Dr. Michael Levin
It is my honor to occasionally mentor very early career scholars; truly amazing young people with whom we sometimes write papers (some at https://drmichaellevin.org/students/papers-k12.html). Below, you can read the thoughts of Francesca Crachilova on aspects of our work on life and mind (I encourage you to check out the whole issue of the new journal Orbital Studies here; download the PDF of the paper here). More by her at https://medium.com/@francesca.crachilova.
Featured image by Midjourney.
Great work! Joscha Bach has similar ideas on complex patterns “the province of psychology” – consciousness is the ability to perceive that you’re perceiving – a self-organizing software causal pattern that can control processes in the physical world.
Do you have a plan to implement “The task ahead… to map the landscape and understand kinds of patterns…”?
For example, Bach’s plan is to take an engineering approach because it restricts the search/design space – to run simulation models in a safe narrow environment with experiments showing a kind of phase transition that happens artificially/in the brain of a mouse when it wakes up.
Francesca’s paper mentions “having an inner perspective—of being a cognitive self embodied in the universe”. Reminds me of your ideas on ‘perspective’ in the conversation with Michael Pollan here: https://thoughtforms.life/self-improvising-memories-a-few-thoughts-around-a-recent-paper/
How are perspectives “propagated through evolution/perpetuated through the universe”? Is it DNA, algorithms, or something else?
Also love what you said in Pollan’s new book ‘A World Appears’: “maybe your theory of consciousness generates a poem! That’s what it is like to have that consciousness. So maybe that’s what a theory of consciousness is going to generate—art!”
I had the same idea! Started my career in neuroscience, also explored sleep yoga & psychedelics, moved into design & writing, then pivoted into AI. I fused all these to create a sort of ‘mnemonic improvised’ portfolio – that people say is a “piece of art”/”like another world” – to let you feel shifts in perspective and rewrite the story of my past (e.g. chatbot) in new and more useful ways: https://www.cortexcopywriter.com/
Mnemonic improvisation is similar to Mark Solms’ claim that cognitive consciousness is generated by memory reconsolidation – the returning of consolidated predictions to states of uncertainty. That is why dreams (which are a form of problem-solving) are conscious.
To tie this all together, one of the main benefits of consciousness is that it allows you to be creative – you’re not just following a gradient (like generative AI) in the approximation of a result. You can make a jump, experiment, backtrack your path and try multiple things. This kind of attentional learning that is possible in our mind, like Francesca says, should be understood/integrated into a shared world 🙂
> Do you have a plan to implement “The task ahead… to map the landscape and understand kinds of patterns…”?
Absolutely. I’ve got a few people working on this now, in a mix of minimal engineered systems and more complex biological ones.
> How are perspectives “propagated through evolution/perpetuated through the universe”? Is it DNA, algorithms, or something else?
There are many physical interfaces (maybe all of them) that can host ingressions from those patterns. DNA is one way it happens on Earth, and some embodiments are such that they make it easy to make copies (biological reproduction).
> You can make a jump,
that’s one thing we’re working on too – the nature of “inspiration” and how patterns like us navigate the space of other patterns (ideas) – sometimes laboriously step by step, other times with leaps of “insight”. It’s accessible to all sorts of systems, not just us, not just life, not just complex constructs.
We’re thinking alike! Great minds 😀
>that’s one thing we’re working on too – the nature of “inspiration” and how patterns like us navigate the space of other patterns (ideas)
Regarding “how patterns navigate the space”, does your work consider:
•Mark Solms’ theory of cognition – the aim of mind-wandering is to improve the efficiency of your generative model/capacity of memory systems to generate a virtual world.
•Michael Gazzaniga and Bridget Queenan approaching the human nervous system from a rhythm perspective – consciousness, like music, is not a single physical object, it emerges when a body tries to braid waves together into something coherent:
-Dead = generates no waves, an instrument or band that is silent.
-Asleep = generates a simple polyrhythm (the beat of heart v. breathing).
-Awake = generates a complex polyrhythm (beat of heart vs. breathing vs. blinking vs. moving).
