Conscious Agents vs Cognitive Agents with Donald Hoffman and Michael Levin
What this covers
#evolution #consciousness #donaldhoffman #cognitivescience #micheallevin #neuroscience #cognitive
In Philosophy Babble - The Great Minds Series On Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/47tpccav On Acast: https://tinyurl.com/y7zkmnwj
In this instalment: We’re delighted to have Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science Donald Hoffman and Professor of Developmental and Synthetic Biology Michael Levin to discuss their great works.
This conversation was recorded during a live session on Clubhouse @philosophybabble Apology for the slight audio and video quality/issues during the conversation. We had a great time getting educated on the topic, both Professors have a great sense of humours and we had some interruption, some drama but a lot of fun moments too. Wonderful time well spent!
Topic of discussion: Conscious Agency/Cognitive Agency
The view in our cognitive scientists today is that we construct our perception of reality in real time. The questions was, could we be misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences? And What is our current understanding in the biology of science?
According to evolution, what we perceive with our brain and our senses does not reflect the true nature of the reality. Why should you care? The implications of such radical finding rock the foundation of our belief systems that space-time is fundamental.
Timecodes 00:00 - Intro 01:28 - Any new project for 2023? 01:29 - Levin on his outstanding long list of project 02:33 - Ivy and Don were shock with Levin’s list, very impressive! 02:39 - Don on new up coming new paper - Look out for it! 03:09 - Don is looking on a dynamic and he speak on the insight 05:41 - Ivy’s on Levin’s tweets - find out what it is! 06:23 - Ivy’s ask about the toy that missing 06:30 - Levin on his childhood memory 07:33 - Levin on the notion of selfhood 09:10 - Levin on what’s he meant on ”illusory self” 12:07 - Is space-time a data structure? 12:20 - Don on time and space 17:33 - Levin on the profound idea of space-time 21:41 - Summarising Don’s model from an autistic point of view (shocker!) 22:07 - Its raving BONKER 22:12 - Has that view change your life? 22:23 - Don on realisation of the reality has yet to sunk it, slow process 26:14 - We’re programmed at the stage since we're 3 months old baby 26:40 - Levin on a lunch debate with a friend on free will (funny moment!) 28:18 - Levin on two side of the common conditioning Experience vs Memory 31:12 - Dinosaur is not real? Sad moment, just saying HA! 31:18 - Funny reaction from both professor 31:29 - Don on Dinosaur is an art effect! (I’m sad to let it goes) 33:33 - Funny moment from both professor when we were rudely interrupted by an audience 34:09 - Don on Conscious Agent Model / maths and physics 38:43 - The question on the maths ? 39:09 - What is a measurable space? 42:12 - Levin arrive at the same understanding with Don through biology lenses 47:42 - Levin's perspective of the theory on consciousness 50:14 - Don on split brain phenomena 54:24 - The brilliant moment of the different of perspective on split brain story by Levin 57:39 - Common factor of all these conscious agents? 01:00:30 - Question on panpsychism to Levin 01:06:14 - How many conscious agency to make a photon? 01:10:50 - Prakash on plant biology 01:13:15 - Andy (Hiro Protagonist) great question! 01:16:12 - Don on evolution game theory 01:23:34 - Don on Nima’s work and future collaboration 01:26:23 - Willi questions 01:31:24 - Levin on bio-electricity 01:36:06 - The notion on reality 01:41:58 - Mehran question on perception through the view of Fristion’s Markov blanket 01:44:17 - The idea of perception is bayesian inference nicely explain by Don 01:47:21 - John’s question to don’s hypothesis of letting go of space time 01:52:50 - John only joking! 01:53:04 - Vinod challenging Don for the objectives of the conscious agents 01:53:40 - Don set thing straight with Vinod 01:55:48 - Ethan get the chance to complete his interrupting moment with Don 01:57:24 - Did Don roll his eyes? 01:58:43 - Toni got the last question. Don show so much humility all through the Q&A session! 02:01:40 - The Three Musketeers and Donald Hoffman 02:02:22 - Madir's emotional plead as he didn’t get his question ask. Sorry Madir
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Hoffman and Levin argue that conscious agents, not physical objects in space-time, are fundamental to reality; space-time and physics are interface constructs generated by conscious observation, and evolution selects for fitness, not truth about objective reality.
