Transcription
How would you explain the platonic realm of patterns that biology accesses to someone who is new to your work?
Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is that uh this this whole platonic space business is only something that I've begun talking about recently. So, the vast majority of my work today has not emphasized this at all. It's it's a it's kind of a uh something that we're able to bring now because now it can actually be helpful. It wasn't something that I emphasized before because we we didn't really need it before but but I think now we need it and and and in particular now we have tools to actually explore that space and so now now it becomes actionable.
So so the idea yeah the idea is is is quite simple. Um there are uh let's just go let's go all the way back uh to where this idea uh really kind of first became prominent at least in the in the western world was with Pythagoras and Plato and the idea is that there are mathematical facts that don't seem to have explanations the way that physical facts do which is usually either some law of physics or some historical selection or in the case of evolution. and biological beings. So there are all kinds of all kinds of fascinating um you know truths of number theory and uh you know distribution of primes and just just all kinds of uh of of these things in mathematics that don't seem to have an explanation in the physical world. In other words, there's nothing you could change about the physical world to make those facts be any different.
So I think it was pretty clear already uh and those those great thinkers made it made it explicit that uh there is a non-physical space of of important patterns and that these patterns do in fact matter for things that happen in the physical world and the simplest kind of uh example that I give for people right off the bat is this idea just just imagine there was a world where the the highest fitness was a very specific kind of triangle you know there was some kind of specific triangle and it had the highest fitness So, so just imagine evolution cranks through a bunch of generations and it finds the first angle and then it cranks through a bunch of more generations, finds a second angle. Now something amazing happens. You don't need to do it again and find the third angle. You already know what that angle has to be and it's a kind of a free lunch that you get from from geometry and it saves you as as evolution. It saves a bunch of time.
What I what I don't love about that example is that it's very um spatial and it makes it makes you know it makes people think that this is all about um re real shapes in the 3D world and it's not. There are many examples I could give that have nothing to do with with spatiality like that. But what I do like about it is that it just makes it clear that it's very practical. This is not some weird philosophical thing that you could choose to believe or not believe. It's just it evolution saves a bunch of effort. In fact oneird in that case one/ird of its effort it's safe. So it's it's a very practical thing.
So on a practical philosophical avenue we need non-physical patterns right triangles number theory these exist even without a physical world. Um so then tell me more about how biology would access it. So you know okay this has been known Plato was around but why biologists now needing to think about such non-physical patterns.
Yeah. Well first of all they've always needed to think about them if you really want to understand certain phenomena for for example there are cicas that come out every what is it you know 13 and 17 years or something like that. And if you want to understand why those specific numbers the the actual answer is not anything about physics or chemistry. The actual answer is because those numbers don't have any factors. They're prime. And if you and if and if you emerge on those uh on the on that time frame, it's it's it's the most difficult for predators to time your cycles and and appear at the same time. Right? So the explanation for why this is happening is not a physical explanation or or a chemical explanation. It's a mathematical explanation. So by so this has been this has already been been here for a long time. uh you know Darcy Thompson's book on growth and form for example from the 20s shows a million examples where biology is just is just incredibly benefiting from these things.
Um there are there are other examples like uh for example if you uh if you evolve a voltage gated uh ion channel. Okay so you evolve a protein that that just is a voltage gated ion channel. What you have there is a voltage gate at current current conductance aka a transistor. And once you have that transistor you have a couple of them you can make a logic gate. And if you can make a logic gate you automatically that logic gate automatically comes with a truth table. it automatically comes with certain other facts like that the NANDgate is is special and all these things you never had to evolve those you never had to evolve a truth table you never had to micromanage any of that it's a free gift from from where not from physics it's from it's from logic and mathematics so so so biology is full of these things the reason that I started I'm I'm talking about all this stuff now is that we now having having created anthrobots and zenobots and various other creatures that have never existed on earth before we now have an interesting problem which is they have all sorts of complex forms, forms of of anatomy, forms of behavior, forms of gene expression, forms of physiology, all of these things uh they have very specific patterns. And now we have to ask where did these patterns come from? And normally when you do this for normal evolved living beings, the answer is well a long history of selection. So so it was selected to do certain things, not other things. So there you go. That's where it came from. Well, that doesn't work for xenobots or anthrobots because there's never been any anthrobots or zenobots. There's never been selection to be a good xenobot and do kinematic replication or to be a good anthrobot and to go around healing neural wounds. Um, there's there's never been any of that. So, if you want to understand now, uh, then then then you have to ask where these things come from.
Now, the traditional approach, which is what everybody says when they first see this, and they say, "Oh, it's emergent." And they say, "Well, what does that mean exactly?" And they say, "Well, it's just a fact that holds in our world." So the problem with that, the problem with cashing out this this idea of emergence as just meaning surprise, meaning we didn't see it coming. I mean, that's nice and it's a label and you can catalog those things and sort of write them down in your big book big book of emergent facts. But what it doesn't do is help you find the next emerging thing. In other words, I I think I think this idea that it's just a sort of random grabag of stuff that happens to hold in our world is a very pessimistic approach. It's a very mysterian approach. I I I like uh and and this is a metaphysical claim. This is not something that you know you can prove with one experiment. But I I really think the much more fruitful way is an optimistic approach which is what the the platonist mathematicians take which is the hypothesis that this is not a random grabag of stuff that that we are surprised by. It's an ordered space that you can systematically study. In other words, they these things are are structured in some way that we can that we can move from one to the other. having found one thing you can jump from that to something else and that there is an ordered space of things like people when they make the you know they're making the map of mathematics that kind of thing.
