Iain McGilchrist, Michael Levin and Richard Watson conversation 5
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- čas přidán 6. 08. 2023
- Michael Levin is a synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. He is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.
To purchase The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist
Hardback internationally Amazon.com and BookDepository.com
Hardback UK only ChannelMcGilchrist.com , Amazon.co.uk and other booksellers nationwide
Kindle on www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com
Thanks Iain for pushing to get the answer to the fundamental question and I agree it will lead to a revolution in biology.
The song idea is totally congruent with both the Australian indigenous and the Amazonian indigenous worldviews. The world is essentially a song in these cultures and we can sing with the world to co-create the world. Lovely conversation! Thank you so much 🙏❤🌏
@@lookupEdwardBernays
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In what way is life a song when genocides are common in human history, and mass quantities of humans starve in famines, etc?
@@KneeSlice1775 have you ever listened to death metal?
The synergy of these three brilliant minds is so imaginatively generative, while remaining grounded through the filter of logic and scientific method. This conversation was absolutely beautiful and inspiring to witness; and I believe it contributes to human understanding, itself a “song” that is sung and adapted through the generations. Many thanks for recording these discussions and making them available to the public.
I'm just reading The Master and His Emmisary Iain. I have always been a right hemisphere brain individual trying to fit into a left hemisphere majority. I make connections others just do not see. However your book is the light and made it all make sense. Thank you.
Same here, but what we must not forget is that the connections still need to be tested by reality. Sometimes an intuition is incorrect and that's normal to happen.
Richard’s musical metaphors are beautiful
Agree. Iain seems a bit stuck on the need for a “score”, a static representation of the information in a living (or conscious) system, whereas Richard and Michael seem more comfortable with the idea that this information can be held dynamically as waves through various types of information media (genes, neurons, ion channels etc). Humans conveyed knowledge through songs and stories long before static representations (e.g. written language and musical notation) were developed. It’s also clear that other species have their own dynamic channels for passing on knowledge that is of interest to them (within their own “problem spaces” as Michael might point out.)
@@danlindy9670 yes, I think there’s some interplay between homomorphism and mimesis happening at a fundamental level. A substrate-independent propagation of patterns with some improvisational Jazz thrown in.
Thank all you for these amazing discussions. ❤️
Thank you again, Dr. Iian McGilchrist, Michael Levin & Richard Watson, conversation #5.
This is exhilarating. Thank all of you again
Holy Moly. Around 40 minutes in and wasn't going to comment but this is so beautiful. I feel like you are talking about the relationship of 2 people. And one "The beginnings matter because you would never get to the song you are in, in this moment, which is growing enough to be able to make the choices that have lead you to this song we are in right now. One where I can determine what is good for me. And you can determine what is right for you.
I love the fact that Iain is constantly exploring new scientific theories and seeing how it plays with his theories.
GG
These are my absolute favourite videos, with Michael Levin. Thank you so much!
I don't understand why these conversations keep being rereleased as new. They've been out for a while. They're wonderful of course.
Yes, they have ❤
Language is also a great example to use for reasoning about top-down vs bottom-up, in that as we decode a sentence in the order of its words, we're constructing at the same time the top-down context (which modifies the meaning of each word / group of words), as well as the meaning of each individual word and the relationships they naturally form (groupings, bottom-up emergence).
In this sense, I like to think there are 2 bottom-up forces, and 1 top-down force.
- The top down force is the plan or song, and/or the momentum that is created by the performance. It's the large scale pattern that the bottom up elements have to sort themselves into, like a melody has to stay within a beat, or how a car cannot steer or slow down quickly once it is at speed. It's basically an environmental constraint, from the bottom-up perspective.
- The first bottom-up force is each individual note, adding to the whole.
- The second bottom-up force is the natural groupings that individual notes form (technically a top-down force that emerges from a bottom-up force, naturally formed institutions that may then become relied upon, like chords or skills).
