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Show Notes

This is a ~2 hour discussion among contributors to the Platonic Space Symposium (

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Strong perception framework

(10:12) Perception model boundaries

(17:41) Penrose and probabilities

(30:57) Quantum interpretations debated

(39:28) Probability dynamics and gravity

(53:50) Relational observer problem

(01:00:30) Dance synchronization physics

(01:12:02) Rituals and group flow

(01:23:43) Boundaries and agency

(01:31:38) Religious possibility spaces

(01:46:30) Numbers in theology

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Transcript

This transcript is automatically generated; we strive for accuracy, but errors in wording or speaker identification may occur. Please verify key details when needed.

Main Episode

[00:00] Benjamin Studebaker: I could share something if everyone's okay with it. Last week I started off with a little presentation, and based on the discussion, I had a bunch of new ideas, so I whipped up another little something I'd like to show you all about a potential mechanism for ingression in general because I think there's a really clear example from economics about how it works. So I'll try to go through this pretty briefly, and we'll see what kind of ideas come out of that. So everyone's seeing this presentation? Cool. So this was a yes.

[00:34] Pavel: Yes.

[00:35] Benjamin Studebaker: Sick, thank you. So this is about what I'm calling strong perception. It's a way of perceiving the environment by coupling two invariants in it. I think it provides a general mechanism for ingression based on all kinds of patterns. I've written various essays on it at this URL here. So as we're all kind of here to discuss, we have this interesting situation where there seem to be these non-physical patterns that ingress into our world, like how the prime numbers influence when cicadas emerge. But there are also physical patterns and other patterns as well, like economic patterns, social patterns, psychological patterns, et cetera, that we also seem to align to in some way. And so the question is, are those all different kinds of things, or is there some general mechanism underlying all of that? And what I'm basically going to argue is that there is a general mechanism here, which is strong perception. So in contrast to strong perception is probably the more typical way of thinking about perceiving the environment, which I'm calling weak perception over here, which is, by the way, just a terminological thing. It doesn't mean it's worse or inferior. It has, in fact, some significant advantages. This is just like the history of the terminology. But basically, weak perception is how we typically think of it working, which is you've taken data from the environment through your eyes and ears, you feed that into some kind of internal model, and in doing so form some picture of reality and then decide on what you should do on that base. You're making inferences, you're doing computations, it's all that stuff. Strong perception is basically an extension of the James Gibson idea of direct perception, where you just directly couple two things in your environment and do perception that way. So a classic example is how a baseball fielder can catch a fly ball rather than doing things the weak perception way where you would calculate the trajectory of the ball and run to where you think it's going to go. You instead couple to the ball by maintaining a visual relationship with it, as long as you hold it constant in your vision in a particular way, and you just run in a way that makes that happen, you will end up where the ball is going, not by computing a model, but just by holding some relationship with the environment steady. So just by coupling to something in the environment. So I didn't know Carl was going to be in this, but here I am quoting him, as he said in a 2013 paper, an agent doesn't have a model of its world, it is a model. So that is the strong perception view. What makes this kind of coupling possible is an invariant. It's a regularity that holds some scale and substrate. So this works because basically the environment isn't random. There are patterns to it. There is structure. So just by relating yourself to the environment, you can then navigate it in reliable ways. These could be-- the classic example of this from Gibson is the optic array. There are basically rules about how light bounces off surfaces in the environment. So when that light comes to your eye, it's not just some random thing. It reflects these regularities. And so by coupling to those regularities, you can act accordingly. There are also non-physically lawful but still reliable invariants, such as red light means stop, green light means go. Not a lot of physics, obviously, but it's still a stable enough fact about the environment that you can just couple to the red light, green light pattern in your traffic environment and drive safely without having to think too hard about what's going on. And so what that brings us to is a potential mechanism for ingression, which is that patterns can reach you through an invariant. All you need to do is align to some local parameter, and distant events are going to flow into your behavior without you even having to know that that's what's happening. So there's a very nice example here from economics, a very typical textbook thing here, which is suppose there's a weather event in Vietnam, some frost that hits coffee growing regions, which as a coffee drinking American, you might never even hear about happening. Most of us probably not following weather events in faraway regions. But what's going to happen is that because the supply of coffee is going to be reduced by this shock, the price of coffee is going to go up. So you're going to see some invariant, which is the relationship between prices and other things in the environment affecting the availability of coffee. You're going to see a change in that invariant. And what that's going to do is shift your behavior, not because you're consciously thinking about it, but just because you are coupled to prices through your budget constraint, you only have so much money.

[05:20] Benjamin Studebaker: So if the price of coffee goes up, you are forced to change your behavior in some way. That's what it means to couple to this invariant by maintaining your budget constraint, by not spending more money than you have, you are forced to adjust your behavior as the price of coffee changes. And what that does is you're going to buy less coffee because it got more expensive, which now aligns you to weather events in Vietnam. So without you ever realizing just by maintaining your budget constraint and respecting the price of coffee, your behavior starts to reflect patterns about weather in Vietnam. And so what you could think of this is that this could be ingression in a very mundane way. If you think of Vietnam as some other world, then its events seem to ingress into your own through the price system, aligning you to it without your awareness. In fact, without the help of prices, you could argue it is another realm because the weather event is outside your cognitive light cone. So the proposal I have here is that this is the general ingression mechanism. Invariants in the environment are the pointers or interfaces to patterns in platonic space. And we align to these patterns by coupling with the invariant via strong perception or as strong perception. Part of why I think this might be the general mechanism is that it's very efficient because what these invariants are, such as prices, are bow ties, which are able to maintain their invariant structure across a huge array of inputs and outputs or patterns on the organism side and patterns on the environment side. So price, for example, the price of coffee, it takes in a huge amount of facts about the world, about things going on, weather, agriculture, people's shopping patterns, all kinds of things going on and feeds that out into all kinds of things you can do with coffee. Do you want a hot brew in the morning, a cold brew in the afternoon? You can do all kinds, whatever you want to do with coffee. You can make a tiramisu, whatever. So the price, even though there's all these different things going on in the input and output side, the invariant relationship price has with the conditions of supply and demand remains. So it's this very efficient way of coupling to these patterns because it's just so reliable across a huge range of circumstances. And it's not just prices that work this way, but there's bow ties anywhere, traffic lights, a conductor's baton. The marginal value of a shot in basketball or something like that is going to organize the game around. Each of these are a tiny knot that coordinates a huge varied world. So something I'm thinking about is that there's a spectrum of invariance by depth of coordination. Instead of thinking of mathematical and physical and social patterns and so on as being different kinds of things, we can think of them as being one spectrum where just the sort of reliability of the invariant varies. So mathematical patterns mostly seem to be atemporal, hold everywhere in all universes as far as we know. It's like very reliable invariants. Physical invariants, maybe not quite as truly universal, but at least in our universe and at least as far as we're going to explore that universe, they're going to be there, all the way to something like the state of a chessboard or the marginal value of a shot in a basketball game, which really just holds that set of rules. So to summarize, basically what I'm thinking is that there's one mechanism at every kind of level of the spectrum, where step one, you align to some pattern by coupling to some invariant. You don't need to even know about the pattern. You just maintain some relationship with your environment. Coupling with the invariant induces ingress, that's a typo, where the organism behaves as if anticipating patterns from distant realms, such as how we're all behaving as if we're anticipating weather events around the world through the price system. And then all you need to do is reorganize by just maintaining your coupling to the invariant as those patterns change. It's like as new events change, the price changes, you maintain your coupling to the price system by just holding on to respecting your own budget constraint. And that maintains that alignment to the pattern. So one thing that one kind of insight that comes out of this is that we can see how these patterns in turn exploit us. So we construct prices by just coordinating with each other and that gives rise to prices in coffee and other areas. But what those prices do is they compete for a finite reservoir, which is our total budget, the total amount of money people have to spend on things. Because basically, if one price goes up, then another price has to go down because otherwise there's not enough money to support the total price system. And what that does is this turns each individual price into a network. So the price system emerges because they're all pulling on this common reservoir of people's budgets. And so the individual prices actually end up exploiting us to network and scale up into a total price system. So that's what I have here, which is basically this is a potential mechanism for regression, a lot of invariance all on this spectrum, math, physics, economics, et cetera, all working according to this kind of pattern. So I know that was a lot, but I want to stop there and just kind of get people's takes on what they think about that.

[10:12] Richard Watson: Just when you think about these patterns and you have your hierarchy of things that change more or things that are permanent. Are you suggesting that this possibility space contains permanent objects just there and that we are sampling them and revealing them? Or is it the other way, that these things are there in this order and that order is independent of observation?

[10:41] Benjamin Studebaker: Honestly, I really have no clue. I mean, I think the price system is an interesting example where we can observe prices behaving in an agent-like manner, where we create them to coordinate us and then they in turn use us to coordinate themselves with each other and create the price system. But other patterns don't seem to work like that as far as I can tell. So honestly, no clue.

[11:10] David: David. This is really interesting. I have a question about this distinction between the strong and the weak perception you make. Let me go back to the tracking example. Suppose you have a moth, sorry, you have a bat tracking a moth in flight and that is strong perception. It's just tracking it, you're saying without any internal representation of the moth in flight. It seems to me that the way that tracking works behaviorally for the bat is there is some kind of, it may not be conscious, but there's some kind of model that's working on its physiology to direct its flight. So can you help me understand that distinction?

[12:06] Benjamin Studebaker: I think basically it's a question of what are the boundaries of the model? So in strong perception, you just are the models. You don't use a model to navigate your environment. Your behavior just is a model of the environment. In weak perception, you have some separated internal model that you use to navigate. And we use both of these for a lot of activities in your life, like the way I'm sitting in my chair, I'm just directly coupled to it and my posture is just the efficient way for me to sit in this chair. But then in other situations, of course, you use an internal model to plan out your day. So humans use both. I'm sure other animals use both as well.

