Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Discovering Consciousness Beyond the Brain | Michael Levin & Anna Ciaunica

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

In this episode, developmental biologist Michael Levin and cognitive scientist Anna Ciaunica examine how cellular intelligence challenges our traditional understanding of consciousness. They explore how memory, embodiment, and our interactions with others fundamentally shape the self. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe A huge thank you to Dina Rudick, a four-time Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker / journalist, who expertly aided this production at the last minute. You can find more about her work at https://www.dinarudick.com. Definitely check out her films. Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Links Mentioned: Michael Levin’s website: https://drmichaellevin.org/ Anna Ciaunica’s website: https://annaciaunica.fr/ Curt’s previous talk with Michael: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s&t=3924s&ab_channel=CurtJaimungal Timestamps: 00:00 – Opening 01:42 – The Biggest Myths in Biology and Neuroscience 03:18 – Anna’s Take on How Self Emerges from “Bunches of Cells” 04:10 – Critique of Adult-Centric Perspectives 05:15 – Dropping Old Conceptual “Epicycles” 07:45 – Continuity from Single Cells to Human Minds 09:28 – On Memory, Metaphors, and Shifting Perspectives 10:46 – Bridging Disciplinary Silos & The Power of Interdisciplinarity 13:04 – Development, Evolution, and Goal-Directed Systems 17:05 – Expanding the Concept of “Goal-Seeking” in Biology 25:12 – Depression, Body States, and Self-Regulation 31:57 – Aging, Goals, and the Problem of “Having Nothing Left to Do” 41:10 – Pregnancy, Immune Systems, and “Sharing a Self” 51:08 – “Interconnectedness” as Fundamental to Selfhood 57:56 – The Story We Tell Ourselves vs. The Agency of Thoughts 1:07:00 – Rewriting “You”: Caterpillars, Butterflies, and Memory 1:16:15 – Final Thoughts: The Self as an Ongoing, Embodied Process 1:24:01 – Closing Remarks and Where to Find More Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #biology #research #scientist #consciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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winning with purpose, and showing the world what AI was meant to be. Let's create the agent-first future together. Head to salesforce.com slash careers to learn more. If you don't change, you will die. If you do change, you are no longer yourself. What all of this is about, it's not really philosophy. It's empirical claims about which set of tools is going to apply.

You are in no way tied to the story that was told by your past self. We need to figure out how basically we are linked to other individuals to understand the self. What you're really talking about is ways to relate to that system and gain optimal interaction that enriches both sides. Biology, neuroscience, and philosophy often seem to walk separate paths, but two radical thinkers are challenging our most basal assumptions about consciousness, memory, and the self. Michael Levin, a pioneer in developmental biology, has discovered that intelligence isn't limited to brains, rather it extends all the way down to single cells and even bacterial colonies.

Alongside him is cognitive scientist and philosopher Ana Chauñica, who upends the mainstream view of consciousness and selfhood. My name is Kurt Dimungle, and this was part of my three-day tour at Harvard, Tufts, and MIT, where I recorded five podcasts, including this Theolocution with Michael Levin, distinguished professor at Tufts University, and Ana Chauñica, who's currently based at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London. The other recordings are with Jacob Barndes, which is over seven hours long on quantum theory, and Manolis Kellis of MIT. There's also Professor William Hahn, a computer scientist, and that was filmed live at the MIT Media Lab.

Subscribe to get notified. Levin and Chaunica's groundbreaking Theolocution raises provocative questions that challenge the foundations of neuroscience and philosophy such as, what is the self? Can you be yourself without others? Is your memory yours to control? And what if thoughts have minds of their own? What's the largest myth in your respective fields that you have to dispel even to your colleagues?

