Iain McGilchrist, Richard Watson, and Mile Levin #4

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[00:00] Iain McGilchrist: Michael, I've seen that very interesting talk between Matt Siegel and yourself. I was very taken by it. I'm a great admirer of Matt and share much of his philosophical stance. I wanted to come back to the question of the nature of form, which seems to me the centrally interesting undecided element here in developmental biology. How is it that antlers know the pattern to regenerate? How is it that the morphogenesis of the skull of a frog knows that it's going in the wrong direction and corrects itself? Where is that knowledge or memory stored? And above all, where is the knowledge and memory of the human brain's massively complex structures stored? It's clearly not in the DNA string, and you yourself have demonstrated there's nowhere near enough information. What are we talking about and where is this? Is there a field? In physics now one is continually talking not so much about matter and so on, but about fields and forces of energy. Do you think that's a way of looking at what we're talking about here?

[01:17] Michael Levin: I think we could address this in two ways. I could certainly tell you stories about the mechanistic medium in which I think this information is held. Funny enough, although I started out by reading Harold Burr and people like that who really thought of bioelectricity as fields. Burr, who was very prescient and wrote about many things back in the 30s, felt very strongly that we should be using field models instead of charge models. That's my origin story on bioelectricity. But despite that, we haven't done anything with fields yet. Everything that I've done so far has been on spatial patterns of static voltage gradients. We haven't done fields, but people like Earl Miller at MIT, who has recast the way neuroscientists think about neural networks as a field phenomenon. I think something like that is certainly possible for us. We have a project starting to do that. A postdoc in my lab and I are doing it. Regardless, whether field or more classic things, we can certainly talk about what I think is the medium that holds these set points for anatomical homeostasis. I think there's an even deeper question here, which is, what does it mean, both in the cognitive sense and in the morphological sense, for information to be somewhere? When people ask, "Where is it?" I'm not even sure. I don't know what the correct shape of the answer to that looks like anymore. That's something we could discuss as well, because increasingly that doesn't seem to me the right formalism for that question.

[03:22] Iain McGilchrist: We don't have a formula for things that are non-spatially located. We have to accept that certain things, consciousness, can't be spatially located, although Mark Soames thinks that he can locate it in the brain, which is another question. We can't see where consciousness itself is located. It's the wrong question to ask about it. Nonetheless, we have to be able to deal with this idea of form fields that have very strong interactions with information that we can more clearly specify where it is and how it's accessed. We don't seem to have any clue about where or how the information about form is even stored, never mind where it is in a more profound sense.

[04:12] Michael Levin: I think it really matters for many reasons. One is I can certainly tell a story about a bioelectric network that holds the memory to which the cells are going to build if it's injured or even in basic development. We can see it now. We can visualize this information structure. We can read and write into it so we can modify it. The cells will build something different if we change it. So we're beginning, and again burst all of this in the 30s. He proposed this and then he would sprite it. We can see all of that. But to me, what's now becoming even more interesting is that we see that around that, there is a weird latent space of possibilities that you normally never observe until you perturb the system in a particular way, until you take away the cells and they make a xenobot or the wasp comes and prompts a bunch of oak leaf cells to make this crazy spiky gall thing. You wouldn't know that those things are in the possible space of these cells. It's nowhere in the pattern that we would read out normally. And so I'm now really interested. I view all of these model systems now as telescopes that let us peer into this weird, invisible, latent space. The xenobot, and I guess everything is a device for asking what else is in that space, what's possible. You start with a little keyhole through which you see a tadpole or an oak leaf, and that's all you see. But around it, we now know, is all this other stuff. And I'm really interested in this — this is what Matt and I talked about — I certainly can't say where it is. It's wherever the truths of mathematics are, I guess. I don't know.

[05:56] Iain McGilchrist: But would you accept that there's a difference between being able to upset a form by intervening in some way without knowing, in other words, how to make the form not happen? That doesn't tell us how the form normally happens. It's like being able to intervene in a very complex system at a certain point in a serial pathway of causation. You can intervene somewhere, see a mechanism, and create a possibly predictable result. But unfortunately, that doesn't help you understand the whole complex system. It just tells you that you can wreck it in some way or change it by interfering in it. And so there's the difference between knowing that we can interfere with it and knowing how it's actually working when it's working properly.

