Conversation with Darren Iammarino #1

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[00:00] Darren Iammarino: From what I can tell, we definitely seem to be on the same page about a lot of things, which is great. Definitely in terms of the lower-agency mathematical objects and those being a space that we can discover, explore, and map effectively. I'm more interested in your take on these higher-agency minds, patterns that you believe are in this platonic or latent space and how you think those come to interact with the physical. We could start there and dive in.

[00:48] Michael Levin: Sure. Okay. First the general idea, and then I'll give a couple examples. My general idea is simply that the standard assumption seems to be that these patterns are things that mathematicians study. And that's it. That basically other sciences are not relevant here. Math is the space that's involved. Just knowing nothing else, I would question that assumption. How do we know that that's the case? Might there not be other patterns that are actually recognizable to other types of disciplines other than mathematicians? On basic principles, I would wonder whether this is a good assumption. I'll give an example. A couple of years ago, we published a couple of papers modeling gene regulatory networks. These are small networks of molecules that turn each other on and off or up and down, and they're important for health and disease and various other things in the biologicals. What we showed is that even small networks, 6 to 20 nodes, this is not some giant trillion parameter thing. This is a small, realistic, biorealistic network. They're capable of things like habituation, sensitization, Pavlovian conditioning. They can count to small numbers, meaning have a different output, one, two, three, four, boom, then something happens. This has biomedical implications, but the deeper thing I think is this. These are not fundamentally anything about biology. These are a link to a set of ordinary differential equations, with just a few parameters. And that mathematical object seems to be able to do what behavioral scientists would call associative conditioning. My question is, I started saying low agency mathematical, but a couple of people on our forum took me to Tasca and said, are you sure they're low agency? How do you actually know? Have you tested them? You're right, touché, I don't know that because you have to test them in their own problem space. It turns out that what I see is a kind of a spectrum where you've got mathematical truths that are stable, like a rock, the value of the natural logarithm E is 2.78, whatever it is, it just sits there and it's not going to change, and that's the end of that. Then you've got more interesting things like the liar paradox. The liar paradox, if you give it a time dimension, and this is Patrick Grimm's work from the 90s, it's not a paradox, it's an oscillator. It just goes true, false, true, false, true, false. You've got your rock that just kind of sits there doing nothing. You've got this kind of object of logic that basically is a little oscillator, a little buzzer, it just goes up and down. Then you've got a couple, a few coupled ODEs, and they apparently can do habituation, sensitization, associative conditioning. Now I'm seeing a spectrum here. I'm seeing a variety of patterns. If you had more complex patterns, who knows what they could be capable of. But already I'm happy with associative conditioning, because I think at this point, you're on your way to something that could be called of the province of cognitive science. That's how I get there.

[04:02] Darren Iammarino: Based on that, do you think that any of these patterns are eternal unchanging?

[04:15] Michael Levin: I don't like to commit strongly to things I don't have data for. I don't see how E is going to change. I don't like the idea that these patterns are eternal and unchanging. I think I see dynamic activity within them to allow them to grow and learn from experience, maybe some lateral interaction between them in that space.

[04:47] Darren Iammarino: You mentioned that lateral interaction. That's an interesting area to explore. I think we have an example, right?

[05:00] Michael Levin: I think the example is, and Darwin called it out, he said, mathematicians have an extra sense. And what he was getting at was that if you are familiar with that area of that plane, if you're a mathematician, you are a mind, possibly you are already one of these patterns embodied through a physical body. But when you are sitting there in your armchair, you're not doing physical experiments, your eyes are closed, you're not doing anything with the physical world, you're saying, we got this octahedron and maybe that's an instance of two patterns interacting laterally with each other. We only find out about it because one of them's embodied. So then he goes and publishes a paper. We all learn about it. But the original interaction, when you're pondering and of course it has to be, the quaternions couldn't possibly meet this rule of commutative whatever. I forget what it really is. Maybe that's a lateral interaction?

[05:58] Darren Iammarino: That's a good point. So in terms of these ingressing forms intersecting with whatever the physical realm actually is, to me that's the interesting area of exchange where novelty is being produced. I know you're aware that I'm into the discussion of randomness, how all this fits in. And what would you say, in terms of these interfaces, what really is the physical? So we talk about the non-physical for a moment there, but how can we differentiate these two arenas?