So, so, so this is what I, you know, what I think is critical for biology is that we can now use xenobots, anthrobots, and of course all other kinds of biobots, chimeas, you know, all sorts of things without an evolutionary history. We can use them to explore the space. It's interesting with your artificial organisms like zenobots that you mention because if they're accessing uh competencies and forms that they didn't seemingly evolve for because um they're quite coherent even though you've taken them from an organism and so then I'm wondering it's not like a simple pattern like mathematical or just like computational logic like you mentioned ion channels earlier it's something yeah much more coherent. Tell me more about uh those kinds of organisms.
Yeah, the the the current my my current model is simply this that this this platonic space and by the way there's a there's a nomenclature problem here because when I say platonic space what I'm not trying to do is to stick close to the views of Plato. So my point is not that this is exactly what Plato thought. I actually am not sure we know exactly what Plato thought on some of these things, but and and there are certainly um experts like Matt Seagull and and others who who actually know much more about this that I I'm I'm far less interested in what the historical facts of what um Plato actually thought.
What I'm trying to do is come up with a reasonable framework that helps us move forward in new experiments. And what's interesting about this the the Platonic space as such the reason I I pick up that name rather than just come up with a new name which at some point we might need to is that I I want to point out to people that this is not a new and crazy thing that that that I just dragged in here this is something many mathematicians take very seriously. So so this is this is similar to to the kind of thing they're thinking about.
However, uh the way I extend it is by saying okay this space whatever you call it has layers that bel that that are populated with the low agency static forms that mathematics sees. So this is where the prime numbers and the you know the different facts of about uh topology and and all of this that that those things live there. But that's not all of it. there are uh other um I don't want to say regions because I'm not sure how spatialized it actually is but there are other domains of that space that contain much more complicated much more active dynamic forms that we would recognize as behavioral propensities. In other words, it's not just patterns of the distribution of mathematical structures. It's patterns of contextsensitive behavior in specific circumstances which we would recognize as kinds of minds. In other words, that's that's what I think is going on here. I think that that that space is not just about the mathematical features we're all used to. We are now realizing that that a lot of the uh ingressions of patterns that we see in biology are these these high-end things that we would recognize as as different kinds of minds either primitive or quite sophisticated.
H tell me why what part of your work is convincing you that there are minds that are not necessarily localized to the physical but they they it must exist in some sense beforehand before biology uses them or or the mind uses biology. Like just tell me a bit more about um why you'd invoke Yeah, the we mentioned it ear the space is full of minds and agential patterns. It's not just static forms. Tell me more about why that would be.
Yeah. Well, there's two there's two pieces to this and and and just let's let's just get the v vocabulary down a little bit. So So the claim of my current model is that when we build things and these are anything including simple machines, uh biobots, uh cyborgs, embryos, any of that stuff. what we're actually building are interfaces through which the various forms uh and the various patterns ingress into and become observable to us in the physical world. Okay. So that's so that's what I think is actually happening here.
Now now why do I you know, why why do I think these are these are these are minds? Well, first of all uh we need to uh we need to decide how how do we recognize when we're looking at a at a at what we would call a mind of some of some sort. So some people do it by definition. They say look minds are the things that brains do. Uh I think that's I think that's that's a that's a huge mistake.
Uh you know brains are one particular way to do intelligence. But I think we're much better off having a broader definition of intelligence because otherwise we leave a lot on the table scientifically. So again my claim is not that this is this is not linguistics. It is not philosophy or poetry or any of that. This is this is science in the sense that either you make a commitment that you are you are sticking to a sharp category. Minds are what brains do and therefore I'm never going to take the tools of cognitive and behavioral science and apply them to anything that aren't brainy animals. Or you say well actually the null hypothesis is that it should be a continuum because we understand developmental biology. We see what's happening in evolution. It is it is clearly uh the the null hypothesis should be should be a continuum view where these things uh these these capacities slowly change and and transform and uh and anybody who wants to argue for sharp transitions needs to make that argument strongly.
In that case in that case you are facilitated in taking the tools of uh cognitive and behavioral science and applying them to all sorts of other things. And what I'm arguing is that as a matter of uh empirical fact when you do that you discover things that otherwise have not been discovered and and I've you know we my lab and and other labs have shown dozens of these things. So it's a so so my my only defense of this is empirical fruitfulness because by doing this you enable yourself to discover things that you otherwise never would. And so so that's the first thing right that this is this is how we recognize minds is we have tools we already have the tools you know from from behavioral science to recognize problem solving to recognize learning and memory to recognize u navigation of problem spaces we we already have tools for all this and so we've shown that you can now apply this to all kinds of other things and then the remaining question is where do those things come from and we just talked about that you can say that it's emergent and just well look at that surprise or you can say okay there's a particular mapping between the interface that we make, let's say it's a an embryo or a robot of a particular type or whatever it's going to be and the kinds of patterns that are going to come through that interface and that's the research agenda now is to is to understand that mapping and I think it's we we have to assume that it's rationally uh uh understandable. We can't we can't just give up certainly not at this stage.