Well, boy, there's a lot. Let's see. One of them is that neurons and the things that neurons do are an extremely unique aspect of the brain. So it is often assumed that different kinds of intelligence are necessarily limited to brains. And so that's something that we talk about a lot about where neurons actually,

and the properties of neural networks, where those things actually came from, both evolutionarily and developmentally. And that this is these kinds of capacities that exist far outside of brainy organisms. That's a huge one. What sort of neural capacities are you referring to that are present in non-neural networks? Well, for example, I mean, the most obvious thing is that the actual mechanism, so the

ion channels, the electrical synapses known as gap junctions, the neurotransmitters, all of those things working in a network to integrate information across space and time. Those things are evolutionarily absolutely ancient. They predate multicellularity. So even bacterial biofilms have all of the components. And then there's the actual function. So the ability to learn from experience, to navigate some kind of problem space, not necessarily move around in 3D space, but navigate other problem spaces like physiological space, metabolic space,

gene expression space, anatomical space. All of these things long predate the invention of nerve and muscle and running around the 3D world. So all of these capacities are very widespread. So, Anna, we were talking off-air about how you think differently than your colleagues, so please. Yeah, so I think in my case, the biggest myth, because I work on the self, and I think people want to want to understand the self, they start with self, but I think it's wrong, I think we should start with the other from the very beginning. Because we take another centric perspective,

and kind of like the individual self is already there, so fully fledged a bit, like the Athena coming from Ziva's head. But I'm interested more how we get there, so fully-fledged a bit, like the Athena coming from Ziva's head. But I'm interested more how you get there, how you become a self from a bunch of selves, right? So how you develop that. And when you ask yourself this question, then you realize that actually you cannot be yourself by yourself. You need another, because the other was there from the very beginning, there's some sort

of lineage or transmission later on. So I think the biggest myth is that we can figure out things about the self by looking just at the individual. I think that's deeply wrong. We need to look at it in a wider aspect and I would say even more provocatively that it's like actually we need to start with the second person rather than the first person in order to understand. It's just like the second person comes first. We don't really choose to be ourselves the way we are. So we are kind of like part of something bigger. So we need to figure out how basically we are linked as individuals to other individuals to understand the self. And I think many of the concepts that we have right now are very much

static and adult-centric and then we use that lens to understand complex phenomena. And I don't know if you know this epicycle thing that we had once upon a time, we started with this, people started at a time with this preconception that the circle was a perfect figure. And because the circle is a perfect figure, everything has to move circularly in the sky. But that obviously was not matching the empirical data because people realized that the planets are moving very differently than they were expected according to the circle. So what they did, they had epi-circles in the circle to explain for the mismatching of data.

So they basically constructed this complicated epi-circle until one day somebody said, actually just drop the idea of a circle. It's not a circle. It's an ellipsis. So just drop an idea and everything fall into place like the Kepler. I think we need something similar in philosophy of mind and cognitive science as well. I think this idea that there is one system and then we try to figure out everything through that system and then at a certain point something happens that has actually dropped out.

Look at the elliptic movement and then you realize that actually that idea matches the observation. Yeah. Well, what was that, let's drop that moment for you. What was some axiom that you held onto that your field holds onto? Yeah, so I actually had a couple of those. So it's like a domino effect from boom, boom, boom, from one another. So I did my thesis on physicalism and quality.

I started to do the goal of all the old fashioned is like, okay, so I have brain states and then subjective experiences like feelings and things. So you want to ask yourself how exactly something like, which is like immaterial in nature, ineffable, is linked to something which is heavily material that can measure, right? You know, you have a brain in your hands, has certain consistency, certain color, where exactly are my experiences in the brain?

So that's a big question. And then there was like entire field is like looking up of like how you reduce or not the mental states to physical states. And then I realized that the entire physical discussion around this was based on outdated physical science. So, and they were not looking at other type of like, because they were taken to account today, they had the most fundamental part is the physics and we just ignore everything else. Just focus on those like have the layer cake, physics at the bottom, and then chemistry,

biology, psychology on the top, we have the cherry on the top, like the subjectivity of the experiences. And then we are obsessed about how to connect the cherry with the bottom of the cake. But I think that was like missing the point. And that was my aha moment. I say, okay, actually, what I really need to understand is like how physics relates to chemistry. It's like the two layers of the cake, how they basically link to each other. And then I realized that actually what is maybe, probably what is fundamental is not how the beats are layered one to each other and how it's dismantled like the bricks of this wall. But basically is the interconnectedness between

the two that actually is fundamental. So you basically have the relatedness between the two which is fundamental. And then you keep the relatedness the same. You just like change the bricks and you have a very similar system. So that was my aha moment when I realized, wait a minute, actually, it's like the armchair thinking and experimental science were kind of like disconnected. So I want to do both. So I, you know, in my lifetime as a human being and a scientist, I don't want to just like, just like take one track and ignore the other. I want to, you know, do the two together.

