Iain McGilchrist, Michael Levin and Richard Watson conversation 4
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- čas přidán 20. 07. 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
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This is truly wonderful. Thank you all🙏
Absolutely brilliant monologue at roughly 23:00mins in, I very, very much appreciated that ranty tangent, thank you.
I’m very happy to hear more disagreements in this session. Please keep having these conversations, and do let us hear them 😃 Thank you all 🙏
This is another brilliant and creative discussion with Dr. Iian McGilchrist, Michael Levin, and Richard Watson that I have heard once before.
As àlways, I am truly grateful as I listen to many over and over again and guiding people ,hopefully, to these programs and conversations.
There is one writer that I would like to ask anyone of you if you have read her novels?
Clarise Lespector. She was born in the Russian Empire who conquered Brazilian and Portuguese literature, and her novels have bewitched millions throughout the world.
She was born into a Jewish family only three years after the Bolshevick Revolution of 1917. Lispector's family moved to Brazil when she was one year old. In 1930, her mother was paralyzed and died in 1930 when she was nine years old.
Her history his remarkable and and she is definitely one of my favorite writers. Among many other writers from South America.
Today my favorite is Isabella Allendre who is now 80 wrote her first book at the age of 40, "The House of Spirits," She was born in Chili, but moved to Venezuela, because of the revolution in 1981. She has written 26 books and her new one is ,"The Wind Knows My Name." I have to buy this one.
But getting back to Clarise, her novels are exhilarating, "Near to the Wild Heart," published in 1943.
This novel challenges the story who has an animalistic side that challenges society's expectation. It is told through in a flashbacks in a consciousness style.
Published in 1964,"The Passion according to G.H." Absolutely my favorite, to make brief comment is about her maid and her killing of a coachroach. The effect breaks her body down. Her identity crumbles down. She comes to the realization that the crashed body of the coachroach contains essential elements that also makes her own. It's the same matter. The physical and spiritualizations just like some insectorous animal like a lizard devours an insect for food.
"Aqua viva" (The Stream of Life) published in 1973, considered her best work. The title means living in water.
A stream that bubbles through inner turmour. This novel breaths as a wind blows through it or a tumbleweed that rolls arouns in the wind. I want slendor succulents in all fruits and vast distances of my savage intuition of my self.
1, Life's water
2. We are lkike water
3.We bubbles out of earth
4.We crawl like a stream
5.We tumble like a waterfall
6. We scream and roar like a torrent.
7.We are the ocean
8. We are the limitless, boundless amd endless.
As soon as you name it, you limit it. It was wriiten in a style that anthing goes. The unconscious is without limit and it is consciousness that put a limit on it. She quoted: What beautiful deaths I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air, it is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. "I am sensing you a chamber writing."
One must read all her novels.
With the deepest appreciation and respect for all of you this morning 🌄
"When you get close to the truth, the paradox is what you find." -I.M.
In your own words, define “TRUTH”. ☝️🤔☝️
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices in your own words, define, "DEFINE". Haha just kidding...kinda.
Truth may be related to true, as it is used in carpentry, such as, at the proper angle to. Positioning oneself at the right angle to something allows for a useful and reliable construction to occur. Maybe truth is like that. We take a perspective or angle on something that is right or true. The truth might be what we realized from that proper angle or framing. One caveat is that there may or may not be just one proper angle.
That's the best I can do without thinking about it for a thousand years. I'm certainly wrong. Do you have a definition for TRUTH or DEFINE?
@@S.G.Wallner
The word “TRUTH” (“satyam”, “tathya”, “tattva”, or “siddhānta”, in Sanskrit) is one of the most greatly-misused terms in the English tongue.
Anything that has ever been written or spoken, by even the greatest sage or Avatāra (incarnation of Divinity, assuming such a phenomenon exists - see the Glossary for that word), including every single postulation within this Holiest of Holy Scriptures, “F.I.S.H”, is merely a CONCEPT (that is, an idea, or a notion that belongs to the sphere of relative truth) and not “The Truth”, at least in the Absolute sense of the term.
