Transcription
Let, let me just run down some of the list and and if any of them strike you as, oh yeah, I want to start there. Sure.
Um, just tell me. And also, if you wanted to take a few minutes and just talk about your work and that, you know, tell us where you're where you're coming from and what you've been working on, that's that's great, too.
Um, okay, I will, I'll give a, since since I'm the the unknown quantity here, I'll do that.
Um, so my my work has been um very transdisciplinary, but focused particularly on language. When I was in college reading systems theory, you know, von Bertalanffy, I kept thinking, if only he had developed a better language for this. Um, and so I'm not setting out to do that for von Bertalanffy, but I started seeing things, seeing aspects of both language and our our worldviews, our cognitive models that I think kept, to me, keep people constrained.
Um, I I saw both and everywhere. I saw um the interconnectedness of, you know, nature and nurture and mind and body, and it just seems silly that people would, you know, argue about is it this or that, instead of looking for a way to um to to language the the dynamics, the interpenetration, the the both andness of them. And um, I was also influenced by um uh topology, the Mobius strip and the Klein bottle, and saw them as um interesting metaphors for doing just that, for maintaining both the distinction, um, you know, a a Mobius strip seems to have two different sides, just like a piece of paper, but it looked at globally, it only has one side. And um, same for the Klein bottle and inside and outside. And so I started looking for ways to bring this kind of multi-layered thinking into language itself.
Um, is that is that enough of it? Okay. Yeah, that's great.
Um, so so yeah, where it overlaps with with your work, this can be used for both, you know, local and global perspectives, multiple scales, um, and uh specifying.
>> [sighs and gasps] >> Try, what what I'm really interested in is in seeing how, particularly in biology, um, when you are cognizant of the the multiple scales of intelligence and goal setting and and cognition that are going on, how do you talk about like all of that together? But I'm not asking you for answers. I'm saying this is what I'm working on, and you know, maybe you have some insights that could help me, and I have some insights that could help you. Um, I don't know. Let's find out.
Uh, yeah, I would very much like to be able to talk about the relationship between uh parts and holes and nested selves in a way that respected the autonomy of the parts and the autonomy of the whole and the relationship between them. I guess we're relatively comfortable with the idea that some concepts are relational, that we're not just talking about things, but we're talking about relationships between them, and we're relatively comfortable with talking about processes rather than structure or material. But when it has that uh nested relationship, it's usually treated in a very dull way of just parts and holes.
Um, I I I feel like there's something quite deep about what we need to get to in our understanding of mechanisms of cognition and what cognition is and how cognition works, that's uh that is intrinsically about the relationship between parts and wholes and the and the, but those aren't the right words, right? Between between the selves within and the self without and and the self that is the two together.
Um, uh, that it's something to do with um, cuz I think about uh cognition as being about causes that operate on different time scales. Uh, so multiple instances of a process that is rapid versus one instance of a process that is slow. Um, and that memory is about bringing causes from the past into the here and now, which is just another way of saying there's multiple time scales involved in the causes that you're talking about.
Um, and that does, Yeah, well, at at the very least, I agree with you, the lang, the existing language is insufficient to be able to talk about those things. I don't like to be able to talk about them more easily. I often resort, recently I've been resorting to metaphorical language, or possibly advocating for the literal interpretation in terms of things like resonance. In particular, resonance between a tune played at one frequency and the same tune played at a lower frequency that nonetheless are the same tune and resonate with each other and hold the shape of each other, right? Uh, which has a sort of the insides reaching out to the outside and the outside reaching into the inside sort of feeling to it. Uh, so maybe if there were other words available to talk about such concepts, then uh I wouldn't have to call it a metaphor and I wouldn't have to say it was literal either. I could, you know, I could say it was that, you know, it was that kind of thing that I'm that I'm talking about.
Yeah, from from my side, um, I for for in terms of language, I've been thinking that one of the fundamental limiting aspects of our language, and I don't know if this is true in other languages, the ones that I know are all have the same problem, but I don't know very many. So maybe maybe other languages do this better, but uh, we only have two options. We have a what, and then we have a who. And that's it. Everything is either a what or a who. And I, I mean, I don't even think that works when you have a dog. You already you're like, well, it's it's it may not be a who, but it's definitely not a what. And so so this idea that that we're going to just divide the world into two two sharp categories, and that's all that our language allows.