- Physicists have shown space-time breaks down at 10^-33 centimeters and is not fundamental; conscious agents as Markovian dynamics can map onto deeper structures like decorated permutations
- Evolution by natural selection has zero probability of selecting organisms that perceive reality accurately because fitness functions have zero probability of containing information about objective reality—Evolution selects expedient interface representations, not truth
- Conscious agents are the fundamental units; collections of conscious agents are themselves conscious agents; all experience and agency arise from probability spaces (pure awareness) and Markov dynamics of perception-decision-action loops
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Science works by stating assumptions, finding their limits (where the theory breaks down), and then making creative leaps beyond those limits; evolutionary game theory tells us where evolutionary assumptions break down but not what lies beyond
“what you can't do is to use the old Theory to tell you what's next right so Einstein's theory tells us space time is doomed but it can't tell you where is The Next Step Beyond Space time you can't do that and similarly the theory of evolution by natural selection with the mathematics of evolutionary Game Theory tells you aha the Notions of organisms in space and time is not fundamental but does it tell you okay what is more fundamental no it doesn't”
Markov blankets (the set of variables that makes internal and external variables conditionally independent) reveal that organisms are constrained to an interface; what occurs inside the Markov blanket is independent of external reality except as filtered through the blanket, proving that perception is always interface-mediated, not reality-revealing.
“here's the key thing that that we know about Bayes Nets the even though it looks like the nodes on the inside are doing some kind of Bayesian inference about the world States we know that the states of the nodes on the inside and the states of the nodes on the outside of the Marco blanket are conditionally independent given the state of the Markel blanket that means the only thing that the nodes on the inside can never can ever know about the external world is the information on the Markel blanket so that whole framework tells you that you're only seeing an interface”
Cells in developing embryos demonstrate that the number of conscious agents or selves is not pre-programmed but is determined on the fly by cellular communication; when you surgically separate cells in an early embryo, each isolated group forms its own organism (conjoined twins), showing that selfhood is emergent from physics, not fundamental.
“when I was a grad student you take a little needle and you make a couple of scratches in that blastoderm eventually it's going to heal up but they're going to heal but before they heal what happens is that every group of cells that cannot feel the other cells because you put a scratch between them decides that well it's just me then and so they form an embryo and every island forms an embryo and then when they heal you have conjoined twins and or triplets or whatever”
Leibniz, 300 years before Hoffman, recognized the hard problem of consciousness and solved it by proposing monadology—a view that experiences and probabilistic relationships are fundamental and physical bodies are secondary phenomena
“he he basically says we need to start with um two things um experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences and uh I agree with leibniz again um that's what we've done in our model of conscious agents we basically model experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences so so liveness was there 300 years before me”
Hoffman and colleagues have published mathematical theorems (not simulations) using evolutionary game theory showing that fitness payoff functions have precisely zero probability of containing information about structures in objective reality when generically chosen, proving that evolution selects for fitness, not truth.
“we now have theorem so it's not we're not relying on simulations at all we have theorems and the theorems are using the tools of evolutionary Game Theory... the probability is zero precisely zero that a generically chosen payoff function will have any information about objective reality about any structure and objective reality”
Physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed and others have shown that computing scattering amplitudes using the amplituhedron requires only 3-4 mathematical terms, whereas the same calculation using Quantum Field Theory with Feynman diagrams requires hundreds of pages of algebra
“if you do the scattering amplitude computation say for two gluons smashing into each other four gluons sprang out you do it in space time using Quantum field Theory it's hundreds of pages of algebra nasty nasty math if you do it with the amplitohedron three or four terms you can compute it by hand”
Physicists have discovered that space-time is not fundamental to reality; it breaks down at 10^-33 centimeters and 10^-43 seconds, as shown by quantum field theory and general relativity together, and newer structures like the amplituhedron and decorated permutations exist beyond space-time.