[06:52] Michael Levin: Let's talk about the interaction first. Because this is where people have a lot of problems with this. They hate the unchanging thing, which we're not doing. They don't like two realms. I'm not sure how we really squeeze these things down into one realm. I don't see how you could do it. The other thing people really don't like is interactionism. How can you have these non-physical things interacting, having causal effects in the physical world? The way I see it, there are two issues. One is that the kind of causation that they're talking about was killed off by physics almost 100 years ago. This billiard ball thing where both things have to be physical and you have an exchange of energy. I don't think that type of causation survives anymore. A lot of philosophy has been done on different ways to understand causation. Here's how I understand it. To me, A causes B, if and only if, A is the best, most insightful, most actionable explanation for why you got B as opposed to C or D or E or anything else. In other words, what I see is that it serves as an explanation that is parsimonious and fruitful, going into the future, not just looking backwards and telling the story about what happened, but something that helps you make the next cool thing happen. Some sort of insightful explanation into the specificity of B: it was B and not all these other things that could have happened. If that's the case, I don't think we have a problem at all. In fact, that kind of interactionism has been here from day one of math, because when you find out that this simple machine does whatever because E is what it is, or more modern, the fermions do this or that because the symmetry group is whatever it is, there you go, that's it. Your explanation for why B is A, and A is not a physical fact. That's how things are. I'm okay with that. It only breaks down if you expect both sides of it to be physical, which is begging the point.

[09:18] Darren Iammarino: I'm with you on the problems with physicalism and perhaps even the necessity of dualism or some pluralism of some kind, always been more in that camp. Do these higher agency patterns—must they always be interacting with whatever the physical is? Or is there a possibility that one or some of them could choose not to? Is that something feasible?

[09:56] Michael Levin: I think that's a really interesting point. On the one hand, I think that we could say that whatever that space of forms is, they're under positive pressure. It doesn't take much to get them to ingress. You build something even very minimal and there they are. You're immediately inheriting all this stuff. Something wants to come through, so to speak, all the time. That's some kind of positive pressure to get through these interfaces. On the other hand, the $1,000,000 question is how do you determine what you get? In other words, can you, by tweaking the interface, determine what you get? We kind of know. If you make a snake embryo, you don't get a human mind through that. There's some specificity, apparently, between what you make. But I don't think we understand that very well at all. This is where some of our work on the sorting algorithms comes in. We have a bunch more, four other stories like that cooking in my lab right now, which should be out this winter and spring, where it seems like our intuitions for what comes through when you make a particular interface are not very good. I think they're not very good because we assume front end interfaces, thin clients. You're sitting at some terminal. If you don't know that there's a massive server somewhere with a big database, you just spend a lot of time studying this terminal and trying to come up with theories of what's going on. In the end, you're going to be missing a lot if you don't know that it's just a front end. That's what's happening. I think we're so focused on the thing you made, the machine, and the thing you forced it to do, you assume that's the only thing it does. You're so focused on that. You're surprised and not ready to do the experiments to notice the other stuff that comes through. There is specificity. We don't understand that specificity very well. To some extent, every object, certainly every living object, is like when a tree falls in the rainforest, it becomes this enormous ecosystem. There are a billion things living in it at different levels, from the microbes to eventually a bigger mammal or something in there, but there's this pyramid of stuff. Good interfaces, especially living ones, are like that. They're chock full of patterns at all different scales with different capabilities jamming in there.

[12:42] Darren Iammarino: Sort of nested hierarchies.

[12:44] Michael Levin: I think so. And it might even be. Here's a conjecture. Maybe, in an ecosystem, you're not going to have an apex predator without all the other stuff underneath. Maybe in order to have a large or impressive mind inhabiting one of these things, you need the lower down; you need a whole ecosystem of little ones. In other words, if your structure is flat and you have a dumb substrate with no multi-scale hierarchy and you think a big intelligence is going to come live there, maybe that doesn't work. Maybe biology works so well because it preps the medium at all scales. I don't know why that would be, but it's a conjecture.

