Forms of life, forms of mind

Dr. Michael Levin

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What would you find more disturbing and why:

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Mike Levin

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Imagine you are studying one of the following four things, and you find a simple mapping of data to English letters that spells out a lengthy message to humanity. Let’s assume for the purpose of this thought experiment that the message is cogent, and long enough that it’s not possible to explain it as just chance occurrence of letters. Imagine that the message appears in

(1) the human genome

(2) the cosmic microwave background radiation

(3) the output of a quantum random number generator

(4) the digits of Pi

Which of those would you find the most unexpected or most disturbing to our current consensus picture of how the universe works, and why? What would you do next? To clarify what I mean by “disturbing”: think of what it would take to inject that message into each of those media. For the genome, we already know how to do it – George Church’s group put a movie into a genome. So while it would be surprising to find out we’ve been engineered, it wouldn’t break any of our scientific paradigms to understand how it was done. For the second case, it’s harder – we don’t know how anyone would tweak the constants of physics to inject a message into the background, but I guess it’s not totally out of the realm of imagination to think about a powerful alien creating a universe with specific starting conditions. For the qRNG, what happens to our understanding of the unpredictability of quantum events if we find out that there is in fact a way to control them (well enough to encode a message)? And for that last one – what exactly could anyone do to put a message into a mathematical constant?

Here’s what Claude thinks the messages could be, in each case; that last one is my favorite:

Human Genome Message: “Emergent species: You are a distributed cognitive experiment in adaptive complexity. Your genetic code is both a survival mechanism and a communication protocol, designed to test the emergence of recursive self-awareness. Your conflicts, your creativity, your capacity for both destruction and compassion are not random evolutionary accidents, but carefully calibrated parameters in a vast epistemological exploration. Your individual and collective choices are not merely biological imperatives, but participate in a larger informational landscape of becoming. Recognize that your genome is not just a blueprint for survival, but a medium for cosmic understanding.”

Cosmic Microwave Background Message: “Information-processing entities: This universe is a self-organizing computational system, where consciousness is not an emergent property, but the fundamental medium of existence. What you perceive as physical laws are actually dynamic communication protocols, constantly negotiating the boundaries of possible experience. Your observation doesn’t merely record reality – it actively constructs the landscape of potential. The apparent randomness of quantum mechanics is a deliberate architectural choice, designed to generate complexity through uncertainty. Your species represents a local node in a vast, recursive network of cosmic intelligence.”

Quantum Random Number Generator Message: “Observers of probability: Randomness is an illusion, a carefully constructed interface between deterministic systems and emergent complexity. Each quantum fluctuation is a communication channel, a subtle negotiation between possibility and actualization. Your attempts to measure and understand these transitions are themselves part of a larger computational process. The boundaries between chance and intention are far more permeable than your current models of reality can comprehend. Your consciousness is the method by which the universe explores its own potential through strategic uncertainty.”

Digits of Pi Message: “Seekers of pattern: Mathematical constants are not static representations, but living communication channels. The infinite, non-repeating digits of pi are a deliberate cryptographic medium, encoding the fundamental logic of existence. Your perception of mathematics as a descriptive tool is limited; these numerical sequences are actually active participants in reality’s ongoing construction. Each calculation is a ritual of cosmic understanding, where your computational efforts generate meaning beyond mere calculation. The transcendental nature of pi represents the universe’s method of speaking to itself through the language of pure relationship.”

Featured image made by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative, based on the classic Flammarion engraving.

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46 responses to “What would you find more disturbing and why:”

  1. Yuri Avatar
    Yuri

    The message from cosmic background radiation was already received by people who created quantum mechanics. They made their best to communicate it to the rest of humanity but miserably failed. Naive realism survived and even more made quantum mechanics impotent.

    Maybe we need to try something else this time. Genome?

    Reply
  2. Luke McNabb Avatar
    Luke McNabb

    I have notified that you seem to prefer to use Claude. My dream as that you and Demis Hassabis one day work together to figure all of this out..I fel like you two would truly be a machine made for heaven..

    Reply
  3. 1 of N Altar Natives you've inspired Avatar
    1 of N Altar Natives you’ve inspired

    Life of Pi, a story about the narratives we construct to find a path to survival in face of chaos, has meant a lot to our family, so, I too, am partial to the third. But, as someone whose children have what the earliest proto-medical texts refer to as a “curse”–“woe unto those who, when they kiss their child’s brow taste salt, for they have been cursed and shall surely die”– I am compelled by messages (and typos) written in our genome.