So I started thinking, and so you know, I don't know what the answer is, but my my crazy version for this was to was to put a little exponent on the O. So like, you could have like, I'm I'm a level 10 who, right? So so you know, and and >> [laughter] >> and maybe and maybe if I go to some, you know, some meditation retreat or whatever, I'll I'll gain a, I'll gain a, you know, I'll be a level 11 or something. And and maybe maybe my dog is a level seven, and then, you know, maybe my my zenobots are level three. I I have no idea. But but this notion that at least even if we don't agree on what the exponent is or or whatever, this idea that it it it it just can't be two two sharp categories for this sort of thing. I think, and you learn that so early in your language, and it just freezes everything from then on. So that we have to keep having the same arguments again and again about the spectrum of of of cognition, and I I maybe that's why maybe right, because it's just baked into the language. So I don't know. I'd be interested if there were to know if there were other languages that that have a have wider options, but it's uh, yeah, I think that's one of those things that has to be melted down and and and redone.
Um, >> Um, sorry. I Uh, other languages uh do divide the the categories differently. Um, you know, some indigenous languages include many more beings, types of beings in the who category. You know, they will give beavers and mountains and trees personhood, knowing that they're not human persons, they're beaver persons or mountain persons.
Um, So, it's it's not just a language issue. It's it's it's a category structure issue.
>> Mhm. Yeah. Which relates back to culture then. Mhm. Yeah. Uh, I guess in in English we talk about the spirit of something, and in some in some contexts we mean that in a quite who-like way, and in another context we mean that in a quite what-like way. Mhm.
>> [clears throat] >> Uh, so, part of what we're talking about here is language in the sense of, hey, wouldn't it be useful if we had a word for this? Uh, and together with that, if we had a word for this, it might change the way that we think about things on the ontological structures and that we impose over things. But also part of it is perhaps uh that the thing that we want to talk about is a linguistic thing, that the thing that we want to talk about is um, how can one part refer to another, or how can one part uh establish identity or non-identity with another? And that we're we're talking about, for example, when we're talking about um, uh, well, the sort of strange loops that you mentioned at the beginning, um, in Hofstadter's term, like like the Mobius loop and the Klein bottle that have the the idea that they feel they're feeling of the inside reaching out to be the outside, or that the inside and outside isn't clearly defined, or that it's flipping back and forth or something like that. That that's a that's a thing that you can do when you can do language. But when you take everything literally, non-declaratively, um, uh, non-referentially, it's it's just a concept you can't have. It's all, Do you know what I'm reaching for? He says, for lack of language.
>> [laughter] >> I I think you're reaching for the distinction between metaphoric language and literal language, and and in some circumstances, like science, we try to reach for literal more often than metaphoric, even though I know you both have uh uh understand that science is full of metaphor.
Um, at multiple levels, both in at the level that we talk about things, and also at the level of um, scientific models are a kind of metaphor as well. Mhm. That's so so to take Chomsky's notions of uh linguistic structures, uh productivity, compositionality, systematicity, uh all of which are involved in recursion. And it feels like there's it's not just that >> [sighs and gasps] >> it's not just that we need words for those things, as though as observers looking at those things, we need words for it. But that the thing that we want to talk about is intrinsically of that kind. It's intrinsically linguistic in nature. That the that the kind of the concepts like center embedding, um, systematicity, compositionality, and things like those are the those are like the kind of construct that we want to be able to talk about when we're saying these mobioid, I just made that up. Um, uh, structures where the inside reaches out to the outside and vice versa.
Um, And that's not just because we need a word for that thing that's out there, but because the thing that we're talking about is a sort of abstraction. That's a sort of something that you can that can only exist when abstractions are possible. Maybe that's what I'm trying to say. Mhm.
I I'd also >> Like you can only create a paradox by using words which label things in a particular way that creates paradoxes, right? >> Yeah. Yeah.
Um, I'd also like to add a another caveat to my um, my my interests um, in in looking at how all of you know, language and culture and the different aspects of language are so interconnected themselves. I'm I'm not just looking for new words. I'm I'm actually looking for new structures for language to be able to um express this kind of mobile mobioid, I'll use your new word. Um, types of relationships, uh, and ways of expressing a, you know, the the complexity of um, certain types of, uh, again, there's no word, experiences, um, processes that uh, that that we're trying to um, have a way to discuss without having to uh, reduce them to the old categories.