* I suppose I should mention as a top-down force any preceding sentences in a conversation or bars in a song, but technically they're the same thing. If there is a preceding sentence or bar, its context and momentum may carry over to the next.
** From the top down you could say that there are also layers, in the sense that we have plans within plans within plans, reaching all the way down to the micro level, until the bottom-up elements reach up to meet the top-down structure. Whether things go according to plan, and the bottom-up elements shape themselves to accommodate for the top-down structure, or whether that top-down structure has to deform in order to accommodate for bottom-up elements, I suppose would depend on circumstances (constraints).
In terms of "where are the memories stored", perhaps the analogy of an orchestra isn't such a bad one? Where is the information stored, for all the musicians in the orchestra creating the music? Each has a specialised role and remembers its own part as efficiently as it can from its own perspective (they all optimise their memories for their own purposes, they have their own data structures and specific knowledge).
Should be noted there's a difference between using written music (repeating from memory) and improvising (the genre being the musical center that all musicians recognise, rather than sheet music), which you could say represent top-down and bottom-up approaches, respectively.
You could say that in order to be able to play together, western instruments have divided octaves into 12 notes (tempering of instruments), with 440 hertz being A above middle C (also known as concert pitch). The notes are 12 tonal "centers" that are used as the letters of a language that all musicians/instruments understand (with some additional symbols for modifying a sound starting from those notes/centers). Of course an instrument could have fewer than 12 notes, if so it could use a smaller vocabulary. You might also use instruments with different tempering (say non-western instruments), and of course percussion and melody read the same music differently. As long the musician knows which notes in their individual vocabulary map to which notes in the larger vocabulary, they can play together. In this sense, each musician is looking for cues in the music that map to notes or sequences in their individual vocabulary. A niche to fill, you could say.
You could see each musician's vocabulary (data structure) as a shape, with corners equal to the amount of notes, and then see how all these shapes come together and overlap to form the orchestra and the music, using the language of 12 tonal centers per octave at the highest level to communicate/coordinate.
Alright, last comment... Thanks for the wonderful conversation!
Interesting to note is also the role of the director of an orchestra. When you increase the size of an orchestra, you run into command and control problems a bit like an army does. If you put two musicians far enough away from each other, if they try to synchronise to each other (from both ends), they'll always be "off" because sound takes a while to travel (latency). The solution would be to either use a different kind of cue without latency (ignore the sound, look only at visual cues), and/or to use a centralised referee/judge that both musicians take cues from (this should also ensure that the sound is in synch at the location of the director, who is in the center).
Of course a director and a musician could be considered similar, in that a musician directs their instrument like a director directs musicians.
Can we have the link to the sound wave in 2 dimensions? That is very interesting. Thanks for this excellent meeting of minds. More please!
Another discussion! Very excited
What is that 'link in the chat' to the song-whatever? Great discussion.
+1 I’m imagining it sounds like the Close Encounters of the Third Kind spaceship
He meant their zoom chat, but it's good robask, let's see if they post it😊
Exactly what I came looking for
Thanks Iain. Good point about using models to guide a general scope but unable to provide all details.
I like the resonace thing too. Memory is hard one to pin down. I know the heart loves music, and it still feels out the most important things even when the mind cannot respond outwardly in the immediate environment.
Thanks Michael!
Keep going! These conversations get better each time. I enjoy the respectful disagreements.
Morphic resonance , R Sheldrake.
Having watched several of Dr. Levin's excellent videos, one question kept bothering me but did not seem to occur to interviewers to ask: where is this "memory" that cellular collectives use to drive towards morphogenetic goals? From what I understand, it is not a fixed Platonic form because some interventions carried out in the lab can displace the old morphogenetic end-point with a new one. So where is this dynamic memory held, at least in the context of highly plastic creatures like planarians? The idea that it is stored in some fashion in the electrical network created by the cells would seem to be negated by the experiment that slices the worm into ever-smaller pieces, an operation that would surely damage the electrical network if not destroy it. How far can you take this experiment? Would a single cell be capable of reconstituting the entire network and worm body (assuming it is immersed in the nutrient medium)? If not, how many cells do you need?