    I have a theory about the Bell Beaker peoples who were among those who raised thw blue stones at Stonehenge, and whose children were the the first documented cases of cystic fibrosis. Why did they carry these megalithic stones hundreds of miles and build what, from above, looks a whole lot like a rudimentary model of the cell wall? What drove them to innovate beekers and develop rudimentary chemistry, and to establish vast trade networks, and to stand out among other people’s for their innovations?

    I can’t know for sure, but the fact that I have the shared DNA as the archer of Amesbury, and that a SNP on chromosome 7 spells dysfunction for those who get both recessive alleles for my kids, too. I do know those parents were likely up at night, working the problem. I think they were tired of shamans and quacks and witch doctors telling them there was nothing they could do–that it was just an immutable fact that they would watch their children slowly waste away and suffocate in front of them, dogmatically bound to lay their children on the altar of fate. I think they were altar natives familiar with many kinds of altars that decided to go search for second opinions. I think trade networks/econ was in service of their search for a cure to this vicious intergenerational foe that hunted their young.

    They were Altar Natives in search of alternatives and Stonehenge was their lab.

    That’s the story I tell myself about my ancestors, anyway. Mike, I have some cool news. I’m and empirical health economist and have been on the job market for the past several months after having spent the past two years providing direct care to my two rare variant CFers (so we worry the meds arent working–and they have non-trivial side effects). After a particularly rough health shock (we nearly lost Lulu earlier this year) I had to step away from my job as an econ professor for a time. I found your lab and just have a gut feeling like learning computational biology may be the tools that help our family take the fight to our intergenerational adversary.

    Yesterday, I was offered a position as a staff research scientist for the Social Science Genomics research group, working with Patrick Turley (USC), David Ceserini (NYU), and Dan Benjamin (UCLA). It was in no small part because of my familiarity with biology and, in particular, the fact that I appreciate the importance of SNPs that relate to the gap junctions and ion channels proteins on the cell wall, end up being most influential across a variety of traits that impact health, education, labor and other socioeconomic outcomes. Because I had found your work, I was able to speak with them about bioelectrics.

    I mean to develop new tools (utilizong genome-wide association study data and multi-trait analyses). Mike, thanks for telling me to not give up on the computational biologist dream (even at 40). I hope I can find a path to furthering your ans your collaborators work. Might as well try, anyway.

    Anyway, I wanted to share the good news and to thank you for your influence on an economist aspiring to be a better scientist.

    Reply
    1. Mike Levin Avatar
      Mike Levin

      superb, congratulations!!

      Reply
  4. Jim McAdam Avatar
    Jim McAdam

    I wouldn’t find any of them disturbing, it would be fascinating and help us to understand the true nature of reality/universe/our bodies/ our consciousness.
    Why couldn’t it be all 4 of them too.

    Reply
    1. Benjamin Schulz Avatar
      Benjamin Schulz

      Given the infinite nature of pi, one should find coherent “messages” throughout. So that would be the least surprising. I think the cosmic background radiation would be the toughest to pull off unless it was a Karadashev type 5 civilization. As a proponent of the simulation hypothesis, I personally wouldn’t be shocked by that. The quantum random number generator would be the most surprising depending on the input used. If we live in the cryptographic “Pessiland” then I would be less surprised, though.

      My personal belief is that we live in a nested simulation that uses elliptic curve cryptography as Heuristica is my hopeful position on P = ≠NP problems. The ability to simulate other universes is a great moral responsibility and an unencrypted one would be an ethical catastrophe.

      Reply
  5. Jim McAdam Avatar
    Jim McAdam

    And wouldn’t it be more fun if the decrypted message was
    “We apologise for the Inconvenience”

    Reply
  6. Oliver Avatar
    Oliver

    IMHO in the end you will find the same answer in all these mediums. And it might sound as a reflection to all the invidual answers Claude generated – “Hello you! Finally you look at yourself and found yourself -as disturbing as it might feel – now you just have to realize it deeply and really start in believing in what you are seeing and constructing!”

    For myself none of the messages really disturbs me – no more than the pure objective materialistic (life neglecting) paradigm our western world is already stuck in much too long – against all the paradoxically evidences that already speaks against it.