Um, so it's it's kind of a difficult project because it it involves change at multiple levels simultaneously, um, which is often difficult to do. So, yes, change at um, both the the cognitive level, meaning how we think about and categorize the world, and how we speak about it and write about it. Um, All of those forms, I think, need simultaneous changing. Otherwise, the system, language is is a a system that likes to maintain some level of um, homeostasis or homeodynamics, and and so the the various already existing structures help to keep the whole intact when when one part of it wants to, you know, go off and do something different. Does Does that make sense? In other words, I'm I while I'm all for um, neologisms, I don't think they're enough. I think I think language has to really embrace, or we as language users have to create um, or or evolve our own language to be able to um, express the the kind of things that you're doing.
>> [laughter] >> Um, at a at at interesting multi-level systems dynamics. Uh, Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, so I'm going to have a go at describing the concept that I want a word for. Okay. So, uh, building on those words for the kind of um, properties that one might want from a systematic language, compositionality, compositionality, productivity, and systematicity. Um, and concepts like being able to refer to something rather than already being it, and, you know, being a referent to something. Mhm. From that, we have we build up to an idea of something being self-referential, that it refers to itself. And then I don't quite want something that refers to itself. I want something like a whole referential parts and part referential wholes, so that they um, that they're referring between levels. But I don't just want either one of those either. I want both of them at the same time. The whole is referring to the parts, and the part is referring to the whole at the same time. But I don't quite want that either. What I really want is one where you can't really tell which is the whole and which is the parts, because it keeps turning inside out. I'd like a word for that.
That's beautiful. >> [laughter] >> Um, >> Maybe that is the word, just beauty. >> [laughter] >> Um, yeah, so so you also have notions in there that are holographic and fractal. Yeah.
Um, So one one of one of the neologisms, new forms that I did make up, I'm not sure it fits everything, but I think it it at least fits part of what you're looking for is um, I invented a glyph that I call mobi, which means distinct but not separate from. Mhm. Um, and so the distinct part is that linguistically you can distinguish this bit of a whole, um, but ontologically they're not they're not separate. So so it's a way of of capturing something about a system that allows you to say, well, okay, this part of the system does this, and this part of the system does that, with without turning both of those into different what's to use Mike's distinction earlier, that it it's a way of retaining the the wholeness and the partness um simultaneously.
Um, and And and so we we we are mobi um at many different levels. Um, you know, I I am mobi my microbiome. Um, so I am distinct but not separate from my microbiome. My microbiome makes up me. I I would not be me without my particular microbiome. But yet, those are also um, you know, whole organisms within themselves and collectivities within themselves within me. Uh, and I can also say say I am mobi, you know, uh, my place here in California, or I am mobi the earth, because I am not separate from the earth. If if I I was going to say, if I got separated from the earth, and then I just thought, oh, we just sent astronauts.
>> [laughter] >> Maybe this isn't going to work. But while I'm on earth, I I am interdependent with it. I I need I need it for my sustenance. It needs it needs me as well. Um, and and so there's, I think we're heading, I a term like that, heading in the direction you're looking for. I don't think it fully captures what you're looking for, though. Uh, so I I often these days, uh, return to the notion of things being the same and different at the same time. Yes. Which which is not quite the same as being distinct but, uh, not separate from, because that doesn't necessarily imply that there's a symmetry there. Mhm. Right? That there that there's a sameness there. There's a there's um, interdependent partsness and, uh, and a so a separateness and a non-separateness at the same time, but not necessarily a sameness and a distinction at the same time. So an an example of a sameness, same and different at the same time is an object and its reflection. Yes. So, you know, an object's reflection, you know, if it would if it was different, it wouldn't be its reflection, right? It has to be the same, but it also, but it isn't the same, because this is the object, and that's its reflection, unless of course I was inside the looking glass, and then that would be the object, and this would be the reflection, right? So so there's they're two different things, there two different things that I can refer to, and also they're the same, right? Or maybe they are different, but only in one respect, right? That there's a there's a line of there's a plane of symmetry, so they're they're their distances are all opposite in that one dimension.
Um, and I, uh, what I would really like is is to be is to be a better able to articulate that same and different at the same time, but with the nested part-whole, you know, that the whole is different from the parts, but it's also a reflection of the parts, and the parts are different from the whole, but they're a reflection of the whole, and that they are there's a sameness there and a difference there, but in that um, uh, in that scale relationship, that containment relationship, more particularly than an object and in its reflection, and also still keep that in a, and I don't really know which one is the parts and which one is the wholes, and which one is the wholes and which one is the parts, right? Um, I don't know if I can really articulate why I'm attached to that last bit, but I am.