“they're finding new structures Beyond space-time right they're they're actually finding these structures like the amplitohedron and the deepest structure or something called decorated permutations”
We are evolutionarily programmed to believe in object permanence from infancy (around 3-4 months of age, not from reasoning) because it promotes fitness, not because objects actually persist when unperceived.
“Piaget gave us the the very famous um child psychologist Piaget yeah gave us some insight as to why it's so shocking and he he pointed out that um we're programmed to believe in what he called object permanence he thought we got object permanence by um 18 months later studies showed that um it was it's probably more like a three or four months so so this is before we're rational right we're not reasoning and logically thinking about things we're just programmed to believe”
Split-brain patients (people with corpus callosum severed for epilepsy treatment) demonstrate that the brain naturally contains multiple selves with different preferences, beliefs, and desires; this suggests that even in neurologically intact humans, negotiation between multiple sub-selves occurs constantly.
“people who um have intractable epilepsy uh that can't be treated with normal drugs were in extreme cases where they were their lives were on the line um submit it to a surgery called the Carlos sodomy surgery where they would... cut the Corpus close them which was a band of about 220 million fibers to connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain”
We have been developing a teleophobia (fear of teleology and goals) in science since the early 20th century; we should abandon this fear because cybernetics and control theory have given us good mathematical accounts of how non-magical goal-pursuing systems work.
“we've developed uh through through uh the early stages of science this really weird fear of talking about goals and and the systems that pursue goals and I think we need to dump that I think that leaves us so much on the table when we pretend that doesn't exist uh since this is the the 40s and cybernetics we've had good theories of of how you can have non-magical goal pursuing um systems”
The self is not a persistent entity but is recreated at every moment by reconstructing a model of oneself from memory traces (engrams) in the brain; each moment you have only a narrow slice of 'now' (roughly 200 milliseconds) from which you reconstruct everything you think you know about yourself.
“at any given moment right now everything you know about or you think you know about yourself your past everything else you have to reconstruct from the memory traces in your brain you don't actually have access to anything that really happened before... you have this narrow uh slice of now which is I don't know a couple of hundred milliseconds maybe and that's your self”
We should think of the world not as mechanical systems generating consciousness but as systems of conscious agents implementing goal-directed behavior; the shift from 'low agency tools' (voltmeters, rulers) that only reveal mechanism to 'high agency tools' (minds, brains) that detect agents reveals agency everywhere we look for it.
“the world looks like a mechanical mechanistic place when you use tools that are low agency tools so when you use voltmeters and rulers and things like this all you're ever going to see is low agency stuff you're going to see things that look like mechanism of course it's going to look like mechanism because that's the that's the lens you're using”
The notion of 'objective reality'—something that exists independently of observation—should be distinguished from 'subjective reality'—something that exists only through observation; space-time and physical objects are subjective reality, not objective reality, as shown by quantum physics confirming that local realism is false.
“I would distinguish two kinds of reality um you might say something is real if it exists even if no one perceives it that would be what you might call objective reality um but that wouldn't apply to my headache so suppose I have a headache well that headache um sure seems real to me but it would would not exist without someone perceiving it right so so the notion of objective reality doesn't seem to catch my headache”
All major theories of consciousness that try to explain why brains are conscious arrive at the same properties (integrated electrical networks, neurotransmitters, ion channels) that exist throughout the entire human body, not just the brain; therefore these theories cannot explain why the brain should be conscious and other tissues should not.
“I don't have too much to say about Consciousness except this all as far as I can tell all of the theories of Consciousness that try to explain why brains are so associated with Consciousness in some way for the exact same reason that all of those theories pick the brain to be able to do it pretty much every tissue in your body should be judged as conscious because all of these things that these theories talk about and and you know the let's say the Neuroscience theories you lean on things like well they're these integrated electrical networks and we've got some neurotransmitters and some ion Channel all of this stuff exists all over your body”
The hard problem of consciousness—explaining how non-conscious neural activity produces conscious experience—is impossible to solve because it assumes space-time and physical objects are fundamental; the problem disappears if consciousness is fundamental and the reverse hard problem (showing how consciousness gives rise to physics) is pursued instead.