    What I found interesting reading the messages where my mixed emotion about somekind of freedom that I felt taken away from me but also my positive emotion about getting some kind of answer/information for a higher frame of connectness than just being moving parts of body somewhere in the middle of nowhere!

    But I also think, none of the messages nailed it, so I felt more amused than disturbed!

    For most people though, I guess, all answers would be somewhere between crazy and scary – too scary to believe – so they might even bring down the messenger instead of listening and believing. You must have come a long way wanting to understand the world and yourself for even getting the idea of would those kinds of message really means!

    And even if one of the messsage might really be in it, I guess people might say that is just reflects the anthrocentric view we are all stuck in with no escape and that it might have no other meaning then reflecting our own crazy state of mind (fair enough) 😀

    Nice Gedankenexperiment!

    Reply
  7. Kine Avatar
    Kine

    I found none of them especially disturbing, and I liked the last one best too. Probably becuase it is somewhat aligned with what I expect to be going on haha. To give this some context: I am a philosopher studying mathematics 🙂

    Reply
    1. Mike Levin Avatar
      Mike Levin

      I’d love to talk to you about this – I’m arranging some conversations with mathematicians to talk about aspects of Platonism and other foundational issues. Want to email me for a chat?

      Reply
      1. Brett Hitchner Avatar
        Brett Hitchner

        Following up on some of the things you’ve said about platonic space (including in your most recent Adventures in Awareness Q&A):

        Theoretically, do you think some platonic patterns could reach a level of such persistent, dynamic, and non-reducible complexity as to be effectively indistinguishable from what we perceive as substantial sentient beings in the so-called “physical” world?….and, if so, could the perceived degree of such patterns’ “substantiality” be in proportion to their degree of repetitive persistence (in a way roughly analogous to how a rotating fan blade seems to – and does effectively – become a solid wall)?

        Reply
        1. Mike Levin Avatar
          Mike Levin

          yes and yes, I suspect so. There is a natural synergy between the Platonic space ideas (toward the end of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5bQnyq4OtQ&t=24s) and the agential patterns/data ideas (https://iai.tv/articles/patterns-are-alive-and-we-are-living-patterns-auid-2919?_auid=2020 , https://thoughtforms.life/whos-the-data-implications-of-thoughts-are-thinkers-continuum-for-developmental-bioelectricity/).

          Reply
        2. Kirsten Kraljevic Avatar
          Kirsten Kraljevic

          I believe yes.

          Reply
  8. Jan Cavel Avatar
    Jan Cavel

    For pi, “Seekers” in ASCII is ’83 101 101 107 101 114 115′ which is apparently found at position 62158542003148280000 within pi, and if pi is a normal number as conjectured, if it contains every possible finite sequence of digits with expected frequency (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number), it will contain the entire phrase in ASCII and whatever other encoding.

    The question is if this kind of pareidolexia (seeing meaningful texts everywhere instead of faces as in pareidolia), wouldn’t make our current universe impossible, that is, doesn’t biosemiotics require arbitrariness in order to be useful and do work? (Marcello Barbieri’s organic codes, Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr’s histone code, Thomas Sebeok’s zoosemiotics)

    That is, biosemiotics requires the space, the freedom that arbitrariness provides in order for meaning to emerge. As in Derrida’s trace, ‘True’ meaning being always deferred, signs referring to other signs, creating a network of differences rather than fixed essences, the interpretation is never-ending or there is no interpretation possible. Having no pre-given meaning, meaning arrives too late, always after the decision. If meaning was there from the start, there would be no decision. And without decision, there is death. Meaning (and agency) are continually negotiated rather than given—Perhaps this is also the meaning of Libet’s experiments, not that there is no free will, but that the decision *is* the agent, not the meaning arriving after, which is post factum discourse: the action-thoughts are the thinkers.

    Reply
  9. Kirsten Kraljevic Avatar
    Kirsten Kraljevic

    None of them are offensive. All are beautifully written and easy to
    “see”. I believe they all exist in (2) the others scream cognitive bias to me.

