Dr. Michael Levin
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A conversation between Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Santosh Manicka, and I:
Further Reading (some papers mentioned during the discussion):
https://qri.org/blog/digital-sentience
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33487109/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1233119/full
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-hallucinate-20180730/
“The data is fighting like hell to stay relevant…” So profoundly accurate. I confess, upon awakening today I found myself in the middle of a fight with such data & really had to wrestle with myself not allow it take control of my body to the point of a physical action being taken that would have not only bought that very decoherent & traumatic data back into relevance, would have potentially phase-locked it back into the practicality of my daily life for a number of years.
Thankfully, your email notification for this post happened to interrupt and take my attention away from the noise that data is making, and I have been happily listening & engaging internally with an entirely new intelligential data-stream!
At 51:00 you discuss the challenges of describing certain agentic properties without time. Timeless agency is something I’ve been thinking about in the context of mathematical agency. It’ll be part of what I talk about with your computational group in a couple of weeks.
That’s what the great insight of all Buddhas is. The “amata dhatu” is timeless, unconditioned, it’s beyond agency because there is not action.
This was such a great conversation. Very happy to be able to listen in. Would be enlightening to talk to NDErs about phenomenological timelessness (or rather experiencing multiple time scales simultaneously…which is arguably different from timelessness…still a profoundly different experience of time than we typically experience at any rate). It’s one of the most common features of NDEs and could provide a valuable perspective.
Hi Heather, couldn’t agree more. As an NDE er myself (to a depth of the shapeless, positionless, mind only level), I can say that that experience colours all of my contemplations on scientific/philosophical matters.
It also may be worth tapping in to a conversation with Sam Parnia (ICU specialist at NYU langone).
Or keneth ring while he still lives. I love the perspective he has gained despite not being an NDE er hinself. Here is a nice 30 min podcast from decades ago. https://youtu.be/vu6-h28dkys?si=a1eG8JR_2mOi8tkz
Regarding innate geometric pattern reasoning in the mind, there was a paper just released which describes this:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.13.584141v1.full.pdf
Dear Dr. Levin,
I am currently watching a YouTube video where you discuss binding with Andres Emilsson and Elan Barenholtz. It’s posted on Elon’s YouTube channel, and I’m not sure if it’s the same as the audio posted on this page. However, this seemed like a good a place as any to follow up. I found this post on your website by searching for the word binding because I wanted to make a comment about some recent reading I’ve done in Buddhist philosophy and was intrigued that this page also included a post on Buddhism. I’m very familiar with your theory of mine from watching many videos on the subject over the past couple of years. And as I’ve become more immersed in Buddhist philosophy, I’ve had the strong sense that there is a lot of resonance between your perspective and the concept of the mind system as expressed in the yogacara school. In the video I’m referring to, you refer to how stress may play an important role in cognitive glue. That different “minds” in the body may cooperate to reduce stress rather than out of any sense of altruism. This reminded me very much of the description by John Yates in his book the mind illuminated about how the mind system works according to the yogacara philosophers. You can find his detailed description in the chapter of that book titled FIFTH INTERLUDE: The Mind-System*. To the best of my recollection, the theory of mine proposes that there are multiple minds competing for attention in each of us. And when the activity of one of those minds captures the attention, the thought process in that mind becomes available to the other minds in the system. And that action is taken by the person when a consensus is reached among a sufficient number of the dominant sub minds. There’s no individual agent who coordinates or execute this decision-making process. The office actually uses the phrase binding moments of consciousness in his explanation. If you’re not familiar with this perspective, I think it might be interesting to you and others commenting here.
*”The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness” by John Yates.
[…] I recently had the chance to talk to Michael Levin and Elan Barenholtz (thanks to Ekkolapto at University of Toronto!) on the topic of phenomenal binding and the Platonic Realm (hear also the conversation I had with Levin last year): […]
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