[12:50] David: So again, you are the model. What about a fish? Is it more like a fish swimming in a current? And when the current changes, the fish is gonna change anyway because they don't even have to model the current. They're just moved by it. Is that what you're saying? I'm just trying to understand.

[13:11] Benjamin Studebaker: I think that's a good example. So the fish is trying to maintain some relationship with its environment, which is the invariant it's coupling to. I don't know, maybe that's, I wouldn't know in the case of fish, but maybe it's just trying to maintain some angle that it's traveling at or something like that. So it's just trying to maintain some visual relationship with something in the water and that's what's going to determine that angle. And then all it has to do is adjust its body and the current to maintain that. So without thinking about anything that's going on, it just says I am maintaining this relationship and then I do whatever I have to do to do that. And the result of that, as long as the fish is able to behave effectively, is it is in fact going to do a very good job of modeling its environment or behaving as a model of its environment. And I'll throw the paper in the chat as well because it's a really good one that I got most of these ideas from.

[14:12] Joel: Yeah, I'm not sure I completely understand what price refers to here, but I actually built something recently that sounds at least analogous to this as a sort of multi-agent model for agents that can listen in on your conversation and then give opinions on things. And the interesting thing that happens, you have a massive number of agents that could be listening in any given time that they interact with you through lights, basically. So each light they can control. And if they have something to say, they basically pulse the light. And then if you touch the light, then basically you can hear what they have to say. It'll be translated to audio signal for you. But in order to accommodate this, I had to basically build a system where the AIs evaluate how much they think that they have something to contribute to your conversation. So they evaluate as a percentage, but then also you get to post-facto evaluate it to see if they actually did. And then that particular agent doesn't necessarily get to raise their hand quite as much or approach the light quite as much if they're not perceived as valuable by the receiver. So it's kind of an interesting way of navigating that could apply in some of these contexts as well.

[15:24] Benjamin Studebaker: There is a similar mechanism in the economy where the better you are at making efficient use of scarce resources, the more you can sell those resources for. You take something, transform it into something valuable. In turn, that increases your budget and you can buy more stuff and basically have more ability to influence the allocation of scarce resources in the economy. Good. If y'all just want to talk, feel free.

[15:58] Richard Watson: I just wanted to ask Joel on that, where you've got the agents and multi-agents commenting on the paper. Have you thought about looking at Marcus Beaver's research around the bigger architecture that he did on the graph, on the graph theoretic swarms for discovering new materials? So in lieu of them just self-reporting on their own argument, you have one specialized agent whose job is to basically break whatever suggestion and then you only get filtered up only the ding comes out when it's been challenged internally. So you have iteration on the quality of that debate or that feedback that you're getting because it was producing novel outcomes in those experiments that he was running. And I thought it might be interesting because adversarial way of ranking things might produce better feedback in that type of model. I mean, that's the case in materials, but might not be the case in.

[17:03] Joel: In this case, it's very time dependent because it needs to be in your existing conversational stream. So there's that perceptive thing. And then also no one so far in this whole thing, actually in the entire history of when I've done this, has done a particularly good of coming or something that the people who are participating in the conversation find meaningful and timely. So that's an interesting catch-all. At least part of it is that latency and translation to the audio signal for the various things that exist at this moment.

[17:40] Richard Watson: Yvette.

[17:41] Ivette Fuentes: Hi. Yes, thanks. I feel really outside of my comfort zone here making comments on this because I'm a quantum physicist, so I spend all my life just thinking about atoms and photons. But I always had the How the Light Gets In festival this past weekend. And I went to a talk on a philosopher from Oxford talking about mental states and Buddhism and how they say that one has no free will and no self depending on how your mental states behave. And basically what she had was just a chain of mental states that were determined. So it really reminded me a lot of what you just showed us because it was a similar thing that was like, okay, you went to, her example was you go to a market and you smell a mango and that triggers a response and one thing leads to another. And that's how she claims our minds work based on the Buddhist philosophy. But what really was very striking for me is that throughout the chain, everything was completely deterministic. So this would mean that basically you're saying that thought is computational. But something that made me think a lot is Roger Penrose's arguments on why humans would not think in this deterministic way. So I wonder if that could be interesting or related or anything like that, or is it just a crazy idea?

[19:25] Benjamin Studebaker: So that's a very interesting observation. I think that where I'm going with this is almost the complete opposite direction, where what we're seeing actually is that things are very frequently underdetermined, where there are degeneracies, which means there's many ways of satisfying some task constraints in terms of organizing muscles or things going on in your brain or whatever. And so what that does is it forces new task constraints to be added to make some outcome happen. And it is through that optionality where I think weak anticipation, the possibility for that, comes from. Like, how do you have some internal model that's in some way shielded from the environment so that's not just immediately coupling to whatever, but can freely vary and simulate things? It's because you have a lot of options for how to, which invariants are you coupling to and how particular are you organizing your body at any particular moment to do a particular coupling? There's actually a lot of flexibility there because it's just not actually that deterministic. And that then gives you the freedom to choose a solution that also accomplishes other things. Basically a generalization of that sorting paper, sorting algorithm paper with Mike and Adam Goldstein and all that, where they show that, like, it's got options for what it can do, and so it can pursue along the way.

[20:41] Ivette Fuentes: I'll keep paying attention and then seeing what rings. I just for me this weekend, I was very excited with the ideas of in what way are we not thinking in computational ways? Because that, well, according to Roger, that's where understanding comes in. And it has to do with what you said with having different options, right? But what's quite interesting, maybe that's something I could talk about at some point, but I'm not an expert in, that is related to quantum probabilities because the only thing that is really not deterministic in, let's say, at the atomic level and that would affect all the other layers is quantum probabilities. And that's how Roger uses to argue that the human mind might not be computational and deterministic. And that would be the root of understanding and creativity and things like that that computers would never in principle be able to achieve.

[22:07] Benjamin Studebaker: That's super interesting because the ecological psychology approach that I'm drawing on, the work of people like James Gibson and Michael Turvey and so forth, it's more of a scale-free approach to this kind of optionality where at any scale, as long as you have degeneracy, you can basically then add additional task constraints to pursue other goals. There might be some synthesis about combining that with this quantum physics stuff. You would need someone who understands quantum physics though, and that's not gonna be me, so.

[22:37] Ivette Fuentes: Well, here's the other way around. I understand that part and not the other. So no, but what's very interesting about it is that if you think, I mean, we see probabilities everywhere, right? And you would say, okay, you could also say in a certain circumstance inside a computer, you would also have different states with different probabilities. But the thing is, none of these probabilities are fundamental because they're always determined by something else. So the perfect example is a coin where if you ignore all the details of the initial conditions and the temperature and the air and all the things that could happen, this thing looks probabilistic. But if you take into account the system as a whole, it's all deterministic. It's really not. And then if you have something that's deterministic, that is just computational, any machine eventually would be able to have it. But the probabilities that you have in quantum mechanics are of a different nature. They're fundamental. There's nothing you can do to recover that sort of losing information. They are the only real probabilities. So then that would mean that, you know, that gives like opens a chance to having something outside what's computational.

[24:03] Michael Levin: So my thought on this would be the following. I agree that, okay, I've been thinking hard recently about this kind of spectrum of different kinds of problem solving, all the way from very mechanical, meticulous, step-by-step stuff to what we call flashes of insight, great kinds of inspiration, people who are creative, who just suddenly, wow, well, the symphony was just sort of there. I didn't have to calculate it out and stuff like that. And what I would say is this, that on Roger's claim, I think it makes sense that those are not the kinds of things, what we mean by those things are not what happens when you follow the steps of an algorithm. But I'm very skeptical about this notion of machine at all, because what we see even from extremely minimal, fully deterministic kinds of systems, and we have one thing on the algorithms published and we have a bunch more stuff coming in the next few months, even those kinds of simple deterministic things are not only doing the things that the algorithm tells them to do, which means that if we define this kind of inspiration, intuition, whatever, as the extra stuff that you get while you're obeying the laws of physics and the computation, everything else, you're obeying all that stuff, but also some other things happen that are not captured by that formalism, by the standard computational formalism, I think that makes sense. But then I would claim that you don't have to be human, you don't have to be biological, and you don't even have to be very complex. And I don't know, probably quantum, I don't know anything about the quantum stuff. Maybe it gives you more bells and whistles and you can do more stuff. But even boring Newtonian deterministic kinds of systems already have this kind of thing where it seems to get more than you thought it was going to get from just following the steps. So that would be right now, sitting where I am right now, that would be my claim, is that yes, we have access to some sort of intuition slash insight that isn't captured by the standard computational paradigm. But we're not unique in that. And it seems to, as far as I can tell, go very far down, if not all the way down. That's what I would say.

[26:21] Pavel: This feels like the core is computational irreducibility, right? So you could say that, like in a quantum, right, until you measure the thing, there is fundamentally no way that you can know what the outcome of the spin up or spin down will be. Even without that, you have a complex cellular automata. Until you have it run, you have no way of knowing what it will be. And you could do that without letting it run, but then you'll have to still run it internally. So I feel like the sorts of examples that Mike is pointing out have that. So in my mind, I used to, I'm also kind of physicist by training, and I used to think that I let go of this idea that quantum is really fundamentally different than other things because we have other fundamental horizons in nature that are not only quantum, that is, right, like if you knew the position and velocity of all molecules in the universe, et cetera, then you could predict things, but you'd need the computer to do that and that computer would be the universe. So realistically, like you couldn't really, right?

[27:22] Ivette Fuentes: But there is a fundamental difference that I'm not really doing a very good job at explaining because maybe I would have to go much slower, but I think maybe this could be something that I could slowly put together in a clearer way. I mean, let's say the gist of it would be that nothing of what you might think that it's like. Really this extra thing, like if you have something that looks deterministic and you say, well, even if all my steps are deterministic, I'm still getting something out from that. Is that what you said, Michael?