Last time we talked about some of the relationships and synergies between different parts of biology like brains and the kind of cognition they do but then also embryogenesis and the kind of problem solving that it's doing um to get to the right form to create a human or whatever it's creating. Um, and there many other spaces. Um, so I'm just cuz then I'm just trying to think of what what specific example like tell me about a place where you would need to think about um a pattern. I guess the thing is that they're all going to be in some way the platonic forms are ingressing in many different areas. But um I'm done trying to understand how do we categorize where where and in what place are the like clearly our mind is different from the kind of capacities that our cells have or our liver has or embryogenesis has. So then I'm kind of trying to get a differentiation between what kind of patterns we we should expect kind of minds and competencies we should expect to show up in different places in biology.
Yeah. Uh well the fact is that being able to expect specific things is uh we're nowhere near that. We we have we are very poor at knowing what to expect. We don't even be we don't even have the beginnings of of a of of anything that we could reliably uh trust that we are expecting the right thing. We are surprised constantly. And that is because we have been for the longest time because of our evolutionary past and our and our pre-scientific past we have been uh constrained in in our imagination and in our thinking. We are obsessed with three-dimensional space. Uh it's very hard for us to think about intelligence operating in other spaces. We mainly only recognize things that are of medium size, of medium speed, of you know that kind of thing. And and and we love movement in three-dimensional space as embodiment. uh all of those things are are very specific. The the actual uh set of spaces in which biology solves problems is much much broader than that. And so and so knowing what to expect, it's far too early. That is why we need this research program. Uh the research program of diverse intelligence is is in my in my mind it's exactly that. It's it's trying to understand what is the space of possible minds and can we use and again I don't think you can do this from a philosophical armchair. This is empirical research. Can we build interfaces to map out uh the relationship between the pointers that we create? So the embodiment, the physical embodiment and the patterns that show up.
This is not just about biology at all. This is not about complexity really. Uh we've shown that you get some of these things. For example, delayed gratification. Delayed gratification is a is a is a simple behavioral capacity uh that means that this this agent can move against its um goal. gradient in order to recoup gains later on. Okay. So, so if all you know how to do is is try to follow a gradient, you are one you have one kind of competency, but if you're actually sometimes able to actually get further from your goal in order to go around in some fashion and get what you want, that's that's a more uh sophisticated capacity and there's tons of these and behavioral sciences work these out in in in great detail. But we found for example that even even even simple bubble sort. Okay, so these are sorting algorithms just a few lines of code totally deterministic, completely transparent, no new biology to be discovered. People have been looking at these things for decades. And yet even the even these very simple things have uh these kinds of um competencies that you would recognize as part of the behavioral repertoire of of a sophisticated or perhaps not so sophisticated creature.
So uh we we're we're just bad at knowing when these things are going to show up. This is why we need to do the empirical research.
>> with say finding competencies within algorithms like you said there. What are your intuitions for why we would find unexpected competencies there? Um maybe maybe someone might think, oh, I mean if they're if they're deterministic, I don't know, you made a mistake. You're looking at it wrong. Um tell me about whether we should because if you find it in in evolution or you find it in biological organisms, we don't we feel like we we don't understand them anyway. Like that we have a lot of work to do. But with a deterministic algorithm, we maybe think we we know more about what it should be and what it's supposed to do. So why why would we surprises there?
Yeah, that's that's my point exactly. And that's exactly why I did it because if you if you if you do this in biology then people will say well no doubt there's a mechanism for this somewhere we just haven't found it yet. This this is why I wanted to take the simplest most obvious thing. I wanted something that was deterministic. I wanted something where it was transparent. There was no other steps. And I think this is exactly what it's telling us is that our uh our feeling of yes we make these simple things. We know what they can do and the algorithm tells you what they can do. That's wrong. I I think that's completely wrong and uh you need examples like this to break us out of that assumption and give us a little humility in that no you don't need brains you don't even need living cells you don't need enormous complexity to reach the region where our intuitions break down our intuitions are already broken around even very simple algorithms we need to we need a major overhaul of all of this and that's that's in particular important for um for AI and for for many other things that are going to be relevant for us this this kind of uh these these kind of surpris rises and uh I think uh I I I think it's very important. I mean you can say that that's the wrong way of thinking about it but I go back to I have only one criterion for any of this and that's empirical success. If if you have a better way of thinking about it that allows you to find new things that better and and more things than were uh discover that were reachable with other frameworks fantastic. I'm I'm first in line. But but but let's see it right. And and I think the fact that we do find these things that no one had seen before is is telling us that uh that there's something here that there's something important here.