Interesting idea repeating patterns at different scales. Makes me think of miniaturisation (or compression), in that perhaps we can create certain patterns easily (if messily) at large scales (where we can manipulate them easily), then in order to be able to scale them down (to be able to use them as parts in a larger composition, say) we need to perfect them first.
Like practicing to play chords on a guitar until you can play them with a single thought (delegating the task to a subconscious sub-routine), or compressing memories by breaking down specific events into familiar patterns.
Should note by the way that patterns and sessions are essentially the same thing. A pattern is a shape in space, a session is a shape in time, both have a beginning and an end, which allows them to be distinguished and isolated/extracted from their environment, and repeated/reused if desired.
Each word in a sentence is a session, as is each sentence in a conversation, where we recognise a beginning and an end.
@@PeeGee85
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I am a soprano. My voice and singing is my reality my consciousness and my relation to the world and its complexity
link to resonance song video mentioned at 53:42 ??
Iain consistently continues to be in a different league
It's funny how so often in science we like to ask questions along the lines of "how does it know?" to which the "know" part of the question is always placed within scare quotes, because we are generally anthropomorphising about what we otherwise regard as totally inanimate matter or maybe basic lifeforms such as slime moulds without conscious apparatus. Iain asks precisely this question when discussing the case of antlers, and it was this that caused me to ponder. In saying "know" there's almost a sense of embarrassment. I guess it's just another roundabout way of arriving at the "hard question" again, since where can any line of demarcation actually lie when it comes to truly knowing, as opposed to just "knowing"? After all, the scare quotes must inevitably fall away when as parts of nature ourselves we certainly know that we know!
The temporal context is critical! I won't recognize the song if I have to wait ten days between notes. I also won't recognize the song if I must wait ten nanoseconds between notes.
Hallelujah
Unless we are ready for BIG surprises, we cannot look deeply enough into the unknown. If consciousness has any interest in human opinion, harmony may just be chaos in a state of laziness. That might explain why patterns are not making enough sense essentially.
Model:
There is a dynamic reality behind the material one, that is patterned. Patterns of activity that get repeated enough become habits and habits become instantiated in matter. Thus all the forms we see have a immaterial causative correspondent in this other realm. It's a Sheldrakean morphic resonance / neo-platonic type of thing. Yet this morphogenetic field must have some way of being physicalized in order to have any effect in the physical world, so it can't be entirely in some immaterial realm, whatever that would be. (I wonder what would those "renegades" from electrical universe community have to say about morphogenetic effects of electric fields Levin talks about, but I digress.)
Consideration:
Every thing is (weakly) a dynamical system on some range of spatio-temporal scales. As such, the dynamical systems in fact are (sparsely) coupled dynamical systems. Thus every thing is coupled, on multiple spatio-temporal scales, to other things in the world. There are systems within systems (e.g. cell within an organ within a human in a city on a continent on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy etc.) The "higher systems" create constraints for the "lower" sub-systems.
There is a nascent field of study called **Bayesian mechanics** coming out of the work on the free energy principle (K. Friston), which claims to be the physics of beliefs (see work of Sakhtivadivel and Ramstead from the VERSES lab, Levin has some tangential ties with them, I believe). The central givens in that theory are exactly the sparse couplings between dynamical systems. In other words, every thing is conceptualized as a dialectic of inside (internal system states) and outside (external system states), where the exchange happens via a set of states comprising so-called Markov blanket (J. Pearl). This economy occurs within a larger enveloping system (which itself has internal, blanket and external states). The inside-outside dialectic is shown to be equivalent to approximate Bayesian inference (belief updating). Dynamics of such belief updating is formulated, analogously to Lagrangian/Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics, as principle of least action on information manifolds (each point on the manifold is a probability density function encoding a particular belief). They call it principle of least surprise.