Um, Uh, Okay. >> So so I could, but I don't know if it would help you. >> [laughter] >> Um, So so one of the ways that I I tried to um, address that kind of wanting to hold both at the same time, whether it's sameness and difference, or some other concept, and and this is just, it's really clunky, but you got to, you know, we started with clunky car phones before we got, you know, our nice little iPhones. Um, is to to put concepts like that in a structure like a yin-yang symbol. Mhm. Just to to present both of them simultaneously, so that when when you refer to one, the other is right there. You know, that that sameness can't be sameness without difference. Yeah. Well, the yin-yang symbol in particular has that foreground-background ambiguity and the contained-containing ambiguity as well. Mhm.
>> That that that does do a lot of the work. And and you can combine, you can combine multiple ones. Um, for example, uh, you you, and and this is where I think, you know, our our culture really needs some help. Um, to be able to hold multiple polarities like that simultaneously. Um, so that we can think about, for example, um, I I'm just going to use the example in the book because it's it's simplest, or it's one that, you know, I'm, uh, in in American culture, we talk a lot about freedom, and that word gets bandied about, but freedom can't be freedom without some sort of responsibility behind it. Um, and when we talk about freedom, you know, it's not just every person individual's freedom. Um, the individual's freedom is is essentially constrained by and given by the collective freedom. So there's a there's a freedom-responsibility polarity, there's a self-other polarity, and then there's also a a temporal one, like my freedom right now to, you know, do X, um, versus and considered along with how is that going to play out in the long term? So there's like a short term, long term. So how how can we um, think about all of these, you know, multiple polarities simultaneously, and and be able to express them.
Um, I I don't know. I mean, I'm sure that sort of thing comes up in in uh, you know, in in biology as well. Just to try to loop Mike back into the conversation. [laughter] Um, you know, because the body is doing is is balancing all kinds of different polarities, you know, whether it's the the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems working simultaneously along with um, interactions with the environment, along with cognitive interactions, emotions, and feelings, and, you know, um, all all of those things in play simultaneously.
Uh, I should probably come up with a question here. Um, Well, like, why is Mike scowling? >> [laughter] >> Oh, no, I'm not I'm not scowling. Um, no, please, if you have if you have a question, let's let's do it. I mean, you're right, of course. I think in anybody, there are numerous different agents with agendas and priors and different capabilities, and they're all hacking each other, and the higher levels are bending the lower levels, and the lower levels are constraining and then enabling things the higher levels do. I mean, this is, you know, it's a huge ecosystem for that kind of stuff, and I don't just mean bacteria versus, you know, versus cells. All all of these things are nested in and whatnot. Yeah, but also you as a whole can feel [clears throat] the stress of your parts. And I think your parts can feel the stress of the whole. Mhm. That they that they tune in with one another directly, that they are that your identity and the identity of your parts is not just a containment relation, but that there's a there's a sort of skipping levels. Mhm. Like if it pisses off my cells, it pisses me off. And I'm like, why? You know, like that doesn't that doesn't have to equate, does it? You know. Yeah. I could just know that they are without without connecting with them in that way, without identifying uh with their um, I've gotten the word. >> [snorts] >> affect. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and isn't there and isn't there a language issue there, too, in the sense that in order to have the kind of relation that Richard just mentioned, there has to be some impedance match? Like we all at the at the very least, you need to share a concept of being pissed off and whatever, right? So that you can be in or vaguely similar states. And so then you wonder, what are the states that we don't share that we don't know about, right? And that's also a language issue. There could be all kinds of, in fact, they're almost guaranteed to be all kinds of things that the cells and then the molecular networks inside of them and the bioelectric gradients and the tensile forces and everything else, they could have all sorts of other states that we can't we can't really, you know. Yeah, they're all they're feeling all moby-lacking right now, and we're struggling to to tune in with that. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and and they might uh have um differing goals than than what the whole organism has. You know, the if I had a bunch of candida, I might be craving sugar, and, you know, while the whole organism, me, is trying to diet and not wanting to eat sugar, and and uh, and uh, so so that the other language issue in this scenario that that I find interesting is the um, the agency at multiple levels. You know, the the candida in my gut have have their own agency. They're trying to live their life in their environment. Their environment just happens to be me. I'm trying to live my life in my environment. Um, there's probably all sorts of other um, you know, bifido bacteria and other creatures trying to live out their lives, needing different things, wanting different things. And um, and how all of this maintains balance, uh, and, you know, to stay healthy, to to um, to continue the infinite game of life. You know, there there are so many infinite games going on, you know, just in every single organism.