[28:07] Michael Levin: Well, what I said was that what you apparently get in some of these simple systems are not just unpredictability and not just things that are hard to, as Pavel just said, know ahead of time with the finite resources. What I see is things that are fundamentally recognizable to behavior scientists. So these are behavioral propensities, these are problem-solving skills, these are specific patterns, which to me, all of these things are on the same spectrum anyway. I think these are all the same things. But I don't think it's just being, it's not just the fact that you couldn't predict it. Because in fact, in our example, I think you could, just no one looked for it. You actually could predict it. But it's not the prediction aspect of it. It's the fact that these things do the kind of work that we expect agents to do. And we have, by the way, Carl, I don't know if you remember, but you made some suggestions for us about how to look for active inference in that system. And Reed Bender and I have a manuscript that we're working on. We actually found exactly what you suggested we look for, and it's there. And so we'll be writing it up. So this is what I mean, is that it just seems to me that the standard computational paradigm that we use to A, say, what are you going to get when you do certain things? And B, the inverse problem, which is if I want to solve something, how much effort do I need to put in to make this happen? They don't do the accounting properly. They leave out something very important. And I think at the lower end of the scale with these simple things, these things are measurable, but they're kind of modest. And then as you go to higher biological systems and beyond, they become more difficult to quantify, but much, much more impressive and pretty close, I think, to what we mean by intuition and things like that.

[30:01] Ivette Fuentes: The only thing that is important, I think, is the distinction of having probabilities that are fundamental, that come from quantum mechanics, no way that they are outside our universe, those probabilities. They're outside the physical universe. There's no way you can. And all the others are apparent. There's always something that you can do to recover that. And that is really key to what Roger says. And I think that most, well, at least in the physics scenario, most people miss that and it's really key. But anyway, I will listen more and I think, yeah.

[30:57] Michael Levin: Sorry, could you talk about that last bit again? Because I'm really interested when you say they're outside, and this is, I have no expertise in this, but when you say they're outside of our universe, what do you mean by that? Outside this universe, outside physics in general, outside of what exactly? I'd love to hear.

[31:16] Ivette Fuentes: Well, I mean, I think this also touches on interpretations of quantum mechanics, right? We've been arguing about this for 100 years, but let me maybe go into the key explanations. One of them would be many worlds. So in many worlds, in one single branch, you don't have any probabilities, you don't have to worry about them. So everything would be deterministic in one branch. But you have to live with the fact that there are an infinite number of universes that do not interact with this one. So there would then, in that sense, be things outside this universe, which would be other universes. I don't like that interpretation because I think it's too crazy. But let's say, I'm gonna try to simplify it, but other interpretations that would be more of the type of hidden variables, for example, that David Bohm, for example, put forward. And Einstein also used to think that there must be something hidden and so on. There are some interpretations of them that are like things that you cannot measure with a physical apparatus. By that I mean outside the universe. You cannot use a photon or another atom or any other thing to measure that part of the system because it's just not physical in that sense.

[32:44] Michael Levin: Just out of curiosity, is that a pretty conventional claim or just because I'm just curious how people take that because what I've noticed is that everybody's really allergic to other realms. And when you say that something is outside of physics, people really tend to freak out. And I'm just curious in your world.

[33:05] Ivette Fuentes: Well, I mean, I think it just means it. The thing is that interpretations of quantum mechanics, we've been for 100 years disagreeing. So there is the many worlds camps and there's an epistemologic camp that says that quantum mechanics doesn't even talk about physics. It just talks about information. I mean, those extreme, you know, perhaps the interpretations are that difficult. So of course, if one says one thing, you'll always find many other people that are going to disagree. But what I meant, this is what I am finding in my own research, is that there are some variables involved in quantum mechanics that you cannot measure by physical means, meaning I can't plug apparatus to it. I can't use photos. I can't use other systems with mass because they just don't couple. However, they give rise to these probabilities. But many worlds people would completely disagree with that interpretation.

[34:21] Michael Levin: Well, they got enough other realms, so they.

[34:24] Ivette Fuentes: But there’s something—let me give you another example, like collapse models. Those collapse models say that there is a stochastic field, which is universal. And that sounds very nice, which produces the collapse. What does stochastic mean? Stochastic means it’s a field of probabilities. But these probabilities, again, are fundamental. It’s like the notion of probability means that there’s something missing in your description. And then maybe that would be the clearest way to say every time you have a stochastic field or a probability or something like that, that we cannot get rid of in quantum mechanics unless we go too many worlds. All the other interpretations of quantum mechanics would require something to be stochastic, probabilistic, and so on. Probability means you do not have information. But there is a huge difference between not having information because there are too many degrees of freedom and your computer can’t cope, or you don’t have an apparatus, in principle, that there are actually just nothing you can do in the physical world to recover the information that’s missing. I mean, not even a black hole is like that, because in a black hole you could decide to fall into the black hole and you would find the missing information in there. So it’s even worse than a black hole.

[35:55] Michael Levin: And is there, did somebody else want to say something?

[36:01] David: No, you go ahead. I did. I'll wait for a second.

[36:03] Michael Levin: So if that's the case, is there anything in physics that prohibits there being some kind of structure to this? So we've said that these probabilities are somehow outside of this world, fine. But wherever it is that they originate, is it possible that there's some large-scale structure such that what looks to us in experiments is random, but overall there's some kind of underlying pattern to how these things show up, or are there aspects of physics that actually rule that out, like observationally that can't be right?

[36:38] Ivette Fuentes: No, I mean, the patterns, I don't know if I'm understanding your question well, but the patterns are very strong in the sense that if you use quantum mechanics to predict the outcome of an experiment, you will get, I don't know, an accuracy much better than anything else. That's why we keep quantum mechanics, because it's just incredibly powerful. But what we do is that we use something called the Born rule that we just say, okay, so suddenly these states which have some coefficients, they turn into probabilities. It's so magical. Right now that's how we live with quantum mechanics. I teach quantum mechanics at the university and you have to tell students this is the state of the system. This is a Schrodinger equation that tells you in a deterministic way how the system evolves. And then out of my sleeve, I have to put forward Born's rule, which is the measurement postulate, and say that the state collapses to one of the outcomes with a given probability. But there's been for 100 years no explanations of where the probabilities come from. But the only thing we do understand, I think any physicist would agree, is that probabilities mean something is missing in the information. So I guess I loosely speaking, I said it's out of this. It's out of it because it's fundamental. It's not because of our lack of knowledge.

[38:10] David: I guess what I'd like to ask is whether the probabilities you're talking about, you're thinking about, you said missing information. That to me suggests that probability is epistemological, that if you just had more information, you would be able to find the answer or reduce this probability, reduce your uncertainty. But there are people, I think there's some interpretations of quantum mechanics that say, no, probability is metaphysical. It's just part of the structure of the universe. Things are just really at this fundamental level, probabilistic, and we need to just get over it.

[38:49] Ivette Fuentes: Yeah. Yeah.

[38:49] David: And that's one way of looking at it.

[38:52] Ivette Fuentes: Well, you just mentioned two interpretations, right? One of them would be that one, and the other one would say quantum mechanics doesn't talk about the physical world, just talks about information or our state of knowledge of the physical world and things like that. But in all cases, you have to deal with something is missing.

[39:22] Michael Levin: Carl, I think you were next.

[39:28] Karl Friston: Sorry, I was just having a sneaky cigarette. Yeah, just one thing. I was also at The HowTheLightGetsIn, and just out of interest, had a fireside chat with Hilary Lawson, who's the director of the IAI, and told him about you, generically.

[39:53] Ivette Fuentes: I was in a debate with him, and I went to your debate, or discussion with him, which I loved, by the way. It was really amazing.

[40:02] Karl Friston: So he was sort of shopping around for the next likely set of generation of speakers in this space. So hopefully, he said his secretary was going to e-mail me with a list of links and the like, 'cause the things you're talking about here are exactly what they like to hear about these festivals. Sorry, just something that might tie together the missing information perspective on probability and the first scale invariant or looking for invariances or symmetries at multiple scales. One response, as a physicist with very little training, and my training was a year of quantum mechanics and a year of probability theory, is that it's all about probability. There is no reality. And on that view, information is just an attribute of a probability density. In fact, literally, the self-information in Shannon and information theory generally is the negative log of a probability. It is a functional. There is nothing apart from probability. And information just is a statement or an attribute of a probability distribution. And that seems to me to make sense in relation to the derivation of at least the time-independent Schrödinger equation from the Fokker-Planck equation. And then you ask yourself, what is a Fokker-Planck equation? It's just the deterministic behaviour of probability densities. So what I'm saying is, you know, I agree entirely with Yvette that it's all about probabilities. But I would say beyond the quantum realm, you know, in my world, the Born rule is unnecessary because you just say all physics is measurement, and it's all measurement, all measurement is inference, and all inference is just making a probabilistic commitment. And as such, you could describe all physics, classical physics, statistical physics, mechanics, quantum mechanics as a statement about the density dynamics. And if you follow that route, you could quite easily derive the Schrödinger wave equation just by taking the complex roots of the probability distribution over the things that have the missing information. So if you pursue that perspective, I think that you can gracefully connect this notion of the weak and strong perception. I've just read the abstract of the paper that was circulated, and it does strike me that they were wanting to talk about synchronization and certainly have a nod to dynamical systems theory. But what kind of dynamical systems theory? And my guess is, yes, it is certainly interesting to talk about deterministic chaos and generalized synchrony in the context of deterministic systems, but the real-world application is actually the probabilistic space of stochastic chaos. And then I think you're in the world then of talking about the alignment that Benjamin was talking about in terms of synchronization in generalized synchrony in the context of stochastic chaos, which is just written in terms of the density dynamics. So I think that there is a way of sort of joining the dots and licensing the notion that it's all about probability dynamics all the way up and all the way down. And I say that because the Penrosian-like arguments, I think, are slightly misguided in the sense that, listening to the conversation, it seems to me that computation is read in the sense of universal computation on infinitely precise Turing machines with infinite memory. And then you can get into all the arguments of Komarov complexity and Solomorov induction and universal computation. And that may be apt for von Neumann architectures, but that's not the kind of mortal computation which we're dealing with.