Even though it's more complicated, it takes more time and it's messier because it's like, ah, I'm between. But I think we have a clearer understanding of the phenomena. And if you allow me to use a metaphor, so suppose you have a table here and like this thing you have, and then you want to go from point A to point B. And you take the straight line. It's the fastest way. Which is fine. But then you can also take right, left, right, left, right, left, right, left.

And then you still arrive at the end point. But at the end of the day you mapped better the surface of that table if you just take the tours rather than just go straight because basically experience other perspective on the thing. So you have a clearer understanding of the phenomena. So that's the bullet I'm biting and say, okay, so maybe it'll take me longer to get to my end point. But I want to have this like rich perspective because I don't think this idea of disciplinarity is quite new, actually, in scientists. It's like people of 300 years ago when they were doing philosophy, like Rene Descarte, also mathematicians, they were also opticians, so he wrote a treat in optics.

He was also a mathematician, so he invented the XY. So there is no clear-cut distinction, and I think this is something very new that we inherited in our society. It's like, okay, here's your discipline, here's your discipline, here's those methods. It's kind of like separate parallel tracks, and sometimes they don't communicate with each other. And when they come together, it's like, oh, it was like a collision. What was that? It's like I realized that you can spend your entire career on a track and then it's blown away in a couple of seconds by somebody coming from a different field. And

I said, okay, I don't want to do that. I want to avoid that. So right now, that's my aha moment is just like that I can't do it from armchair alone. I see. So that's, yeah, the point about the disciplines is very important because you know right away it's an issue because I can often tell what department I'm talking in based on which part of my talk makes people mad.

And it's often a different thing because certain things are completely obvious in one department and they're heresy in a different department. And so you can right away tell that there's a problem here, right? Because people have unshakable assumptions that are just not portable across disciplines. Can you give an example of when you're presenting and how you could tell the difference? Well, okay, I mean, there's many. Here's an example. If I say that the information processing in a group of cells is not determined by the genetics, it's driven, the memory is stored in it and it's driven by it memory is stored in and is driven by,

and there's plasticity at the level of electrophysiological circuits and they hold the actual information about what's going to happen. In a neuroscience department, like, well, yeah, no kidding. But then to them, the odd part is when I say, yeah, but it doesn't have to be neurons. And in fact, what's a neuron anyway, right? And so we just say, okay, so the first part is obvious to them,

the second part is weird. If I say that in a molecular genetics department, it's like, what are you talking about? Of course it's the genes and then the rest of it is sort of the fluff and the genes drive and then, you know, but then they're like, well, yeah, the cells are similar and whatnot. So it's like that same idea that a group of cells is reprogrammable with respect to what it's going to do and that it, you know, if I talk about, let's say, the pattern memory in the two-headed plenary and the fact that they had a physiological experience that permanently altered

how those cells are going to behave in the future, there's nothing wrong with the genetics. The genetics haven't been touched. Again, the neuroscience, yeah, of course, because we know you don't need to change your genome to learn new things. If you're a brain, that's obvious. But in the molecular genetics world, that's completely bizarre.

So, I think that's a very symptom of this adult-centric perspective of why neuroscientists are focused just on the brain. Because if you take a development perspective, the brain development or cell developments, then you realize that you have neurons in the body before you have neurons in the brain. And actually, you need to understand the neurons, how they function in the body rather than just in the brain. Whereas for biologists, that's kind of like simple because they are not obsessed with the human cognition and just human-centric type of like, you know, self-centric human lens. And they take the organism as a starting point and then the

organism you have like cells. Yeah. And that's kind of like makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, the whole developmental thing is so important. I was going to mention this as well as in terms of these misconceptions, right? And that things that there's this really firm idea in a lot of people that we have a proper cognitive human being, and then there are

physical objects. And then once you start sort of poking into that, like how did you get here? You know you were a single cell once, right? Both evolutionarily and developmentally, you were a single cell that probably most people will say that it's, you know, well described by chemistry and physics. And most people, not me, but most people will look at a single cell and say that, okay, this cannot be a cognitive system.