M m moving to biology right it's okay it's in computer algorithms um and then why when you create say zenobots anthrobots these hybrid organisms uh are you able to predict some of the forms there like tell me about those experiments creating these organisms and is and is there a reason why biology should be expected to do that to have uh cells taken manipulated from one environment but and still have competencies and capacities to solve problems and and live uh outside of that.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the the the amazing thing is that um they they do have these properties and what often happens is after we do the experiment, people see it and they understand there's no magic as as we do and so they say, "Well, that makes sense. It had to be this way." Because they've already seen it. The question is right, it's it's actually very different be when when you're asked what do you think would happen before you know if if I if if you and and I know this because uh for some of these things I I try we we tried to get grant funding to do the experiment before we had the answers and and what what do people say? They say, "Well, that's never going to work. That's that's crazy. That's never going to work." And so and so that's what you say beforehand. And then after you see it happening, then everybody says, "Well, yeah, I guess that makes sense." So, so it's really important for to have frameworks that don't just explain explain things quote unquote after the fact. They actually let they actually lead you to discover the new things.
And so, you know, lots of lots of examples. So, so so for example, the the Zenobots, right? Uh, one of the things one of the things that that you see with Xenobots, for example, is this uh first of all, kinematic self-replication. the fact that they can make copies of themselves from by coring other cells and compacting them into a similar shape. That one that one, interestingly enough, actually was predicted. It was predicted by an AI. So, in Josh Bongard's lab, um St. Creman and uh and and Josh made up this uh this the system that basically simulated uh the the Zenobot behaviors and and and pointed out that yeah, you know, this this should actually work. They should be able to and then and so so so it's not that it's not that this thing is is, you know, impossible to predict. It's just we don't have our our intuitions aren't aren't honed correctly and so and so nobody saw this this this this coming really.
Then then we found out uh and this is this is much more recent data. We did some transcripttoic analysis on these things and we found out that zenobots express hundreds of transcripts very differently than their parent tissue. Um we don't change the genome, we don't put in any new synthetic circuits, there are no nanom materials. All we do is take them away from the normal influence of the other cells that normally forces them to be this like boring two-dimensional outer layer that you protects the the insides of the embryo. So when you when you liberate them from these forces, you get to find out what what is their intrinsic motivation so to speak. What what will they do normally? And you find out that they express hundreds of new genes including uh as we found out a gene cluster related to hearing. Okay. It had to do with perception of sound and and and hearing in other animals. And so we wondered um could this really be uh could could they really have this this capacity? And so um Vipaf Pie in my group did the experiments. We put a little speaker under the under the dish of xenobots and we found out that sure enough uh they can they can respond to sound and they change their behaviors in the presence of sound. And so well and and normal embryos don't do this. And so and so they do have this they do have this capacity. again, we we didn't have any ability to know this was going to happen ahead of time. And you know, uh, no, I I'm pretty sure this is all just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what these things can do.
And then and then you get into things like, well, people look at that and they and they said when when we first rolled out the Zenobots, some people said, well, you know, uh, amphibian embryos are pretty plastic and embryos in general are pretty plastic. And so probably this is just a feature of frog embryology. you know, people called them animal caps, which is a name for the kind of the cells that they come from. And so, and so this is when I, you know, this is back in, you know, 2019 or something. I I said, "Okay, let's get as far away from amphibians and embryos as we can." That would be adult humans. And so, um, Gazmushka and my group, a PhD student, I I asked her to to make up to find a protocol, which she did for taking adult human cells and see what they turn into. And sure enough, they turn they turn into anthrobots, which have 9,000 genes that are expressed differently than the tissue they come from. Okay, nine, it's about almost half the genome now that are completely different. They have they have all kinds of crazy capacities such as healing neural wounds and some other things that we haven't published yet that are absolutely remarkable. And yeah, again, this is not anything that anybody could could have seen coming. So, so all these things need explanations and we need an explanation for why those forms, behaviors and you know physiological uh types of uh types of uh decision-m are are the way they are and not some other way. That's the job of biology is to be able to predict these things.
>> I I know it's a question that you're still grappling with, but that is part of what I wanted to talk to you today about is why the platonic realm is shaped um the way it is. And for example, I talked with the biologist Richard Wagner about the specific shape and contours of genotype space and why it has the mathematical structure that it does so that organisms can explore it um when they have mutations and >> they don't just die. Genetic mutations actually are quite robust and you can explore the space and get to new phenotypes. Um, but when I asked about why at a deep fundamental level it would be shaped like this right it sort of it gets too far out you know I don't know why but I know that biology explores it and makes use of it so tell me um can those kinds of fundamental questions um be asked like like maybe that's what you want to answer right because you don't just want to see oh you know it's emergent hey you know we got these skin cells and they they did this or we got these embryo cells, they did this, you kind of want to know like what is how is the space structured the way it is, but if there are non-physical patterns, so I guess they're just given to us like does this question make sense?
Well, the question does make sense and I think first of all that before before asking anything about why that space is structured, we need to understand how it is structured. So the first the first step is to get the lay of the land so to speak and understand what what are the structures in that space. Is it sparse? Is it densely populated? Are there any disconnected parts where you can't get from one region to another? This is what what is the metric of that space? There are many many questions that we don't know the answers to yet. So, we need to do the research to to get to get those answers. After we do that, we can start tackling the question of why it's structured that way in the first place.