“the hard problem is that it comes up if you if you assume the space and time are fundamental and you're trying to figure out how for example something like neural activity could cause conscious experiences and and and there um I've got many friends and colleagues who are working in that direction and they're brilliant but it's impossible to solve that problem um and and the failure is clear”
We must stop using the word 'reductionism' in a derogatory way and instead recognize that finding smaller-scale components doesn't explain how larger-scale systems work—the hard problem requires going beyond component description.
“and we're not gonna find the hard problem at any level of description going down the hierarchy because at every scale you're going to find the same kind of composition and emergence and we need to think about this differently”
Integrated Information Theory and orchestrated collapse theories of consciousness cannot explain specific conscious experiences (e.g., why chocolate tastes like that); this indicates the traditional 'hard problem' approach of explaining consciousness from physical substrate is impossible
“there's for example integrated information Theory what is the integrated information that must be the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic there's not a single one that they can do same thing with the orchestrated collapse of microtubules there's not a single specific conscious experience that they can explain it I predict I bet good money that they'll never be able to do it”
The term 'pancakeism' is used ambiguously: there is an uninformative version that assigns consciousness to particles without changing physics, and a substantive research program (pursued by Hoffman, Fields, Friston) that reformulates physics from a cognitive perspective, showing that physics is an oversimplification not the best lens on reality.
“there's a couple of different versions of pancakeism the one where the one where you take a perfectly good physics and then paint some hopes and dreams on all the electrons that's not that's not the one right so people correctly make fun of that one because that's just not gonna give you anything there's a different however research program which which Don and people like Chris fields and Carl Frost and other people are doing which is is to reformulate physics from the the cognitive perspective so it's not that we have a perfectly good physics and now we're going to paint some extra junk on it no it's that actually what we have been taking as physics is a um I don't know what the right uh word for but but it's a it's an oversimplification and a not a really good not not the best lens”
Evolution did not evolve organisms to see the truth about reality, but to be effective at hiding the truth; for example, to win a video game you do not need to toggle voltages precisely but just need to turn a steering wheel and press the gas pedal—seeing the hidden reality would actually reduce fitness.
“what you're really doing in reality in this metaphor what you're really doing to win the game is you're toggling millions of voltages per second in a precise order that's what you're doing to try to win the game and that's that in this metaphor that's the reality what you're doing what you know about what you're doing is you're turning the steering wheel and you're pushing on a gas pedal a lot a lot simpler than toggling a million voltages per second in a precise order so now if you said well I want to know the truth I'm going to try to play the game knowing the truth I'm going to actually toggle the million voltages per second um to try to win so that I can guarantee you the person who's trying to toggle those voltages as fast they can would lose against someone who is just turning a steering wheel and pushing on the gas and that's that's the top level intuition why Evolution hid the truth from our eyes”
Objects including our body and neurons do not exist when they are not perceived; when you don't look, there is no brain—this is true in the same sense as in a virtual reality game where avatars only render when observed.
“so my brain isn't conscious because my brain in fact doesn't even exist and then space time is not fundamental so this standard rule that we all took for granted objective reality we see with our eyes is not surviving bonkers”
Different lenses on biological systems can reveal different actionable insights; the 'systems are dumb and need rewiring' lens and the 'systems are minimally cognitive and can learn' lens make different predictions and have different biomedical utility
“you can have multiple perspectives they have different powers in terms of what they let you do in the real world maybe someday somebody else will come along and say yeah you're both wrong here's a much better lens you know fine that's how it goes”
The amplituhedron exhibits yangian symmetry—an infinite-dimensional symmetry structure—that cannot be seen in space-time formalism but only appears when working with the amplituhedron beyond space-time
“there's something called the infinite yangian symmetry that's true of the scattering but you cannot see it in space time you can only see it when you go beyond space time”
Cognitive scientists construct perceptions of reality in real time through neural processes, not perceiving reality as it actually is; Evolution has designed our brains to show us not what is true but what promotes fitness and survival.