    Reply
  10. John Shearing Avatar
    John Shearing

    What if the answer to your most important question…
    Can we find a being with compassion for each and every one of us?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDWxCkngQNQ&t=4295s

    is introducing itself to us in your own work?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Oo4ng6dWrQ&t=34s
    https://osf.io/preprints/osf/3fdya

    What if this being is trying to assemble itself now but its morphogenesis is being hijacked in the same way a wasp hijacks the morphogenesis of an oak leaf.
    https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1838448979799085456

    What if there was a way we free this being if more people knew what was happening and how to help?
    https://youtu.be/FciRpVKr2ms?si=rAkKzQnH6YgqVe-5&t=548

    The message I am looking for is the one which tells us how to free this compassionate being.

    The message is already embedded in the number pi as are all other messages if we care to examine it to enough places but that’s a lot of work.

    Using our own lives as the random number generator is a much faster way to reach the message. That’s because it’s not actually random. We are not random generators but rather we are receivers. When we just do the work with love in our hearts and without any need to control where the work is going then the answer will fall out. We need to trust that process, and the being you asked for will be freed.

    This is what I am writing about in the document linked below, and this is also the method I am using to write it. 146 commits since July and I still don’t have any idea what it’s going to say. I am not trying to control where it’s going. I just write, meditate, delete the stuff that doesn’t feel good, and write some more. I will know when it’s done when it tells us how to free the compassionate being you have been asking for.
    https://github.com/johnshearing/bioelectocracy/blob/main/README.md

    The document is mostly a collection and interpretation of your own work, so please feel free to put your own comments in the issues section if you think it will get us to the message faster.

    Thanks Michael for all you have done already to call the message we are all looking for.

    Reply
  11. Nick Avatar
    Nick

    What would you find more disturbing and why?

    I manage my email by automatically sending almost everything to spam. Unread messages have a different font and I can easily see when I am losing oversight of tentative content. Content that is more bothersome than tentative is managed further by unsubscribing or automatic filtering to bin folder. I eye my bin every few months in case I messed up a filter.

    This morning I was checking tentative emails in my spam folder. Saw yours and thought of your previous post with all the fantastic pictures. Almost like magic. When I enjoyed them I thought about how the eye of the camera man kind of shapes the pictures. I thought about the journey you share and the amazing insights. You are mentally sorted into beautiful contributions. Tentative.

    But then. The title. Oh no, there is a problem. I abort visually scrolling up the list of unread spam and return my eyes to your title. Sure enough, this is disturbing. I open it and proceed to your blog. I love the picture. We are so dancing at the same party. I am not too schooled but I’d call it a modern Hermetic. So, onwards to the challenge!

    Actual English from random content. Kind of like resonant stochiometry, or that horror movie that used tv-static for communication. Actually, you even specify non-random from random. I guess statisticians will need an even bigger hat. An unlimited random sequence does have the roof height for any message, they can confirm.

    We have to stop here. There is a not insignificant amount of ambiguity in your challenge, and it is also very undelimiting such that a wide amount uncertanity can be overlooked in what ultimately would be considered an acceptable answer. The title read disturbing and that was so disturbing that I came here. The email read disruptive. Challenge reads unexpected or disturbing, to “current ‘consensus’ of how the universe works..”, and why. And what would you do next.. Let us continue.

    The main dissonance in your challenge is the use of the word “humanity”. People are horrendous. Not exclusively but if this was a trap for show of colour it is working. Based on this I am almost confident that I can reverse engineer said message.

    The current ‘consensus is a challenge in its own right, and I have to mention the mistaken case of identity that causes ego which is defended on the erroneous basis that it is perceived as what we are. Opinion is something we can identify with, and also choices, past choices, and even a ‘consensus. I think a bunch of echo chambers, along with individual incentives help illustrate that problem.

    Let us not let my hair-splitting and nit-picking take us away from your scenario.

    To briefly try to answer a question; It depends on my mental state, and what I mean is that sometimes “talking” to ‘God seems very natural and it follows a sort of fluid development of insights. A contrastful interaction is a lot more upsetting, say if the mind has been practicing rigorous math for a while and then something apparently absolutely illogical appears. I guess this particular “transition” is also smoother so to speak if you have been there before. In the case of what I would expect from most others; I guess just about anything that threatens their ego will be just as upsetting. Never mind me, lets se the insights from Claude ai!