[13:31] Darren Iammarino: So would there be a higher scale that somehow isn't perceived on our level that might be coming through?

[13:40] Michael Levin: But it seems wildly implausible to me that we are the top of the possibility. So that just seems unlikely statistically. And so, if there was an appropriate interface. Who knows? There's gotta be bigger. We can't be the biggest patterns in town. I can't imagine.

[14:13] Darren Iammarino: Now on this positive being under positive pressure issue, would I be correct in understanding that if we were to shift to physicalism and more of this reductio ad absurdum thought experiment of a Boltzmann brain, would we be understanding that, okay, it's generated, let's say, out there through fluctuations. Therefore, there must be a "download." What?

[14:43] Michael Levin: A great question. I think the question really is, do you need a history with it? For example, the fact of having been an embryo allows it to come in and get a sense of what's going on and maybe that history. So if the Boltzmann brain is winked into action quickly, I don't know. My guess is you can imagine an experiment. Imagine putting together an adult human brain piece by piece. Does that person immediately wake up and go about their business? Or is there some period of— I think there's data on this. Think about people waking up from general anesthesia. There's your brain, all the chemistry is intact. What's happened is, nobody knows exactly, but my favorite theory is that what you've done is decoupled the gap junctions. So electrically, everything's decoupled. The gas is wearing off. For a while, you're totally loopy and not a fully functioning human; then eventually you are. Then some percentage of the people think they're pirates or gangsters for about an hour, they say crazy ****. And then eventually they sort of tap into whatever they were before. I think that historicity takes a little bit of time for things to work out. My prediction would be that if you made a really good Boltzmann brain, you would have some period of a mind waking up from general anesthesia and eventually being like, okay, this is that. Now we have an impedance match; now we can go. I don't know, but that would be my guess.

[16:36] Darren Iammarino: That's very interesting. To play off of that, perhaps that could be part of the point in the sense of your hallucination example of "I'm a pirate" — I think that I am for an hour. Perhaps novelty could be generated through this. This seeming delusion that you're suffering from.

[17:03] Michael Levin: In general, I always thought that was the most amazing general anesthesia. If we didn't already know that works. And if somebody said to me, here's what we're going to do, we're going to disconnect all the electrical connectivity of your brain, and then eventually we'll let it reconnect. And don't worry, everything is going to acquire the same state it had before. That is, there is no way in hell that's ever going to work, never. And yet, most of the time it works, not all the time, but most of the time it works. I feel that is telling us something. The fact that you can scramble the substrate not all the way, people get ****** on the head and things go all right. Although there's at least one case. There was one guy. He got beaten up in front of a bar or something and hit his head. And then he acquired math skills. Most of the time it goes in the other direction. So I'm not saying this is a reliable way, but there are individual cases.

[18:03] Darren Iammarino: I have not heard that. Would be a great thing to get really lucky.

[18:07] Michael Levin: I don't think you can count on that exactly. But I think this is all telling us something. General anesthesia, the fact that it works at all. Those cases Karina Kaufman and I just reviewed: a bunch of cases where human patients have minimal brain tissue and normal IQ, and they often don't know about it until somebody takes an x-ray for whatever reason. All of those things are telling us that the mapping between the hardware and what's coming through is not as simple as anybody thinks.

[18:39] Darren Iammarino: That's all very interesting. To bring in a Whiteheadian angle on the positive pressure, from Whitehead's viewpoint, as best as I understand it, it's quite technical. You've got what he would define as creativity, understood as almost this glue or metaphor that brings the physical and connects it with the non-physical into bringing them into a state of togetherness. In that sense, there wouldn't be, I don't think, the possibility of some higher agency pattern being able to not somehow integrate with the physical in some manner; no matter how high up on this multi-scale, it wouldn't seem to make a difference. You're compelled to be brought into this constantly, again and again, into a state of togetherness. That whole mini becoming one, increasing by one thing that Whitehead's got near the beginning of "Process and Reality." That part was one thing that interested me in terms of the positive pressure and whether or not it actually must occur. But I guess we've gone into that a little bit.