So what we have here so far is inside-outside dialectic. Special case of that dialectic is nestedness of one system inside another (vertical coupling). Horizontal coupling, I suppose, would be two co-equal system coupled together, like for example, you and me exchanging words in a conversation.
In neuroscience you have the increasingly popular predictive processing model of cognition and behavior, which, Vervaeke argues, bears strong structural similarities to the neo-platonic model of reality, following the Parmenidean principle: the same is for being as for thinking. The free energy principle is what undergirds, so-called active inference which is a restatement of the predictive processing model in information-theoretic terms.
Another plate: In Chris Fields' physics theory (see lecture series on Active Inference Institute YT channel), the Markov blankets are called interfaces or communication channels because they effectively constrain what can be exchanged with the outside (the other systems to which I'm coupled in divine economy). Fundamental to Fields' theory is that it is topological - not geometric - because all that is postulated there are communicating agents (inside-outside dialectic). E.g. Bob is coupled to / connected with / in contact with / exchanging information with / communicating with Alice. And, as we know, topology is only concerned with connections (only notions of closeness / neighborhood - no angles, lengths, distances etc.). Fields claims on these grounds that therefore space and time are not primary - what is primary is the interactions in this grand dynamic soup, I suppose. (Don't know where the soup, Bob or Alice come from though.)
In all of this you can ultimately see a verticality of stacking of progressively slower dynamics nesting within themselves and affording economies of faster dynamics. Wolfgang Smith in his Vertical Ascent calls this vertical causation. His view is complete inversion of the current view. He identifies the problem of todays materialist view as starting with Descartes who separated *res cogitans* from *res extensa*. Smith goes back to classical metaphysics, which says being comes from above. Thus, for example, an apple is more real than the particles that make it up.
Another plate: Alicia Juarrero in her book Dynamics in Action has created a model of intentional action combining information theory and dynamical systems theory. Attractor landscapes become important tool for viewing the nature of the coupled dynamics. I think in her view, the attractor landscape changes as the agent acts with what surrounds him, thus one can't tell ahead of time, how one would be compelled to act had one decided to act on certain decision. One has to wait as it were - to actualize the decision for the attractor landscape, as it were, to open up (the world to respond really).
My point here with regards to the forms / body plans, is that they are like grooves in the attractor landscapes. That’s what I wanted to point to in all of this. This is however older idea going back to some guy or other Sheldrake writes about in Presence of the Past. (Prigogine?)
So what I hope to have shown here by this lengthy post the following emerging themes:
- inside-boundary-outside dialectic
- information-theoretic lens on dynamical systems (leading to differential geometric treatments)
- beliefs, communication, relationality, agency
I know you don't like Wheeler's "it from bit" Iain, but it might be worthwhile to give it another look perhaps.
I think consciousness is always a variable instead of a constant?
In otherworldly consciousness is always evolving, ever changing.
Well, Ian summed it up "it is what it is" perfect
Consciousness of great people is all evolving.
Consciousness of the lowest common denominators of humanity can sometimes be like a stuck record.
@michaelnurse9089 reminds me of politicians. But is the song stuck on repeat a choice to listen to until consciousness of the individual is ready to move on? So I guess I'm saying even the lowest common denominator has some value no matter how slow it moves. It's a tool that serves the purpose of right time. Maybe? I'm just pondering. I like what you said, just made me think.
I guess I was thinking "what constitutes a great person?"
Very good then. Thank you.
Iain was trying to steer them away from the material perspective. I liked his interlocutor's arguments, especially the material-resonance hypothesis, but it was still rooted in emergence from a material substrate. If I may be so bold, I believe what Iain was getting at was that there is epi-phenomena and perhaps that's what is the, may I say, "magical" element.