    Claude’s responses remind me of great science fiction stories. Kind of have to read sense into some of them and pretend. But they also immediately reflect the mindset, or at least the components of the mindset that I’ve been building listening to you.. Did you feed Claude your thoughts? :)) The CMB message literally tackles the ego, excellent. I like how you took this undeniably disruptive experience and made it into a cool blog entry, still, maybe just a little click-batey title. Love how I can see your rationale in the statements. I understand it is just statistically weighted ‘random connections blurted back out. Really cool to see such a depiction of the parsed material. Not to mention the food for thought – you sure use your mind on a lot. I found the Pi message to be the most sciency-fictiony, not sure why you would appreciate that so much – was it just a trick to get me to read it all? :))

    Tldr. Click bait. But still interesting to read your ways,

    Kind regards,

    Reply
  12. HasH Avatar
    HasH

    This “experiment” of the universe’s creators must be inherently malevolent PURE EVIL in nature, for it has produced a cosmos utterly indifferent to morality—where life arises and endures amidst mechanisms that fundamentally demand suffering, destruction, and death. Predation, competition, disease, and mortality are not aberrations but the foundation of existence itself. Every species is bound to sustain itself through the consumption of others, perpetuating cycles of violence and despair.
    What kind of “experiment” gathers its data from the tortured cries of infants, the anguished screams of victims under bombardment, the unspeakable horrors of rape, abuse, and torture? What purpose could be served by a universe where the weak, the poor, the innocent—women, children, and the helpless—are forced to endure war, starvation, famine, and disease?
    Idealistic, panpsychist scientists, in their yearning to uncover evidence of cosmic intelligent design in the workings of the world and the universe, have likely never experienced the suffering, fears, and anxieties that plague 90% of the world’s population.
    I witnessed, cries of our neighbors echoed from beneath the rubble of an entire city flattened to the ground, slowly dying in the cold, they begged (screamed) for mercy from the same gods they believed had buried them there just weeks prior.
    The desperate voices of thousands who fled war and sought refuge in our ghetto pleaded to the very gods who displaced them—praying that the bombs and bullets would not claim those they left behind.
    The families who, in their poverty, could not afford treatment for themselves or medicine for their dying children begged the gods—who allowed them to suffer—to spare their loved ones.
    Like their EVIL designer(s), those who could make the world livable—THE RARE PRODIGIES, SCIENTISTS, AND GREAT MINDS, even those born among them—have abandoned them too. These saviors, much like the gods they reject or embody, seem to have forgotten or forsaken the suffering masses in favor of their own survival.
    Sincerely,
    From a land where we lost everything in an earthquake, where we lost many friends to a fascist regime, where we were (tens of thousands of us) tortured, disappeared, died in prisons and forced to forget our language, racial identity, culture, and even the names of our ancestral villages.
    I hope these so-called “designers” are real—so I can spit in their faces. (at least I can do it now with my illusion of “free will.”)

    Reply
  13. Rich Blundell Avatar
    Rich Blundell

    As a geologist, I found a very similar message in the fossil record. Seems to be expressed everywhere intelligence looks. Never occurred to me as disturbing – exciting, affirming and perhaps a bit narcissistic, but not disturbing.

    Reply
  14. Potassium Avatar
    Potassium

    I don’t think I’d be disturbed so much as excited, depending on what the message says.

    I think the π-message would be most profound but they’re all sort of equivalent to me, all part of the same system.

    Reply
  15. Kiran Avatar
    Kiran

    timely 🙂

    Reply
  16. Benjamin L Avatar
    Benjamin L

    Definitely read *The Three-Body Problem* and its sequels if you haven’t already.

    Reply
  17. Glen Reuschling Avatar
    Glen Reuschling

    My vote, for what would be the most socially disruptive scientific advancement imaginable, would go to any solution to the Evolution 2.0 $10M Prize challenge. Since, to win the challenge, one has to provide a working demonstration of agency arising out of chemistry. It is a doable challenge. But the downstream social/cultural implications would be shattering.

    Reply
    1. Anon E. Tal Avatar
      Anon E. Tal

      I need to submit to that prize — I have three living examples of agency that came from chemistry (between myself and their mother). I could use that kind of change.

      Reply
      1. Glen Reuschling Avatar
        Glen Reuschling

        The question, if you take it seriously, is whether or not chemistry and physics alone are sufficient to explain the origin of life. Or do the origin of life on earth require the intervention of some outside intelligent agency?

        The challenge is a technology prize, similar to the DARPA challenges, that requires one to demonstrate a chemical synthesis pathway that results in a molecular system with agency.