[06:53] Michael Levin: I see it as a continuum because, for example, we can do things with a tadpole tail and head that definitely wreck it as far as a standard Xenopus laevis tadpole is concerned. That's simply not correct. It's a birth defect, but it's perfectly correct for a different species of frog. It starts to look like an entirely different species of frog. For that species of frog, it's not a defect at all. It's exactly what it's supposed to be. There are certain things you can do that are wrecking it. There are other influences that are not so much wrecking it, but they're going in a different region of that space that would have been perfectly fine if that had happened on its own. There are...

[07:42] Iain McGilchrist: It sounds like you're suggesting there is a field of form for some other frog that, if you divert the field of form for this frog, it will switch over to the other one. So it's sitting there waiting in potentia.

[07:58] Michael Levin: Yeah, as much as molecular biologists would say this isn't a crazy talk, I'm starting to think that that's exactly what it is. Funny enough, Darcy Thompson, in his classic "Growth and Form", has one of my favorite parts: four or five pages where he takes existing creatures and puts them on a grid, on what they call math paper here. He then stretches the grid in various weird ways. What you get are these distorted things that are a completely different species — he's got crabs and fish and whatnot. I think he was on to this idea; you didn't have the language of attractors yet.

[08:44] Richard Watson: Does the language of competence and performance, in a linguistic sense, help here? When we think about sentences that are well formed grammatically but have never been uttered before, I think we're in that territory. There's a deep structure, the kinds of things that can be built out of developmental processes. If you perturb them, it's not just broken or spoiled. It's: okay, I'll say something else. But there's something else — what's the closest thing I can say semantically that's still grammatically correct given the language of things that are possible?

[09:31] Iain McGilchrist: But take the instance of cutting off a set of antlers or just one of the antlers from a stag. That stag has a unique formation in the cross sections of that antler, and it will be reproduced by whatever grows back. So to go a step back behind what you're saying, where is the sentence, the right formed sentence? Where is that information? Can you say that?

[10:11] Michael Levin: The story with the antlers is even more disturbing than that because of the trophic memory business. I have these antlers in my lab. The guy, Bubenik, who did all this stuff, he and his son did this work for almost 60 years together. He's retired now; he sent me all the antlers, so I've got them. I've had them CT scanned and everything. They're all labeled with the name of the deer and 1981, 82, 83, 84. What you do is you make a cut in the antler and it grows a little bone callus and it heals and then the whole thing falls off. When the new antlers come out, it has an ectopic branch point at the location that you injured last year for the next five or six years. Not only is that a memory, but it learns. It's a labile memory; it gets progressively smaller and goes away. I remember reading this and thinking about what a molecular biological model of this would look like, where the cells in the scalp have to store for months the idea that three steps to the left there's an extra thing there. If you're thinking about local rules and cellular automata, you have to be able to work it backwards and say, what should the rules be to give me an extra thing in the pattern? And it keeps that memory. The antler thing is a really profound example.

[11:40] Iain McGilchrist: I'm not sure that we can. I just want to keep it in mind because it's easy to feel that it's rather like the hard question and the soft question. What I think Mark Soames does is answer the soft question. He thinks he can point to a place in the brain where consciousness originates, or consciousness is most centred.

[12:04] Richard Watson: The neural correlates, as they say.

[12:06] Iain McGilchrist: Sorry about that.

[12:07] Richard Watson: The neural correlates, as they say.

[12:08] Iain McGilchrist: The neural correlates. That's the soft question. The hard question is where does consciousness come from? How does it arise and what is it? I think the same thing can happen in our discussions. We can say, I can specify a mechanism whereby this thing can correct itself. Where is the plan according to which it's correcting itself? That's the thing, because it's certainly not in anything that we've looked at so far. As Michael has demonstrated, there's just nothing like the amount of information that could conceivably be needed. When you consider that, during certain periods of gestation, up to 500,000 brain cells are being generated every minute, they've got to not just be a mass of brain cells; they've got to be forming themselves into the brain with all its immensely complex and minutely important elements in their correct place. The question still remains for me, unless you can illuminate it, either of you. What on earth are we talking about here? Where is this? What is it? How does it know what's going on?