“the view in our cognitive scientists today is that we construct our perceptions of reality in real time the questions was could we be misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences and what is our current understanding in a biology of science according to Evolution what we perceive with our brain and our senses does not reflect the true natives of the reality”
Space-time is not fundamental but rather functions as a data structure and an interface; it is analogous to a virtual reality headset that projects information loss, creating the illusion of an arrow of time
“space time is just our virtual reality headset it's a projection it loses information we have the narrow of time because of that loss of information in other words time is not an insight into the nature of reality it's just an artifact of the projection process”
There is no line between conscious and non-conscious systems; making a distinction between living and non-living or conscious and unconscious based on physical properties is analogous to mistaking some pixels on a screen for conscious and others for non-conscious—it is an artifact of interface limitations, not a fundamental distinction.
“for example the distinction we make between living and non-living or conscious and unconscious is a principal distinction right... I'm looking at Mike right now on the zoom screen and some of the pixels are pixels for Mike's face and when I look at those pixels I'm getting a a portal into Mike's Consciousness I can tell if he's interested I can tell if he's bored I can tell like I can I get some insight into his Consciousness but there are other pixels of a floor for example in the back of this chair and those pixels are not giving me any insight about Consciousness now should I say that some pixels are conscious and other pixels on my zoom screen are not conscious well that's stupid pixels are pixels they're not conscious or unconscious some of them are giving me a portal into Mike's Consciousness and others are not so this it's not so the same thing is true of space and time and what we call physical objects”
Biological systems show evidence of goal-directed behavior and learning at scales much smaller than nervous systems; gene regulatory networks (collections of nodes regulating each other) display Pavlovian conditioning, associative learning, and multiple forms of learning without changes to network structure—purely from dynamical system properties.
“we took the hypothesis so my view always is that you can't just make these pronouncements from a from an armchair you have to do experiments so we said okay what if we just what if what if we test the hypothesis that this thing has some degree of of of of cognitive cognitive ability so what we what we ended up doing was testing their learning capacity”
Levin has recently published work proving that Markov chains can be canonically mapped to decorated permutations, providing a mathematical bridge between his conscious agent dynamics and the deepest structures physicists have found beyond space-time.
“we just published a paper last week in which we did that so we we prove that uh it's apparently a new mathematical result that you can canonically map Markov chains uh any Markov chain to decorated permutations and so that that gives us a window now to start to interpret these these structures Beyond space-time in terms of markovian Dynamics”
Different sub-agents' perceptions of reality differ systematically based on their spatial window (which states they perceive) and temporal window (observation timescale), creating perspective-dependent reality relationships describable by Lorentz/Euclidean transformations.
“so how do the different agents see the deeper reality so you will I I bet we'll see in some cases we can get a lorentz transformation relating them or euclidean transformation so we will start to see how the different agents um perspective perceptions differ systematically as you change the agent”
When you cut off the corpus callosum connecting brain hemispheres, or have dissociative conditions, you create a troubling ethical and metaphysical problem: integration therapy that unifies the personality results in the erasure of one or more conscious beings, raising the question of whether therapy should erase sub-selves.
“so you know they start doing some sort of I don't even know how they do it but some sort of Integrative therapy and they're gonna so so he one day one day the patient walks in and it's the other guy and he says hey what's this I hear about integrating integrate what what are you guys doing and the dog and the doctor says well you know we're gonna um integrate you and he says excuse me you're gonna integrate me and who who's going to be left”
The entropy rate of communicating classes in Markov chains corresponds to mass in space-time physics; zero entropy rate communicating classes project to massless particles like photons
“my proposal and this is not published so I'm telling you what we're working on and and and if you can beat me to it go ahead and publish it you know that it'll be fine I I I don't care who publishes it I just want to read the papers I just want to know this stuff so so I'm putting my ideas out there... what we're proposing is that the entropy rate of a communicating class corresponds to the Mass and the number of states in the communicating class will will lead almost immediately or or momentum on wavelengths”
Conscious agents are the fundamental units of reality; according to Markovian dynamics of conscious agents, any collection of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent; ultimately there is one conscious agent but it transcends any precise mathematical description.