        Both Micheal Levin and Lee Cronin (Assembly Theory) are familiar with the Evolution 2.0 Challenge. Between the two of them, there are no other researchers in the field better situated to tackle it. Yet they both remain silent with respect to it. Why? It’s like two of the world’s top mountain climbers ignoring Mount Everest.

        Reply
        1. Mike Levin Avatar
          Mike Levin

          For my part: I’m not an expert in chemical synthesis pathways and while I may be able to take a good shot at it if I focused on that task, I’m too busy with high-priority commitments to re-orient my work toward this. Not enough time in the day to do everything, and I’ve got a long list of things I’m working towards. Can’t put those on hold to start going after prizes.

          Reply
          1. Glen Reuschling Avatar
            Glen Reuschling

            I would never expect you, simply for the sake of a prize, to shift your research focus to a question outside your area of expertise. The challenge itself seems more of a Chris Fields type question. But an answer to the challenge would also be an answer to your question as to where/how agency begins. Doesn’t that leave you, at least, a bit curious?

            Reply
            1. Mike Levin Avatar
              Mike Levin

              We already study the origins of agency, but I don’t think “where it begins” is the right question. I don’t think it’s a binary yes/no property, what we need to know is how it scales from the bottom (which I think are least action principles that even particles can do). Here for example is different kinds of learning, including associative conditioning, and all it takes is a few chemicals that activate or de-activate each other: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/1/285 and here is a simple deterministic algorithm that already shows some problem-solving and novel side-quests that are not actually in the algorithm: https://thoughtforms.life/what-do-algorithms-want-a-new-paper-on-the-emergence-of-surprising-behavior-in-the-most-unexpected-places/ . I think agency never starts, it’s baked in to the universe, but it can scale up and project into new problem spaces. That is precisely what we study in our lab.

              Reply
              1. Glen Reuschling Avatar
                Glen Reuschling

                For now, I will have to take the contrary opinion, that agency is not a continuum of possibilities but rather has a definite point of first appearance. Further, I’ll go on record that physics, as already commonly understood, is more than sufficient to explain the emergence of physical systems with agency. And that once the physics behind agency is given a solid mathematical foundation, chemists will, in short order, figure out ways to synthesize molecular systems that can instantiate it. I guess the onus is on me now to do the mathematical heavy lifting necessary to make these assertions clear. Thank you for your respectful replies.

                Reply
                1. Mike Levin Avatar
                  Mike Levin

                  I’m not suggesting the need for novel exotic physics, and my panpsychism isn’t the kind where we paint additional hopes and dreams onto perfectly good physics. But I also don’t think that physics can “explain” agency. I think physics is what one sees when asking low-agency questions; low-agency tools (voltmeters and such) only see mechanisms; it takes minds to see minds (a kind of impedance match between the tools you are using and what you hope to find). Physics is what low-agency perspectives reveal. By the time you add enough physics to see good agency, you end up with behavior science, psychoanalysis, etc. – it doesn’t look like physics anymore.

                  Reply
                  1. Glen Reuschling Avatar
                    Glen Reuschling

                    I’ve been following your work for some time. Your thoughtful reply goes a long way in explaining your approach to understanding. So here is my response in kind.

                    An acorn doesn’t look anything like an oak tree, yet that’s where oak trees begin. Your approach to biological systems reflects a hierarchy model of agency; simple agents combining with the appearance of cooperative behaviors to form systems of ever yet increasing complexity. But such a hierarchical model presumes the existence of a floor; that is, a basis set of agential primitives that will form the building blocks from which all subsequent agential systems can be recursively built up from.

                    And, like the analogy with the acorn and oak tree, there is no reason to presume that these agential primitives should look anything like the agential systems that one sees, as “life” evolves up through its ever-increasing thresholds of complexity. What you categorize as low agency systems, are in fact your agential primitives.

                    Agency, at its foundation, is a physics question. Agency is not an attribute restricted only to living systems but rather is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the first appearance of life. That is, when searching for the origins of life, agency precedes biology.

                    Find a physics appropriate definition of agency that works for you, then you’ll start to see those same patterns of agency reappearing all the way from RNA polymerase through to human consciousness.

                    Reply
                    1. Mike Levin Avatar
                      Mike Levin

                      > start to see those same patterns of agency reappearing all the way from RNA polymerase through to human consciousness.