A concept is either accurate or inaccurate. Virtually all concepts are inaccurate to a degree. However, some concepts are far more accurate than others. For example, the personal conception of Ultimate Reality (God or The Goddess) is inaccurate to a large extent (see Chapter 07). The concept of Ultimate Reality being singular (“All is One”) is far more accurate. The transcendence of BOTH the above concepts (non-duality) is excruciatingly accurate. However, none of these concepts is “The Truth” as such, since all ideas are relative, whilst The Truth is Absolute.
A BELIEF is an unhealthy and somewhat problematic relationship one has with a certain concept or idea, due to misapprehension of life as it is, objectively-speaking. Attachment to beliefs, particularly in the presumption of individual free-will, is the cause of all psychological suffering.
RELATIVE Vs ABSOLUTE TRUTH:
It is VITALLY important to distinguish between relative truth and Absolute Truth. Relative truth is temporal, mutable, subjective, dependent, immanent, differentiated, conditioned, finite, complex, reducible, imperfect, and contingent, whilst Absolute Truth is eternal, immutable, objective, independent, transcendent, undifferentiated, unconditional, infinite, non-dual (i.e. simple), irreducible, perfect, and necessary.
Absolute Truth is the ground of all being (“Brahman”, in Sanskrit), and is prior to any mind, matter, name, form, intent, thought, word, or deed.
The ONLY Real Truth in the phenomenal manifestation is the impersonal sense of being, that is, the sense of “I am” (“aham”, in Sanskrit).
Everything else is merely transient and unreal (“unreal” for that very reason - because it is ever-mutating, lacking permanence and stability).
This sense of haecceity is otherwise called “Infinite Awareness”, “Spirit”, “God”, “The Ground of Being”, “Necessary Existence“, “The Higher Self”, as well as various other epithets, for it is the very essence of one’s being. Chapters 06 and 10 deal more fully with this subject matter.
Of course, for one who is fully self-realized and enlightened, the subject-object duality has collapsed. Therefore, a fully-awakened individual does not perceive any REAL difference between himself and the external world, and so, sees everything in himself, and himself in everything.
TRUTH IS UNBEARABLE:
If it is true that there are none so blind as those who don’t WANT to see, and none so deaf as those who don’t WANT to hear, then surely, there are none so ignorant as those who don’t WANT to learn the truth.
Obviously, in the previous sentence, and in most other references to the word “truth” within this book, it is meant “the most accurate concept possible”, or at least “an extremely accurate fact”. For example, as unmistakably demonstrated in Chapters 21 and 22 of this Holiest of Holy Scriptures, “A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, it is undoubtedly “true” (i.e. accurate) that a divinely-instituted monarchy is the most favourable form of national governance, but that is not the Absolute Truth, which is the impersonal, never-changing foundation of all being.
So, to put it succinctly, all “truths” are relative concepts (even if they are very accurate) but the Universal Self alone is REAL (Absolute) Truth.
“In the absence of both the belief ‘I am the body’ and in the absence of the belief that ‘I am not the body’, what is left is what we really are.
We don’t need to define what we really are. We don’t need to create a thought to tell us what we are. What we are is what TRUTH is."
Roger Castillo,
Australian Spiritual Teacher, 15/07/2015.
“The significance of true philosophy, is that it works - in the sense, that it's strength lies not in its words, but in the active practice of it.”
*************
“The identified man takes part in things and suffers. The unidentified man merely watches the spectacle.
The identified man tries to understand truth, while the unidentified man experiences it.”
Ramesh S. Balsekar,
Indian Spiritual Teacher.
“I am the TRUTH...” “...and the TRUTH shall set you free”.
“The Gospel According to John” 14:16 & 8:32 (attributed to Lord Jesus Christ).
“When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.”