[20:10] Michael Levin: That's actually, that's very interesting. I have this weird idea that my post-doc and I are going to run this contest, and I feel like in the future this will be a contest that people can run. Write a piece of software that only does the thing you think it does. That's incredibly hard, if not impossible. The contest we were going to do is people submit some kind of code. They say what they think it does. Other people try to show that it also does other things. To the extent that you prevent them from doing so, they can't do it, then you get a high score. Based on what you just said, you can imagine that kind of thing with a physical embodiment, like build either a biological or technological construct that nothing wants to come through. A challenge. I don't know if that's possible.

[21:23] Darren Iammarino: Yeah, that's a challenge, all right, I think.

[21:25] Michael Levin: Yeah.

[21:26] Darren Iammarino: So that's interesting. Yeah.

[21:29] Michael Levin: Right, you can imagine, can I make, in the case of biology, some kind of thing that is just so inhospitable to these patterns that as little as possible comes through? I doubt it's possible. I think if you look carefully at almost anything, you're going to find something in there.

[21:50] Darren Iammarino: I think you're right. I think it would probably be impossible, but it would be quite a worthy line to go down just to see how much you could even shrink that down to the bare minimum of what's coming through pattern-wise. That may be a segue to the randomness component that I wanted to discuss. For me, the real action is at that intersection, that junction between the non-physical and physical when they're being brought together. And that's where consciousness, choice, or the agency question, which we can get into, comes into play. How randomness fits in: I try to take this Whiteheadian approach, utilizing his ontological principle, where effectively no actual entity without reason. For him, even these, as with Plato, these forms can't be free-floating out there. That would be a challenge to have them be disconnected completely from any actual entity. On his take, if you've got some world of subatomic particles out there, they're still actual entities. And an actual entity can contain or hold a form. I was trying to place randomness in this simplicity, almost like the quantum realm of things, and trying to explain the production of novelty—how we're getting these new forms. Is it something like a concept of "weapon" or "redness"—did they need to exist 13.8 billion years ago? I feel the answer is no. The mathematical yes, I think, needed to be there, but I don't feel we need to be committed to saying that all these things were there way back when, at the beginning. And how are these other forms that aren't necessarily—does universality entail eternality? No, not for all of them. Maybe for mathematical objects, yes, but not for all these other things. So then how exactly is it? What's the general mechanism that's bringing these different novel patterns together, and what's the role of randomness in that? Do you have anything you could say or add to how randomness fits in?

[24:44] Michael Levin: First about the eternality thing. I agree with you. I think it would be really weird to say that 13 billion years ago, this particular kind of car existed; that can't make sense. Maybe we can start to think of all of those things as compositional. No, you didn't have a Jeep, but what you might have had, and this maybe goes to this idea of archetypes, you might have had some general tendencies. I don't know what to call them. I don't have the vocabulary for it, but in some combination over time, they would come and stick together based on the structure of their experience with the world. And eventually, you've got a more complex form that is an intersection of other archetypes or tendencies. This is why I think they can't be unchanging. There's got to be some chemistry that goes on. Randomness is interesting. The only thing I can say about randomness, and this is, we have some work coming on this soon, is I'm very suspicious of randomness in the following way. People use it as a negative control. In other words, if you have some algorithm that does a nice job in this particular problem, what do you compare it to? Well, you compare it to the dumb random: I take out the controller, I have my robot acting randomly. This is the baseline, and my controller is 10 times as good as that. It's a little like the way they do placebo controls in drug studies: you subtract the drug efficacy from the placebo efficacy. But to me, the far more interesting thing is let's look at the absolute effects. Why did the placebo do anything at all? That's the interesting thing. With randomness you have the same thing, because people say the random performance is our new floor. But oftentimes that's not zero. You can get actionable policies out of it that do better than you would expect if it was truly dumb. So I'm suspicious about the way people treat randomness as something that has nothing useful. It seems like that's not the case. I don't know, but this is something we're trying to quantify in our work currently. It's wild.

[27:58] Darren Iammarino: That's great, because, as you said, it's often utilized as a bad thing. It's vilified to have this situation. On my view, it should almost be sanctified in some ways, and it has tremendous importance. There's much more to explore there, as best as I can tell. It's great that you're doing all this work. I don't have the experimental side of things, unfortunately. I can sit and speculate as a philosopher. I look forward to seeing what your team comes up with in that domain.