[13:26] Richard Watson: I've been thinking about that with Mike. I've been developing an idea, a theory, a vision, possibly just an analogy about how that might work. It hasn't had many outings yet. I don't know if I'll be able to get it out in a way which makes any sense to you, but I wouldn't mind having a go if you're interested. I've been thinking about a metaphor that's a deeper concept of the music of life, where information is held in a way that you might call a song. A song is something in between language and a vibration, which actually does mechanical work. With language, you could write something down, but I still need an interpreter. The words themselves don't do any work. With a song, you have the idea that a note is actually a vibration, which is capable of doing physical work by moving other resonators, which are of a similar frequency or of a harmonic frequency. One note on its own isn't going to hold much information, but when you think about a stack of harmonic frequencies from one octave to the other, they can hold much more information because of the way in which they stack on top of each other and do phase locking. Each time you double the frequency, you double the number of ways in which the phase locking can occur.

[15:39] Iain McGilchrist: Okay, yes.

[15:42] Richard Watson: Now, the high frequencies must live in small physical scales, and the low frequencies live in larger physical scales. And the various dynamical systems of an organism's body, from molecular vibrations to gene regulatory cycles to cytoplasmic flows to cellular metabolic dynamics to tissue bioelectric dynamics to larger and larger scales, all of these dynamics are not a one-way decoding, but a dynamical vibration. Some of them are mechanical and some of them are electrical and some of them are chemical. But they are all interlocked in a way which registers with the scale above and the scale below because there's a harmonic phase locking, but also in a way which is labile, it could lock this way and it could lock that way. So that it becomes productive like a language does, that there's a deep structure to the utterances that can be held in such a structure. A song can be transferred from one suitably irritable substrate to another. You can put the same song at one physical scale into another physical scale by changing the octave, and it's still the same song. Now you change: the G is still a G as you change the scales up. That means that the kind of combination of harmonics that you have in the particular shape of an antler, where there are bioelectric vibrations moving around that shape, where the shape controls the combination of harmonics that live happily in that antler, like a combination of harmonics that live in a tuning fork, can also resonate with a combination of harmonics that sings the same song in a gene regulatory network or sings the same song in a neural network. There's a substrate independence of those combinations of harmonics that enables the song to move about from one scale to another and one tissue to another and one substrate to another. And it's the song that is inherited through evolutionary lineages. The genes play a part of that, but the cell plays a part of that, and the heritable environment plays a part of that. All of those different scales set up the material substrate, but also the dynamical properties, because the material substrate and the dynamical properties are co-creating one another. There are the fast time scales we think of as dynamics, which are controlled by parameters of the slow scales. But the slow scales are not really parameters because they're also variables changing on a slower scale and held in larger physical media. I've been thinking about answers to questions like you were asking in those terms, that a song is not just informational, but it's also something that has causal power in the world. It doesn't need a decoder, it just is.

[19:39] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, but if the analogy, and I like the analogy to a great extent, where is the memory of it? So, for example, I play a certain piece of music by Bach and then somebody else is able to know what that music is, because it's written down on the score. But where is this information of the song, the memory of it? I think the concept of memory comes in importantly here, because we're talking about an evolving pattern, which somehow knows about its past and its future.

[20:20] Richard Watson: Well, memory is not that difficult. So it's any substrate which is plastic; when it gets pushed, it stays like that. And there are all sorts of plasticities at all sorts of physical scales. But one important question is what's the relationship to the genetic information? And I've been thinking about that in a particular sound phenomenon which is called Chladni plates. Do you know how they work?

[21:02] Iain McGilchrist: Please explain.

[21:03] Richard Watson: So Chladni played around with squares of metal and circles of metal, which he would support in the middle on a post, bow the edge of it with a violin bow, and then sprinkle salt or sand on the metal.

[21:21] Iain McGilchrist: Plate. I'm familiar with this. So striking and beautiful.

[21:29] Richard Watson: So the modes that fit in a geometry reveal the dynamics which are in that particular structure. And the modes are in part determined by the geometry of the plate and in part determined by the frequency with which it's vibrated. And if the sand was a bit heavier, it would be in part determined by the memory of the note that it had just been played.

[22:00] Iain McGilchrist: Yeah, okay.

[22:02] Richard Watson: The experiment is designed that the sand is supposed to be a way of reading the vibrations, but it doesn't actually alter them. It doesn't interfere with them. It does interfere with them: the position of the sand holds memory in the plate that makes it more likely to adopt one mode than another because that's the mode held previously.

[22:30] Iain McGilchrist: But as soon as a new vibration was set up, all that would be lost.