[44:14] Ivette Fuentes: Okay, but I don't think that that's necessary. Roger's argument is quite simplistic in a way. But we do agree that everything are probabilities. But if I understood you well, you're saying that in these interpretations of quantum mechanics where you're saying, well, everything is just about information, in a way it's saying there's no physics, there's just information. And I mean, you resolve some problems, of course, by getting rid of the physical world. But still, I mean, I don't think about the physical world, I guess, in the traditional way. I have a bit more out there ideas, but I am interested in trying to find ways in which the mental world and the physical world might couple, in the sense that maybe if you say from an idealistic point of view, let's say, if you want, you could still find the problem of explaining what are the internal states with respect to the states that you think you perceive outside. A super interesting problem was not resolved yet.

[45:39] Karl Friston: Can I just finish asking you a question? Could you pretend to be Carlo Rovelli and then comment upon what you've just said?

[45:48] Ivette Fuentes: No, I can't pretend to be Carlo Rovelli.

[45:54] Karl Friston: I'll go back to my cigarette then and listen to the next question.

[45:57] Ivette Fuentes: No, because you know what? I have not had discussions along these topics with Carlo. Also, work-wise, Carlo has this loop quantum gravity approach, which I don't think is, I mean, with all respect to Carlo, I don't think it's correct, you know? So I think I disagree with Carlo in some approaches on how to quantize gravity and things like that. And I know a lot more about that side of his work and much less about other of his ideas. It would be very interesting to see what he says about these things. I mean, right now I speak with a lot of caution, but I am about to publish a paper that I think is quite, well, at least for me, it's a breakthrough in understanding where the probabilities come from, because it's like really concrete and so on. But there are some fields there that you cannot measure with what we would call atoms and so on. And my curiosity is to find out if they could then be related to something more like mental states.

[47:14] Richard Watson: Not prejudicing your conclusions, but where do the probabilities come from? I know it's not published. What's the conclusion?

[47:22] Ivette Fuentes: Sorry.

[47:23] Richard Watson: You swear that where do the probabilities come from? You said you had a concrete answer from your paper. I’m sorry I’m getting ahead of you publishing it, but can you tease this? It’d be interesting to hear where you think they come from.

[47:37] Ivette Fuentes: Well, I find, so, what I'm doing is I am including gravity, but in a way different from what other people have been doing so far. I mean, to start with, people say that you have a mass that curves space-time. And what they try to do is they try to quantize space-time. And I'm going to come up quite like a different point of view, quite strong, I think, and say, no, if you have a mass in one position, it curves space-time, but the space-time is classical. When you get like a quantum version of gravity is when you put the mass in a superposition of left and right, then you have only then you have quantum gravity and so on. So in order to do that, well, I mean, I have to construct things in a way that I recover gravity on one hand and quantum mechanics on the other. And right now it's looking very good. I mean, I'm really almost like I didn't answer your question, I know. But in doing that, in order to get quantum mechanics right and so on, I have to postulate the existence of some fields and you cannot measure them.

[49:08] Richard Watson: I wanted to sort of think about your framing on probabilities. When you talk about probability, and I'm not a physicist, I'm very, very far from a physicist, but when I think about it philosophically and I think about it through time, when you talk about the space of probabilities where you've got an unknown amount of hidden information, do you just have a space of everything and then the measurer or the observer that's constraining that space, they clearly are finite. So anything that's taking a measure of those fields or the underlying probability space has some optimization built into it because it's finite and particularly here because our models are built computationally or at least possible to us computationally when we talk about them we compose sentences to discuss them that imposes an ordering on that space. And to me everything at root might be this field, but the stratifications we're giving it, like orders of efficiency, like when we do physics, or at least my metaphysical read of it, is we're taking lots of observations and physics is just the stuff that is the most predictable. Like we have reduced this to the most computationally efficient representation that lets us output a model of reality that's useful for us to gather more information. We have figured out shortcuts, we have discovered symmetries. When symmetries here, if I have a symmetry, I don't need to use as much computation. And so working through it, you start with this space of many worlds or space, and you have selection at the most fundamental level. Like I think evolution goes all the way back to those sorts of discussions where you have some observer imposing constraints, and it's really where you draw the line at an observer. In the computational formulas that Wolfram has, you have this idea of every rule being composed in this space. And unions are very simple rules, right? It's a finite lookup that combines an observer together. So if you take the state of the universe at the moment we get a stable particle, right? Like we have an atom or something. At that point, the union of all of that is that computing on that substrate and it's just outputting whatever's a fixed or close to fixed representation. And some of that has couplings and they sort of bounce off each other, but they do do these two things that we can describe computationally, like they, you know, an atom will emit an electron or have a dipole moment or something like that. Now this is, you know, getting head over skis with my very limited, compared to discrete physics knowledge, but if you have selection can't you just impose that sort of structure on that space and therefore those probabilities become less problematic because it's just an order of description. It's the level of description that's most useful to effectively find computational reducibility for that observer to continue to build and complexify their model and then have more degrees of freedom as they move through some time or state update or measurements.

[52:12] Ivette Fuentes: Well, that's also an open question, and I'm understanding you right. If you look at many worlds, that's assuming that quantum mechanics applies universally to all scales from the microscopic world to the cosmic scales. You would say quantum mechanics applies to all scales. And that sounds very nice because we have a universal theory. Again, you have to live with the fact that you have an infinite number of youths. One is smoking and the other not. All of these things, which really makes me...

[52:45] Richard Watson: I'm more saying that many worlds gets narrowed to one world. We have this big and we chuck away all of the other worlds. So they're explanatorily useless until maybe we make a quantum computer that someone figures out is sampling one of those other branches to get its compute power to solve these very hard algorithms.

[53:07] Ivette Fuentes: But if you get rid of all the other branches, you have classical physics.

[53:14] Pavel: That's what.

[53:16] Ivette Fuentes: We observe. There is a... But we do observe lasers, and lasers wouldn't work without quantum theory. No, but that's the thing: scale is a big thing, right? And that's one of the things about when you put in gravity, that could give you the scale because that could give you a mass at which you would get the classical world emerging from the quantum world. And that would explain why we can build lasers, but we can also explain why you don't see me in two places at the same time.

[53:50] Pavel: There is actually a theory called quantum Darwinism that is kind of pointing at what you, Sam, were talking about, and it's a bit weird. But my favorite one is relational quantum mechanics, also from Carlo, and to me, that's sort of the one I personally like the most. It foregrounds relationality of things. And so this is what I want to also talk about now, or say, I'm trying to, again, connect all these threads that we've been discussing. And it seems like one thing that stands out to me among all these is a matter of perspective, right? That a lot of these questions really depend on how you cut the universe up into the observer and the observed. So it's about relationality, right? The thing that we ultimately know is true. Like, I don't know if I exist, I don't know if the universe exists, but I know that I'm having an experience and know that there is an interaction between a mind and a world and matter, right? And those relations are to me like the most reliable ontological reality to start with. For me, relational ontology is a starting point. I feel like this comes into a lot of these threads. For example, we were talking earlier about internal model versus I am the model and I'm just a fish responding to current. To me, that also seems like a matter of perspective of, well, if I isolate my brain as, okay, this is me and this is inside, now that thing can have an internal model that mediates my actions. Whereas if I don't isolate it and this whole thing is just a sort of part of the environment, there is just a stimulus and a response and it's just happening, right? So it almost seems like a matter of measurement, right? Similarly, I guess what Mike was talking about with the sorting algorithms and these simple algorithms that seem to exhibit agentic behavior or even something like active inference, right? It also seems like, okay, some things might be simple, but they might look agentic depending on who's looking, right? Depending on what you're looking for, right? In sort of perception of agency like cognitive science research where they try to see what do things, what do people consider agentic or not? Like one of the best things to do is you put googly eyes on almost anything and the kids will necessarily start recognizing that as agentic as opposed to not, right? So it really depends on the perceiver whether this is an agent or not in some sense, right? And I guess for me, I almost kind of want to push back on this thing that in physics we sort of, I feel like it's an implicit assumption that we start with often, is this, that there is such a thing as a view from nowhere, that there is such a thing as an observer-independent universe that is just there anyway, right? And it seems like what a lot of the people also were saying, or how I'm hearing what they're saying, is that, well, but wait a second, right? Like we are a subject of evolution, part of this universe, et cetera, and that's our perspective. It's very relative. And so sort of questioning the validity of like, yeah, the view from nowhere doesn't exist, but it's not just, well, oh, that's inconvenient, but no, it's like ontologically non-existent. Like there is a fundamental barrier to like, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere, right? Any view will be mediated by, it's kind of like the thing in itself, right? Doesn't a water bottle exist in itself if I'm not watching it, right? And that it's always mediated by the observer and the observer problem of quantum mechanics also computes. And I think that probability as an optimal description.

