22.400 To sort of try to say something real about sort of sensation and cells and whatnot. I 362 00:34:22.440 --> 00:34:25.220 think it's very important to think about the kinds of possible ways that cells can sort 363 00:34:25.220 --> 00:34:29.600 of depolarize or collapse into a sort of less lower charge state. 364 00:34:30.360 --> 00:34:37.540 When you say low to mid hundreds of ways, do you mean the channels that are causing 365 00:34:37.540 --> 00:34:40.580 it or do you mean the specific physiological states that they can then occupy? 366 00:34:40.900 --> 00:34:45.840 The specific physiological states, which will definitely be like correlated with 367 00:34:45.840 --> 00:34:46.440 the channels. 368 00:34:47.020 --> 00:34:52.300 So if we pretend the whole membrane has one value, then... 369 00:34:52.300 --> 00:34:52.420 Yeah. 370 00:34:52.440 --> 00:34:56.660 you're talking about a scale that basically goes from roughly zero to roughly minus 80, 371 00:34:56.840 --> 00:34:59.940 something like that. And as far as we can tell, 372 00:35:00.080 --> 00:35:05.820 the cells are only sensitive to plus or minus five millivolts, 373 00:35:05.820 --> 00:35:07.060 any given cell. 374 00:35:07.120 --> 00:35:09.300 Like it's probably not going to read any finer than that. 375 00:35:09.640 --> 00:35:16.580 So that tells you, right, that you've got a small number of tens of distinct states. 376 00:35:16.720 --> 00:35:20.240 However, the cell membrane is not a single value. 377 00:35:20.760 --> 00:35:27.820 When we've looked at it, the domains that can be different voltages are about two to 378 00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:29.260 five microns in size. 379 00:35:29.860 --> 00:35:36.640 So potentially, potentially a cell could be like a soccer ball of different polygons or 380 00:35:36.640 --> 00:35:37.420 whatever on it. 381 00:35:37.560 --> 00:35:38.880 So that's a lot more. 382 00:35:39.420 --> 00:35:44.020 And then, right, so that would be, you know, I don't know, probably in the thousands, I 383 00:35:44.020 --> 00:35:44.180 guess. 384 00:35:44.720 --> 00:35:46.460 Yeah. Interesting. 385 00:35:46.580 --> 00:35:53.480 Because my guess is, and so we don't know how finely cells react to that, you know, how 386 00:35:53.480 --> 00:35:55.420 finely do they read that whole manifold. 387 00:35:55.420 --> 00:36:01.780 But my suspicion is that it can matter, that there is a code there that it can, you know, 388 00:36:01.780 --> 00:36:02.520 that it can interpret. 389 00:36:02.900 --> 00:36:04.120 Yeah. Interesting. 390 00:36:04.500 --> 00:36:14.220 So I guess the follow up question there would be, it's like, if there are dangers to cells, 391 00:36:14.980 --> 00:36:23.000 if like there's some acid or there's a predator, there's like some bad condition, you know, 392 00:36:23.000 --> 00:36:24.600 somewhere, or there's some good conditions. 393 00:36:24.840 --> 00:36:25.360 Yeah. 394 00:36:25.420 --> 00:36:33.040 And then you know, close by and it's like what components of cells would the cell want to be 395 00:36:33.040 --> 00:36:34.040 very protective of? 396 00:36:35.940 --> 00:36:44.820 It's like, so just to like tell this sort of very simple story with water structure, you know, 397 00:36:44.820 --> 00:36:54.840 Ling talks about how the water in the cell is sort of structured around proteins and sort of 398 00:36:55.420 --> 00:37:02.380 proteins kind of get unfurled and then water sort of being a dipole molecule, it sort of 399 00:37:02.380 --> 00:37:08.260 attaches to the charge sites and then other water attaches there and they sort of hold 400 00:37:08.260 --> 00:37:13.720 the dipole such that it's a little bit more polarized. And in theory, you can get sort 401 00:37:13.720 --> 00:37:22.920 of chains of water molecules, sort of hydrating proteins. And then just like trying to tell 402 00:37:22.920 --> 00:37:30.440 the story about how Ling thought of this as like the living state and it's kind of a delicate 403 00:37:30.440 --> 00:37:40.960 balance. And then if you have something like hydrogen ions kind of trying to bump into 404 00:37:40.960 --> 00:37:49.180 this, it would disorder this system. And so it would be kind of a danger and kind of it 405 00:37:49.180 --> 00:37:52.720 would lead to symmetry breaking of this water matrix. 