From Chapter 2 of “Tao Te Ching”,
Laozi (or Lao-Tzu).
I like this . Very interesting and a little frightening at times. I feel that truth is ever changing and flows properly when allowed to. However, everyone has their own truth, that can lie stagnant when fear freezes it in place; Then it is no longer the truth, it becomes a lie.
I find the word lie is in much more need of understanding. For a lie leaves the truth laying flat and frozen in time.
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices very thorough. maybe too thorough for me to wrap my arms around. I am a simple person. I can pull out a few headlines from you explanation, and I think our answers align in some ways, maybe about the relative nature of external truths. I agree, not in a solipsistic way that the only truth I am certain of is that I am, and that I am a part of something bigger.
Now...can you define, DEFINE? haha.
Full of gems (again). This is great and thanks for this.
So interesting and thought-provoking. Our brains, imaginings and, feelings interact; we ask questions and extrapolate answers. I moved to scan a Netflix docuseries called Dogs - Episode 1. It answered, for me, those questions that were asked during the above referenced conversation. I cannot imagine any AI/machine evoking the lessons, learning, love, and emotional involvement that I saw in Episode 1. Thanks for all that you.
About 10 minutes in. I think we evolve our denials or we evolve our truths. And who knows which one will overcome. I would have to say truth, hopefully, for myself.
I also love the concept of responsiveness being tied to responsibility. Very cool.❤ Responsiveness is an important spice of life. Soo good.
I'm interested in how an organism might go beyond, extend or expand from it's cognitive light cone. Imagination, hope, inspiration, creativity?
By raising its process response time as well as its Model predictive control horizon. As for the model using process mining to identify new fundamental and derivative refrence signals, while maintaining a feasible metabolic and allostatic load schedule. This means scheduling positive eroi behaviours within the elastic limit of the system/organism. The time dependency then forces a prioritisation of models that are true and whose predictions are beneficial to improving the outcomes of the current feasible schedule
@@SamuelOrjiM interesting. I don't completely understand you but partially so. Can you expand on the reference of time? Maybe dumb it doesn't for me a little. Also is it always productive control? It seems like that is something you find formal to system functioning, so maybe that's always yes for you. I'm not convinced that it's predictive control all the way down.
yet another gift
Amazing show, expanding thought A class brain food.
There's so much noise in the world these days, takes too much energy to parse through it all... Nuggets like these conversations are buried deep within - sadly very far from mainstream thought
26:00 lol. "Literally. Cogs..." I think when someone gets a good grasp of the synchronisation of the main automaton system. It will probably no longer need to be adjusted again. The rest is time, maturation and learning. 47:33 weird ey. 57:20 that bit is interesting. Good Bodega. Thank you!
Interesting interaction. It seems no one moved the ball into the goal and the same goalkeepers keep blocking shots all while playing peaceful up and down the field.
Not sure I could help other than being another goalkeeper and fielder passing the ball back and forth.
Bayesian weights are heavy; often intractably anchored.
As you all do I agree with all and none of you.
The key will be in the building.
On our way to tissue and limb registration.
On our way to resurrections. I wonder what T-Rex will do with Mao?
Brilliant!
@@mikefuller9073 I fig someone would catch that! Lol
Just them meeting and talking about these topics are brilliant
*is
@@mikefuller9073 don't be so hard on yourself as ya have fun😅! Be well too and enjoy the convo 🙂.
Love the warm weather...⛱
Happy Easter on July 21, 2023.
I love having a discussion this morning with Dr. Iain McGilchrist and this panel
The terrific trifecta of thoughtful theorists returns.
An intelligent idea coming from the whole into the part is what sparked the creation of machina. It's neither right nor wrong, it simply is. If we want to conceptualize it as living, this would just be another game. Play away; says the universe.
Living is just a word, the way that can be named is not the eternal way.