[22:35] Richard Watson: If you assume that the vibration is driven rather than sung. If the vibration was itself the dynamics of the plate in interaction with the dynamics of other physical scales, then the song both creates the structure and is affected by the structure. It's like when you put two metronomes that are out of phase on a shared wobbly board, and they lock up with each other.

[23:04] Iain McGilchrist: They lock up, yeah.

[23:05] Richard Watson: Which one was in charge? Did the one on the left do what the one on the right said, or did the one on the right do what the one on the left said?

[23:12] Iain McGilchrist: Of course that's the wrong question because it's a dynamic system. Dynamic systems are always changing. If you want something that is constantly repeated, you'd have to have a way of knowing how to hold things sufficiently stable for this familiar pattern to be expressed again, it seems to me. Otherwise you'd find something else altogether happening. We're concerned with the extraordinary consistency of enormously complex forms in three dimensions. A song is a lovely idea, but it's also only a structure of the imagination and isn't able to store three-dimensional information.

[24:03] Richard Watson: I don't think that's the case. A particular frequency lives naturally on a string of a particular length. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to go from a combination of frequencies defining a two-dimensional shape and a chord of more notes defining a three-dimensional shape. Particular combinations of geometries won't fit in a one-dimensional orbit, but they'll fit in a two- or three-dimensional orbit.

[24:38] Iain McGilchrist: They can be notated in an entirely two-dimensional plane. As long as you repeat whatever it is that's inscribed on that piece of paper, information has two-dimensional instructions. How can this sort of thing describe the structure of the skull of a frog?

[24:58] Richard Watson: I wonder if I could find that little illustration that I showed you, Mike. It might be useful. Do you want to chip in whilst I see if I can find it?

[25:10] Michael Levin: One intuition pump for these things, and I'm in no way suggesting that these things are properly captured by the model of cellular automata. If you think about cellular automata, the classic Game of Life, where the genetics of each cell is a very simple rule that counts neighbors, and depending on that, it will either be on or off in the next generation. That's it. That's all it has. On a reductionist level. There's nothing else. You can see all the rules. There's no magic in that world. If you run this, what happens is that our visual system inspecting this world sees things like gliders. You see these patterns that are moving, and if you take them seriously, you can build Turing machines in that world that use gliders as bit streams. These gliders have an angle at which they move through the plane, and they have a speed at which they move through the plane. One could ask, where in the genetics and physics of that environment is the speed and angle of motion of these things recorded? You'll never find it because the rules don't say anything about gliders. In fact, at the reductionist level, they don't exist. There aren't any gliders. But if you don't believe in gliders, you miss out on quite a bit because you can't engineer the way that somebody who believes in gliders could. As soon as you accept that they exist in some useful fashion, you face this insolvable problem of they move at this particular, very characteristic angle. It's like pi or e or these other constants that just show up — where are they recorded? I always come back to the same thing. I feel like the same thing that allows evolution to save all kinds of effort. When it's evolving a triangle, all it has to do is get the first two angles. It doesn't need to evolve the third one. You get the third for free. I feel like that's a free gift. I feel like there is an important sense in which biology, by taking advantage of what I think biology is doing, is figuring out pointers into this space, prompts or pointers into this enormous space of possibilities, which I think exists in the same way that people make these maps of mathematics. You have number theory over here and then next to it is some other thing. I feel like this is not made-up, and some people agree, I think Penrose would agree with this, that these things are out there in some important way. And I don't think biology has to invent everything from scratch by searching this very difficult micro space of all the things you have to do.

[28:12] Iain McGilchrist: But two things occurred to me there. One is that that's a step forward in itself, because you're saying that, as with pretty much eternal forms of things like pi and the triangle and so forth, there are some forms where we can't say where those are, and we can't say where the biological ones are either. Is that right? And the second thing is that the analogy with the gliders is slightly different from what I'm wanting us to focus on, because gliders are an illusion within our visual system; behind what we see as a glider there is something else which is not a glider. And that's what you were basically saying. But if we're looking at the structure of a brain, it's not that. I just look at the brain and happen to see this complex series of ganglia that are perfectly formed and in the right order. And that's not a visual illusion. It's absolutely real.

[29:21] Michael Levin: Let me push back on that because Josh Bongard and I tried to formalize this in a recent paper. I think people have said this; Don Hoffman would say something like this. I think one way to think about almost anything is as a construction in the mind of some particular observer. I'm certainly not going in the way that anything goes, because I think some constructions are way better than other constructions.

[29:55] Iain McGilchrist: Exactly.