Do do you are you familiar with Carse? Yeah, okay. Um, Sorry, with what? Say that again. Oh, James Carse's finite and infinite games, the distinction between them? I don't know the name. I mean, I I think I know about the distinction, but I don't know who James Carse is. Tell us more. >> He was a philosopher. I think he was at NYU. Um, no longer with us. Wrote a wonderful little book called Finite and Infinite Games. Interesting. Um, you know, that some some games are made um to be played to win or lose. Um, and some games are made to be played so that the game can continue to be played. And those have very different kinds of rules than the games that are made to be to be won or lost. And yet, and also that there are finite games that keep the infinite game going. Um, you know, so the the the finite games within our body are that, you know, cells senesce and die, and to keep the infinite game going, we have other cells that, you know, come along and process them and take their parts and recycle, you know, recycle the parts. So there's a living and dying game going on, you know, both at the cellular level and at the more than cellular level, um, that keeps the infinite game of life itself going.
Yeah, I mean, I think too, it gets it gets even like the combinatorics get even weirder, because I I think it's not just the tangible things like cells and and the bacteria and whatnot, but but you can think about the patterns as as well, right? As And so this is this is something that we've been working on lately is kind of fuzzing out that distinction between thoughts and thinkers in a sense. Uh, between between, you know, real beings and kind of just patterns in excitable media, that sort of thing. So when you when you have the butterfly caterpillar, the caterpillar butterfly transition, there are multiple. So you can take the perspective of the caterpillar and facing a kind of singularity and sort of think about what it means and whether you're going to exist or not. And you can take the perspective of the butterfly and ask, because because they do inherit some of the memories of the caterpillar, in fact, remapping them to their new embodiment. And so you, you know, the the butterfly might ask, is like, I have these I have some weird, you know, feelings about certain stimuli. Why is that? I don't remember having ever having encountered it. Like there's no specific encounter, but I have I have these these I've been saddled with these odd, you know, behavioral propensities for some reason that I don't think I own, but clearly I do, and so on. And And so that's bad enough, but you can also take the perspective of the memory itself as as a pattern within the cognitive medium of the caterpillar, and the idea that you're you're you're not going to survive as a caterpillar memory. You can't, because you're about things the butterfly doesn't care anything about. But if you if you are plastic to the extent that you can remap and generalize and sort of now you can be about things. So So whereas before it was the kind of motion that a soft-bodied creature can do in in order to reach some leaves, in a butterfly, you might be the kind of motions that that that a hard-bodied kind of creature like a butterfly can do in 3D, by the way, with an extra dimension to your to your thing. And it's no longer about leaves, now it's about nectar, and the perception is different because your eyes are different, and everything is different, but but the but the associative conditioning that that you received as a as a larva um passes on, right? So so you can persist. And so this this notion that we've been exploring around that like spectrum, you know, where you have fleeting patterns or fleeting thoughts. These are like a wave, you know, it sort of comes and goes. And then then you have these sort of persistent thoughts, which are hard to get rid of. They do a little bit of work to keep themselves going, maybe a little niche construction in your brain, you know, as depressive and and and those kind of repetitive thoughts do. And then there's some other stuff, and then eventually you get to uh something that's maybe a personality fragment, you know, like from dissociative identity kind of scenarios, where you're not you're not a full human personality, but you're you're way more than a than a simple thought pattern, because you can plan and you can have, you know, preferences and so on. And then and then there's a full human personality, and then who knows what's on the other side of that. So um, you know, we need whatever vocabulary we have uh for all these things has to has to take that those kinds of things into account as well, potentially.