Yogis, Western Mystics have always been able to directly observe the blueprint for the bodies design. It is quite clear to them that its energy is of a non-physical sort and will never be detectable with a microscope of any resolution. The problem is scientists of the 21st century are required to reject out of hand such talk, and continue in their impossible quest to try and prove the non-physical through the physical. It is simply the modern equivalent of the Questing Beast - a mythical beast that King Arthur's knights pursue but can never catch, but which distracts them from their true duties. imo Iain is different to the rest, which is why he poses these questions.
Would be interesting to see whether they think Tim Palmer’s fractal approach in The Primacy of Doubt would be helpful here.
What proportion of antler tines are Lamarkian?
"There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made the first Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony."
Tolkien didn't write that stuff from nothing - he was trying to give the English their own creation myth, something every other people on earth had their own version of.
On the question of "where does the information live?" I was kind of seeing an analogy with Taylor Polynomials (not that I'm a math genius or anything!). But the idea that a huge amount of information is contained in a point struck me as suggestive.
So it all comes down to resonance? Intuitively I felt this was the case for a long, long time. What's doing all the resonating... that's another question!
All physical things at a small enough scale break down to waves and fields and the like (which imply resonances are commonplace), quantum theory shows us that and numerous experiments show the theory holds water. That is why I considered what he said about them to be non-useful. The question is not whether such things are capable of holding the blueprint of livings forms (they seemingly are) but whether indeed they do (no good evidence that they do).
@@michaelnurse9089 Good points. When you have resonance you generally also have standing waves and these provide semi-stable patterns that might function as what appears a kind of blueprint, I guess. I think that's sort of what he was saying really. I'm being very handwaving and he was trying to be precise in ways that didn't convince me either.
Real irritating clicking sound. Buy a mic. This deserves the 8.99
I know, and Watson sounds muffled all the time. The worst is when a show acts like there's no issue, as if they can't tell what clean audio sounds like. It's even funnier when it's musicians doing this, but then a lot of them have hearing loss 😂
The clipping is like some compression artifacts and could be excess processing after show they never heard. I assume they have support crew doing some of the housekeeping and could look into their equipment & process.
I have notice some things get these artifacts on some playback software but not others. It could be find on device but then CZcams/browser messes it up.@@jonathanedwardgibson
sounds like shortwave radio. Shame
I'm going from stereo to mono, with all the clicking on top of it. Annoying would be an understatement. Peace
We imagine we’re figuring out reality but all this seeming of shining light on new perspectives is our mechanisms being enlisted by larger processes and projects we know nothing of.
I came to think of an analogy: Consciousness is a state of being aware that becomes activated each day like how the state of water changes from liquid to ice. And just as the state of water isn't any substance in itself, so too can perhaps consciousness be a state without any substance of its own.
I’m at 36:30...
I might be missing the point but if I understand the Kantian dilemma... the epistemological dilemma? correctly, that I think Iain referred to at 32 mins, in reference to Hoffman; was it roughly that we have no way of knowing ‘the thing in itself’?
I surely fail to understand this because (and thinking of Iain’s original title ‘there are no things’) how could we possibly (conceivably) know a ‘thing’ in itself? Thingness as independent of our view ‘through the glass darkly’?
Did Kant think there was a potential understanding, comprehension, only we didn’t (couldn’t) have access to it?
That doesn’t really matter (that word), when Kant said something about the stars above and the moral law within, what are these two phenomenological experiences? What is he saying?
I have some thoughts on that, unsurprisingly 🙄
In Iain’s table of contents, for The Matter Of Things, there’s a lot of focus on the concept of “truth”. I’m not saying that’s not important but, and thinking of attention being a moral act, the concept of truth can be misleading; conscience and good, or bad, faith (our intents and purposes) are paramount.
Is Hoffman’s notions about anything any more profound or important than a child’s perception of, or interaction with, a toy?