Michael Levin: We could, you and I have had the experience of talking to a physicist who will say, "Brain, what brain? There's no brain. There's a collection of symmetries of some underlying field and some particles, maybe nowadays probably not even particles. And that's it. And you're making stuff up. All this talk of brains and tabletops and even space-time itself." Don Hoffman says now that space-time is doomed; the physicists apparently are not into space-time anymore. There are people who would push back and say everything we see is exactly the status of a glider. It is some successful observer putting a stencil on reality and saying, "this is the frame I would like; I want to look at things at this level of organization, not below, not above," and so on.

[30:49] Iain McGilchrist: If we're to go there, I fairly fundamentally disagree with Donald Hoffman about this. It's an old story, which is that it's almost a Kantian vision that really we can't get beyond our perceptions. And that we're inside a windowless room, seeing projections on an internal screen or reading out from a dial, as he says. But I don't think that's an adequate description of what happened. I've written at length about why in "The Matter with Things." I think what is mistaken here is something that both Niels Bohr and Ian Whitehead pointed out, which is that Bohr said, "The trouble is that scientists mistake their model for the reality, whereas all we're trying to do is to make things cohere, but it's not necessarily the reality." Although there is a way in which you can conveniently make things cohere, there is no guarantee that this is a representation of any kind of a reality. Now that's not saying that there is no reality, that the only reality that we can actually have is a model that we've designed and created, because there is a whole realm of perception, of emotion, of embodiment, of experience in which we find that certain things are truer, more veridical, more repeatable and so on than others. This whole area of experience is ruled out by using a purely cognitive construct of how reality can be or could be thought of. I think the error is to mistake a possible model for anything to do with reality. How do you judge what reality is? That's why as a neuroscientist, I begin my inquiry in neuroscience, in which you can see certain things about different parts of the brain and their ability to sustain something that is veridical in any sense that you or I would accept that term, i.e. that if we followed its promptings, we would be less likely to end up in a catastrophe than if we followed another one. There are realities that are experientially testable, and to say that we can never be certain of something and we can never ultimately know it is not to say that we can't really know what's going on out there. Our minds help to construct it, too. I don't like either of these rather naive, in my view, conclusions: a kind of really excessively naive idealism and an excessively naive realism. Either of these is a wrong answer. It's in a relationship between these things that everything comes into being.

[33:47] Richard Watson: I wonder if it's useful to think about how one song sees another, how one frequency sees another frequency. So if I'm an oscillator with a particular frequency, what kind of influence can I have on other potential oscillators or other dynamical systems? If they're a very different frequency from me, then there's a sense in which they just can't see me. We'll be in phase for just a moment, we'll be out of phase the next moment, and there's no stability in our relationship. On the other hand, if we're very similar in frequency, then I turn very slowly compared to them. If we're identical in frequency, then I stand still, like a rotating object in a strobe light. When I observe that same thing with a different frequency strobe, I can see something else. For example, it will seem stationary if I flash it at half the frequency. I don't really know whether it's the same frequency as me or whether it's double the frequency of me, because it would seem stationary for both those things. I'm not really making one observation. I'm not really measuring its rotational speed. I'm only measuring its rotational speed with respect to mine. Now, if I'm not just one frequency, but I'm a whole collection of frequencies, and I'm observing something else, which is a whole collection of frequencies, then some aspects of it will seem stationary and some aspects of it will seem invisible to me. Other aspects will seem to be rotating quickly. The ones which are more like me are not just things which I can see, but they're things which are actually connected with me. The phase locking that occurs between us is mutual. Whenever there's any weak coupling between the systems, it's the coupling described by a one-to-one ratio or a simple harmonic that are the ones I can see. The difference between our two songs is a combination of frequencies in itself so that our relationship creates a new song in our relationship to one another. So this is a way of seeing an observer-dependent way of one dynamical system observing another dynamical system, without it throwing your hands in the air and saying it could be anything depending on how you look at it.

[36:50] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, but then to go back to the musical model, there are obvious ways in which an octave and a fifth relate to one another. But there are also important things like a diminished seventh and other sorts of passing. Bach is absolutely full of all kinds of colossally different relationships, but they do work together functionally, even though they don't have this resonance at all. In fact, they have the opposite of that. So the dissonance becomes part of the resonance.

[37:29] Richard Watson: No, that's not true. You have to fill in the rest of the chord in order for the diminished 7th to feel concordant and not discordant.