406 00:37:52.920 --> 00:38:04.760 In a specific sort of taste or flavor. Likewise, you'd have something like amino acids with 407 00:38:04.760 --> 00:38:10.340 hydrophobic side chains. So things that taste bitter. And if this bumped into this water 408 00:38:10.340 --> 00:38:15.380 matrix, it would also disorder. They would also sort of lead to symmetry breaking, but 409 00:38:15.380 --> 00:38:18.540 in a different motif with sort of a different flavor. 410 00:38:21.400 --> 00:38:22.880 So I guess I'm... 411 00:38:22.920 --> 00:38:30.060 I'm looking at sort of cell microstates as sort of corresponding to various symmetry 412 00:38:30.060 --> 00:38:42.520 breaks of this water matrix. Now, this is very loosely held, but I guess I think like 413 00:38:42.840 --> 00:38:49.780 a big question is like, what is the cell trying to preserve? What is the cell trying to protect? 414 00:38:51.100 --> 00:38:52.900 And like, this is one case where I'm like, I'm going to try to find out what the cell 415 00:38:54.280 --> 00:39:02.760 candidate uh but it's like sensory states will sort of revolve around like the core 416 00:39:02.760 --> 00:39:13.840 things that the cell wants to maintain we can say yeah yeah interesting um i think that's i think 417 00:39:13.840 --> 00:39:20.180 that's a good uh that's a good thing to to think about this there's an there's another issue here 418 00:39:20.180 --> 00:39:32.380 to think about which is in in induced versus intrinsic motivation so in our and this is just 419 00:39:32.380 --> 00:39:38.340 the beginning so i i'm not certain about you know what what the what the bigger picture is going to 420 00:39:38.340 --> 00:39:44.160 be but but in our in our work on sorting algorithms yeah these are short deterministic 421 00:39:44.160 --> 00:39:49.560 algorithms to sort numbers what we found is that there's the thing that 422 00:39:50.180 --> 00:39:56.120 we make it do via the algorithm which is to sort numbers and yeah sorts numbers all right but also 423 00:39:56.540 --> 00:40:00.000 there are these weird side quests that it takes that are nowhere in the algorithm 424 00:40:00.240 --> 00:40:22.640 They're not prohibited by the algorithm, but neither are they you know uh instantiated by it they're sort of and so and so you can loosely i so so i've been playing with this with this notion of there's the there's the reward function that we force on it but but then there's the intrinsic motivation so i think you can sort of see that in biology too so evolution would be 425 00:40:22.680 --> 00:40:24.080 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426 00:40:24.080 --> 00:40:29.660 say you have to do this and this but in the meantime there's some others that as long as 427 00:40:29.660 --> 00:40:34.860 you don't interfere too badly with it too much of the time you're also free to do some other stuff 428 00:40:34.860 --> 00:40:40.720 and what that other stuff you know we're used to i think we're very used to looking at biological 429 00:40:40.720 --> 00:40:45.840 functions from that evolutionary lens and saying okay why is it doing that that's got to be good 430 00:40:45.840 --> 00:40:49.720 for reproduction or it's got to be it's got to be a side effect of something else that's good 431 00:40:49.720 --> 00:40:56.320 for reproduction or you know but i have a feeling that that there's also a bunch of other stuff that 432 00:40:56.320 --> 00:41:01.980 things are doing even very simple things are probably doing other things that i don't think 433 00:41:01.980 --> 00:41:08.540 are coming directly from any of their experiences in the physical world maybe you know whether we 434 00:41:08.540 --> 00:41:13.880 can flesh out a theory of of platonic space for it or yeah i don't know but you know it's like 435 00:41:13.880 --> 00:41:18.100 it's like some of the stuff that we see the xenobots and the anthropos doing like they do 436 00:41:18.100 --> 00:41:19.700 things that were clearly evolutionally 437 00:41:19.720 --> 00:41:25.200 important for their primary goal but or their primary lifestyle i should say but when you take 438 00:41:25.200 --> 00:41:29.780 them out of that lifestyle then you get to find out here's