This is just, it's a chemical machine or biochemical machine. But the facts of developmental biology are that there is no magic lightning flash that sort of says, okay, boom, now you've gone from the land of physics and chemistry and now you're a mind. There is no magic place where that happens, right?

So to me, the important thing there to point out is that the continuity, that's the null hypothesis. It's not on us to have to argue that actually, you know, people think, well, you know, to claim that physical systems and minds are on the same spectrum is this like bizarre thing that you have to argue for. No, no, that's the null hypothesis. We know those are the facts of development. So embryogenesis is a critical teacher of that.

If on the other hand you think that there are great phase transitions or something special happens, that's the thing that needs arguing. And I'm not saying it's impossible. I've not heard a good argument for it, but that's the thing that would need to be shown. The null hypothesis should actually be the background. And that's not how people think about this at all. Like, so worried about my sister.

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So, carrot cake, which is like a mixed cake, is quite a horrible cake compared to red velvet cake, which is demarcated. Depends on the taste. So, please make the case for me, because we're talking about the self. And Anna, you mentioned the other, which there's a distinguishing factor there. So please, what are the nourishing factors of talking about what is separated? Yeah. So, so here's my, here's my approach to this. One of the ways that people argue against this kind of continuity thesis

is the paradox of the heap. So the idea is, right, so you get a pile of sand and then, and then they say, well, you know, if, if of course you could argue that every time you take a piece of sand away, you know, when does it stop being a heap and the whole thing is kind of useless. That's the argument. So my point about all of that is that I think all of these terms in terms of these cognitive terms, the mentalistic terms and so on, I think all of these things are interaction protocols, exactly as Anand was saying, they are ways that we are going to relate to the system. They're not objective facts about the system floating off by itself, they are relationship claims. So what that means is, if you call me up

and you say, I have a heap of sand and I need to move it, I don't want to argue about the definition of a heap. What I do want to know is, am I bringing tweezers, a spoon, a shovel, a bulldozer? What am I bringing, right? It's functional. How are we going to relate to this thing? And so the terminology is only useful to the extent that it gives us a bag of tools to work with.

So now let's imagine, so I call this the spectrum of persuadability. And that's kind of an engineering take. You can also say that at the right side of the spectrum, it's more about bi-directional vulnerability and friendship and love and all of these things. But let's just look an engineering take. You can also say that at the right side of the spectrum, it's more about bi-directional vulnerability and friendship and love and all of these things. But let's just look at the spectrum. So I'll just give you four things that are on the spectrum.

So on the left side, you have a mechanical clock, okay? And then you have something like a thermostat, and then you have something like a dog, and then you have something like a human, and who knows what you have after that. So what's different along the spectrum, there are a number of interesting things, but the key thing here is what are the bag of tools that you're going to bring

to optimally relate to that system. So with the mechanical clock, you are not going to reward it or punish it or convince it of anything. Your only bag of tools is rewiring, physical hardware rewiring. That's pretty much all you're going to do with it. Once you reach something like a thermostat, you have some more interesting options from cybernetics and control theory, where now you don't even really need to know how it does what it does. What you need to know is, A, that it is a goal-seeking system and B, how to rewrite the goal.

So if you wanted to keep the temperature in your house at a different range, you know how to rewrite the goal, and then you can walk away and trust there's a degree of autonomy, there's a degree of trust. You know this thing, you know, it isn't going to ponder why the house is at a certain temperature, but, but the one thing it is going to do is, is hold onto that goal that you've specified for it. So that's interesting. Now, now we can control that system by rewriting the goals, but you do need to dip into the hardware and rewrite the goals.

Now you get to something like, like a dog. And of course there's a million things in between the spectrum. You get to something like a dog or a horse. Interesting thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience whatsoever, to something like a dog or a horse. Interesting. Thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience whatsoever, you could train a dog or a horse. You didn't know anything about it. Synapses. You didn't have to go in and try to run the thing like a puppet with, you know,

moving all the, all the neurons around. Uh, it has this amazing interface, this, this, this very thin interface whereby rewards and punishments. And now you've got a bag of tools from, from behavioral science and using those. Now you're communicating with it, right? And you're providing incentives and things like that. And because this creature has that interface, you don't even need to know much of anything about what's really inside in order to have some effective interactions with it because

it's going to do the hard part of taking the signals you give it and converting it to its internal states and moving around the syn you know, synaptic proteins and all of that stuff. And then, and then sort of further on to the right of that system, you have humans. And there, you know, all it takes is, is, is sometimes is a whisper of something that's a, a convincing argument. And then they take it from there, right? They, they, they buy into it or not. They, they might change the course of their life. They might start a revolution.