[57:31] Ivette Fuentes: Sorry, I'm going to have to go because I have a group meeting and my students are already there and calling. But just to finish with that. And I'm sorry you have to leave early. But just to comment to what you were saying is that there's, of course, the relational, that's yet another interpretation and so on. And something that I find fascinating about quantum mechanics is that with classical physics, we thought, OK, the observer and the observed are definitely separated and one doesn't affect the other. And then quantum mechanics comes in and shows us that this separation is not that clear cut. And that's what I find really fascinating about the whole thing. And then different interpretations deal with this observer-observed thing in a very different way. And the funny thing about Rogers is that if you say gravity collapses the wave function, that's a way of getting rid of the observer. And then comes Roger to say, yes, but that's where from this collapse, that's where you get, that's Rogers theory. I'm just explaining what he says, the consciousness and mental states. So in a way, he tried to get rid of the observer, but then he actually said, no, actually, this is the essence of the observer in one way, right? So I think what's clear is that you cannot separate them. But now we have all these different proposals for 100 years. The more time passes, the more interpretations we have. And at some point the question is, how do we decide which one? And, well, I think experiments are a good way to at least have a way to choose. Like if you invent a laser and the laser makes a hole in the hand, well, maybe there's something. Now I'm thinking about Carl, about Hillary, because Hillary was probably saying, ah, there's nothing out there and so on. But, well, at least in my case, I'm proposing an experiment with my work that's very clear cut that would allow to see if that's the right perspective or not. But what I find exciting about it is to recognize in my work that is something there that is not, let's say, physical in a sense that you can measure it with a physical system, with an atom, with a photon, with anything of that sort. But yeah, well, I hope next time I don't have to. I do have to leave early. Or maybe I'll connect there and if I can, I come back. Thank you.

[1:00:22] Michael Levin: Thanks very much, Yvette. See you next time.

[1:00:30] Joel: I had a bit of a question related to the quantum mechanics and et cetera things, is if there is anything there that would account for the type of coupling that I've noticed, not only in dance, where you get synchronized to a beat or something like that, but it seems often I've observed this somatically on multiple occasions, including things like partner dance or making love or something, where you actually get caught up in the teleological movement of a particular piece of music. And it seems particularly prominent for me for something that has symphonic notes, but they have a sort of embedded teleology already. But you also begin to anticipate what the music is doing. And so your creative process, so to speak, is tied towards that. I see it most obviously in dance and movement exercises, but I don't know of any particular mechanism that would explain that or any theory that takes that into account. Open question for the quantum knowledgeable people, but.

[1:01:37] Pavel: I think I didn't quite get the question. I'm curious if you could.

[1:01:40] Joel: What I observe is that in times when people are dancing, there's a synchronization that happens, particularly with more advanced dancers to a particular piece of music. And the most obviously observable version of that is to the beat of the music. So you have a drum beat and you're synchronizing to that beat and you start to anticipate, but that beat can change and there can be multiple polyrhythms or things like that come in. And more broadly, I've observed it's also possible to synchronize to the teleology of the music, meaning the sort of way that it develops and progresses over time. There could be changes in tempo, maybe various progressions, but somehow in the expression of this, and I think partner dance is one version of that, group dance is another version. I would say making love is also a sort of version of that. You can actually embody the symphony, so to speak. But you do so from a non-cognitive and often anticipatory state. And I don't know of any mechanism that properly explains that. But it does seem to exist and at least seems to tie to these other concepts of when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so to speak. It looks like Carl maybe has something to say about it.

[1:03:00] Karl Friston: Yes, I do. Yes. Yeah, that's a great question, and it reminds me very much of the focus of something called Herb Academy, an autumn academy in Switzerland that was co-organized by a chap called Wolfgang Schacke in conjunction with Hermann Haken of Synergetics fame. And it was a delight. I suspect it stopped a few years ago since COVID, but every year they'd have one in German and one in English. And it was exactly to drill down on the physics of that kind of synchronization and alignment you get in dance and song. So they'd have Hermann Haken introducing laser physics and Landau maths, and then they'd have a dance therapist come on and show videos of her dance therapy, trying to bring together the physics of this kind of synchronization. So there is a literature out there on exactly this. I've actually participated in that literature. There's a paper written by Chris Frith called A Duet for One, and it just basically shows that you can get this kind of alignment with this deep temporal structure, which is to a certain extent scale free in time. So that, as with singing and dancing and music, there is structure at a number of different scales. And this is an emergent property of just putting two things trying to measure each other or infer each other. And if they are trying to predict and infer and measure each other, then they are going to think themselves successful if they're mutually predictable, and then they converge on technically a synchronization manifold, which I'm using this language because of Benjamin's initial presentation that, I think, finding that bottleneck is mathematically collapsing in the joint space of two dancers onto that synchronization manifold that has much fewer degrees of freedom. And then you are now tracing out orbits on that synchronization manifold. And that's, if you like, the steady state solution. That's a sort of the most stable or free energy minimizing solution. So I think there is an easy route to answer that kind of question from the point of view of the physics of self-organization that appeals to generalized synchronization of chaos. The interesting thing then emerges, which speaks to another theme, which we mentioned earlier on, is that you talked about the ideology, and I imagine by which you mean that the time constants and the orbits on the synchronization manifold, on the bottleneck, if you like, are set by the physical technology of our bodies, so that the rhythms of music are not dissimilar from some of the more important biorhythms like heartbeats and respiration and the like. And in particular, those kinds of rhythmic behaviours that we witness in each other. So if we're co-constructing a sensorium that then can be measured or observed, so that the observer is observing the observer and so on ad infinitum, then it is quite natural that the natural synchrony that would emerge would be that which is constrained in Benjamin's notion of boundary conditions by the kinetics and the physics of the things that are acting out this dance and this singing from the same hymn sheet. I don't know if that helps, but from the point of view of laser physics, for example, and the synergetics of Hermann Haken's sort, where you get the notions of, for example, the slaving principle, which speaks to the sort of coupling between the scales that we were talking about before, this kind of explanation, the kind of alignment and synchronization you were talking about, is the only possible outcome for two loosely coupled systems. That goes all the way back to Donders in Nijmegen in the sense of blocks coming to oscillate in synchrony if they're loosely coupled or can see each other through a common wall or a common beam.

[1:07:51] Joel: If I'm not mistaken, it implies that maybe even some version becomes definitive, that the music itself has some ontological status that can be defined.

[1:08:00] Karl Friston: Oh yeah. People in Montreal have written about this at a slightly more abstract level in terms of variational niche construction. So that's the other point that came up before, this sort of circular causality that you get as you commit closer and closer to radical inactivism. I don't, but people do, and I did get a slight sense of a touch of radical inactivism. But if you take it to its limit, that's absolutely the case. And when applied to this dance between the inside and the outside, the rest of the universe, where the rest of the universe now becomes another dancer, then you naturally induce a symmetry. So the environment that you're co-constructing with your conspecifics is now in exactly the same way you are trying to measure it. It is trying to measure you, and it learns from you, and it does have its own ontological status. So my favorite argument here is the notion of a desire path or an elephant path. This is when you walk over a grass verge, take a shortcut to your favourite cafe, then that's the environment learning about the things that occupy the agents or the conspecifics of the phenotypes that occupy the environment. And crucially, it leaves a track. It leaves the semiotics to it. Deontic cues is some jargon often used. That means that, okay, I see this path worn through the grass. That means that things like me should go down there. And therefore you can now start to talk about the environment, the universe, learning about all the denizens or things that constitute that universe. And then the environment and the niche, the niche and the agent, are then co-constructing together, learning about each other. And you can extend this to culture, so books, language. These are all things that are.

[1:10:01] Joel: Is there something there that would clarify the nature of space in a sense? Because if you have two ontic things that have discrete properties that are then coming into some sort of coupling, presumably, observationally, there's times where they couple well and times where they don't couple well or they don't couple at all. And I think Mike led in with this concept of these people who are seeing the music and they're just writing it down and they sort of have a direct more or less relationship, maybe Beethoven being a good example of that. Is there some sort of concrete explanation for why that would happen in some circumstances as opposed to others? That is, I guess, a physics question ultimately.

[1:10:47] Michael Levin: I mean there's a whole huge literature on anomalous cases of this kind of thing, whether it be savants with minimal brain volume or severe defects in certain cases that are able to do specific things, right? I think Trefford had this amazing book on these examples of people who would like twins would just spew prime numbers back and forth to each other, having had no real education in math or anything like that. Yeah, and cases everything from Ramanujan down to the various other people who get these sort of downloads of specific stuff. Yeah, so there's a big literature of examples, but I don't think there have been any progress on necessary and sufficient conditions for when it happens or how. But people do have, of course, techniques, right? Everybody has their own favorite techniques for facilitating that. And when you talk to these people, they often have individualized tools that they use to facilitate that kind of thing if they want it. There's also negative versions where people get it and they don't want it, then they try to suppress it.

[1:12:02] Richard Watson: When I think about things like that, I think it's around observational access. The model that I work with is rule constraint based, where you sort of stratify, or your modeled observer stratifies information's way to constraint. I give quite an anthropomorphic example, but you can apply it to any domain structure as long as the domains are stratified by different cardinalities of rules that have to be sampled on and off for that state to make sense. So when you're intuiting a whole, or understanding the typical methods, things that are studied quite heavily, like meditation, psychedelics, prayer, these are all different methods of trying to capture some larger space with focused attention, where you're narrowing to a basin or a gradient within possibility space and then going and you think that gradient is useful, and with that focus, you can explore more basins. And so you get a bigger space from that focused effort and sampling. It's akin to the sort of next thing is when that thing turns on and you get that insight, you can loop around it very, with low resistance or low informational entropy. It's like, I think, what we call flow. And so those things I think work together. I think that you get that sort of intuitive insight as you focus down to one specific point. And then the job is taking that point and then expanding it out and sort of looping around it. But you have to try, and that's that teleic drive of that sort of thing. It has to be going for something to even do that. And so tools that have been used for thousands of years, ritual, coming of age ceremonies, they're all about expanding the state space for that individual observer, often bound to coupling or communal.

[1:14:14] Benjamin Studebaker: Sam, I think we're not getting your audio now. It seemed to glitch out.

[1:14:27] Karl Friston: Just to point out what is reconnecting, there is a literature on rituals that play exactly that teleological role of putting a common ground out there that we can all share. It may have some ontological aspect to it.