what it would be doing if the other 439 00:41:29.780 --> 00:41:34.180 cells didn't force it to be a two-dimensional skin layer on the outside of the embryo right 440 00:41:34.180 --> 00:41:40.320 and normally all that is suppressed and it's it's sort of um uh you know it's like it's like uh 441 00:41:41.080 --> 00:41:45.500 you know forcing a kid to sit in class and do math you don't get to find out what else you'd 442 00:41:45.500 --> 00:41:49.700 be doing if you if you weren't doing that right but if you but if you let up to some extent then 443 00:41:49.720 --> 00:41:54.380 then then you get to find out what the intrinsic motivation is and then possibly possibly you work 444 00:41:54.380 --> 00:42:00.220 with that right so there are of course you know educational um uh philosophies that that target 445 00:42:00.220 --> 00:42:06.240 that as opposed to trying to you know do a a strict reward function so so i wonder you know 446 00:42:06.240 --> 00:42:10.560 when we look at these cells i wonder how much of that and and that also relates to some other 447 00:42:10.560 --> 00:42:16.760 conversations that i've had with other people about whether problem solving so we've cashed out 448 00:42:16.760 --> 00:42:19.700 all when we study intelligence i define it as a problem solving problem solving is a problem solving 449 00:42:19.720 --> 00:42:23.640 it as problem solving so goal directed problem solving but that's just for convenience there are 450 00:42:23.640 --> 00:42:27.840 of course other aspects of being cognitive that have nothing to do with with that they're you 451 00:42:27.840 --> 00:42:31.940 know just play exploration right there's all this other stuff that isn't captured by the by this 452 00:42:31.940 --> 00:42:36.360 kind of thing and so we talked about what does that like we all know what it looks like when 453 00:42:36.360 --> 00:42:40.920 birds and mammals play so you can see crows doing these things you know they're sliding down roofs 454 00:42:40.920 --> 00:42:44.840 on these on these little little flat things that they've you know found somewhere and they you know 455 00:42:44.840 --> 00:42:48.640 clearly like they're just having fun you can you can see it it's not anything useful that they're 456 00:42:48.640 --> 00:42:49.700 doing so so the question is what do you think about that and what do you think about that and 457 00:42:49.720 --> 00:42:53.740 question is what what does it look like when cells do this so right so there's the evolutionary 458 00:42:54.180 --> 00:42:58.120 extrinsic motivation like yeah you have to keep your ph in this level if you don't do that you're 459 00:42:58.120 --> 00:43:03.940 going to die fine right but alongside of that what does what does play look like on the cellular scale 460 00:43:03.940 --> 00:43:08.600 what what else are you doing and you know and and these you know some people say well cells are too 461 00:43:08.600 --> 00:43:13.560 simple to do that if six if if bubble sword can do it i'm pretty sure cells can do it and and you 462 00:43:13.560 --> 00:43:19.180 know and so i think i think we're just bad at noticing it is all it is and we need to uh 463 00:43:19.720 --> 00:43:24.780 as much as we've been focusing on intelligence and problem solving we we or somebody needs to 464 00:43:24.780 --> 00:43:30.380 needs to develop uh some tools to be able to recognize play and exploration in unconventional 465 00:43:30.920 --> 00:43:38.620 embodiments yeah yeah nice that's great um i'm i'm such a fan of your your work on xenobots 466 00:43:38.620 --> 00:43:43.980 yeah good stuff um and i guess like i was thinking about you know what is 467 00:43:44.400 --> 00:43:48.860 you know if we if we take the perspective of um cells as quality pixels 468 00:43:49.720 --> 00:43:55.700 um uh although i i keep wanting to use the word quarks as quality pixels 469 00:43:55.700 --> 00:44:04.760 i'm getting some pushback on that but um but then uh uh you know taking a look at like what is like 470 00:44:04.760 --> 00:44:13.260 a lone xenobot uh look like as a as sort of a dynamic quality pixel how does it how does its 471 00:44:13.260 --> 00:44:18.680 value change uh in different environments and like is it this sort of unitary pixel 472 00:44:19.720 --> 00:44:26.160 uh that the best way to look at it is like okay like there's the xenobot there's the cell and it 473 00:44:26.160 --> 00:44:34.180 has a value or um is it heterogeneous and that you know maybe we could think of its mitochondria 474 00:44:34.180 --> 00:44:46.280 as its pixels um so yeah yeah i don't have a clear answer there yeah yeah it's a good question 475 00:44:46.280 --> 00:44:47.500 that's a good question uh 476 00:44:51.620 --> 00:44:54.880 yeah yeah i don't know i guess i guess we'll have to we'll have to see uh 477 00:44:55.340 --> 00:45:00.000 to what extent we end up needing to solve some kind of a summation function 478 00:45:00.680 --> 00:45:18.080 Function or not, or whether it's just completely different types of consciousness that shows up when you make a particular interface. Yeah, I'm not sure how much, how constraining the parts are. 479 00:45:18.540 --> 00:45:19.140 Yep. 480 00:45:21.080 --> 00:45:26.340 For what you get. The causal architecture is clearly important in some way, but. 481 00:45:27.940 --> 00:45:31.720 Right, right. Yeah, and I guess this gets into questions of, 482 00:45:33.280 --> 00:45:40.780 does consciousness require definite extension and location in space and time? 483 00:45:42.540 --> 00:45:47.040 Or can it be more of a logical computational thing? 484 00:45:47.640 --> 00:45:49.960 Yeah. I mean, I tend to think that 485 00:45:52.040 --> 00:45:55.780 a particular embodiment of consciousness 486 00:45:56.340 --> 00:46:02.140 will have location in space and time. That location will be fuzzy to some extent because 487 00:46:02.140 --> 00:46:08.160 there is no unified, there is no indivisible intelligence anywhere. We're all made of parts, 488 00:46:08.200 --> 00:46:11.920 we're all collective intelligence. And so, I don't know, once you get to electrons or something, 489 00:46:12.040 --> 00:46:19.080 I don't know what the deal is in physics. So it's going to be a little bit fuzzy. 490 00:46:19.300 --> 00:46:25.320 But the other question that this brings up is, to what extent are there lateral interactions within 491 00:46:26.340 --> 00:46:32.100 space in addition to, among things that are not currently coming through any interface? 492 00:46:32.340 --> 00:46:38.200 Because if they are not static, which I strongly suspect is the case, 493 00:46:38.300 --> 00:46:43.400 then there will be some sort of its own chemistry of patterns in that space that 494 00:46:43.400 --> 00:46:46.480 are doing things regardless of their connection in the physical world. 495 00:46:46.860 --> 00:46:47.340 Yeah. 496 00:46:47.900 --> 00:46:56.100 And those things, then how much spatiality there is, I sort of, I can sort of imagine that it's not, 497 00:46:56.340 --> 00:47:00.040 it's not spatial the way we're, it doesn't have a location the way we're used to, 498 00:47:00.120 --> 00:47:05.920 but it's much more, it's almost like a, it's almost like a content addressable memory instead 499 00:47:05.920 --> 00:47:10.360 of a location addressable, right? So instead of saying, this is where this information is, 500 00:47:10.400 --> 00:47:14.520 it's like, well, what is this information about? Well, then it must be somewhere near this other 501 00:47:14.520 --> 00:47:17.740 thing, which is about the same thing, right? So something like that. 502 00:47:20.120 --> 00:47:26.320 Yeah, that makes sense. Interesting. I guess one, one sort of, 503 00:47:27.340 --> 00:47:37.360 for this sort of analysis is that it's always a question of, for me, so I guess nine years ago now, 504 00:47:37.500 --> 00:47:46.560 I had came out with this symmetry theory of valence. And sort of similar to what you've said 505 00:47:46.560 --> 00:47:53.560 about sort of geometric frustration is real frustration. And it's sort of, if we had a 506 00:47:53.560 --> 00:47:57.140 mathematical representation of an experience, the 507 00:47:57.340 --> 00:48:03.700 symmetry of this representation would correspond to the pleasantness of the experience. So wrote a 508 00:48:03.700 --> 00:48:13.540 short book on this. Yeah. And so it's sort of, it's speaking about, you know, a formalism of an 509 00:48:13.540 --> 00:48:18.780 experience and, you know, not necessarily making a big claim in terms of how