Iain seems to be part of school of thought that thinks very little of Kant. The reason being this: Any theory needs to at least withstand itself without collapsing. Kant's idea falls apart because he says we cannot know anything about anything for various reasons, but he is using mental constructs to posit this, ergo we can know nothing about his mental constructs, ergo we should not trust them and so dismiss them.
The alternative to Kant is that through perception we can know nothing about 'things in themselves' but we can get a complete picture when we use thinking to complete our knowledge. Complete perception + accurate thinking = truth. This will always be an ideal because we have neither of those outside the world of mathematics.
@@michaelnurse9089 thank you for taking the time to rather succinctly reply to my not succinct comment.
I think I understand... darkly🤷🏻♂ I’m not sure how relevant this is but do you think what Kant said about the stars (external?) and the moral law within was in any way a profound distillation of his philosophy? Epistemology? Phenomenology? Ontology? Deontology?
Or was it more in the spirit of the sort of thing Blake might have said (perhaps even more profound for it)?
The ‘stars above’ by contrast to ‘moral law within’ seems to imply a false distinction (or perhaps I’m superimposing a category error)
He’s referring to an external (objective?) phenomena, but surely more so the subjective sense of awe and wonder (thaumazein?) by contrast to moral sense (deontology?).
Any thoughts?
Secondly, re maths; are all mathematical statements, equations, (providing they have been ‘resolved’) as ‘true’ as 2+2=4?
Is not our understanding of 2+2=4 contingent upon intuition rooted in what Johnson and Lakoff demonstrate about our embodied interaction with ‘reality’?
It seems I’m oscillating about a, or the, Cartesian ‘error’ and this seems to come down to, what I think is, the most important underpinning of the hemisphere hypothesis (HH); that consciousness (not least that of the child with the toy) is fundamental to the cosmological dialectic (though I take some issue with the Hegelian dialectic; I think it may be more misleading than illuminating of the HH)
I suspect ontology is inherently ‘dialectical’ in a way that the HH gives the most profound philosophical window... maybe theological.
My, perhaps, hairsplitting quibble with Hegel’s dialectical schema (if I understand it correctly) is revealed somewhat in the etymology of ‘thesis’, which supposedly derives from ‘to place’ but I contend (if I follow the HH correctly) it is the LH that does the ‘placing’, fixing, categorising etc so the dialectic is not oscillating between ‘placing’ one way and ‘replacing’ another, to give rise to a synthesis; more an oscillation between... ‘unplaced’ (flow) and ‘placed’...
I don’t know... that seems banal... I think I may be pursuing an unfruitful line of reasoning 🤷🏻♂
No *so* succinct
Of course for ‘thesis’ ‘antithesis’ Iain speaks of ‘presents’ ‘represents’
Regarding McGilchrist's point on the difference between being able to use something for manipulation and truly understanding it, one only has to look at quantum physics. We have been using it for a century with great technological results and predictive success, but do we understand it? From the point of view of foundational understanding, we are more or less as confused today as we were a century ago.
"....we go from an excessively naive idealism to an excessively naive realism..."
Would we agree that our models, collectively are moving closer to the ultimate truth?
I would have been interested in viewing Richard's two dimensional expression video....
An interesting talk, thank you all.
functional nuero disorders rehab are teaching meditation etc... though they don't use the ancient reference or language.
this is little known and on the horizon for our tech world
AI, if it lives up to the hype, will provide Iain with all that he is looking for. Apart from it being unimaginable that it will see further than ourselves. As it stands it is a tarnished mirror.
9:30 The moment I heard you hint at the morphology (and function) of living systems being built in part upon a scaffold of emergent attractor & repulsive features, that strikes me as far more likely than Nature "trying every combination" and only the fittest surviving. That things might evolve into well fit entities AS they change in response to the local environment existing at the time seems entirely more plausible.
I think Rupert Scheldrake would be proud of you all😊
I think Levin is a bit too (neo)Platonic in his interpretation when he says things like [those forms] "are where mathematical truths are".
He reminds me of Michelangelo's famous quotes:
"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it's the task of the sculptor to discover it".