[37:38] Iain McGilchrist: But surely that means that all nodes in that case?

[37:43] Richard Watson: It's a case of how long the story I need to tell for you to see that this other note is a harmonic. When it's the same note or an octave or a fifth, I don't need to tell a big story. For the fifth, I only need to go up two octaves and then down a half and there we are. But for the diminished seventh, there's a longer story that I need to tell you to warm you up to the idea that this does belong in the same family. If I tell it a different way, I can make it sound like it belongs less.

[38:17] Iain McGilchrist: What you've demonstrated is that the whole has an influence on each part of it. And so the whole song, the whole piece of music, the whole, has unfolding resonances with itself that suggest that it's already completed. Otherwise, one wouldn't understand where one was going in it.

[38:39] Richard Watson: No, because there's still the level.

[38:41] Iain McGilchrist: You've got to go from the top down as well as from the bottom up.

[38:44] Richard Watson: But that's exactly what happens in harmonics. So the lability of the song is that I can play you a note and another note which goes together and then a sequence of notes which seem to go together. And then I can play you a repetition of that sequence that goes together—it's the same as the previous one—but I can also play that same sequence that's a fifth up or a third down, or I can play a variation of that sequence. And those are all utterances in the same language, but they are all error-correcting within their own frequency as well. There are still big gaps in between them. I can't just play any old note and have that fit. And the entire tuning of the entire key scale that I'm playing at still disallows most possible frequencies, but there's still an enormous language of possible songs that I can play.

[39:40] Iain McGilchrist: Unless you're a stockhouse. I don't know how you can get from this, which is a very, very wide-ranging conception of relations. I think relations is very important, which is why I like your image of music. I want to test it. And it seems to me that this one has no sense of, we mustn't get too far away from the formation of a frog skull or the formation of a human brain. In this, can you explain to me how this model that allows so many different variations either helps to perpetuate a form so that it is repeated in the future, or where the information is? In the case of Bach it's obvious. There's a score, we open it or we hear somebody play it, we're able to write it down, like Mozart, and then we can play it. But where is this? And has this added to the question, where is the information and how is it repeated and what is the memory of it?

[40:46] Richard Watson: I didn't explain the connection with the Chladni plates yet. Imagine that instead of playing one vibration to a Chladni plate, you play a song. You play a combination of chords or a changing combination of chords over time. For some particular special kinds of molecules that have that linear read-write, tape-like behavior, if you're putting those vibrations onto a molecule whilst you're moving the read-write head across it, you're leaving those patterns along it as you go. And if those patterns, next time you read it, influence what you read so they can be read rather than written, then you have a way of recording a dynamical process into the sand as you travel. That's how I'm viewing the relationship between the behavior, shape, and form of the organism and the information that's in the DNA. The sand is not where the vibration is; it's not like a musical score of the vibrations. It's just a projection into a low-dimensional space, like the salt is of the mode that's vibrating in the plate.

[42:01] Iain McGilchrist: Yes.

[42:02] Richard Watson: I think it's enough to influence it, but it's not a code for it.

[42:07] Iain McGilchrist: I like this. I just think we've got a long way to go, but that's fine. This is a helpful step, but it's still a very long way from helping to answer the questions with which I started.

[42:24] Michael Levin: I sometimes like to work backwards and ask myself, how will we know the answer if and when we find it? So what does the ideal situation look like? And this to me is very similar to the quest for a theory of consciousness. So we look at the ones that have been put out and for each of them, we can say, that's not it; it doesn't work. That's not what; that explains something else. It's neural correlates or behavior or physiology. That's not what we mean by consciousness. So then eventually one says, what would it take? Never mind what the situation is in the real world. Let's assume we can make up whatever we like. What would be a story that we would say, now you've cracked it? That's it. That's a story I'll buy as an answer, whatever that might be. It's very hard. Certainly for consciousness, it's very hard. It's very hard to think of what a theory would be where we would say, "Well, by golly, that's it; that answers my question." I don't see what a coherent story about that would be that we would buy. And for the shape, of course, this is very important, and I talk about this to the people in my lab all the time. What are we going for? What does the final answer look like? In keeping with my instrumentalist view on reality, what we are looking for then is a set of protocols, as it were, for making the shape be whatever you want. So you've got the answer to this question if and only if I say, "I want a frog with six legs and a propeller on top and a tail like a tiger." You say to me, we can do that, and here's how you would do it. I will change this and that. There you go. That's what you will get. If they can do that, then you must have found the encoding. I don't know what's better than that. I'm open to other views on this. What does a solution do?