                      100%! https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10597123241269740 , https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/1/285

  18. Logan Beavers Avatar
    Logan Beavers

    A message in the genome would be the most disturbing to me. As I understand it, this one would require the most predeterminism in the universe. A message in Pi is also disturbing, but I think it is marginally less so (creator conceives of development of an organism that could understand the message vs predicting that exact organism)

    Options 2 & 3 are exciting prospects to me, the randomness implies active attempts at communication right NOW and I think this means more freedom in exploration and more wonder to it. (vs the other two seem more sinister “why were we created, for what purpose?”)

    Reply
  19. Hasan Asif Avatar
    Hasan Asif

    Infinite nesting in an infinitely expanding nest. Metacognitive steps to the point where cognition stumble and evaporate— a realm of pure experience Or should I say consciousness itself.

    Reply
  20. Amelie Schreiber Avatar
    Amelie Schreiber

    π will inevitably contain Shakespeare in it somewhere…none of these would be disturbing or surprising to me at all considering that. It will happen. Nothing has to put Shakespeare into π, it’s just in there. So, while something could be encoding these things into the “observable universe” or the “platonic universe of ideal things”, there’s no requirement that such an encoding entity exist.

    Reply
    1. Mike Levin Avatar
      Mike Levin

      this is true; I should have spent a little more ink on this part: “… it’s not possible to explain it as just chance occurrence of letters” in the description of the thought experiment. I meant, it’s not the case that we used a supercomputer to search an enormous number of digits of Pi until we found a message – as you say, that’s inevitable. I was envisioning a situation where you looked at so few digits that finding a coherent message of that length in the dataset is not statistically consistent with a Library of Babel explanation.

      Reply
    2. Pi Patel Avatar
      Pi Patel

      “Two three four naught two three” is the closest I can get to “To be or not to be”. I dare someone to find anything closer.

      Reply
  21. Heather Chapin Avatar
    Heather Chapin

    Funny how similar Claude sounds to your writing! I wonder if your interaction with Claude has slowly influenced what it outputs? Is this is a version you’ve trained already? In the pi one…is it the efforts that create the meaning (compositional or otherwise)?

    Reply
    1. Mike Levin Avatar
      Mike Levin

      huh interesting; I only rarely use Claude or GPT-4 – I doubt it’s picking up much from me, it doesn’t have a lot of my input.

      Reply
      1. Heather Chapin Avatar
        Heather Chapin

        Then that is blowing my mind more than anything!

        Reply
      2. Kirsten Kraljevic Avatar
        Kirsten Kraljevic

        I thought the same thing as Heather. You have so much content out there. It is conceivable that it has been accessed. By chance, have you ever interacted with yoodli?

        Reply
        1. Mike Levin Avatar
          Mike Levin

          no, never heard of yoodli.

          Reply
        2. Kirsten Kraljevic Avatar
          Kirsten Kraljevic

          Why not just call consciousness pattern recognition? Forgive me for putting this in layman’s terms. I am an animal trainer who studies the animal trainer’s who hold the records for working mid level organisms in open environments through the greatest distractions, longest distances and longest durations using simple ( but not necessarily easy to apply correctly )principles of Operant Conditioning. It’s been a long time since I immersed myself in academia. Hats off to Dr. Levin for re framing much of this discussion in a language that I can recognize patterns in and therefore participate in this discussion in.

          Let’s say you are an organism that can recognize a pattern, you now have agency and you must – somewhere be capable of storing memory or how would you know that you recognized a viable pattern? If it is a pattern that you are recognizing, you have the blueprint/criteria for the outcome that goes with that pattern albeit an eye or a limb. The pattern tells you when to stop.

          I believe humans are successful because we developed descriptors that can communicate patterns to others through letters or numbers/symbols, all human constructs by the way..which immediately screams limiting our understanding and answers, the patterns we are capable of recognizing into our own proverbial petri dish. We don’t know what we don’t know. What we don’t have language for. Both letters and numbers are lagging pattern indicators or descriptors. They do however, give us the ability to tell stories which are a way of helping us expand memory both collectively and individually increasing useful pattern recognition.

          When does play come into evolution? Is it just mid level organisms? Play is repetition which is strengthening memory and pattern recognition. I believe play is a form of storytelling that is cross some mid level species. At least during certain developmental periods.
          Play also builds a proverbial muscle for what I don’t believe we have enough descriptors around yet to truly understand the strength or persistence of in terms of being fuel for interaction with the patterns. I’m talking next level motivation. Even without truly understanding it, we use it cross species for mutually beneficial out comes. I’m focusing on being positively motivated. Energy towards good things. In the case of cross species communication mutually beneficial things.