But I want to I want to point out again uh we need to we need to know what a proper explanation looks like. like like what's an what is a what is the shape of an answer to a why question that makes you satisfied. So if you ask you know why are frogs who live in a in a in a swamp why are they green? You can come up with an evolutionary answer because everything that wasn't green got picked off by the by the by the you know birds and whatnot and eaten and so now what you have left over are the green ones. So that that's that's great and that and that those kinds of things can be explained by a specific history of selection. But in mathematics, we have a number of facts that don't have that kind of explanation. So if you're looking at a particular fractal shape or if you're looking at why certain things happen in five dimensions that don't happen in other kinds of dimensions or whatever, the explanation for those things are never anything about the settings of the universal constants at the Big Bang. They're never anything about evolutionary history. Oh, because all the other, you know, facts about other spaces got killed off. That that doesn't that doesn't exist.
So in mathematics the question of why is it like that is completely different and you know I'm not a philosopher of mathematics but you have to decide uh what does it mean when the answer is you know why is the distribution of primes the way it is that the answer sometimes might be there is no lower level explanation for why that's just how it is you can relate it to other things and you might say look isn't this cool this other mathematical object is is is you know basically telling you what the distribution is going to be and so on, right? So, you'll have you'll make these lateral connections, but it is not guaranteed and I'm not sure. I mean, you probably need a mathematician here for this, but I'm not sure it's at all guaranteed that that those kinds of y questions in math are not going to terminate with yeah, that's just how it is. You know, that's that's just, you know, why why doesn't 13, you know, have have any factors? Well, look, that's how it is. And and you don't get the kinds of explanations that you get in in physics or in biology. So uh I think we have to think hard about uh what what what do we want the the the why question to do for us ultimately.
>> I understand that with mathematics sometimes you can almost pointlessly keep asking why the world has a structure that it is. Um, but one thing that feels relevant here is you mentioned Darcy Thompson with so he has stuff where you can have these grids of organisms like that's like one organism then you manipulate it by a certain angle or something and then it's exactly the shape of the species of another organism >> and you've done stuff similarly with pleneria and creating new heads of new organisms. So that's what I mean by understanding the space of it because there's like a coherency like and yeah that's that's really interesting because that that seems much more complex than just mathematics.
Um well I I don't know. I mean in in some sense it's it's more complex but I don't think it's more complex than mathematics. I think it's it's a it's a different kind of mathematics. I I I kind of think that in some sense it's it's sort of like um uh microbiology versus all of biology, right? So so microbiology focuses on a particular layer. So I I think mathematics kind of focuses on a particular layer of the platonic space, but there are other sciences that we have that can tell us about these other layers.
And yeah, the the the grid deformations in Thompson's book are my favorite. They're my favorite part. I mean, it's an amazing book but but those are also my favorite parts of that book and that is exactly the kind of thing that we're studying. So so yes we can get the stock plenarian hardware to visit attractors that belong to other species of flatworms but we can also get them to make structures that don't look anything like flatworms. And so one of the things we don't know for example is are the patterns in the platonic space discreet? Are they really natural kinds? I mean, I'm normally very suspicious of that, but I don't know that that does, you know, that that doesn't work in the Platonic space. Are there things in between uh and and you know, what what does it look like? What does the topology of it actually look like? Uh what does time look like, if anything, in that space? There there are many many deep questions that that we don't know and it's really too early to have any certainty about any of it until we do more experiments to flesh out that mapping between the interfaces that we make in the physical world and the forms that ingress. If we can't even my, you know, the bottom line is this. If if we can't even guess what's going to come through when you make a bubble sort algorithm, you have zero hope right now of predicting in advance all the forms that are going to come from something as complex as a biological interface. So, we just need to roll up our sleeves, do the experiments, and and try to map out the space in a in a functional way.
Do you know if when you manipulate plenaria to have heads of different species or other strange shapes whether they like it or not? Um like like I'm just wondering what what are the preferences, you know, if you take a cell from a another like an embryo and then you make it some strange uh h highbot whatever like is it happy being like that?
Yeah. Uh it it's it's it's an excellent question. Uh some people are going to are going to say that's a that's a bad question. I don't think it's a bad question at all. I think I think it's good for I I think it's a good scientific question and I think it's an important ethical question as well. Uh look, judging judging the veilance of of uh other minds, especially alien minds, never mind the actual plenarian mind, but how about the morph the morphagenetic mind, you know, the the actual um decision-m cognitive processes that that's that act that act in morphospace. Trying to understand what the what the veilance is for those things is incredibly difficult for us. uh we we even struggle with things like whales and and octopus and things that are much closer to us than than some of these these alien kinds of uh kinds of minds.
But I think we can I think we can get there in in a couple of ways and and we're working on all this stuff in my group. One one way is to simply say look uh thing the how you know when when things like something is when they preferentially try to get to it. So, so behaviorally right so say look if if if something keeps despite various barriers and whatever if something keeps trying to get to a particular region you of of state space you can say that this is that being's version of an attractive stim you know an attractive stimulus as opposed to an aversive stimulus. So that's so so behaviorally is is one way to do it. Another way to do it is there are there are stress markers and this is a really interesting project that we haven't we haven't published on yet but we will. It's kind of a it's going to be kind of quite quite wild. Uh the good news is that biology seems to reuse some of the same markers to express stress at different levels. So, so molecules that used to be used for DNA damage and protein misfolding and the things like that are, it turns out, reused for uh expressing stress and unhappiness on and in other uh at other levels of organization.