So so I I've heard you talk about platonic spaces a lot. Um, so it seems like you're making distinctions um, between different types of, let's just use Plato's words, platonic forms um, within a [clears throat] platonic space. Uh, well, so so I am not trying to stick close to Plato's ideas, whatever extent we know we even know what they are. Um, I the reason, and and this may need a total vocabulary kind of refresh at some point. I I went with platonic because I wanted to anchor it first in mathematics and go from there. And when you say platonic patterns to mathematicians, they they know exactly what what we mean, and then, you know, some percentage of them agree agree with this with this idea that there are important facts or pattern more broadly, more generally patterns that are not physical facts. These are things that you would not discover as a physicist. These are things that you can't just, you know, sort of disband the math department and hope physicists find these things. You can't, more importantly, you can't change these facts by tweaking the fundamental constants of physics. You're not going to change, you know, why quaternions don't obey the whatever it was, the property of, you know, of multiplication and so on, like you're not going to change that by by changing the fine structure constant and things like that.
So, So so that's the idea that is that you you start with this with the simple notion that like it or not, there appear to be uh, at least temporarily, I think we have to say that there are at least two realms. This is I say it on purpose because people people hate this notion that there's more than one realm, but I think it's important to say that um, if if that is if realms is to have any meaning at all, you have to be able to say that there are things in this realm that are quite different than the things that we're used to dealing with. And then and then from there, you know, the the some other stuff. But but basically then I then I wanted what I want to do is drop the drop the assumption, because that's all it is. I think it's not a result. It's it's it's a it's an axiom that people add for some reason. I don't think we should add it that that these patterns are only relevant for mathematics. That basically it's only the low agency static forms that mathematicians study. My suspicion is that once you've once you've accepted, and I don't see any way around it, once you've accepted that there are these kind of patterns that that are important for physics and biology and so on, but but they're not they're not their their origin is not in in in the physical world as as we study it. Then you might ask, but could you have patterns that have various degrees of agency, including ones that we might recognize as kinds of minds? And so now you sort of shade smoothly into an old class of of theories in the philosophy of mind where minds are simply not of the physical world. They're something else, and then you have this interaction, and then of course you run into the interaction problem. But you already had an interaction problem between math and physics, is what what I claim. So you're not this is not new. This is, you know, Pythagoras already had all this. So that's that's um, that's kind of the idea, and we can even we can even we can even show some some of the intermediate steps.
So the one of my favorites, do you know um Patrick Grim's work? Patrick Grim's work at all? Um, So so he's a he's a philosopher um, uh, I I think he's at uh, at Stony in New York, and he uh, he he basically he basically started out by saying that, well, you've got this liar. So this is interesting, cuz it's language, it gets to language and and so on. So so he says, you got the liar paradox, and the reason it's a paradox is because you insist on one truth value, and then then it's a problem. But if you treat it as a dynamical system, no problem. You got an oscillator, true, false, true, false, true, false, right? You you just have an oscillator. And once you do that, you can start making dynamical systems maps of English sentences that have various degrees of paradoxical self-reference. And you can have multiple ones. So if you have two sentences, and you know, sentence A is, I am 80% as true as sentence B is false, and sentence B is, well, I'm only true if sentence A is less than 70%, we whatever. You you have these things, then you can plot them. And so and so he shows these beautiful fractal structures that these things have, and some of them settle down, and some of them don't don't settle down. But what's interesting is, so so you have your you have your static patterns, like you know, E E is a certain a certain number of pi is more than three, and then that's like a rock. It's not going anywhere. It's just how it is, you know. It's the it's the electron and so forth, that world. Um, and then and then you have these little oscillators, as you know, just kind of like the liar paradox that just kind of buzz up and down. But once you have those things, you can do something. You can take the next step and you can make sets of sentences that act exactly as the gene regulatory network models that that we study. They can be trained. And so I have a student that's actually training sets of English sentences, because in the end, they're just the dynamical systems uh kinds of things, and some of them, if you give them stimuli, and what I mean by stimuli is a temporary bump in one of the values. So so you have let's say 10 sentences. They're all sort of about each other, and you can give a a little a little bump in one, and so that stimulates, and some stuff happens, and then it settles down, and you do it again, and you do it again. And you just ask the question, as you keep doing it, is there habituation? Is there sensitization? Can you condition two stimuli on on each other, and give it a, you know, a placebo effect kind of thing, is [clears throat] associative conditioning. Turns out you can, uh, and and more um, and so, uh, and then and then you can, you they don't have to be closed off and only be about each other. You can some of the sentences can refer to things in the outside world. So you can give them an embodiment by saying, okay, uh, here are your sentences, and also there's a lamp or a clock or a whatever, and one of those sentences might be, I'm only true if if that thing is green, or I'm only true if the car is running, and you do what, and so now now they're about the outside world, but they have their own learning capacity, right? And and it affects how they interact with the outside world. So you can build all of this, and it's grounded in these kind of language slash logic systems. So you can imagine a whole set of, and and once you have, you know, as far as I can see, once you have associative conditioning, possibly you could keep going. I don't know how far you can keep going. We haven't, you know, we haven't gone terribly far yet. But so you can imagine things like that.