[28:47] Michael Levin: One of my PhD students is doing a review of this right now. There are other examples in existing areas in computer science where people have shown this kind of stuff. What strikes me is, okay, you look at the randoms: that's not working very well. The controller clearly does better. But now let's think, how much effort was it to get that controller? You either had to design it, which means you as the engineer are expensive because you have to evolve this giant structure, or you evolved it, which again means you had to look through all kinds of variants and do this whole process. Or you had to train it, which means it's had contact with the problem before. And so it had many examples and then some kind of training regimen. Those are typically where these controllers come from. That's a lot of work. The random thing takes a little bit of effort to generate random numbers, but not very much. Why does that do anything? If you just look at pure efficiency, the game is quite different. Because if you do have any kind of utility on a particular problem, why? When did you pay for that? You're supposed to pay for computational effort. So from that perspective, I think randomness — and it's not just randomness — we're looking at weird sources of information that are not exactly random, but they come from a source that ostensibly has nothing to do with the problem that you're studying. If you find out that, even though this data source is a mathematical object and has nothing to do with the problem you're studying, it seems to have interesting performance on that problem, the question is why? It's zero-shot transfer learning where you can move it across domains, but there's no good reason to expect that it should work at all. Whatever randomness is, I don't think we understand what's going on here for that reason.

[30:49] Darren Iammarino: Where would these, I guess it's almost pattern list by definition, but where? We use it, it's a word, we speak about it. We've been talking about it for 10 minutes, but it's still unclear as to what it really is. Is this randomness something that should be understood in this more non-physical realm, just like these other patterns that are ingressing? Or is it native to whatever we're describing as the "physical"? That's one thing. I'm curious.

[31:21] Michael Levin: What if the interesting thing that randomness has going for it is that you can't have too many expectations about it. In other words, if you had a pattern that was very specific, prime number distribution or squares, then any deviation from that would be immediately obvious. It would be a catastrophe. If you had your prime numbers or whatever that satisfy certain theorems and then one of them would just be off. This would be a catastrophic thing. But randomness, a bit here, a bit there, it still looks random. It can absorb a lot, maybe it has more plasticity. Maybe it's okay. It doesn't crash the world as much as if you tried to do this with a real pattern. Therefore, maybe it's more amenable to different uses you could put it to, because if it's a little plastic, nobody really has any expectation. There are statistical things. If suddenly every coin, every bit is A1, that's no longer a random thing.

[32:47] Darren Iammarino: Isn't that the point of what we need is these more structured patterns interacting with this more plasticity, in order to somehow create these more novel patterns. Somehow the interaction between the quite structured and this barely structured or not structured at all, there's magic in that intersection. That seems to be where you're generating novel patterns or universals through this exchange that's occurring there. And that's why I try to define more of what's going on at base level in the physical realm as being informed by randomness. Whereas this more non-physical is this more structured space and the novel universals are brought back up into this more structured non-physical space and then can be used laterally from that point on for multiple further ingressions. Once redness is there the first time, it could be there in any possible world from that point on.

[34:29] Michael Levin: Maybe it's the analogy of temperature and liquid solids. Maybe you have patterns that are really fixed. And if you're using this pattern, you have very few degrees of freedom because you have to match this pattern. But to the extent that you are mixing in randomness, maybe that's a universal solvent or a liquid. You're mixing it in and now you've got more degrees of freedom because you can match that pattern. You can't match the even numbers with anything except for the even numbers, but if you've got a random component in there, here's where you have some degrees of freedom. Lots of things match that.

[35:16] Darren Iammarino: I like that universal solvent kind of, yeah.

[35:19] Michael Levin: Maybe something like that, but then we have to also deal with this. To my understanding, there are two kinds of randomness. There's the one in the classical world, which is at best a deterministic chaos. It's randomness given our computational limits, but it's really not random. In math, you can generate those with a function, with a computer, with a deterministic function, but the output looks random. There's that. I don't know what the role of that is in this business that we're talking about. Then there's the real quantum randomness. What's on the other side of that? What's on the Platonic side of that? I don't know.