So we are we are studying all this and we can literally ask the question how stressed out are zenobot cells about being a zenobot and how long does it take them to realize that well this is you know now I'm a zenobot I don't need to worry about not being a frog embryo anymore. Uh all all of those kinds of things are actually I think reasonable scientific questions. Now, all of this still faces the pro the the what they call the the um you know the hard problem of consciousness which is I'm not saying that that you can use these techniques to understand what it's like to be a zonabot from a first person perspective because I don't think you can not not in this way anyway but but as far as aversive versus attractive stimuli as far as stress perception um as far as those kinds of things I actually think this is a perfectly reasonable research agenda and and we will we will have those uh you know we'll have we'll have the answers to those questions at least the beginnings of them later this year.
I also wonder whether ponic patterns and minds that are nonphysically instantiated whether they want to be ingressed into the physical world. Do they have preferences even before their physical instantiation?
I I think I think that's a great question and here's a guess. Okay, and this is this is a total guess on my part. I I don't I can't prove this in any strong way, but this is what I what I provisionally think. Uh I think they do and I I don't know to what degree we can say that this is a this is an active preference. At minimum, I think what we are looking at is that the contents of the platonic space are under positive pressure. In other words, whenever you make an appropriate interface that that's it. The forms flow through it. It's like if you it's like imagining a big, you know, a big um a membrane enclosing something and it's under pressure. So anytime you poke a little hole in, you get you get automatically stuff starts coming through. At minimum, I think that's the case.
Uh my gut feeling is that some of these higher level patterns are not um eternal in the way that sometimes people interpret um Plato to be saying that they're just changeless. They just sit there. I and don't don't change or don't move. My hypothesis at this point is that uh the interactions with the physical world are in some way useful to them. Meaning that they must change by by by interaction with the physical world. Otherwise, I I just don't see what the what the point would be, right? And and and again, it doesn't have to be a point, but but optimistically, I I think there probably is. And so, uh I suspect that some of these forms are not just frozen and hanging in place. I think there is some kind of buildup or resonance between uh uh between the interfaces that are built in the physical world and the thing that could come through. How much of that is happening? What does it look like? Uh how much is there a feedback loop where some of these things can actually affect the interfaces that are forming to make it easier for them? You can think of it as a kind of niche construction, you know, where some creatures uh actually affect the environment in a way that makes it easier for them to inhabit that environment. So, so maybe there's some of that going on. All of this is pure conjecture. I can't say any of that for sure right now. Um, but I certainly think these are uh useful hypotheses to be looking at while we're mapping out the space.
On the point of the non-physical patterns having agency and in some way wanting to be ingress, helping the physical ingress into more patterns. Um, uh, I've been thinking recently about Christian cosmology. I'm a Christian, but I've been looking at things like angels. Um, and the reason I don't want to, you know, bring up heretical, scientifically heretical things to you, but, uh, I found it very helpful to understand your work. I'm trying to understand it because there it seems like they they think of every non-physical pattern as having some kind of agency. At least some of these theologians do. Um, and so then for them maybe it wouldn't be that surprising that the physical world is sort of permeated and it's like a pressure coming in. Um, and I don't know if you have anything to again partly because I'm trying to search for ideas to kind of help us understand these things, right? If we're now needing to stretch our imaginations to think about the adjacent adjacent possibilities of what could be there when we manipulate an organism um or cognition or some systems we we stretch its capacities, right?
Yeah. Uh well f first of all uh I I'm I'm not worried about heresies. There shouldn't be any uh there should be no such thing. you know, science should be the science of the the study of whatever is interesting and useful and so it is what it is. Uh, however, uh, and and, uh, it certainly has not escaped my attention that this view is is broadly comp what the things that I've said about Platonic space is broadly compatible with a number of um, sort of ancient traditions that talk about stuff like this. But I I think it's really critical and I I get a lot of emails where somebody says, "Oh, you know, the great sages have said this, you know, have already said this thousands of years ago." Yes, sure. And I've I've read all that stuff and of course they did. But there's a difference between saying there is a beautiful life under every rock maybe. But to get from there to to the point where you can say we now have a a rigorous science of knowing what kind of mind it is, how do we recognize it? How do we communicate with it? How do we have an ethical relationship with it? Uh how do we know when we're wrong? Because because that's really critical. You can't just you can't just, you know, assume these things. You have to you have to have some way of knowing that that you're on the right track.
Doing all of that is really difficult. And it is absolutely not the same thing to to just say this stuff versus uh have something actionable that that all of us now not just the great mystics who could sort of perceive it directly if they could. Uh I'm talking about all of us the way that that your toaster you know your toaster works every single time we we we know how it works. This is this should be our ideal for how this stuff needs to work. And and what I'm not saying is that this is about the technology of making widgets or that all of us get to stay the same and not need to change in order to apprehend these great great truths. I actually think that we will absolutely need to change that. That's that part is is is different from your toaster. You can you don't have to change much in order to to use to use a toaster. you will have to change significantly to really um uh uh have these
kind of uh relationships with the with the beings of the future that that I think are pretty inevitable at this point.
