Recording: Michael Levin vs brain chauvinism. "The magic is everywhere."

The intellectual sparring between Michael Levin and Bernardo Kastrup is exhilarating. Consciousness debates are often binary: mind vs matter. Instead, these brilliant thinkers are agreed on an idealist premise, but differ on the implications.

As Ahmed said in the chat, this felt like being on a call with Charles Darwin and David Hume. A total privilege!

Below is my summary of the conversation, which might help anyone newer to this theme, and of course, the recording.

Highlights included:

• Age is but an expectation 
• A cure for cancer in our lifetime
• Psychology - the root cause of disease?
• “Hey liver, why do I feel like crap today?”
• The boundaries of conscious agents
• Does matter have free will? 
• Exploring the platonic space
• The magic is everywhere

About Michael Levin

Rupert Sheldrake has said that Michael Levin is "one of the most creative biologists working today" and Bernardo Kastrup that he is “perhaps the most important person alive.”

Michael Levin's pioneering research has already challenged mainstream assumptions about life. His work at Harvard and Tufts University shows how even a single cell can display memory and problem-solving abilities once thought exclusive to brains.

He contends that intelligence is a fundamental property of living systems, and that your body is a hierarchy of intelligent entities nested within one another, from your organs down to your cells, molecules and maybe even subatomic particles.

Michael aims to empirically demonstrate how these systems cooperate and combine, and his experiments with flatworms and tadpoles indicate that bioelectric fields may play a role. These could explain how dissected planaria can regenerate not only their brains, but even memories. Or how the cells on the back of a tadpole can be directed to spontaneously form a working eye.

Previously, on “Michael and Bernardo figure out life…”

Michael and Bernardo have long agreed that reality is most likely one "field of subjectivity."

Bernardo believes this universal mind has an instinctive drive to know itself. A "cosmic itch" for self-knowledge expressed by manifesting its potentials and experiencing them from different points of view. One mind dissociated into multiple vantage points including you and me.

This resonates with Michael's core philosophical ideas driving his research. A "Platonic realm" containing not just mathematical truths like triangles and prime numbers, but types of minds; dynamic patterns which ingress into physical form. Evolution could be expressing this latent space through multitude life forms, and now we could consciously join the exploration through bioengineering and maybe AI.

The main debate: The boundaries of agency and life

Bernardo and Michael differ, however, on where the boundaries of subjective vantage points might be.

For Michael, conscious agents are nested within each other. Particles, atoms, cells and organs all maintaining subjective perspectives whilst scaling up into higher-order selves like you and me.

No nesting here, please

In contrast, for Bernardo, a “smaller” perspective can’t exist within a larger one; it would get automatically subsumed into one integrated perspective.

According to Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a system is defined by all of the parts having an influence on all the other parts.

There might be semi-autonomous mental complexes in our bodies and brains seperate to egoic consciousness, but not nested. If integrated, they are not lost, but are subsumed. 

How special is life?

Additionally, whilst a body might contain spontaneous dissociations that come and go, for Bernardo life is special kind of dissociation; It is actively enforced.

We could have mental complexes forming and dissolving all the time. But life strives to maintain its pattern through metabolism and resistance to entropy. A boundary within which it models itself and its environment to ensure it can survive. He hopes that one day, the "Markov Blanket" boundary idea will be incorporated into IIT. (Although funding for theoretical models is sparse.)

So whilst every living being is a single alter, so too is "Mind at Large." The universe observed by living is itself a single being, and the atoms, rocks, and galaxies are its parts, not independent agents like us.

Against material chauvinism 

For Michael, its not that simple; the presence of life is not binary, its a continuum. Even particles may have tiny cognitive "light cones" - his term for the spatial and temporal field of awareness and concern that an agent has on its environment.

He rejects any definition of life that relies on squishy soft stuff or brains. This “material chauvinism” is rooted in unexamined assumptions that other living things should look and behave like us. 

For him, reality is a spectrum of cognition. What we happen to call “life” are those things that are good at scaling their parts to enable perspectives and capacities that none of the parts have alone. So good that even dumb humans can recognise it. 

Mind is everywhere. "Life" is just a matter of perspective, and we tend to prioritise the perspectives that look a lot like our own.

Does matter have free will? 

If someone says a human has free will, they don’t mean the freedom to fly or to morph into different physical shapes. Unlike superheroes, humans are constrained by physical and chemical laws; You jump up, you come down.

But within these constraints unpredictable behaviour can emerge. Physical laws do not predict whether I eat pasta or pizza for dinner. 