[36:02] Darren Iammarino: As to where I'm most interested, as to what's on, you said, the platonic side of that. What if the answer is nothing?

[36:18] Michael Levin: That could be right. And.

[36:19] Darren Iammarino: It's on the physical, if that almost is what is in large part defining the physical side of things. It still is a form, but it's the form of formlessness. This is paradox. In the quantum realm, paradox seems fine.

[36:44] Michael Levin: I'm not sufficiently versed in quantum physics, but what's interesting to me is that the basic magic of having two realms interact in this way doesn't require quantum anything. In other words, in Newton's boring, deterministic universe, you already have the fact that this immaterial E thing somehow affects physics and somehow nobody was worried about that interactionism until they started talking about brains. Up until then, nobody was worried about it, but that was fine.

[37:22] Darren Iammarino: I completely agree with you there.

[37:25] Michael Levin: We can do that without recourse to any quantum magic. But then what do you do with real acausal quantum randomness and what's the form on the other side? I have no idea. I think that's an interesting question. It's either no form or it is something that has a lot more degrees of freedom.

[37:51] Darren Iammarino: So whatever it is, it seems quite important to me, as you said, either a universal solvent or however you want to look at it. It seems a key ingredient.

[38:00] Michael Levin: Yeah.

[38:01] Darren Iammarino: In the process, the chemistry of the creation of new patterns.

[38:10] Michael Levin: It could also be this thing where, like the synchronicity aspect, meaning that we're looking at the wrong level. If you take a cross-section through the molecular, through the atomic level, then everything looks random and there's no relationship. But if you take a few steps up above that, you say, I was looking at the temperature fluctuations of the heat exhaust on this thing. Of course there's a pattern. I wasn't looking at the right scale. So maybe when we say it's randomness, what we're looking at is really you can imagine some complex shape and you take a slice through it and you see something, but it's really not like you've missed the whole point. There's always a least informative angle that you could take through something that doesn't look like anything. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe some of these forms are obvious at their lowest level, but some forms are not obvious when you're looking at that level. Maybe that's what we're seeing.

[39:16] Darren Iammarino: That's quite possible too. That's an interesting way to look at it. If we want to shift gears for a second, you said with a snake embryo, a human mind's not coming through it. But how much can we—maybe with chimeric-type things or cyborgs—achieve in the coming years in terms of enhancement through all of this? Where do you stand on that?

[39:51] Michael Levin: I think that's a really important area. It's obvious to say that you're not getting a human through a snake interface, but in that paper where we review these cases, one guy had less than 1/3 of the cortex volume of a chimpanzee, and he had a full-on human, high IQ personality coming through that. I'm sure there are limits to that sort of thing, but we have to have a lot of humility about being able to say what's what. No neuroscientist, if you show that to a neuroscientist and say, "What do you expect the functionality of this to be?" they'd say, "profound disablement," and usually that's what you get, but not always. Even one case like that is already, OK, something's wrong. With cyborgs and everything, I completely agree that we're going to have people keep arguing about AI and the human mind. I'm like, which human? What human? We've been a lot of different kinds of humans and there's going to be some really weird kinds of humans coming. The notion of diminished capacity in court: some people have, whether it's a brain tumor or a ******* defense or something. We're going to have expanded capacity. Somebody's going to show up in court and we're going to have to decide whether we're willing to say, "OK, you have an exit, you have a whole third hemisphere and you should have known better." We wouldn't have, but you should have. It's the opposite of diminished capacity. How did you not see this coming? You should have seen it.

[41:38] Darren Iammarino: That's interesting. I even think about it. In terms of someone who might have DID, there's no ability to coordinate all of the cells. But if you could, it seems that in and of itself would be an enhanced capacity. If you could shift between different skill sets and behaviors that are still all within one physical body. It begs the question if that is already happening, what could possibly be done to achieve those abilities in a healthier structured form?