So so it seems that at least with the the liar's paradox, and I don't know about the the conditioning [clears throat] experiments that you're working on, it relies on um, it interaction between two different levels. So you have the level of the sentence, this sentence is false. But [clears throat] in order to um, judge the truth value of the sentence, you have to go to a higher level, which is the, you know, like the, the self-reflective judgment level.
>> [clears throat] >> Which, let's take a, let's take a different example. If you're looking at a written text and it says, this sentence is red, but it's written in black ink, you have to jump out to that higher level [clears throat] to judge whether it's red or black. Um, which sounds similar to what you're doing with the the the lamp. You know, like, this is true if the lamp is green. Yeah, I mean, it's I think it's consistent with what we've been talking about here, which is numerous interacting observers at different levels, because if you have multiple sentences, sentence B is just looking at sentence A, and that's okay. You can, you know, different observers can, right? It's it's what Richard was saying, is that is that it crosses the is crosses levels. So you can the observations and the the sensors and the effectors can cross levels, and biology is full full of that kind of stuff where you where you can sense something that it it might be mediated by a chemical signal, but you're not the point isn't that you're sending sensing some specific chemical. You're sensing some systemic, you know, systemic state that's like a high-level state that's mediated. So yeah, you can absolutely make um, you know, and and maybe you can even do, we we haven't done this yet, but maybe you can even do crazy things that you keep going further, like, I am only as true as this whole thing is consistent. You know, or or or worse, I'm only as true as this whole thing is interesting. Or I'm only, you know, I'm true if and only if this thing doesn't settle to a to a stable point, right? And maybe maybe that's some kind of crazy Turing, you know, uh, Yeah. Yeah, halting problem.
Um, Yeah. Yeah. I was just writing those. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, we haven't tried that yet. >> This this sentence is true only if those sentences are stable and Mhm. these sentences refer to each other in an unstable way only if that sentence is false, and something like that kind of thing. >> Yeah. And and that introduces actually, now that I think about it, it introduces another degree of freedom, which is time, because if you want to know that they're stable, it's not enough to take a snapshot. You have to watch them for some period of time. And and say, well, you know, right? To know if it stay if it settled down, you have to have multiple multiple time points to compare it with. And um, Like if it's analogous to the Mandelbrot set. Yeah. Yeah, you have to, you have to have observations over some period of time. And now you're back to you have different observers operating at different time scales. And and watching things at different time scales.
What you said about that stimulus being a bump, which was to temporarily modify the truth of one of the statements. Did that hold the truth of all the other statements true whilst they as they were whilst you did it? Uh, you you So we don't touch it. We we don't touch them externally. But of course, the minute you do that, it's going to propagate. So so during the, we have to do the whole thing as a as a discrete, like we have discrete time, unfortunately, right? So so so during the time during the time point that we're bumping it, we don't touch the others, but then we have to recalculate all the others, and the ones that are connected to it will immediately update state. So, they will react to it themselves. Yeah. So, changing one of the variables without changing any of the others is a bit like a jump in time, right? So, if if that's So, this the state that you had before you bumped it, and the state that you had after you bumped it, imagine that those two states, I cheated a bit by saying that you can imagine that. Imagine that those two states are state age by running it forward in time. That if you hadn't bumped it, you would have got to a state where everything was the same except for this bit. Yeah. If you just waited, right? So, that little bump is like nudging it in time at different amounts. It it is, and and I'm sure from from inside the system, it looks like magic, because, you know, all of a sudden this this one node all of a sudden bumped up, and if you're the if you're the node that normally feeds into it, you say, "Well, what is this? I didn't do that. How did How did you How did this thing get bumped up all of a sudden, right?" Cuz we're acting on it from outside the system. Yeah, or it looks like nothing at all. So, it only looks like something if you have a time scale with which you can reflect upon what it was a moment ago before you bumped it. Otherwise, you say, "Hey, that thing just moved." And you say, "What thing just moved?" It's like, "Well, it was It used to be lower, and now it's higher." "No, it isn't." It's like It's like it's already gone, right? Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
So, so you're bringing up another important thing that I think language needs to have a little more um specificity about, which is context and perspective. When you're When you're looking at things from multiple perspectives, to be able to specify, okay, from from this perspective, it looks like there's a bump. From this other perspective, it does not look like there's a bump. How do we reconcile these two perspectives? Um, or three or four or 10. Uh, when you're talking about more complex systems. And and I I think so I'm not just thinking about language as like the the two-dimensional kinds of words that that, you know, we write on a page. I I'm thinking about expanding language to be more graphic, more fully two-dimensional. To be able to show relationships like that, not just say them one word after another like we're doing now.