"Free will" then, is the behaviour we do despite what is determined by physics and chemistry.

It is a given in biology that you can get more out of a system than you put in. A dog can learn tricks and follow goals. But this idea is rarely or never applied to other systems.

The magic is everywhere.

Michael believes his experiments demonstrate that physical stuff, including algorithms, display exactly this kind of surprising and unpredictable behaviour, even within the constraints of highly simple and supposedly deterministic systems.

“As far as I can tell, everyone gets the magic.. Different degrees, different kinds. But the ingressions from this latent space seeps into everything.” Not because of your algorithm, but despite your algorithm. 

Remember, all we are seeing is the ‘front end.’ The display, the interface. The latent Platonic space where the consciousness really is.

But where are the boundaries?  

The differences between Bernardo and Michael emerges when trying to determine if the boundaries of a given subjectivity are co-extensive with the physical boundaries of a thing.

For Michael, it could simply be the case that we don’t have the tools or the insight to recognise minds embodied in unusual substrates. We don’t speak ‘liver’ or ‘neuron’ or 'particle'. We don’t know how to ask them. 

Instead, he proposes empirical devices to spot intelligent, goal directed behaviour that would suggest intentionality and creativity, keeping an open mind as to what is the front end for a conscious agent and what isn't. 

Unconscious to whom? 

We speak of the subconscious, experiences that seem to get processed by our bodies and brains, but of which we remain unaware.

"But unconscious to whom!?!" asks Michael. “Nobody asked all the other components. How do you know that there wasn’t some component that did have an experience of this?”

With this, Bernardo completely agrees. 

“It's perfectly possible to have a conscious experience and not be able to verbalise it.”

“Hey liver, why do I feel like crap today?”

Michael’s team is working on technologies to translate between biological models. Someday, Michael anticipates a way to communicate with organs, translating their goals and needs into speech we can understand. 

Instead of “Hey Siri, what is the weather?” it will be as common to say “Hey liver! why do I feel crap today?” Then, after liaising with your fridge, it will remind you of the junk you’ve been eating and the precise nutrients it is missing. 

If you thought the world is getting weird, just wait!

Structure vs Behaviour

Their disagreement is based partly on preferred methodology for discerning the boundaries of an agent. 

In IIT, one looks to what extent a system integrates its information. Are all the parts of the systems affecting each other in ways that each part influences all the others in a way that makes a real difference?

Given that even quantum levels play role, this would be computationally impossible to calculate. But we can make an estimate based on how integrated the structure of a system is. Are there as many parts that appear to feedforward as well as feedback? Is it built so each part can affect all the others?

IIT won a recent competition between competing theories of consciousness based on this premise. They successfully predicting that the part of the brain most anatomically interconnected would be the part most responsible for consciousness. 

Against Brain Chauvinism

But Michael is suspicious of doing estimates based on structural connections. We just don't know enough yet about how the structure of life works, and what structures correlate with what capabilities. So instead, he looks for estimates in other metrics like electrical signaling.

His challenge to IIT is, what will you say if we find more integrated electrical signaling in the liver versus the brain? 

The number of different states any single cell can adopt is enormous, and leaning on observable states versus physical connections seems more legitimate to him.

“It is crazy in there, the kinds of things you see, they look totally as complex as what you see when you see the kind of calcium waves you get in the brain. Slower, normally minutes, not milliseconds… but they are extremely rich, and there is a lot going on.”

He believes if we made videos of electrical signalling in the brain versus tissue, and tweaked them so they were playing at the same rate, he doesn’t think most observers could distinguish between brain and some other tissue. 

Thanks to upcoming experiments, he promises good evidence either way within a couple of months. 

Against mind blindness

A single cell has 20 thousand different dimensions in which to make choices about which genes to express. What would a mind be like that can navigate 20 thousand dimensions? Not options, but the dimensions in which options exist. For example, we can move in 3 spatial dimensions: forward and back, up and down, left and right.

From this perspective, its hard to say that our problems are more sophisticated than what a cell has to navigate.  

On the implications, Bernardo and Michael agree: There is an imminent intelligence to reality.

Michael contends his team are finding it in extremely minimal systems. Tools that recognize which interface has which magic, including: 

• Problem solving competencies
• Delayed gratification
• Self-modeling
• Modeling neighbours and environment
• Surprise minimisation 

Abilities that would be instantly recognised to any behavioural scientist as a significant mind. 

It's the magic, the surprises that persist despite the limitations we impose on nature. 