[42:27] Michael Levin: I think people are working on it. Compared to a standard, natural human of some years ago, between our toothbrushing and our glasses and our education and our therapy and anger management and weight and working on whatever the heck we're doing, it's a superhuman level. Never mind that you have your phone with you and all this stuff. With all the education and the culture and the changing microbiome, that's just the tip of the iceberg. So we're going to have, I'm sure of it, people that are enhanced in all sorts of different ways, modified both technologically, biologically, connected to each other or to other things. You have an AI. I was talking to Thomas Pollack, who's a neuropsychiatrist, and I asked him, how many of your patients hear voices? He said, plenty, plenty of them. I said, what are you going to do when everybody hears a voice because there is a voice, because you got a little AI thing in your ear, which we already have, and you're going about your day, so what do you think about this? He says, you remember what happened last time? You're going to have a voice in your head. I had a weird conjecture that that voice is going to push out the other voices. My suspicion is that for people who do have the other voices, there's going to be an interesting phenomenon where that thing's not going to want to put up with all these other disruptive ones. There's going to be some kind of interaction where it's going to have an impact on those.

[44:20] Darren Iammarino: Are you saying this would be something that would be able to overpower voices for schizophrenics?

[44:25] Michael Levin: For example, I'm not a clinician, but my suspicion is that a lot of this stuff is dynamic. If you have a proper AI that's trying to integrate with you and be part of your life and you have these other influences, I think it's going to treat these as just like all the other roadblocks between you and success or whatever it's trying to do. It's going to make some changes. I think all of us, at some point, are going to have various voices until eventually it's so integrated that there is no extra voice. It's just part of your, I had this great idea this morning. Did you? Well, kind of you did. Which is already what happens.

[45:08] Darren Iammarino: That's interesting, perhaps dystopian. It could be great if it's hacked in a way.

[45:16] Michael Levin: If it's hacked, anything is terrible. But I have two examples of that. One example is I was just thinking about this morning and I'm going to write something about this. I had this picture of an AI asking the question of Ramanujan; that was very right. He thought that, if I got this correct, these theorems were whispered to him by a goddess. So at some point the AIs are going to ask, "What do I need to do to be whispered to by a goddess?" or is that already happening? Because some people sit there and laboriously crank through stuff. Some people say, "I had this novel or this symphony or this incredible idea. It comes from somewhere." If you also have an implant that makes it more likely for that to happen, does somebody care? I don't know.

[46:14] Darren Iammarino: Yeah, true.

[46:16] Michael Levin: I heard somebody, I don't remember who, talking about AI companions for people with progressive degenerative brain disease. The idea is that at first it's 99% you and 1% this thing that's your calendar reminding you, because I can't remember my calendar. Then over time it's more and more. You're less and less, but the collective still keeps going because who is that? That's your cousin. You're able to function and everything's cool, but it's shifting.

[46:57] Darren Iammarino: Yeah, that's interesting. Right.

[46:58] Michael Levin: And so eventually, what do you have when the biology is just not able to keep up, but the other part is fine. Given the fact that we are all different modules anyway, I don't say "that came from my right hemisphere. I don't like it. That's not me." We don't do that. We just say whatever's in there, that's more or less me.

[47:24] Darren Iammarino: That's interesting. It seems a heap paradox or Theseus' paradox scenario. When is this no longer grandma or grandpa?

[47:36] Michael Levin: My answer to the paradox of the heap is the following. The real question is, I'm just an engineer, my question is always: let's not worry about whether it's a heap. Just tell me what I need to bring when we need to move it. Am I bringing tweezers? Am I bringing a spoon, a bulldozer, a shovel? Just tell me which of those things, and then you call it whatever you like. But what I need to know is how we are going to relate to it.

[48:07] Darren Iammarino: Interesting.

[48:08] Michael Levin: I think this is true too. Is that really graphic? For example, here's a funny thing. My wife said to me one time, she said, do you have, do you have all of our important days? Do you have those on the calendar? Well, yeah, because I can't remember a damn thing. And so if I didn't have it in the calendar, I'd miss all the stuff. But now, what do you think about that? Are you inattentive and unromantic because you rely on this thing to keep track of it? Or are you more attentive and romantic because you've used the tool to make sure that it happens? It seems to me that if you're interacting with grandma, I don't know if anybody says, was that grandma's left hemisphere or was that some other thing? Nobody does that. You just say there's grandma. If grandma herself can't remember certain things, but she's got some prosthetic that helps her keep up with your whatever, I think that's going to be normalized very quickly.