Uh and and and yet the the job of science here is to go beyond beyond these kind of um hypotheticals and to really provide the tools where everyone can for themselves uh establish the knowledge they need to to see the world in a in a better way. So, you know, if to to what to whatever extent these great traditions have information that helps us do the research, great. But, uh the the the the research both in inner and and you know, traditional third person research is really what we need to do to make this actionable.
H I wonder though if the nonphysical space of patterns what if they were not static but they changed or the kind of composition of it like not just any single pattern but just and we don't understand the space. So maybe patterns are connected and we still don't know how to map it out. So maybe it's a question we can answer through research, but could we study whether the space is not static and so uh does that would that then limit how much we could research it?
I I I suspect it's not static at least at least large chunks of it. There may be something that's static. There may be some aspects that are static, but I think I think uh the majority of it probably is not static. and uh and and I my suspicion is that there there may well be lateral interactions. So it's not only that the patterns from the space ingress into the physical world and then they can and then the physical interfaces can can interact here. I suspect there are lateral interactions in that space as well. Again, this is not something that I'm making any strong claims about now. We don't have any data on it yet. We we haven't needed it to explain anything that we're seeing, but that certainly is my suspicion. And uh if I had to bet right now, I think that's where this is all going to end up.
I I think that's probably true.
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>> Can I ask you a question that moves this discussion more to psychology and the human side?
>> That's right. things you um um you might not have answers to it but there I've seen and I had a podcast on it where um psychotherapists encounter people sometimes they have mental illnesses gone through great stresses normally it's great stresses but then they have parts of their psyche that they claim are not parts of them and it doesn't it seems like they they have um psychic entities that are yeah not part of them and obviously like we don't fully understand our mind and even with our own in our own mind what is us and and what is not like that there can be unconscious parts of ourselves we don't understand but um do you think that can be um understood scientifically
well I mean my optimistic view is that everything can be understood scientifically if we take a broad enough view of what scientific means right so so scientifically to to to me scientific just means an unflinching systematic search for the truth. And so my optimistic assumption is that that that ought to serve us well for almost anything. So so that's the background. Now specifically in terms of things that are not part of ourselves. Look, we are not very good at introspecting. And so there are syndromes where people will suddenly look at their leg and say that's not my leg. And they get super upset because like who attached this this cadaavver leg to my body? This wasn't mine. And so on. It's very distressing. So um we are we we clearly have many ways to be correct or incorrect about what is part of oursel and what is not and I'm sure there are many uh syndromes that um failure modes of our cognitive system where one can uh mistake patterns of our own thinking for some sort of external feature. So I'm sure I'm sure that's true.
Having said all that, the reality is that it is not clear or obvious what where our borders actually lie. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to ass to assign some degree of agency to various components of our own mind. And this is William James said this when he said thoughts can be thinkers too. I'm probably I'm sure I'm butchering the actual quote, but but he said something like that. And the idea is this that uh while while we ourselves not not not our bodies but but you know the patterns that are that are ingressing we ourselves are fairly complex uh psychological patterns. Some of those subunits are not passive data that we move around. Some of them have their own agendas. And so you can imagine the spectrum where you have fleeting thoughts and those kinds of thoughts are like passive data. We you know we we pick them up. We we examine them. and we do something with them and off off they go, right? But then then you got your intrusive and persistent thoughts and those those are kind of hard to get rid of often and they do as far as I understand the the evidence uh they do some niche construction in your brain actually to to modify your your your neural network to make it easier to keep having those obsessive thoughts and things like that. So, so those have a little bit of of of a self-preservation agenda. And then you can sort of move further and have actual uh frag personality fragments such as in dissociative identity disorder that are not themselves full humans and yet they can do planning and they can do um you know goal- directed activities and they they you know they can sabotage some of the other personalities and whatnot. So I I don't think it's crazy at all to say that look, I have some components in my uh psychological makeup that are not well modeled by this idea of passive data that just sits there waiting for me to think about it, but better modeled as dynamic entities which themselves have simple uh goal states that they try to that they try to achieve with various degrees of competency or or or not. So doesn't seem crazy to me at all.
uh and you know uh all there are there are other things that that we normally take as a positive for for for example uh you're in math class and somebody makes a claim and it sounds it sounds crazy. There's no there's no way that's true and then they show you a proof and once you've seen the proof you you can't unsee it and you are now convinced of it. What they've done by showing you that proof is they've now sort of colonized your mind with a with a with a belief and some other stuff that goes with it that you cannot get rid of. You just can't un un you know unhear it and you can't unlearn it and there's nothing you can do to yourself to uh to make you not believe it anymore once you've seen the proof. Right? So we are susceptible and I mean that's kind of the whole point of education. You're supposed to be forced by by facts and reason to certain conclusions whether you like it or not. Um, and that's the goal of every successful um, example, every successful lecture book, what, you know, whatever. You're trying to you're trying to give give the reader some some things that they didn't have before that they're not going to be able to get rid of. So, yeah, I I think it's I think it's perfectly reasonable to to just realize that that our minds are by by by design, our minds are uh susceptible to colonization by uh by other patterns that are not coming from us.