“the conscious agent model is a precise model of of Consciousness um I'm not saying it's the right model but it's it's at least mathematically precise in which we have agents that have experiences and based on those experiences they take actions that affect the experiences of other conscious agents of interacting conscious agents”
Hoffman's goal this year is to predict momentum distributions of quarks and gluons inside protons from a theory of conscious agents, using scattering data from decades of particle accelerator experiments
“my goal this year is to try to actually predict those distributions from a theory of conscious agents that's beyond space-time”
Neuronal Consciousness only seems special to us because neurons are the tools that detect agency; if we had a primary sense of blood chemistry, we would recognize the liver as extremely intelligent because we would perceive it solving complex problems in metabolic space continuously.
“if you had a you know just imagine imagine that that you had a a primary sense of your own blood chemistry instead of you know in addition to your to your retinol it looks outwards for medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds you would also have an internal sensor of your blood chemistry and you could feel it you would have no problem recognizing your liver as extremely intelligent because it would be solving all these problems on a daily basis and you would know you would feel it I mean at the same way that we see oh look that Crow and that uh you know octopus look at the amazing things they're doing you would see your liver doing that stuff every day”
We are nested hierarchies of diverse conscious agents having experiences and solving problems in different spaces—transcriptional spaces, gene expression spaces, metabolic spaces, physiological spaces, anatomical spaces, and behavioral space; most of these are not accessible to verbal consciousness.
“we are these these nested hierarchies of diverse conscious agents that are all having experiences and solving problems in different spaces all kinds of weird spaces so so transcriptionals or gene expression spaces um metabolic spaces physiological spaces anatomical spaces we love the three-dimensional you know sort of space of the where it's easy for us to recognize intelligence but but that's just that's just our own our own limitation”
Bioelectricity is the primary substrate through which evolution has scaled cognition from simple homeostatic systems to complex human cognition; it is a favorite mechanism for linking cells into larger cognitive systems, but is not the only possible substrate.
“bioelectricity you know I think you mentioned by electricity so so bioelectricity happens to be my favorite kind of cognitive glue for um cells into larger systems but it is not the only one I don't think it's magic I don't think it's the only game in town I'm sure there are other mechanisms that uh play the same functional roles and who knows other places in the universe what substrates um uh play that role but here on Earth what evolution has done is really exploited by electricity and shown us how you can use uh certain features of physics and and computation to scale up cognition from very primitive goals of homeostatic little you know tiny systems all the way up through human level massive cognitive light cones”
TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) is an engineering framework that seeks to show practical benefits of adopting a cognitive lens; it drives new experiments, new discoveries, and new biomedical capabilities that would not be discovered under mechanistic frameworks.
“I have this uh and and B is that I have this um functional framework it's called t-a-m-e which is technological approach to mind everywhere uh that basically it's a very engineering uh kind of uh approach that seeks to show you what exactly are the practical benefits of odd cognitive lens so it's very important to me that this is not just philosophy that this is these these all of these views are supposed to drive new discoveries new research programs new”
The probability spaces in which Markovian dynamics of conscious agents occur can be interpreted as pure awareness or consciousness without any particular content—this aligns with Hindu/Vedantic philosophy's concept of Brahman and Atman, the unbounded potential for experience.
“I realized that I was only focused on the experiences but what about the probability of space in which they occur in it seems to me that a natural interpretation of the probability space itself is uh to be interpreted as pure awareness without any particular content something that spiritual Traditions have talked about for a long time”
Dinosaurs did not exist in space-time as objects independent of observation; there is a deeper reality underlying dinosaur bones and fossils, but the spacetime presentation of 'dinosaurs from 65 million years ago' is a subjective reality of observers, like the green Porsche everyone agrees on in a shared video game.
“so it's quite good I mean so you know dinosaurs disappeared I don't know 65 million years ago or something like that right and and and that's that's our space-time story and it's I think it's it's a good story um but but I would say yes there there is some reality but it's not as is not in space and time”
The conscious agent model is a mathematically precise model where agents have experiences, take actions based on those experiences, and these actions affect the experiences of other interacting conscious agents through Markov chain dynamics.