Who knows what they're going to do? There's tons of complicated things that are going to happen. You didn't have to micromanage any of that. So, and so now you're dealing, so what are the tools, right? So now you're dealing with the tools of psychoanalysis and psychiatry and things like that. So, the argument basically I'm making is that what all of this is about are, it's not really philosophy.

It's empirical claims about which set of tools is going to apply. And so now my claim is for novel things, cells, tissues, organs, novel synthetic biology constructs, weird minimal things that people in A life make or, you know, active matter droplets and all of these things, you can't from a philosophical armchair, just like you were saying the experiments are critical. You can't sit there and say, well, that's a cell. I think it's definitely like the clock.

I'm a synthetic biologist, this is the chemical machine. It's gonna be like the mechanical clock. No, you have to do experiments. And when you do experiments, you try the different tools from the different disciplines and you say, oh, gee, when I use this set of tools, turns out I can do things that you couldn't do if you were treating it as a mechanical clock.

And that's a lot of what we've done in this lab and other people have done too, is to borrow tools from other disciplines. That could be computer science, that could be certainly behavioral computational neuroscience. Take tools, apply them outside of their standard domain. And when they work, you have to go where the evidence leads you. You can't just decide that, okay, well, that's not real learning or that's not real, whatever. Now, if the tools work, that's what it is. Right?

So, I have this very kind of instrumentalist view of these things that what you're really talking about is ways to relate to that system and gain optimal interaction that enriches both sides. So, when one talks about tools, one is implicitly referencing goals because a tool is for something. How are goals related to the self? Is it that if you have no more goal you have no more self? Is that related to depression or derealization or depersonalization? As you know on theories of everything we delve into some of the most reality spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies,

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not with the mental processing, right? We have a goal which is fundamental and we have it all the time even when we sleep, which is stay alive. So you cannot be depressed or happy if you're not alive. So if you don't disentangle, if you don't detach the self from the body, then you realize that the body has an intrinsic goal of its own, which is part of the life, which is like keep going, keep going, and eventually reproducing. And you know, keep. So that's a fundamental thing that I like to keep it there because I think it's important.

So there is a goal all the time, that's all I want to say. So it's like, unlike the clock who doesn't care, the goal and the thing is just like, if I stop, I stop, yeah, whatever. The living systems, we are part of some sort of like wave and process, which is like keep moving, keep moving. Like on the fly. So there is a goal there all the time. Now on the top of that, you can be aware you have explicit goals, right?

So I want to be an artist or I want to make a movie or I want to have an interview in Boston. So the type of goals that you can explicitly attend to and then they can disrupt it but there is a strike and I cannot take the flight. But what is really important I think when you detach, when you have the feeling of detachment from the body, you also feel detached from reality, which is really interesting, right? As if your connection with the reality is not going through the thinking, but through the embodied experience that you have in life.

So if those are disrupted, then the rest of the pyramid, so to speak, is kind of like feel disconnected and floating. Yeah. And interestingly enough, does that not makes you feel, let's say more, I don't know how to wrap, I need to carefully choose my words. Does it make you feel more present or real? Yeah.

Doesn't make you feel more present or real. On the contrary, it makes you feel more unreal and not present. I think we have a taken for granted goal, embodied goal that we carry with us all the time, even when we sleep, even when you're in a coma, which is the goal that we share with all living systems like viruses and cats and dogs, which is like, keep going, keep going. From the perspective of life, there is no principle reason why a human should keep going, but not a cat or a virus. So there is like the same underlying principle of survival that we share. And I think that's always there. And rest is just something that we have on the top at an explicit level. And then you can have disruptions between the two.