[44:36] Iain McGilchrist: Two things occur to me. One is to do with the immediate analogy that you made of if we could have a frog with it. I understand how you could work experimentally within this complex system and find a way of intervening that caused it to have six legs and a propeller. But you still haven't, and what I want to emphasize is that this isn't an answer to the question how the developing embryo knows how to further develop the frog skull, and how, when it's disturbed or you intervene in it, it says, "I don't like this, I want to go back to a frog skull."

[45:18] Michael Levin: But is that true? Do you think that it's possible to get to the point of being able to make any shape that you want biologically and not have answered that question?

[45:30] Iain McGilchrist: I don't know about the technical aspect of whether you can make frog embryos do these things. You're the man to answer that. But what I'm saying is I'm not sure that this is, I don't think that this is the same as saying what we're doing, what you can report is what you've done in the lab and you've interfered in this. This is slightly like my comparison between the hard and the soft problem of consciousness. You said that Mark Solms can say, and it's perfectly true, and I knew this when I was a medical student, that a particular activating system is incredibly important for consciousness. And when people have a stroke that affects this area, they're not conscious. So that's a different question from what is consciousness. And that brings me to the second thing, my reflection on what you just said, which is I think that's absolutely fair. I think what you're pointing to is the limits of a certain methodology or modeling or whatever, which is that it's satisfied if it can account for something within certain terms, but it's not satisfied or has to accept that it can't answer it, then it says, what would a real answer to this look like? And I think that's progress. I think that's good because I think the proper way to approach consciousness is to say we've tried every possible way we can to see how you can extract consciousness from entirely unconscious matter. If matter really and truly has nothing to do with consciousness, that's a big question because I believe that's not the case. But if that were the case, there is no known way and probably no knowable way. So you're then moved forward, I think, to the position that I hold about consciousness, which is that it is an ontological primitive. It's not extracted from or emergent from anything else. It is what it is. There it is. And I think that what I'm saying about the forms in this respect is that they may be of a kind, that the kind of science that you perfectly correctly and honourably are pursuing is not going to be able to give us an answer to where these forms are or what they are. So if that's the case, is it reasonable enough to posit that there are such fields of forms somewhere and that we may in the future come to know something about them or we may actually never be able to locate them or say what they are?

[48:01] Michael Levin: I'm with you on the consciousness bit. I also agree that these kinds of loss-of-function experiments where you knock something out and it disappears, that's not remotely sufficient. I'm in agreement on all that. My counterfactual story is that I view it as a necessary condition that, in order to have the ability to make whatever kind of shape you want, I don't mean screw up a shape and say, "oh, look, it's gone wrong." I don't mean that. I mean literally I tell you I want this elephant in threefold symmetry with literally complete control. I don't think you can get there without as much understanding of where form is encoded as there is to be had. That to me is the strongest criterion for being able to say: someone could say, "I know you've got airplanes and gliders and rockets, but you still haven't understood flight." There's an essence of flight, and I don't feel like we've got it yet. Sure, there's airplanes and whatnot. There may well be other things behind it. Our positions are not that different because I do think that, somewhat similar to consciousness, some of this stuff is an ontological primitive in the way that the truths of mathematics are. I really do have this Platonic view that some of these things are. That doesn't mean we can't explore them. I think that's exactly what we're doing in synthetic bioengineering and things like that: we're getting a peep into that world.

[49:46] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, I'm glad that we're that close, and I believe we are. But to revert to the question whether we've really understood where forms are and how they operate, if we can change to the elephant that has 17 trunks or whatever it is we particularly want. I think the thing is this, you could say, in this particular sequence of amino acids, I've done certain changes and I've manipulated that. And you've therefore got an account of a narrative of what you did. Is that the same as saying to me, I now know how this information works, because what you're saying is I have a handle on a proxy for it that I can shift, but what is it that I'm actually shifting?