to create the formalism, 510 00:48:18.840 --> 00:48:26.940 but if we had a formalism, how to interpret it. Yeah. And then, but I, I'm always eager 511 00:48:26.940 --> 00:48:27.320 to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, 512 00:48:27.340 --> 00:48:33.400 to try to apply it to biological systems. Yeah. And, you know, there's, there's been a lot of 513 00:48:33.400 --> 00:48:40.340 questions about, well, how do you apply it to, to brain or to a nervous system? And I guess I'm, 514 00:48:40.340 --> 00:48:48.200 I'm optimistic that it can be applied to like a cells symmetry group. Although there's a big 515 00:48:48.200 --> 00:48:52.440 question of how do you coarse grain a cell symmetry group? I think, you know, I think 516 00:48:52.440 --> 00:48:55.960 it'd be interesting to try to apply some of these things to, 517 00:48:57.880 --> 00:49:03.960 data in, for example, transcriptional space, right. So omix data. What does, what does symmetry, 518 00:49:04.320 --> 00:49:08.580 you know, beauty, what does all that stuff look like in the, in that space? 519 00:49:08.700 --> 00:49:12.460 We're already trying to think about, what does it look like to have 520 00:49:12.460 --> 00:49:16.700 barriers? What does it look like to have, you know, what does a mirror test look like in, 521 00:49:16.720 --> 00:49:20.680 in, in, you know, in transcriptional space? Yeah. It's been very hard to think about these things 522 00:49:20.680 --> 00:49:26.480 cause we're so obsessed with the three-dimensional world and so on. But I feel like all this can be 523 00:49:26.480 --> 00:49:27.320 defined and, and so I'm looking at it in a more qualitative and qualitative perspective. 524 00:49:27.340 --> 00:49:31.700 and it would be interesting to see what does symmetry breaking look like in that, 525 00:49:32.280 --> 00:49:33.900 you know, in these other spaces. 526 00:49:34.880 --> 00:49:35.920 Right, right. 527 00:49:36.960 --> 00:49:42.620 Well, yeah, one thing that comes to mind is I do think that symmetry breaking 528 00:49:42.620 --> 00:49:46.520 is directional, which is, it's a very useful property. 529 00:49:47.660 --> 00:49:50.920 So it's like you have the symmetries of a system, 530 00:49:51.040 --> 00:49:55.740 and like a starfish is a pretty simple example where it's just basically 531 00:49:57.340 --> 00:49:57.840 a ring of neurons. 532 00:49:59.060 --> 00:49:59.820 And then 533 00:50:00.000 --> 00:50:26.620 symmetry is the success condition. It's like homeostatic success. And then if a fish comes and starts nibbling on a leg, then the symmetry gets broken in a way that the different parts of an organism can tell where the problem is. There's kind of a lensing effect. And then the starfish can move or 534 00:50:28.000 --> 00:50:57.660 adapt to that. And then once it's safe again, the symmetry gets restored. So I guess in terms of looking at transcription networks and so on, I don't know. But it does seem like there's some sort of directional high information perspective that the system can take, such that if you have a 535 00:50:58.000 --> 00:51:04.240 symmetry and it gets broken, then every part of the system knows a little bit about where the problem is. 536 00:51:06.060 --> 00:51:27.520 That's very interesting. So what I'm hearing is symmetry breaking as a cognitive glue. So some kind of non-locality that is... And yeah, I can see how that would be connected to geometric 537 00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:56.900 illustration, right? And so, yeah. And you'd have some sort of propagation speed of light thing for getting it around. But yeah, I think that's very interesting. I think that's worth more development as symmetry breaking as a binding set of policies that create the collective intelligence. I think that's a cool idea. 538 00:51:58.000 --> 00:51:58.480 Yeah, nice. 539 00:51:59.040 --> 00:51:59.340 Yeah. 540 00:52:00.460 --> 00:52:01.060 Nice. 541 00:52:01.760 --> 00:52:02.360 Yeah. 542 00:52:03.600 --> 00:52:13.720 Nice. Well, I'm mindful of your time. But yeah, any other cool things to talk about? 543 00:52:14.960 --> 00:52:16.720 Let me think. 544 00:52:18.280 --> 00:52:26.280 I was looking at my notes. We covered most of what I wanted. Yeah, let's go off and think about this symmetry breaking business. 