@@SamuelOrjiM touche
50:04
Richard is speaking to communication flows with a bias towards networks between nodes, and Michael is speaking about operation flows with a bias towards boundaried agents in nested agent relationships. Richards priors and Michael's have some seeming contradictions in how a system is defined.
But this is a trick of latency. As Michael works with living organisms, he creates time, urgent and discreet descriptions, and Richards work. Modelling of Microbial Biofilm Systems gives him a bias towards descriptions of continuous dynamics that display time invariance.
To my earlier comment from a sociobiological lense, the problem of the struggle for survival or behaviours with a type dependent energy return on investment has no contradictions with the problem of harmonic resonance.
The key is to view the struggle for survival as a magnitude problem and resonance as a frequency problem. Where magnitude is the stock in a boundary or container and frequency depicts the flows where flows include all mediums through which a signal can propagate. Now that this has been established the resonance depth as alluded to by Richard can then be aligned with Michael's struggle for survival as a nested Particle Swarm Optimisation problem where energy is transmitted from the swarm to its subsystems I.e national institutions or organs through a scheduling protocol to manage the resource distributions based on model predictive controls at all levels of the nested PSO algorithm for the sociobiology of an organism. This means that the problem of resonant depth has a sister in resonant elevation. What this alludes to is the question of if sensations that trigger behaviours for continued existence or flight from mortal danger outweigh structural and temporal similarities.
In my view, a behaving entity has through language been separated by description as Michael puts it to act circumventing the weakness of Laplace's demon. By recognising objects through the use of language, a network cluster of features becomes a gestalt that can be acted on and can be perceived to act. This group created by features in taking up space form a territory in observation when named, but not to name would leave you with Richards perception where network dynamics outweigh the language imposed boundaries. In essence, it is the problem of wave particle duality on the level of Sociomechanics and Sociobiology.
The Territory and Network view of a dynamic system both requires communication, regulations, and operations. Where seemingly discreet but continuous jumps in latency serve as repeatable observation points worth delineating with language. All this to say Energy Return on Investment accounting for system stresses is a process that occurs in the jump from molecular to cellular dynamic systems." But with the missing resonant elevation that comes with the multicellular organism. Our cells will struggle to empathise with cells of a dissimilar molecular component structure and dissimilar swarm dynamics given the absence of multicellularity in single cell cases, but even in multicellular organisms cellular empathy is applied first to cells with the same resonant elevation as well as resonant depth. Thus explaining why human empathy even within the species is mediated by type dependent EROI and internal and external system resonance in the territorial view or criticality in the network view as a value scale for the priority function regulating interactions between agents.
All of this is made clear by considering the technical definition of scheduling which is resource allocation to a task over time, where sociobiological operations can be considered the scheduling of agent, internal organism, internal systems, organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, quantum elements and whatever else physics describes.
This means the pursuit of longevity within its cognitive light cone as Michael calls it and a schedule with a Commensal or Mutual interference pattern. Would qualify for empathy. Neutral interference patterns as Richard Describes it may not give us any recognisable signs of life. On the other hand, Competitive interference patterns should be avoided at all cost while Parasitic or Amenal interference patterns need to be assessed for Sociomechanic or Sociobiological causes.
A thousand thank-yous to Ian for pointing out how our lives have been degraded by having to interact with automated systems. We worry about whether "the AI" will turn on us, while our own misuse of the technology has already done so.
Of course there's Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf.
I love that. My life is not meant to be a struggle. Even though it is on a certain level and to varying degrees at different times. A harmonious relationship. I love that.❤ harmonies with one another. What a dream.
I think even in harmonizing you can still and probably will have struggles, but we can be better equipped in understanding and, for lack of better words, overcoming them the more we are harmonizing with consciousness. Not sure if this makes sense.
54:34
Iain just reminded me of a joke, Child birth and its outcome is the inverse of the problem of Schrodingers cat.
9:00 the weakness at the heart of the UX of AI
Can I speak to a human, please? LOL
I do not understand Mike
Nauseating nudges in the direction of machine ethics; they will probably make laws against machine discrimination, which is disgusting.