Your work in general seems kind of uh strange at first when people encounter it. I know it was for me, but then it kind of makes sense, but I wonder what are some of the things that you've seen in your career in biology that are still weird to you? What are the strangest things that have happened to you?
>> Wow. Uh boy, that's a that's a big question. Uh I I'm my career has been very strange and pretty much everything I see is uh on a on a on a monthly basis I see things that blow my mind that that that are very strange um you know strange and shocking uh there there have been many many examples and and it's and it's kind of funny uh about around a lot of these results that we've shown people ask you know did you did you expect that to happen and it's always hard to answer because on the one And I did because we did the experiment. You have to you have to especially as as when you when you run a lab, you have to commit resources, you know, time, uh people, you have to commit to them to doing something. So you have to have there has to be something inside you that is saying this might work. On the other hand, yeah, really nothing prepares you for seeing things that uh you were told, you know, everything that you've learned tells you that this should not be happening. So that's always I mean I I like it. I I enjoy that kind of thing. I I love seeing weird things happen because it's like a um it's like what are those things? You know those metal detectors that people walk around on the beach, right? Just waiting for that ping that tells you that there's something here that shouldn't be here. You know, that that might actually be valuable. Uh I I I I love it. And and part of that probably is that um my biology background isn't uh the same as many other people in the field. I was a computer scientist first. I picked up a lot of biology before my uh my PhD in in genetics, but I I didn't have the same the same prep as a lot of other people did and going through and having some of the same priors sort of drilled into you that this is this is how you know this is how it needs to work. But yeah, there have been there have been a lot of really really strange strange things
>> like that's in terms of experiments. So, has it changed your beliefs or just beliefs in about the world more generally in your life or like other things you've seen outside of experiments? Like, you know, I can't explain this, but then now I'm more open to maybe this could be explained some point in the future.
>> Yeah. I mean, well, I think everything can be explained at some point in the future. Uh, if we if we work if we work at it. Uh, I think I think explain is funny. I don't I don't exactly know what explain means but understood as a is is I think a better term in terms of being able to internalize something to the point where it it becomes not just data and knowledge but it becomes wisdom in some way that you actually incorporate it to to the other things that you know to to to give you a better you know a more a more meaningful life. I I think everything can be understood in that sense eventually.
Um, but uh yeah I you know I I just I just think the the whole field of diverse intelligence the the emerging field of diverse intelligence is really telling us that we are so bad at recognizing I I've called it mind blindness. uh we are so bad at recognizing unconventional intelligences all around us at at in different implementations and so on that I think the world is actually very different from from the classic picture and also how it seems intuitively to us and so that that that has been a major shift and every time you know one one one way I sometimes give this I have I have a new talk that I that I just started giving that basically shows this like uh scale of different kinds of numbers numbers that people have discovered. You know, you start with accounting numbers and then somebody came up with zero and then we got these negative numbers and then you know, we had some rational and irrationals and and and whatever and you you sort of go all the way up to all these progressively more weird kind of numbers. And and the thing is that every time people sort of discovered new kinds of numbers, it was really disruptive. You know, people people died over this whole irrational thing. People were killed over it. and uh and it just it just rips up some old assumptions and it's very uncomfortable and it makes but but but the the people who who get the credit are the ones who stick with it and follow the science and and and they they they adjust their past uh categories to to to you know to adjust with novel discoveries. So I I think this the exact same thing is happening with diverse intelligence you know. So we thought it was just brains and then we found out that yeah actually those same mechanisms are all over the body and then we can see some of that in things that are not biologicals at all and then we can see some of those things in patterns that are not physical embodiment at all and then there's some weirder steps after that that I don't have time to get into here but you'll see you know later this year there's going to be a couple of really crazy papers from our group looking at looking at those kinds of behavioral competencies in very unconventional places. So that's that's something that I think now permeates my thinking as I as I look around the world. I think my god it's like uh in the olden days before we had a good theory of electromagnetism and we just had no idea that that that lightning um static electricity magnets and light were actually not only were they all one thing where we all thought they were just different things but also there's also all we can see is like a tiny sliver of that spectrum and then there's this massive amount of uh of of em spectrum out there that we couldn't use until we had a good theory until we had tools. So this is this is this is you know how I feel now is that we're just like looking through everything through a tiny slit in terms of being able to recognize other kinds of intelligence.
>> Thank you Mike. This has been really fun. Um, do you point people to uh anywhere usually after these? I know you have um your academic YouTube channel anywhere else.
>> Um, yeah, I have a I have a blog where I uh I write about what I think all of this stuff means in terms of the scientific discoveries that we make and that's called thought forms.life. thought forms.life is the blog. There's also a podcast which organizes all the material from our center YouTube channel.
>> Um, and uh, yeah, I guess that's it. Those are the those are the things.
>> Okay, thank you.
>> Yeah, thanks very much. Yeah, thank you for the discussion and uh I hope I hope you feel better.
>> Thank you. This was fun. So it's uplifted my mood. Good.