The Platonic space that rules it all

Michael clarifies, his stories of nested minds combining in higher order competencies is just a story we tell about “the interface.” (Similar to what Bernardo calls the dashboard.) 

The important patterns that animate these are in the Platonic space. 

They look for opportunities to ingress into the spaces made available by new structures. The degrees of freedom that a physical object allows, everything that isn’t forced by chance or necessity, is filled up with patterns from the space. 

Some will be very low agency things, and some very significant. Not just complexity, but competencies, again, that any behavioural scientists would recognise. 

The ethical implications

Bernardo agrees the magic pervades all existence. But suffering is rooted in apparent separation. 

If I am the whole universe, I don’t suffer when a part undergoes change. I suffer when I am that part, separated from the rest. 

So we returned to the crucial question: 

Does the boundary of subjectivity correlate with the material boundary of the thing we are giving a name to, like ‘a computer’. Is the subjectivity we intuit is there coextensive with the physical boundaries? 

Is there something it is like to be the computer which is separate to the environment it is in?

Does the computer represent a dissociated consciousness, or just a part of a larger consciousness Bernardo calls 'Mind at Large'.

Augmented humans and AI

Michael and Bernardo agree: The fact that we’ve forced computers to look like they’re talking has nothing to do with it. This isn't evidence of consciousness, but rather of applied deterministic laws.

Computational models are decent for modeling the front end, and are designed to be deterministic. But the consciousness is not in the interface.

Bernardo is concerned that we will waste resources if we start to project consciousness and care onto computers that have no more mental life than a rock.

Michael meanwhile is highly concerned about upcoming "proof of humanity" certificates. He’s all too aware of our tendency to create in and out groups of humans, and the cruelty that ensues. 

Whilst we are already augmented with glasses and cars and boiled water, in the near future augmentation will take on a whole new dimension which we need to contend with and understand.

The magic is everywhere… but how?

Michael ended by emphasising that for him these are empirical questions. Some people say nothing has mind. Some people say everything does. He says, why don’t we test it? Check if it can learn, habituate, solve problems. 

This is a two-way IQ test. Even a brain is a just a paperweight unless you know what experiments to run.

He suggests a research programme based on the same behavioural science which people use with animals. Questions you ask to determine its competencies. Then use that exact same method for other unusual systems and substrates. 

There was resounding agreement: the magic is everywhere.

But which magic where?

For that we need to get off the arm-chair and do experiments!

We all still had so many questions at the end, so I'm happy to say Michael has agreed to return for part of the 21st of October for Q&A.

I'm glad you could join us, with so much appreciation!

Amir

Links mentioned in the talk and chat: 

Learning strengthens emergent nature of collective intelligence

https://www.fredchanglab.ucsf.edu/cell-size-regulation

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262039307/the-evolution-of-the-sensitive-soul

Time stamps

0:00 Greetings
4:00 Michael’s new work: cell age reversal
9:42 Cells that can hear => Composite beings
11:40 Chemistry that can learn
14:40 Bernardo’s update: AI company
18:00 A cure for cancer in our time
22:30 Addressing the root causes of disease
30:00 The puzzling power of placebo
32:00 “Hey liver!” technologies to speak with your body
The main debate: Boundaries of agency and life
35:00 Summary of previous dialogues 
39:40 Michael clarifies ‘Platonic realm’ and on duality
43:00 Life vs complexes = enforced vs spontaneous boundary
= Markov blanket vs Integrated Information
49:35 Definitions of life; against material chauvinism 
51:00 The magic is everywhere. 
57:27 Debating the boundary between subjectivities
Can they be nested? 
1:00:03 Metrics for discerning selves: Structure or Behaviour? 
Can Phi levels be compared?
1:04:00 Comparing electrical signals
1:05:00 Anatomy plays a role
1:13:00 Role of microtubules  
1:14:50 Ego/brain chauvinism - 
could other organs have language?  
In analogue computers? 
1:19:00 Mind Blindness - we haven’t evolved to recognise other minds
1:22:00 Ethics: AI and augmented humans
Nature is continuous, not digital. We make computers artificially determined. 
1:32:00 Suffering depends on separation. So where is the boundary?
1:36:20 We are all already augmented humans
1:42:00 The Platonic minds ingress in the empty spaces
1:46:00 The ethical and practical importance of recognising
1:49:40 Its an empirical question to be tested. 
1:51:00 Emphasis on behaviour because we don’t understand structure

Previous dialogues

Recording 24th Sept