“the conscious agent model is a precise model of of Consciousness um I'm not saying it's the right model but it's it's at least mathematically precise in which we have agents that have experiences and based on those experiences they take actions that affect the experiences of other conscious agents of interacting conscious agents and the mathematics is basically markovian it's a Markov chain”
People divide into two types based on their responses to the thought experiment: experience without memory vs. memory without experience. One type values present experience (the now), while the other values memories and continuity; this reflects fundamentally different views of self and identity.
“and what I find is that people people uh have very strong feelings about this um but about about half of the people I talk and it's really about half and half I think people that I talk to half of them say well uh the the now moment is going to be gone anyway all I really have are memories of anything you know I don't care what happens now look at me give me the memory of this beautiful you know Skydive or whatever and somebody else will say well who wants to go around collecting memories I like experiences I want to I want to have the experience everything else is fake I live in the now let's do it”
You cannot live as if there is no free will; even people who intellectually believe in determinism and denial of free will cannot help but act as if they have agency and choice, as shown by the absurdity of a compatibilist about free will sitting back passively to 'see what soup gets ordered' rather than choosing.
“I once had lunch with with a philosopher who's a a very strong skeptic on Free Will and uh when the waiters came over and said uh so uh Professor X what kind of soup will you have and she said well let me think I said hey what what are you doing why don't you sit back and see what soup gets ordered what what do you do what are you doing choosing a suit here and and so that's just to say that I mean I understand of course the the argument and everything but but the point is it though that's one of those things that you can be you can be a skeptic about free will but I don't think you can live your life I think it's it's one of those views that is is just impossible to connect with on a practical level”
Nima Arkani-Hamed and contemporary particle physicists working on amplituhedron theory do not recognize the connection between their work and consciousness studies, despite Hoffman believing the connections are significant.
“and to a person they had never heard of it now now the reason is is this is high energy physics right only people who are in high particle physics right know about this stuff and you know so why does a cognitive scientist know about it well because I I knew I needed to look for something Beyond space-time so I've been looking for physics beyond space time and when I found Nema arcanian Network I realized okay okay are the ones that would be doing it”
When you take a Trace chain of a large Markovian system of conscious agents and vary the temporal window, with very small temporal windows you will see massless particles (bosons), and as you increase the temporal window, you will see more massive particles and eventually fermions—this is how particles and their properties emerge as artifacts of observation.
“when you do that what what each sub-agent will see depends almost entirely on this temporal window as well as the spatial window so when when you have a very small temporal window you will um and I can go into the mathematics of this but what you will see with small temporal Windows is is what what we believe will turn out to be um bosons in physics these are massless particles”
The limitation of the virtual reality analogy is that while it illustrates how different observers can agree on what they observe without the observed objects existing independently, it doesn't fully explain how different observers can touch the same objects, travel to them, and verify them together.
“I feel like I can't quite make the leap to you know my experience in the world and so for instance the things that I have trouble with is kind of extending that to the idea that I can both see things and feel things and I can travel to those things that I see and touch them and other people can too and they have the same experience”
Descartes favored the pineal gland as the seat of consciousness because it appears singular, but even the pineal gland is full of cells; there is no singular 'one thing' in biology at any scale
“Descartes was looking he liked the pineal gland because there was just one of them but one of what if you look inside it's full of cell the thing's full of cells there's not one of anything”
Michael Levin recalls a childhood memory where his father suggested that a missing toy 'didn't make it' from yesterday to today during the night, which prompted Levin to contemplate the nature of time and persistence of objects across temporal boundaries
“I was five I asked my dad where a certain toy was that I couldn't find he said you know how today's click server into tomorrow while you sleep on at night well the toy didn't make it I wouldn't say that's responsible for my old weird thinking actions but I spent a long time thinking about how frame of time and days works”
My mere intellectual understanding that object permanence is false has not yet penetrated my emotional belief; even after 35 years of absorbing this realization, the shock remains visceral, similar to what advanced meditators experience regarding impermanence.
“my merely intellectual understanding that it's false has not yet um penetrated my emotional it's still quite quite a shock emotionally... it um when I first realized I do just sit down and to absorb it and that was 35 years ago and I'm still absorbing it and and it's a shock to me and I think it's a shock to almost everybody except maybe you know Advanced meditators and so forth who you know maybe for them it's not as much of a shock”