"The sculture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material".
But in fact one may say a block of stone has an infinite number of virtual statues inside it, virtual in the sense expressed by Deleuze in his reading of Bergson.
But it's the sculptor who actualizes the virtual.
Only in this sense it can truly be creation, generation of novelty (innovation).
From Deleuze, "Bergsonism":
"When certain biologists invoke a notion of organic virtuality or potentiality and nonetheless maintain that this potentiality is actualized by simple limitation of its global capacity, they clearly fall into a confusion of the virtual and the possible. For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is difference that is primary in the process of actualization - the difference between the virtual from which we begin and the actuals at which we arrive, and also the difference between the complementary lines according to which actualization takes place."
My sense is not that nature selects from a stock of pre-existing, already given forms, but rather that nature is truly creative: the forms are not already given, even though there is a process of actualization of the virtual. But from the virtual to the actual there is true innovation, true introduction of novelty.
In other words, it's the actual that imposes a constraint on the virtual, not the other way around. Once you make an angel out of your block of marble, you cannot make a devil out of the same block of marble. The actualization imposes one particular individuality, but the actualization is not limited by a predefined stock of already given forms.
The creative process of life proceeds by differentiation and diversification.
The virtual is much more like Anaximander's apeiron than like Plato's world of Ideas/Forms. And it is according to the order of time that things come into and go out of existence.
Time needs to be taken seriously. The sun is new every day, as Heraclitus said.
And what if it's in time - rather than in a someWHERE - that memory is "stored"?
I wonder if Michael is familiar with Stephen Wolfram’s work? It seems to run along very similar lines. His theory of physics maps out this ‘platonic’ space of mathematical (computational) truths, and explains how our limited, subjective, coarse grained perspective influences what we see in it. Everything, including our modern physics and quantum phenomena, are emergent from the dynamics of ‘all possible mathematical rules’ unfolded over time. Perhaps he provides a better explanation as to where this metaphysical truth or “essence” Iain feels to be missing comes from. I think he certainly expands the scope of what “mere materialism” is capable of.
And I think his explanation of how consciousness emerges is more satisfying than this panpsychist or ‘consciousness as an ontological primitive’ view, which in equating ‘how did consciousness come into being’ with ‘how did the universe come into being’ makes the former as unanswerable as the latter
If you're talking about resonance at different scales, what about laughter? ;)
How do you make the universe laugh? Scale-free humour.
Some people have a discordant laugh, which is often laughable in its own right.
what so the silvery fingernails mean?
Look and look
again perceptions
waves and particle spins
Mind and matter
Entangled maths
Geometries in matrixes
Connections and flows
In fractals
And patterns
Everything grows
I think it is bazaar to take a living thing and experiment on it tor the sake of trying to understand nothing you may never know.
audio. yeesh
33:00 would love to hear discussion between Hoffman and M Gilchrist... I find critique of M Gilchrist towards Hoffman a bit of a strawman.
wait isn't this the same as part 4?
Anyway, I don't buy the "song" argument at all, I'm afraid. I think that the other two participants, Iain and Michael, are on essentially the right track with some kind of Platonic space for these forms. Ultimately. for something like the distribution of primes, it seems that these could not be different from what they are by anything we presently understand. Ditto with triangles, circles, etc. In some sense, it seems that potential spiders and elephants already exist "out there" in some ALL-ACTUAL-POSSIBILITY space. This does seem to tie in with certain interpretations of quantum mechanics. Perhaps possibility, or more appropriately "potentiality" is the deeper truth, and what we call the "actual" is some kind of infinitesimal cross section or degraded form of that which we happen to call the real.
Another way to think about this, more specifically in terms of biology, might be to imagine that forms are more about categories of connection than actual shapes. Imagine a very large language of being in which a small section of that language pans out as what we call "real, local" effects such as friction, adhesion and so on. But the majority of that language may not be local at all, and biology may be using such connections all the time. My gut suspicion would be that those nonlocal kind of connections, especially, are tapping somehow into that existential space of all-possibility. The local ones too, of course, but maybe not so directly, more in a limited and to some extent contrived sense.