Tom Hanks in Castaway has a pumpkin (or something like that) as friend.
Lex Fridman-Yuval Harari recent podcast, first 20 minutes on how easily we can be foolded into thinking an AI is sentient.
Sri Aurobindo 1872-1952 already discovered (or created) our evolutionary goal. Religions (well,their initiators...)also did this in a primitive way: align, ("do gods will")and be happy. Simple stuff, really.
Consciousness is the creative force, experienced by those who master their basic faculty, Thought, as Joy, Love, Power, Light, Freedom.
Its aim: complete integration/expression of Consciousness into matter, evolution as its method.
Physical immortality. Complete mastery. "God created (is still creating) Man in his own image"
Of course, a rock has consciousness. It is the fabric of existence.("I and the Father are one" ..."Thou art That".)
Aurobindo called Buddha: "wrong". And Jesus :"A failure". That is compared to what he did and discovered. Bold indeed.But then, he was aware of "evolution" and they werent.
The Mother, (french-Mira Alfassa), companion of Sri Aurobindo, already discovered "the Mind of the Cells" in the 1950´s. There is a book by that title by her secretary Satprem.
Another thing to contemplate: the human entity is a biocomputer. Whatever you put in, comes out. Except, because it it is linked directly to Pure Consciousness, it is all powerful. Human 1.0 is an intermediate species.
Time we take that Visionary explorer of Consciousness, and our unlimited capacities, seriously. Not a "philosopher": an experiencer. A Doer. "Architect of Immortality". He wrote the ultimate "prompt". Whatever happens now, happens within that context.
The "laws of manifestation" are not some woo bs, it is just hard te replicate in a lab. It is writing a "prompt"and let the universal computer do the rest. Watch mindvalley videos on The Silva Method.
About AI safety: creating a superwasp with superpowers is a very tricky thing. I dont worry about a billion times smarter, I worry about the inbetween phase. The unruly toddler, the belligerent teen.
Humans tinkering with nature has brought us wonderful things. Or are they crutches? Look what we are doing: despite all our inventions, we are at the brink of extinction.
Recommended reading, free download."The Adventure of Consciousness" by Satprem. Intro to Aurobindo for western minds.
As a scientist who have practiced meditation for more than 5 years, I have become increasingly "offended" by strong analytical and affirmative argumentative tones including Michael's here.
Three gentlemen being bewildered by having placed themselves between two chairs. On one hand they seem to reject materialism and the bottom up causality suggested by neodarwinian evolution. On the other hand they apparently reject the idea of a personal God as the creator of all things.
prof MGC nails it .....wow....25 minute in...wake up sheeple....
To paraphrase Clarke, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from Nature.
The computer says no. Comedy, literate pop music and science fiction have been at the forefront of prophecy for decades, tis a pity English language literature now seems more concerned with the emotional and quotidian lives of the well to do.
Discussion re us vs them seems irrelevant when augmentation, symbiosis and transhumanism is the end game
You're not back on the old transhumanism treadmill are you? MIchael gives me the creeps to be honest.
Exactly. But why is he in this discussion ? He doesn't seem to have any philosophical perspective.
@@stellai06 Obviously you're asking the wrong person, but I do agree with you. To my mind, it's an irreconcilable clash of paradigms and frankly I don't think Michael really gets the other perspective here but nods a long politely. I used to be like that. Lost in a world of materialism and unable to contemplate anything else, while basically presuming other non-materialist perpectives were mysterious exercises in obscurantism. There is a cure but it's not legally available in this country!
I wonder: could it be that there is not only the clashing story about human&machine (or any in-between variation) but also 3 persons talking figuratively, literally and metaphorically?
Wheels? Scoff, I have a much greater relationship with my horse. But cockroaches must be doing something right as they will still be scurrying around after we blow up the world with nukes. Or maybe they are in an animal realm of immense torture and longevity.