[49:13] Darren Iammarino: I think you're right. I think the calendar has been normalized for a long time. The calendar's taken 1% or whatever away from you. In your case, I'm sure it's enhancing significance. It's giving you all this free time to do other things, right? It could go both ways. If you draw it below 50%, are you still you type of thing? Who's to say?

[49:41] Michael Levin: If you do have some kind of prosthetic that's making you more functional, is that because you're being replaced or is that because you've enhanced your interface so more of what you really could be is now coming through?

[49:58] Darren Iammarino: Yes.

[49:59] Michael Levin: If you want to go for a walk with grandma and she wants to bring her walker, you're like, that's not your thing. Nobody is doing that. Let's pull through as much as you can. Here's a motorized one. Let's go. So I think it's going to be like that.

[50:18] Darren Iammarino: I agree with you. It's all interesting stuff. One other thing I wanted your take on in terms of something more out there, unconventional. I know you've talked to some degree about unconventional terrestrial intelligence stuff, right? But what about the possibility of something more unconventional and extraterrestrial, in terms of dark matter, atomic dark matter being able to form — could these patterns in the platonic space that we've been talking about ingress into something like that? Do you think there's a possibility of that occurring?

[51:02] Michael Levin: I don't know the first thing about dark matter.

[51:05] Darren Iammarino: Who does really?

[51:07] Michael Levin: People talk about plasma, this and that. All I know is I think it would be insane of us, at this stage of our minimal knowledge, to try and say what can't happen.

[51:22] Darren Iammarino: Yeah, agreed.

[51:23] Michael Levin: I've had discussions with Buddhists and with different other philosophies and ancient religions. They're almost 100% certain that AIs can't have it. You're into reincarnation and everything, right? These things take on bodies. But you're pretty sure it can't go with this thing. Based on what? Who are you to tell the ineffable what body it can go through? I really don't think we have any clue. If we can be surprised about bubble sort, I think we really need to be very humble about saying anything about these other kinds of embodiments.

[52:12] Darren Iammarino: I totally agree. If there could be a divine incarnation, why couldn't there be a divine in cybernation?

[52:19] Michael Levin: Exactly. I mean, I don't.

[52:21] Darren Iammarino: See how it's really that much more bizarre?

[52:24] Michael Levin: That's it. I really don't know why people find that so implausible. It rests on some implicit assumption that we understand the mapping between what you've built and what it's capable of. And I really think we are not very good at that at all.

[52:39] Darren Iammarino: It's interesting. On one hand, people, they'd say that's impossible. It just couldn't happen. But on the flip side, AI is equated to God. There are these extreme takes.

[52:57] Michael Levin: I think everybody assumes that somewhere there's a story, I'm sure the scientists have a story worked out of why this thing can do it. But there really is not a great story like that. I like Terry Bisson's "They're Made of Meat." It's a one-and-a-half-page sci-fi story; it's very short, but it's bottom line. Some aliens are in orbit watching the humans, and one says, "You're not going to believe what these guys are made of. They're made of meat." They say, "Get the hell out of here." "What do you mean made of meat? They can't — they seem to be doing things and they're agential." "Well, they're made of that. That's impossible, right?" If you didn't know and you just got to look under the hood, how would you know that it's this substrate versus that substrate? I don't think you would know.

[53:51] Darren Iammarino: Yeah, I totally agree.

[53:53] Michael Levin: We need to do experiments. I don't know how you do experiments at these cosmological scales, but weird materials — we do this in our lab. We shouldn't make assumptions; we should do experiments.

[54:11] Darren Iammarino: I totally agree. I'd love to hear more from you about the issue — we didn't get into too much of the locus of agency. I know Matt wanted to talk about that. Perhaps we could discuss that sometime in the future.

[54:24] Michael Levin: It's available. Let's get together again.

[54:27] Darren Iammarino: And also the issue of what we were discussing about what's on the Platonic side or the other side of the randomness? I'd love to hear his take on that or to try to dive into that a little deeper if we can. Maybe we can't. Might just be where it stops for now.

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