-Awake and aware = generates a complex polyrhythm that can change independently and evolve in response to circumstance (rhythms of heart vs. breath vs. blink vs. move). This body appears to contain a whole rhythm section that can “jam” or “improvise.”
Where can I see/follow our “inspiration” work?
When it’s ready, it will appear on https://drmichaellevin.org/publications/ as reprints and then peer-reviewed papers, and a public-level discussion of it will be here on this blog.
Thanks for the link! After reviewing your work and getting a good night’s sleep I made a creative ‘jump’ (as we mentioned above hah) to connect ideas in your work 🤓
You say that morphogenesis in organisms is basically the same thing as creating coherence in your own consciousness but at different time scales. This suggests that life and consciousness at some level are the same.
The secret/core structure of life is DNA/mutation/editing. Your concept of mnemonic improvisation is also about editing – consciousness is what it feels like to be in charge of constant self-construction – continually rewriting the story of your past in order to equip yourself for life in the present and future.
So, here’s the core problem/question – what is the structure of this mnemonic improvisation process:
•View from the perspective of platonic patterns?
•Art/poem (as discussed above and which I created a version of)?
•Virtual simulation/protocol (what it would be like if trillions of cells were actually a single agent that follows a single set of interests and sees the world from a single unified vantage point)?
What intrigues me about this is why stop at living systems? Why shouldn’t this intelligent goal seeking behaviour apply to solar systems, galaxies, the whole cosmos?
There’s no reason to stop at “living” systems (the word isn’t well-defined anyway – @) and indeed we and others work on that in inorganic substrates. And, there’s no reason why one can’t make a hypothesis about solar systems, ecosystems, galaxies, etc. But without actually testing *what kind of cognitive competencies it has* – empirical testing with perturbative experiments – it’s always just a hypothesis, we don’t actually know. You can’t just assume, or decide, any of these things are an embodiment of mind – you have to do experiments. And it’s very difficult to do experiments on large systems like that.
“I wonder if it’s even possible for us to know. Just as our cells operate within the limits of their own cognitive cones—unaware of the goals of the body as a whole—maybe we are incapable of comprehending the goals of a system as vast as our planet or our solar system. If the Earth is an agent, as I suspect, it would act across such vast scales of time and space that it might be beyond our grasp. How could we even begin to test for agency at a planetary level? Is it even possible?”
It seems that the topology of a conscious being, in the Platonic Space, is a spinning vortex ring. It needs at least one qualia to form, sufficient to describe its subjective and objective state. Substrate is irrelevant as long as it introduced enough resolution.
I think this might be pointing to something like a corollary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics that results in increasing order which some scientists have suggested. The patterns might have an origin much like vortexes and waves in rivers.
On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems
Michael L. Wong https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8212-3036, Carol E. Cleland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8703-7580, Daniel Arend, Jr., +5 , and Robert M. Hazen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4163-8644 rhazen@carnegiescience.eduAuthors Info & Affiliations
Contributed by Jonathan I. Lunine; received July 8, 2023; accepted September 10, 2023; reviewed by David Deamer, Andrea Roli, and Corday Seldon
From paper:
The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws do not seem to adequately describe these systems. Recognizing that the identification of conceptual equivalencies among disparate phenomena were foundational to developing previous laws of nature, we approach a potential “missing law” by looking for equivalencies among evolving systems. We suggest that all evolving systems—including but not limited to life—are composed of diverse components that can combine into configurational states that are then selected for or against based on function. We then identify the fundamental sources of selection—static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation—and propose a time-asymmetric law that states that the functional information of a system will increase over time when subjected to selection for function(s).
Thanks a lot for this great precis of your thought, which I’ve mainly followed on podcasts etc. It seems like your thought substantiates some of the work of Husserl, Heidegger and others in that tradition. “Higher than actuality is possibility,” Heidegger writes, for reasons not dissimilar to yours, and speaks especially of the projected possibilities of being. It gets a lot more complicated and goes in a different direction, but your work has made me think of the historical-cultural forms of human existence as some of those Platonic “systems”. Perhaps that’s how culture, language, value etc are transmitted in human time. The historical apriori of collaborative possibilities for the biological creatures we are. I love your work. One day I hope to study it more closely.
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