One way or another I think some kind of Platonism is upon us. Strikingly beautiful forms, and most especially in mathematics, have thoroughly ad hoc explanations without it, and we end up with arbitrary "natural laws" which are pure brute assertion. Rather, these so-called laws can be viewed as samplings from the space of possibility, where other samples could have been made. Especially with respect to spatial geometries. Mathematics tells us that our experienced spatial geometry is by no means the only one that could exist, and there are some that are very doubtful for being made into any kind of "real, local" experience at all, and yet they are a full, legitimate (full-blooded one might say) part of the possibility space, such as complex numbers for example.
On the subject of memory, as an aside, I tend to favour the notion that memory is existential access to past states of that system. Not a processing of past states (though that will undoubtedly go on as well) but a partial fold-back into those past states themselves. Indeed, this might be the normal situation for entia (hence at the quantum level so-called 'particles' seem to violate what we think of as normal temporal as well as spatial communication laws - they can "communicate" backwards in time and so forth). If memories and experiences were "stored" in the organism by some kind of solid state or even network based process, we would expect the size of that to increase in more or less linear terms for the amount of experiences encoded. This is basically a property of all such systems that we actually know to encode information in this sense...hard drives, cds, SSDs etc. But there is no evidence that I know of suggesting that people with 60 years life experience have twice the brain size or twice the connection density of someone with 30 years experience, so there is a flaw **somewhere** in the storage argument, unless one argues for massive extra storage space available (which is the way people usually try to argue their way out of this) but there's no real evidence for that either, and you should still see linear increase with amount of information encoded. I suspect that when we remember something, we are in direct noumenal contact with the original event itself in some sense, and this is not "stored" within the organism, it is extant in the possibility space, essentially eternally, and brain states are simply functioning as a kind of "pointer" system to these noumena. In this way, the historical findings of Penfield are explicable...not because he was activiating stores in the brain, but because he was inadvertantly creating brain states which were either identical with (or very close to) certain "pointer-noumenon" pairings already known to that brain.
Incidentally, in a previous installment Iain mentioned heart transplant patients who began to express the character or even the memories of the donor. This is a real phenomenon which gets little traction in mainstream, because materialists don't want to touch it. When they do, they usually imagine that chemical or protein swirling around in the system as a result of the transplant is somehow responsible. But in the terms above, you have part of another organic whole within your system now. Effectively, you are a new "hybrid whole" and I would hypothesise that you now have at least partial access to that portion of the noumenon space of event-memories formed by the donor, or perhaps even a weak access to all of them. Certainly, this is a phenomenon that makes little sense (and frankly probably no sense) if one insists only on materialist assumptions of life. Nature, as always, is the strictest teacher.
Comment.
Ah, yes, the antler thing! Even more disturbing.
The best thing about being alive is that the chump science materialists can’t figure out our consciousness. The materialism is ridiculous.
Perhaps more pertinently, they also can't figure out where the blueprint for the form of the body lies.
@@michaelnurse9089 Beautiful as well. ⭐️
Cultivate coincidence of opposites 🤪
Iain tries really hard to get across to Levin and Levin misses it. Note that Levin cites that the disposition behind his methodologies seek “control”. Again, the seeking of patterns etc seeks to break matters down to its finest parts in order to better ‘represent it’ and ultimately control it. Levin makes the claim that if this is achieved it answers the question of its ontological primitive. I can’t see how he can’t see that doesn’t work
Don’t we have to be more humble - no matter how much we know , it is nothing compared even to the 13.7 material define - cant we accept the mysterium tremendous . We could still have much matters to resolve .
I think people need to check and see if you have a god complex if you want to play god.
Complete Control.
Sorry these two English people are right out of their depth.