[1:14:42] Joel: Is the word synchronization manifold ever used in that literature? Or is that something that would have a measurable possibility from how well a particular ritual enhanced that or something?

[1:14:56] Karl Friston: I don't know about the particular sort of, I'm thinking of people at Montreal University in McGill, who are particularly interested in this sort of cultural, understanding the mechanics of cultural self-organization, but certainly that literature on dynamical systems approaches to dance and dyadic interactions. So the particular focus of Wolfgang Schakker was actually to be able to measure the generalized synchronization in therapeutic dyadic interactions between the therapist and the doctor, just using simple video cameras or audio recordings and doing time frequency analysis. So anything that you could get as a handle on the behavior of these two dynamical systems, then you try to measure the generalized synchrony to see whether you can predict how engaged, if you like, the patient was with the therapist or vice versa as a predictor of therapeutic outcome. So there are a number of different ways of measuring generalized syncally.

[1:16:02] Richard Watson: I don't know if this is helpful, Joel, for you, but there's a music video that came out a month ago that is doing this with dance. There's a very famous choreographer, a French group called Generation Eight, and they do these very complex, like they're not just classical dance where everyone is doing the same thing, they're moving as a sort of unit. And the impact is that you see outsiders when synchronicities, sort of the idea is that there's a small-world network dynamic and you see it as individuals until there's some bifurcation point and it's an exponential jump and you're suddenly seeing it as a whole. And that sort of exponentialization is like there's this coupling point, this critical point. And after that, we see it as a whole. And I think that's partially based on our own computational boundedness as to how we draw those cuts. But it's something that you recognize not just in people, like when you see dancing, it's a flock of birds doing it is a sort of other version of that sort of dynamic where certain nodes in that network drive the whole network. They pick the rule, they validate the rule that the rest of the network is doing and the whole network just follows it because it propagates so fast within it. And that to me is like a sort of more network-based view of that synchronicity where you can start thinking, again, like, you know, when my modeling stops, right, it's a big computer, everything I see can be made computational. But I think that's sort of a tractable way to describe what's going on. And, you know, I can share it with you. I'll share the link because I think it'll be quite interesting because it was the first time I've seen one of these videos for a while.

[1:17:49] Joel: I think there's a Finnish wrapper as well or something.

[1:17:52] Richard Watson: Yeah, this is the Finnish wrapper. Yeah, exactly.

[1:17:56] Karl Friston: There's some more formal work that reminds me of by Scott Kelso, who is famous for studying syncopation and synchronization in rhythmic, usually finger movements. And the past decade has turned his attention to small group dynamics in exactly the way that Sam was describing. So just to join the dots here in terms of the intellectual legacy, Scott Kelso did a research fellowship with Herman Hakon many, many years ago, and that's where he got the rhetoric and the jargon to then subsequently popularized the notion of dynamical systems in understanding rhythmic coordination. And his particular focus was exactly that bifurcation that takes you from synchronized behavior to syncopated behavior. If you drive the system through it with an order parameter, so the frequency of regular finger movements, as you try to replicate the other person's finger movements and the frequency increases, you now can no longer synchronize, you now bifurcate and you syncopate. And that has some really interesting extensions in the group. So I think Scott had a PNS paper on this within the past three years, extending his particular interpretation of generalized synchrony to a group or small-world context.

[1:19:29] Richard Watson: You could even take this to the scope of, you know, if it's self-similar all the way up and all the way down, you can take it to the scope of all of humanity or a country or a society. And you can go, well, what are the dynamics? Well, you know, at least when I think of evolution, think of two core dynamics: exploit and explore. And things that don't change are fully exploited. They are in equilibrium; that's done. Humanity, if you think of us as a whole, we're sort of a fuzzy outline that's quite chaotic. And then there's a bunch of exploit stuff going on to map that space and keep it stable in the middle. And for me, different philosophical systems that we either invent or they ingress on us, depending on where you think, whether you think they're top down or bottom up, those systems are effectively coordination mechanics to balance out those dynamics for high-complexity observers that can't reduce the exploit-explore dynamic to a simple dynamical equation, or, you know, there's much more, many more degrees of freedom, and maintaining degrees of freedom is optimal for, is optimal to fight, to discover more of the space because you have more possible choices. Therefore you've got this really, you know, Carl's dynamic steady-state equilibrium where it's sort of bouncing up and down around the midpoint. And over time, as that system matures, it will bounce less and less, but it will still always bounce because there's always a non-zero noise component because we have, you know, probability space underneath us, right? So I think all of these dynamics are not just observer dynamics, or at least the loop that observers are proposed to run is you should be universal for anything you count as an observer. And the manifestation of those dynamics and results should, you know, should be self-similar, but it's hard to tell because the jump, because you have this sort of linear, exponential linear or asymptotic approach dynamic, which makes it hard to look down and recognize the system below you as doing a similar or the same thing with, you know, infinitely less or a very high finite number less total computational power. And so that to me is like, when we think about sort of platonic space and we think about coupling and interactions, when we think about ideas and how they ingress, and this is going back to the point that Ben made earlier, I tend to have the view that these things are co-created. There's a set of them that have already been fully reduced by simple computation, by simpler things than us, and there are bigger ideas that sort of live in this space that we embed by sampling and they mature and get bigger and then they limit possibility space. And the dynamics of societies, I think, yeah, very lossily be reduced to the dynamics of those systems interacting at a macro scale and then a micro scale. Individually, you still form part of lots and lots of different superstructures, but which superstructures you actually have agency over to control or drive, well, you know, you can move your body, you may, Carl may be able to move all of neuroscience, like Mike might be able to move all of biology, but most people will be in the exploit part of that system, making sure that the people on the edge of that system are doing things properly and validating, you know, the new rules they discover that unlock new choices or new things. And so you see these, I think you can build a model of observation that can cover that whole space, albeit badly, but I think it's the way to start thinking about process or in process dynamics as opposed to object dynamics, which I think that thinking about sort of platonic spaces is like the easiest thing to do when it's very hard to say what these things actually are. But you can tell, you can figure out what they do. And then hopefully you get to a better answer for what they are by their properties that you're finding out.

[1:23:38] Joel: Yeah, one.

[1:23:41] Richard Watson: Go ahead.

[1:23:43] Pavel: I just wanted to pose a question, but maybe about just to what extent do you guys think all of these things that we're discussing are a function of basically where you draw the boundary of the self versus universe, right? Because like if the universe is learning about us as we're learning about it, basically like where you put that Markov blanket. Right. And it's almost like if you take any random chaotic system and draw some arbitrary boundary in it, and that puts a perspective where all of a sudden we have an agent that, right, like, has these or I mean, of course, not any, but perhaps a wide variety. And then from that stand, we get all this ingression of platonic form, things like that.

[1:24:28] Benjamin Studebaker: The direct perception, strong perception ideas of ecological psychology are that you don't really draw the boundary because rather than having an organ, it's basically very anti-dualist perspective where instead of having the organism and the environment as these separate systems, perception, cognition and action and the ecological view are able to happen precisely because the organism and the environment couple together as organized elements of a single larger system. And then to bring in a little bit of Mike's terminology, what the agent then ends up becoming, the boundaries are its cognitive light cones, the range over which it can perpetuate some agentic dynamics and anything outside of that. So it's really all about the agency and ability to fulfill a plan that ends up determining the boundaries and basically anytime an organism is coupling to its environment, it's forming a collective intelligence with it to some degree to perpetuate whatever dynamics it needs to do. There's a preprint that discusses this a little bit that I'll share with Mike and also Leo Pio Lopez. His lab is super smart. So it doesn't go into that specific question in a ton of detail, but does talk about cognitive light cones as the boundaries of agencies. You might find that interesting.

[1:26:00] Pavel: I guess I was thinking more of that perhaps even, like a dancer being part of the, or the group collectively becoming a single unit or all this. To what extent are all these questions functions of this arbitrary divide of what is a self and what is a not self?

[1:26:22] Richard Watson: Yeah, I think that's actually a fair point, and I think that ultimately you kind of have to start with, well, unless you're sort of David Chalmers, you have to start with your own sort of self-experience as the most real thing to you because you are having this first-person experience. And then you go, well, here's a boundary. And I put boundaries around objects constantly, my cup and my water, where you draw those and whether you draw a boundary, there are people that, you know, you go, oh, you know, I've been talking to a ghost. They'd boundaried a set of air molecules and said, this is an object. Whether or not you believe them, that's coupling, right? And so if enough people couple on an object, and people will throw in validation, because if you're proposing something extreme, you will go and get caught by the rest of the network because it's computationally expensive for the network, for the whole network to couple to this novel object, which only you can see with your sort of specific cognitive light code. And if that object over many, many validation turns is discovered by many, many observers to be more computationally efficient than that object is actually lots and lots of their molecules, then this is like the co-creation, this ingression and co-creation and upward and downward. You have some imposition from a macro-scale observer. It's just like, also see this in Eric Coyle's work, you have some macro-scale description that has causal power, and then that bounds the sort of upward feedback from the network that says, oh, that's real, that's not real. And so over time, you get those boundaries are sort of competitive, like I did, you know, the idea, you know, the simple phrase is like, ideas are evolutionary, they fight. So when we even make an abstract idea, this is literally, you know, what atheists and theists do, they constantly fight about which idea is more stable and sticky. And these things can be applied, I think, up and down scales. But where you take the cut, I think, comes from the fact that we're human-sized and we have this firsthand sort of conscious experience that, you know, okay, you can think you're a zombie, but it's probably not super helpful for you. And that gives you the sort of grounding for all the other objectifications that you do as part of that process.

[1:28:42] Pavel: But then there is the ritual, right? Which then creates these entities that are collectively human sized. Through ritual, couple into the super organism.

[1:28:51] Richard Watson: And now, right?

[1:28:53] Pavel: Yeah. And now like this God becomes.