I don't know, something happens to you, you have an accident and you have a traumatic event and then basically messes up with your internal bodily signals and that will change entirely the way you relate to your other goals in life, right? You change basically the perspective because now your only goal will be like, I want to keep this

system safe and disengage as much as possible from the interaction with the environment that might put you in a place which is dangerous. And hence this idea of the depression people, what they try to do basically is to reduce the energy consuming and just like stick to the very known scenarios to not consume too much energy because a healthy person would be like, oh, I want to explore because by exploration I can interact with other things. Whereas the pressure would be like, no, actually this is a state, a body state that actually is safe. I'm going to keep it here. But paradoxically, this is not sustainable in the long term because in order to thrive, you need to be open to the change and to the uncertainty.

And that's something that we need to train. You need to train how to do it. I think the most important thing is not how precise we are in the quality of our information processing from the environment. I think what is really important is how flexible we are to adapt to a constant unknown environment. Because we cannot ever predict what is coming next. We are doing our best, but you never know. So the information coming to us is always unpredictable in a way.

And hence your best chances for survival is not to build the capacity to deal with all the information that comes to you, rather than just to flexibly adapt to whatever information comes that is useful for you in that particular moment and then just ignore. Yeah. And if you are unable to ignore certain information, then it stands in the way, keeps you stuck. This is something like people with mental health would say all the time, I felt stuck, you know, and there is no flexibility anymore, right, in the subjectivity on how they relate. And I think that may have consequences on how we potentially help to do intervention and therapies because instead of treating the individual what is wrong in the head or

somewhere else, actually we should be able to train or to help to increase the flexibility of the adaptation, right? Like the safe interaction that you can have. And then by training this type of safe interaction, you get the relatedness with the self for free so to speak, like the mental health, the health benefits. I wanted to talk a little bit about a new thing that we're doing with a loss of goal directedness and I want to see what you have to say about one part of it, which we hadn't talked about before. This has to do with, so part of my lab studies aging and this question of why at some point the normal mechanisms that upkeep a particular pattern in the body are not doing that anymore.

And so I preface everything I'm about to say by saying that the paper on this has not been yet peer reviewed. This is a preprint that's out by Leo Pio Lopez and Ben Hartle, those two guys in my lab. So this is brand new stuff. Standard theories of aging basically fall into two categories. There are damage theories that basically says that over time, damage accumulates, so whether it's the DNA or something else, it just gets damaged and eventually you can't keep up. And then there are the programmatic theories that say that

basically evolution wants the old organisms to go away. It's somehow helpful to, you know, more resources for the young, whatever. There's a reason for it. There's a programmatic reason for aging. So I think we have a kind of a third alternative, which is basically, and then we have a bunch of computational work looking at this where the way we understand morphogenesis or the creation of the body and then the upkeep of the body as single cells die and then are replaced and whatever, it's a constant kind of ship of these see a situation going on. And what we've been studying is the idea that the tissues have an inherent memory, literally,

some of it is bioelectrical, some of it is biochemical, maybe biomechanical, that basically is responsible for maintaining a large scale shape. Cells and materials come and go, but the shape is maintained. Those memories are goals of the cellular collective intelligence in the cybernetic sense. Their goal states that the system works really hard to try and reduce the error against. So they keep trying to maintain that state. So one of the things we're seeing is that when you have a system like that,

a goal-directed intelligence system, which is able to find different ways to get to its goal and so on, something interesting happens after it has achieved its goal. After the goal has been met, if there is no new goal and no reinforcement, external reinforcement of the old goal, things start to degrade. And it's not because there's damage, there's nothing wrong

with the hardware, there's nothing wrong with the data, there's nothing wrong with the pieces, but the goal has been reached and the system does not know what to do anymore and it sort of regresses and disorder comes apart. It's a very weird kind of a way of thinking about it because it suggests that it's intrinsic to being a goal directed in morphogenetic space cognitive system. It isn't caused by some outside disturbance or DNA damage or any of that. It's a fundamental feature.

So here's my crazy analogy. I wanna see what you make of this. Imagine kind of this Judeo-Christian version of heaven, right? So you get there, everything is great. There's nothing to worry about and it's infinitely long. So now I can sort of imagine, so this is just intuitively, I don't know if any of this is right,

but you can sort of imagine if I had a snake under those conditions, I don't think there would be any problem. I think a snake could just do snake things for basically forever, right? If I had a dog, I tend to think so. If you had a nice farm with rabbits and all this stuff that dogs like, I tend to, and every day was kind of like every other day, but they were all good days. I tend to think the dog would be fine.