That's going to take a lot of work. I, you know, that's going to take a lot of people coming together with a lot of different expertises, but I I think what you're doing is is helping to um, create a a model system to start working on things like that. I'm reminded of what Mark Solms said in our conversation earlier today about forgetting why you believe something. You getting, you know, that it becomes What was the word he was using? Automatized. Mhm. That it becomes automatic, and you don't know why you know, what you don't know what the evidence was or what the thinking process was that brought you to that conclusion. And now it just becomes automatic. It's like it's just who I am. It's not It's not a belief I have. It's just who I am. Uh, the converse is a system that knows something about the process by which it arrives at its own truth. Something like that, right? That's a weird kind of system already, right? Mhm. In that >> How do you know because that already has that reaching between levels sort of feeling to it that it knows. It's not just It's the same as knowing something about your parts, like I can look in a microscope at my own belly fat, but it's like that knowing something about the process that constructs my own knowing is a is a bit more strange loopy than that. Yeah. Uh, and it feels so that the real reason why I want this inside outside thing to connect or to flip um is because I is because I want the recursion. I want a stopping clause for the recursion, right? It's like, "Well, I you know, if I did know the process by which I knew this, how would I know the process by which I came to know the process by which I knew this, right?" And then I, and that, you know, that sort of, you know, feels like it has a a recursion that can't bottom out. And it that that that that bottom level has to somehow resonate with with right all the way back to the top of that, just because that's what it means to know something. Because that's what it means to say that you know what the process is, right? So, that it becomes not uh a material or substrate dependent constraint that makes you think that, not a historical contingency or happenstance that makes you think that. It becomes a logical truth that you think that because that's the only kind of thing you can really think that is self-consistent. So, the the um catatonic constraints that come from mathematical boundary conditions that you can't change, that just are truths, that are absolute truths, and the dirty, nitty-gritty historical contingencies, substrate dependency facts, they become the same. So, that they're not really they're not really different from each other. Mhm.
So, so there is a uh structure in language. It's it's it's not very um prevalent in in English. It's not required in English, but in some languages with uh that it's called evidentials. And grammar, you have to specify grammatically how you know what it is you're saying, whether you know it firsthand. Um, you know, so like I I saw the bobcat, or whether you know it through um inference. There was a bobcat there because I I saw the tracks that it left. Um, or whether you got it like third-hand. Um, you know, my neighbor told me he saw a bobcat around here yesterday, so be careful. Um, some languages require you to to specify these sorts of things, and it sounds like it would be good to have a way to specify like how we know other kinds of things that you were just talking about, you know, from from the the nitty-gritty to like this is an abstract truth that is unchanging.
Um, Earlier, Mike mentioned the idea that the butterfly doesn't know where it got the odor aversion from. It's like, "I don't know why I Why do I like this or why do I not like that?" That I I'm I find myself thinking about, "Well, whose whose preference does it think that is then?" Right? It's like, you know, like you can't think that it's somebody else's, right? In order for In order to act, it's like you have to own it, right? It has to be my preference in order for me to act on it, right? And then that sort of feels like, "Well, you know, if am I doing that when you tell me an idea that you have, right? When you tell me an idea or a concept that you have or a fact that you have, do I take that in in a way that it becomes like I know it, or am I still holding it like that's what Mike thinks, you know, or like if it when I grok it, it's like it's it's like something shifts, right? That that it becomes my own thought. It's like even though I also remember that you said it a moment ago, and in a moment ago I said I didn't get it. And now I do, but still feels like my thought, right? Mhm. Mhm.
I I've had experiences like that where I I've had an idea that I thought was mine, and then I go back and reread a book that I read 30 years ago, and it's like, "Oh, that's how I got it." >> [laughter]