[1:28:56] Richard Watson: The evolution of religion that way. We have animism. It's this: the Bodhi tree is the tree of everything. Then we go to, oh, it's actually the mountain, bit bigger. I think humans, when they do these ritualistic objectifications of things, we tend to like big things. Things tend to get bigger. And I think it's because you don't just have, when you make an observation, you don't just look at what you can currently see. You make projections. So you have to, in your internal model, you have two levels of it. You have your current cognitive light cone or what your current computational power says, I can roughly predict this. And then you have an imagination. You go, oh, I think the limit is here and this is the biggest thing I can aim for. This is my teleology. This is the thing with the most structured information. And religion that manifests as the ultimate ground, and you have it across every persistent religion, even though each religion has infinitely many different schools and different nuances. The kind of base idea is there is some fundamental one thing or no thing if you're a Buddhist, but conceptually it's like the similar rhymes. It doesn't quite, it's not quite the same, but to survive, those things have been embedded as the hugest objects that we can imagine, right? Especially the difference between transcendence, imminence, right? You get to imminence and you go, oh, well, I've got everything that can possibly happen here. And then someone comes along and goes, actually, no, I've got something that's even bigger. It's not even a concept. I can't even, you can't even describe it. It's unending. And so therefore I have the maximum, I have an unending size of my possibility space that must have more utility for me in the long run, or it wouldn't happen so many times across the world in all these different contexts across thousands of years. And so these sorts of rituals are ways of embedding that where people are getting some utility from that bigger model. And that, I think, is a theory of dynamics of the interface as opposed to reality, but the interface might be getting something from it that's useful for it. And so this is my strong view is that when evolution is predominantly an information or an informational phenomenon, I think survival is downstream of it. I think survival is what things do so that they can keep doing the informational thing. They can keep structuring space or structuring this possibility space up.

[1:31:38] Karl Friston: Could I just point out that the ultimate religion that succumbs to that argument, which I concur with exactly, is actually mathematics? That's the one that is most universally endorsed in a co-evolutionary evo-devo kind of sense. It's just a story that makes sense. So you used the word bigness, I was reading as inclusive or expansive, whilst at the same time, as simple as possible.

[1:32:10] Richard Watson: Yeah, it has to be easy. Otherwise, think about it computationally. When you have, you know, I'm leaning on much more talented mathematicians than me. But when I think about computational possibility space, one of the, I think, neat things within our formalism is it's a closed group void, right? It's an infinite group void. There is a closure point, and that imports geometry and physics. And whether or not you think that's the ontological ground or whether you think it's just the interface or the biggest space to model the interface, that closure point has usefulness, right? It enables that model to take this really big thing and, within simple steps, one, it says everything in that model connects to it by one morphism, one choice, one jump. And so it's instantly, if you've got the communication channel, right, it's instantly easy for people to put into their world model, which is the innovation of Christianity, right? You had Judaism, which was like this transcendent God, it's too far, you can't touch it. Don't, you know, Maimonides, don't, it's nothing. You don't think you know anything about it, just do it. And then Christianity, and that's been baked into rabbinical tour for thousands of years, but you get to Christianity and Christianity is like, no, you can mediate through this thing. Jesus Christ, it's a real thing here. That single jump, you couldn't see it, it was too hard to compute. Here's Jesus, just touch him and you, okay, you'll touch him and he's composed of this point. Actually, this point in infinity is actually a trinity. It's actually three things. So don't worry about it being separate. It's actually the same. Don't worry about it. And so these are the sort of jumps these systems make to compete, right? They compete because for observers like us, they have utility. It's just clear, otherwise they wouldn't stick around. Ideas that fail, ideas that are not, that don't have utility. We're very good at binning. We're very good at fighting about them. That's all we do constantly in every subject.

[1:34:18] Karl Friston: So are you saying that Jesus Christ is one of Benjamin's knots then?

[1:34:23] Richard Watson: For sure. I'm saying it in Taoism, I'm saying it in Hinduism. They're all different strategies to get to the biggest possibility space, in my view. The interesting, you know, Hinduism pre the Vedantic Revolution was like a load of degenerate basins that covered the possibility space in loads and loads of different places. The pantheon was hundreds of gods, and then they were like, oh, actually we can join up all these degenerate basins with this idea of Brahman, bang, and suddenly it's universal. And you get these in Judaism, right? You even look at the evolution of Judaism. It's my religion. You have the Canaanite 70 gods, right? You have El and his consorts. I think it's his consorts. Those 70 gods. You see that integrated into prophetic Torah; they're relegated to idols, but we still keep the 70 faces or 70 interpretations of the single book. So some of the idea survives that sort of validation to make it better or stronger. Some of it doesn't. And that's the nature of all these things. And it's why this is such an interesting forum because it's, you know, people from all different walks of life and all different backgrounds trying to compose the very coupling structures we're talking about in the context of the Platonic Space discussions, which is in itself self-similar to the entire dynamic of observation, which is weird because it shouldn't really do that. It shouldn't do that. It shouldn't be that way around. It should be, you know, it's confusing that top-down ideas can constrain what you can think about or constrain what you can do, but it's intuitive in our day-to-day life, yet we can't find it or we find it very challenging in a physicalist worldview to make sense of it. And so here we can use observers and possibility spaces to start to make sense of it. And the job will be to connect that back to physics, right? This is way beyond my ability, but there are lots of very smart people doing that all the time.

[1:36:46] Benjamin Studebaker: You all might be interested in Tae Dry's work on moral psychology. There's all this stuff about ritual and religion going on and then back to the stuff people were talking about earlier about relational realism. He argues and I think does a really good job of amassing a lot of evidence for the idea that moral psychology is just about regulating relationships with yourself and other people in society. So I think there's a way to combine some of the ideas in this discussion with his research. So I'll put some links to that as well.

[1:37:42] Pavel: Everyone's trying to understand what we believe now.

[1:37:45] Benjamin Studebaker: Yeah.

[1:37:49] Pavel: And where that came from, what utility that provides?

[1:37:53] Richard Watson: Yeah, but I don't think it's like a hard thing. I think it's, I always wonder why things stick around, or what makes something robust and good and beautiful. And these things seem to have a value, like aesthetics seem to have a value, coherence seems to have a value, symmetry seems to be beautiful. Why is, why, what's the why question? The why question to me is these systems are pre-modern, intuitive, intuition-based versions of structure discovery. They're like bottom up with physics. We can go particle way is here, it goes through this slit, it's now here, this is the wave, et cetera. And we can build up a very distinct picture of the parts. When we take the whole, we're by nature coarse graining a much bigger space. And because language also evolves and the things we can say evolve, those intuitions sound very silly when you read the book literally, which is why most of these traditions have, at least in the theological, not scholarly aspect, have four, three, or four different levels of reading of these books. And the interesting thing for me is that why do all of these religions tell stories? Why, if you know the Bible is true, or the Torah is true, or Buddhist precepts, eight noble paths, it's true, why do we write stories? Why are they told in story? And I think it's because story is a technology that is effectively parasitically coupling to your subconscious. You don't validate a story as it's being told. You take the story because you put yourself in the frame of the observer in the story. And because you're not turning on that validation through either myth or fiction, you are integrating the deeper messages of that model in a very coarse way. And so why are these things persistent and why are the structures of stories, why do people like Joseph Campbell are able to write like the monomyth? Why does the monomyth exist in all of these different forms? It exists because it's the best technology. It's not only one. It just seems to be the more effective technology than the circular story that used to sit within the Greco-Roman tradition about the eternal wheel for doing certain things. And so those two-story structures are like some conscious technologies to imprint on us different bounds for what we think about. And I think that's why they're compiled in the way that they are, even if the language is sometimes hiding what I think are quite deep ideas about structure within them. But yeah, so I always end up talking about religion on these science calls. It's terrible. I should go slap myself and say I'm sorry. I love it.

[1:41:03] Pavel: I mean, my understanding is that science is a religion according to most definitions of a religion. And in fact, it's currently the religion that guides politics. So it's like the separation of church and state being completely failed. And now the church that is guiding politics is science and there's a lot of dogmas. Science is amazing. It seems to have some similar points.

[1:41:31] Richard Watson: If it wasn't so bloody good at what it did, it wouldn't be that. But it does have downstream impacts because certain philosophical or axiomatic positions in science basically say, forget the last five, 10,000 years of human history and all the things that we've done, forget about those ideas. They were pre-modern, they were stupid. This is a better way. And I just think that the analogy I give is that there are more possible emotional states accessible to us than there are physical states because each individual person has their own, like a real number versus an integer. And I think that because we, I think this is intuitively first order, when we describe an emotion, if we experience an emotion and then we printed out every single position of every atom in your body, every firing of, and you gave that printout as the 50-page pack back to you. And I said, look, this is your emotion. This is what love is. You might say, yes, that is what it is, but it's not the full part of that experience. I'm missing something. I'm missing information here. I'm missing the gestalt against the whole. I'm missing the whole. The parts do not compose to the whole because the whole operates at an exponentially higher level with less entanglements, more degrees of freedom that to the sort of physical read at the bottom, you can't recover it. And it's the same reason that physics cannot recover chemistry or biology. I think it's the same exponentialization that happens in descriptions that you need to go up to a level of abstraction in the description to access the states. And by doing that, you throw away some of the micro scale dynamics, which is in fact what we see with informational entropy like that is coarse graining in and of itself. And so to me, these sorts of dynamics explain why science is exceptionally powerful, drives our world, but also I think leads to philosophy that by its nature is reductive, just like the sciences, because these systems couple. When you have the Enlightenment, you also get modernism, you also get structuralism, and then everyone turns around and that sort of exhausts itself because it's not the biggest possibility space and therefore it can be attacked. You get postmodernism as our sort of preeminent explore technology, it drives us into loads of different basins because it basically collapses the computational distance. It tells you can change your internal model in any way that's internally validated to yourself. That is the promise. I think to me, that's the computational promise of postmodernism. And we get that and we have 70 years where we go, this is fantastic and science and postmodernism are working together and we get hip hop, we get dance, we get all of these new things. We get fantastic developments in computing and AI. And we get to the point today where all of those basins are now, they're too far apart. They can't sort of couple in the same way or they're coupling effectively. And you get extremes within those basins because when a basin is just working within itself and it's not connecting to the other, it's only doing exploit. And as you go further down the basin, the computational cost of sort of mapping that basin must increase, I think, or increase to a level that means that it's computationally expensive the further a basin sort of deepens for another basin to connect to it. And so why do we have dynamics like, pardon my language, I'm not American, so this is going to sound political and partisan, but it isn't. We have a slightly crazy left and what do we get with a slightly crazy left? We get a slightly crazy right because you can't get the perturbation of having like a centrist Republican will not pull the sort of superstructure back to equilibrium. So you need with the extreme on, you know, or relative extreme versus say a Clinton or an Obama on the left, you need the relative extreme on the right to perturb that system in the same way. And everything comes back to Carl's active inference dynamics. And I'm just expressing it, I think I'm just expressing it computationally. But that's the dynamic that we live with. And so you need a system that says, hey, these are the boxes we're playing with and these are the systems expressed in this fashion. You may disagree with the conclusion. I'm not in the business of conclusions. I'm sort of in the business of here's a language to talk about it. And here's a language to try and have that discussion in a way that's not, that's you peek over the top of your base and to have that. And I think meaning is created when those basins join together because when observers couple, their computational power is multiplicative, and the bigger the networks we create, the better.