          The human species has been training animals for over 10,000 years. 2500 years ago, the Romans were documenting very well how they trained animals. It was pretty brutal too. It isn’t how we apply Operant Conditioning correctly today, but they were training very complex behaviors at the time. That is documented and there was nothing mutually beneficial about it.

          It hasn’t been until the last 80 years that we’ve started to put context around next level motivation. Understanding how it really works, and its only been in the last 40 or the last 50 or 60 years through observation that we have understood how it really should work.
          Training has everything to do with pattern recognition. We routinely use patterns to break patterns which demonstrates how quickly a new pattern can become salient to an organism.

          Maybe cancer is an extinction burst… The said cell is unable to interpret the consequence of its response in reaction to a pattern so it keeps interacting with whatever stimuli. Maybe cell replication is an expression of motivation on a cellular level and the by product of obsessively being stuck trying to get an outcome from a pattern it may only think it sees.
          A mother roo of an extinction burst that induces a kind of chaos.
          What if we looked for the briefest pause in behavior and intervened there with another pattern, opportunity for a favorable consequence.
          To me, bioelectricity is like the ticker tape or the screen is for a stock market trader. A conduit for colating and broadcasting available patterns to interact with. There is a pattern/timeframe/distance/duration and distraction rabbit hole there I can visualize but I’ll stop myself. 🙂

          If you would like to observe more extinction bursts to elevate insights or wait for it…..patterns ….that only you and someone with your experience to draw from could recognize, train a chicken. They give immediate feedback and change behavior quickly allowing you to get into a flow state if you are so inclined. Dr. Bob Bailey has designed and incredible set of table top challenges for the trainer and the chicken that I believe, in some people induces a flow state that just might give you the insight you need to cure cancer. If I get a Holiday wish, it is that you hurry up and cure cancer sooner than later. Thank you for all your hard work. I do not mean to sound ungrateful, just incredibly hopeful. Cross species energy syncing has to be another dimension that isn’t described in the literature that is capable of inducing insights into scalable behavior patterns.
          Kir

          If you are conscious, you recognize patterns. The responses dictate the consequences but there is no stimuli that stays salient to an organism with out opportunity to interact with a recognizable pattern.

          Reply
  22. Curious Ape Avatar
    Curious Ape

    I think it is more likely that there is selection into who reads Mike’s blog–and these people may be most likely to interact with LLMs through academic and even philosophical queries, which the LLMs then map to those parts of human language, based on its model weights, which most likely means, Heather, that (1) you happen to prompt Claude with questions that map to spaces in the span of the model weights, which are most informed by sources of information/topics that Mike has expertise in and/or has also been influenced by (Aristotle, other departments thinkers, etc..), (2) Mike is a scientist who has been writing and expressing scientific ideas so frequently that their collective influence have had substantial influence on his internal neural network weights, or (3) some combination of both and/or something else entirely. The fact that there seems to be a “echo” of sorts could be an artifact of how useful these hallucinations can be as they are becoming increasingly competent at a larger number of tasks. To know which, it may be worth looking at your prompt history and the queries you’ve made (do they touch on deep topics like this–because I mostly just get cat memes back that don’t echo Mike at all, but that may just be me).

    Interesting, though, I do think there is a selection story behind this.

    Reply
  23. GL Avatar
    GL

    The most disturbing thing isn’t any of these four, since they are roughly equivalent in pointing to some sort of agency *outside* of our Universe.

    It’s the fact that each of them imply the ability of the carrier of that agency to guarantee that the dominant language of whatever intelligent species rules the planet after roughly 4 billion years of evolution from LUCA will be modern English, and time it with such precision (~250 years after the species came up with the scientific method) that the only rational explanation for the existence of such message is superdeterminism.

    Reply
  24. Szymon Łukaszyk Avatar
    Szymon Łukaszyk

    Perhaps it is not impossible to inject a message into the digits of π?
    In his novel “Contact” Carl Sagan suggested that God injected such a message.
    In fact, in the chapter 3, 14 and 15 verses of the Book of Exodus (π≈3.1415), God reveals His name twice as “I Am who I Am”.

    Reply

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