[50:42] Michael Levin: But if I didn't, how would I have known which knob to twist? You can pick some low-hanging fruit without knowing what you're doing for sure. And you can make some things that you can fumble around, but I'm asking for more than that. To really have complete control, I don't think you can do that without a proper understanding of where the encoding is, otherwise you wouldn't get it. And in fact, what you just laid out is basically the reason why technologies like CRISPR and genomic editing are not the fundamental solution to regenerative medicine, because they're going to get stuck exactly where you just said. You can pick some low-hanging fruit — I know some things I can twist and get — but you will get nowhere near complete control over mesoscale properties. So things we really care about, fingers and eyes and so on, with that approach. I don't want to take up all the time. I think Richard's got his thing queued up.

[51:41] Richard Watson: Thanks. I don't know if this will resonate with you or not, but resonance is the idea. I'll share my screen for a second to show you this figure. This is a wave, a one-dimensional wave through time. Can you see that okay? If I zoom in on it, you can see there's quite a bit more structure here than you might guess. Within these blobs there, when you get close enough, it is just an oscillation. And it's not built in any programmatic way. It's a combination of cosine to the fourth plus sine squared plus sine of two X, all added up together to make a complicated looking wave. You can see that I summed things which were harmonic so that there's a macro scale wave structure to the whole thing as well: this repeating blob slightly different each time, and within that three repeating blobs and so on, and within it you zoom down and you get more and more detail. I want to show you what that one-dimensional wave looks like when you render it in two dimensions by taking the X coordinate to be every 13th Y position, and the Y coordinate to be every 14th Y position, so that they slip slightly with respect to one another. As the reading frame slips, the reading frames for the X value and the Y value are going at slightly different paces as you move along this song. The result of that is the link I put in the chat, because if I try to play the video, experience suggests that won't work. You can download it and play it.

[53:48] Iain McGilchrist: We're probably approaching an end, but I think there's something very important that we're touching on here that it would be fruitful to think more about and talk more about. It's really the question whether, if you know how to control something, you understand it. It seems to me that this is a fundamental problem in our culture: we believe that because we've found ways of understanding, of controlling something, we actually understand what it is we're doing and what it is that we're dealing with. I think this is part of what we're coming to here: it's like the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, who knows how to utter the spell and knows that certain things will happen, but doesn't really understand what he's doing at all. I just want to keep that distinction between the sense of understanding something—knowing that if I intervene in this way, certain things will predictably happen—and the kind of understanding that I'm really talking about, which is behind that, above it, or on a meta level from that: what are we actually dealing with here, which is a philosophical question. In certain scientists' minds that's the way of saying it's not important, but I don't think so at all. I think science and metaphysics have to walk hand in hand, and science is wrong to discard metaphysics and metaphysics is wrong to disregard science.

[55:30] Michael Levin: I agree 100%. And the way that I think about this is the type of engineering that we were just talking about, where you make your threefold elephant. I view that kind of control engineering as a narrow part of what's really meant, which maybe generalizes as relationship. So, because across that agential spectrum, on the left side, you've got some mechanical clocks and some things like this, where the only relationship you're going to have is to rewire the thing and that's it. But on the right side, you have systems where to really understand them and to really have that kind of relationship, it's not all of it's, in fact, it's largely not about control going in one direction. It's bidirectional — you're going to benefit from their agency. You're going to form some sort of together unit. The kind of thing that I'm talking about is somewhere in the middle where, at least for the biology, that is also a bidirectional relationship and truly understanding it is not enough to just create some stuff and say, see, I made as many trunks as you want. I agree with you that I think it's all part of, to really understand something, there's more to it than just the unidirectional control. But I do see it as one continuum. So it's almost like, it's like engineering on steroids; at some point it's not just you tweaking the system, it's some kind of dance by which both systems benefit and scale up.

[57:07] Iain McGilchrist: Yes, and one interesting consequence of that is if you believe that all relationships are reciprocal or reverberative, there is no such thing as an interaction in which only one party has changed. Then we come to the interesting point where the nature of our intervention affects what it is that we're going to find and what we find affects the nature of what it is we think we've seen and what we next do. So it's worth always remembering that the model or the dynamic that we are pursuing may well be helpful, but it's only a partial help and it may deceive us and it's an adjunct on a process where we have to keep revisiting our model. What I'm pleading for is a less mechanical model, because I don't know where the mechanism is and I'm not sure that anyone does, where this phenomenally complex three-dimensional material is so exquisitely preserved. If we have to go outside of a view of mechanism, as we've had to do in physics, I think it's no shame if biology also has to recognize this. It may cause a revolution in biology as the findings of quantum mechanics formed a revolution in physics.

Iain McGilchrist, Richard Watson, and Mile Levin #4

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