[1:46:30] Joel: I want to cut in here briefly just to mention, I would be remiss since you've been on about religion for quite some time about the two religions that deal explicitly with number, since Carl mentioned the mathematics, and those would be Pythagoreanism and Taoism, in which both cases they talk about a sort of Neoplatonism to a degree where they talk about a theory of emanations, whereby you start with a primordial unity, and then you have various forms of complexity, actually, both Taoism and the fact we just talk about the ones becoming twos becoming threes. But then I think it's also important to note that in these traditions, there's a translational layer and direction in both directions. So there's a bidirectional thing towards greater complexity and then backwards towards greater unity. And one of the things I think that gets trapped in these ontic dogmatic systems, of which religion is often one, particularly when it becomes theological, you can basically be trapped in a particular formalism. And I think that goes into what you're just describing about being, you know, we had a lot of maybe formal categories and you go into a period that's more chaotic. Some of these systems seem to embrace the chaos as well. Taoism would be one that accepts a certain version of chaos as well that can be complementary to more formal systems, but other ones don't. They're basically just a single formal system. So I just wanted to make that distinction.

[1:48:02] Richard Watson: I think the distinction is right. And I think it's actually not just Pythagoreanism and Taoism. So Taoism uses the I Ching, which is a hexadecimal system. I think it's six, I think it's 64 positions and six different compositions of those directions that you can get when you throw the sticks down. When you go to something like Judaism, Judaism has a layer, so Judaism in Hebrew is an alphanumeric system. So they have this idea, and these ideas have been developed over sort of 1,500 years. It's called Gematria, where each of the letters, you know, I don't know if anyone's on Twitter and follows Nick Land, but he does a dire version of this, which is made up. But this idea sits in Judaism. It also sits in Islam and in Arabic. So they use numbers to basically sum word values, and you get weird patterns, and it's, you know, you can take it as numerology or you can take it as encoding structure, depending on which side of, you know, belief you sit on. But they do that. And the interesting thing about Torah is Torah is a really strange system as a book because, numerically, when you take the letters in Torah, you can compose them. So Torah is cut in one way with words now, and each word has a numeric value and each letter can be blown out. So if you imagine you have ABC, you would spell A, the letters A, say AY, and then you would sum the numbers, and they have this fractal and recursive nature to them that exists in the tradition. And I work with someone, I study with someone who is obsessed with that sort of stuff. I'm slightly less interested, but it's definitely something that you see structurally in these books, because I imagine to survive, those numbers at some level are probably important because symmetries and numbers, they're computationally efficient, they're easy to pass, they give different levels of meaning, they build that state space, whether or not they're-

[1:50:19] Pavel: Like error correcting codes? Correct, sorry, error correcting codes.

[1:50:25] Richard Watson: I don't. Maybe a good analogy. I don't like some.

[1:50:29] Pavel: I don't know.

[1:50:30] Richard Watson: I don't know if I know enough to comment accurately.

[1:50:33] Pavel: That's no, I didn't mean to interrupt, just as a relevant.

[1:50:43] Richard Watson: So when I think about religions and dogma, I think mostly religion is packaged to get as many observers as possible to look at it. It's packaged for attention at some level. And so the simple message is often the one that's propagated versus the more complex message, which is what normally sits at the top of those religious hierarchies and, you know, in the priests and monasteries, in Buddhist monks and in Tibet. And they are doing the higher order stuff, the full, the sort of full head of the whole fruit. And as that message propagates down the structure, those observers are in many more basins and therefore they can't go as deep in the core basin. So they give them the simple message, they're given the simple message, the low cost message to draw them in. And I think the confusion comes where you take the simple and say that's the whole thing. But if you have, in theory, an infinitely deep system, which is what these are meant to be, then that would be a very silly thing to say because it's effectively making it finite. It's turning it into, you know, turning a rule that a religion tells you to do it into the equivalent of an idol. Like, or an idol here is anything that's not pointing at like the best attractor, the steepest gradient, the biggest possibility space, you can pick your poison. But that's sort of the dynamic that's going on in those types of superstructures.

[1:52:24] Pavel: Because you still need the small, the whatever the pass-down message to be somehow relevant enough to couple to people to have utility, to provide utility. Right. And that's often right. It's mistaken for the whole, but it's also not optimized to the specific person that is receiving that message. Right. And so it's almost like the two-level problem. Like it's kind of optimized to a generic audience. That's right.

[1:52:54] Richard Watson: Yeah, you're right. And I think you think about it like I'll give you the example from my religion because it's the only one I know well enough to do it. But Judaism categorically, right? If you think about Judaism as a sort of book of law or what it's telling you to do, Judaism's basic categorical construct is we are, this is the minimum rule set for a stable civilization called the Noahide laws. There were like seven laws in Judaism that they say every human should follow. And they're like categorical laws. It's like don't kill is one of them, but it doesn't have all the sub-laws of all the nuance. They have that and then they blow it out to sort of the Ten Commandments, which are the extra three that Jews have to do. And then they blow it out to 613 commandments. So they, each layer, and if you go to any sort of religious community in Israel, they'll be trying to do as many of the 613 as possible. If you speak to me as a secular Jew, I might try to do the first 10. And so they keep the first, they keep the sort of big ones and they're like, try and do these. You'll still have noise, but you're roughly pointing the right way. It's better if you can do all of them, but try not, like here are the ones that we, and in Christianity, like you can pick Christianity as like major innovation is like, is love my neighbor, right? This golden rule. It's like maximize observer coupling. No one is, just say Jesus is the man and you're in our basin. Don't worry about it. We'll figure it out. At the end, Jesus will come back. You'll see him. You'll be like, it's all good.

[1:55:25] Richard Watson: Don't worry about all your stuff. He'll absolve you of all your sins. You're in our basin. And Islam is like the response to that, just like politics has the response of extreme to extreme, comparative, not absolutely, because this can only be looked at from its antithesis. Comparatively, Christianity is a radically open system, and it's exceptionally powerful. And look at, you know, the Western world has done some brutal and horrible things, but we've also built Notre Dame and the Vatican and all of these beautiful, wonderful things that have given us great stuff. And then Islam emerges roughly hundreds of years later, and it's like, bit too open. We need more structure here. We need, you know, now it's not just touch Jesus, it's pray five times a day. There's much more structure around Islamic theology. And it's captured in sort of the jurist versus the Sufis, right? So Christianity, as many of you know, has I can't even, I want to say more than 50 to 100 different denominations of Christianity, different types of churches, whether it's Mormonism or Calvinism or Catholicism or Protestantism or the branching that happened post the Reformation of which seven or eight different types of or marginal flavors of Christianity came out. Islam has two, like it has had two for 1400, for nearly 1400 years. And that binary is intrinsic to its structure because it requires more action. They don't have as many degrees of freedom in their higher order structures, even though those higher order structures, when you look into Sufi metaphysics, it's stunning and beautiful. And the things that the Sufis produced are just some of the most poetry, Rumi, but they have the binary. So it's a much more aggressive system than Christianity, which is much more diffuse. And Judaism, which is, I'd say, probably somewhere in the middle, right? We have maybe 10 or 15 popular denominations of Judaism. And I'd say a bit less, a bit wimp, it's less easy to, less open than Christianity, but it's also probably slightly less structured than Islam. And so when you think about these religions as systems, you start to see the failure modes of said systems in the context of the world that we live in today, where those systems are also competing with something like postmodernism or with science, where you have novel perturbations that weren't there for, you know, for a hundred, you know, really science is, you know, two, three centuries of that sort of perturbation, postmodernism, 70 years in the grand scheme of a few thousand years, that's like, you know, a stock market crash. And if you want to use that sort of analogy, it's like a big, it's and that's what we're going through right now. We're going through the crashing of all of these systems into each other. So figuring out how to articulate the language of these systems seems quite important. At least that's why, that's why, that's what, you know, brought me to the weird, strange places.

[1:58:05] Joel: Any of these that they're fundamentally irresolvable, though, that there's no fundamental ground truth to adjudicate between differences even within the same tradition. Whereas, as Carl was suggesting, within mathematics, we at least have a formal system that can be universalizable.

[1:58:22] Richard Watson: I think Carl's right. I think they're very hard. I'm not gonna lie. I think that is very challenging.