545 00:52:26.420 --> 00:52:27.920 And we could... 546 00:52:28.000 --> 00:52:34.540 Yeah, I think we could look for it if we knew how to recognize it in the abstract, like in its general form. 547 00:52:35.380 --> 00:52:35.920 Yeah. 548 00:52:37.760 --> 00:52:38.300 Yeah. 549 00:52:42.000 --> 00:52:42.540 Yeah. 550 00:52:42.540 --> 00:52:54.900 Yeah. I mean, just a few words on that. So there are different numbers of symmetry in different dimensions. I think in 2D, there are 17 sort of wallpaper symmetry groups. 551 00:52:55.660 --> 00:52:57.980 Like, you know, different ways things can... 552 00:52:57.980 --> 00:53:01.900 get flipped or rotated. Frank Wilczek has this nice 553 00:53:03.100 --> 00:53:09.800 um definition of symmetry as change without change yeah yeah anytime you can apply an 554 00:53:09.800 --> 00:53:15.520 operation to a system but leave it yeah same thing yeah and then there there's something 555 00:53:15.520 --> 00:53:22.640 like you know 300 plus symmetries in in 3D and I think almost 4,000 and 4D although you might 556 00:53:22.640 --> 00:53:30.640 want to check my numbers on this uh but yeah um and then I guess I see in yeah go ahead so I was 557 00:53:30.640 --> 00:53:35.320 just gonna say that that by itself is one of these you know people people often ask you what you know 558 00:53:35.320 --> 00:53:41.340 what do you mean by by by facts that that don't have a physics I mean that right there like like 559 00:53:41.340 --> 00:53:46.380 the number of these groups at under various circumstances that's just what it is yeah yeah 560 00:53:46.380 --> 00:53:50.880 that's just that's just how it is that's it there's no you know there's no there's no fact 561 00:53:50.880 --> 00:53:54.800 of physics there's no history there's nothing that's gonna that's gonna I mean you know underlie 562 00:53:54.800 --> 00:53:59.460 that as a more reductive explanation it just is what it is yeah totally I think I think that's 563 00:53:59.460 --> 00:54:00.420 really interesting yeah 564 00:54:00.640 --> 00:54:08.840 nice yeah I I also see that uh so the the symmetries of a self-organizing system 565 00:54:08.840 --> 00:54:16.900 um I almost see as sort of kaleidoscopic grooves that the system can sort of follow to get back 566 00:54:16.900 --> 00:54:28.560 into a state of order um so my water has uh I believe tetrahedral symmetry uh so I I believe 567 00:54:28.560 --> 00:54:30.560 that's exactly like 24 symmetry 568 00:54:30.640 --> 00:54:32.700 um and 569 00:54:33.980 --> 00:54:34.600 like 570 00:54:34.600 --> 00:54:36.200 and like every symmetry is sort of a 571 00:54:36.200 --> 00:54:36.320 every symmetry is sort of a 572 00:54:36.320 --> 00:54:39.460 every symmetry is sort of a like I I think of them like as like grooves 573 00:54:39.460 --> 00:54:39.660 like I I think of them like as like grooves 574 00:54:39.660 --> 00:54:41.260 like I I think of them like as like grooves in a kaleidoscope that you can kind of 575 00:54:41.260 --> 00:54:41.600 in a kaleidoscope that you can kind of 576 00:54:41.600 --> 00:54:42.400 in a kaleidoscope that you can kind of um uh 577 00:54:42.400 --> 00:54:42.800 um uh 578 00:54:42.800 --> 00:54:44.060 um uh follow back to order 579 00:54:44.060 --> 00:54:44.320 follow back to order 580 00:54:44.320 --> 00:54:48.240 follow back to order and it would be interesting to do this 581 00:54:48.240 --> 00:54:48.260 and it would be interesting to do this 582 00:54:48.260 --> 00:54:50.480 and it would be interesting to do this sort of analysis for your Gene regulatory 583 00:54:50.480 --> 00:54:52.900 sort of analysis for your Gene regulatory networks I I yeah I think I think it 584 00:54:52.900 --> 00:55:00.000 networks I I yeah I think I think 585 00:55:00.120 --> 00:55:16.680 the calculation. But I think that would be quite interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we have, of course there's genomic data, there's transcriptomic data. We have electrophysiological data. We have lots of simulations so we could look at it in, you know, sort of in silico 586 00:55:16.940 --> 00:55:18.340 InScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScriptScript 587 00:55:18.340 --> 00:55:18.520 that.