Maybe forever. I don't know. You tell me what you think. But a human in that condition, I'm not at all certain that we could keep ourselves sane over, you know, I could probably keep myself busy for the first 10,000 years. What happens after that? Like a billion years or trillion years.

It doesn't, it doesn't seem likely. Right. So, so, so in my head, that's really the problem of aging is, is that, is that once you meet a goal as a cognitive system, not a mechanism, but a cognitive system, you need a new challenge or some other kind of challenges. Something needs to change and something needs to happen. Otherwise, there's gonna be degradation.

What do you think? Is any of that plausible? What do you think a mind does over the long term when everything is fine? So I fully agree with you. And I like this idea of open-endedness, so I think that's intrinsic to life and it comes with the territory. When people talk about eternal life, it's a bit like an oxymoron.

I usually play this game with some of my students, say, okay, I'm going to say a word, you need to say the opposite quite quickly, like good, bad. And I'm and I'm saying to them death, and everybody says life, and I'm saying wrong, and they're like, what do you mean? It's like the opposite of death is life. As I know, the opposite of death is birth, yeah, and life is what stays between birth and death. So it's intrinsic to a system to have an end and a beginning to have something in between. And I think that's probably what you're seeing with the heaven thing, right? You wouldn't be aware that you are alive, that you are doing things by just being in an infinite, flat way.

For that to happen, you need, and something beautiful comes from some, because obviously I like science and philosophy, but also I like arts because sometimes you get, as I said, very different perspective from art. And writers like Dostoevsky, they would say something like that. They would say, well, actually you can't really be aware of the light if there is some darkness somewhere in the corner. And there's the contrast between the two that actually gets you the experience that you have right now.

And I think that's the idea that I see in your saying, Mike, about the open-endedness. I need to have some sort of like, there is openness, but there is also endedness. So there is an end there which is open, but it has to be a slight contrast that gives you like the access to it. And another question that I keep asking because I like to work a bit on this idea that, well, as a philosopher, I realized philosophers are obsessed with death. I was like, where am I going? Where am I going to die?

What am I going to do after? But I think that really interesting question is like, where was I before being born? It's like, who am I? Where am I coming from? Right? And that's kind of like this idea of birth was coming into existence, kind of like completely ignored. I mean, almost ignored from there. And the birth is missing, yeah, from philosophy. Death is present, but the birth is not there.

And the thing is like, can I have one without another? Because life is what stands in between. And one of the reasons why the birth is not, yeah, because I think, going back to, I'm a female philosopher, so this means that the thinking in philosophy has been dominated by male thinking for centuries. So the entire conceptual toolbox we're operating right now has been inherited through a tradition that has ignored half of the humanity embodiment, female embodiment.

So dismiss that we might have different problems and different takes on the problems that we have by just simply taking in a different perspective, a different questioning, right? And for me, one of the things that are missing, like the big elephant in the room, is like the invisible face of the moon, is like the birth, is like the beginning into life. And I think that the two are interconnected. So the aging means also, the very notion of aging means that there is a beginning somewhere. So it's like if you fall, I mean I know that we are obsessed with the ending because we know that it's going to end and we never knew that we're going to begin. Yeah? So that's something that is like out of the hour, you know, it's, nobody asked my permission to bring me to life.

I just show up some way or another. And it's like this particular time space, which actually I'm lucky because this particular time space, I can go to school and I do university as a female, yeah, and in a country that I can do that. But if it was 300 years ago, we don't have this conversation. And I think we need to point it out because it's important. So that's the starting point. I think it's kind of like missing because again, this idea of balance between the two

and the communication. And going back to the carrot cake. You said the layers are nice. Well, it depends on taste. Some people don't like the layers. Some people like more like the mixture. They have almonds and carrots and stuff. Maybe some things are more like the gelatin one or more fluid.

There are lots of forms of life, not just the ones that we have. The only thing I would like to stress, which I think is really important, whatever we do, whether we like it or not, we do it from our perspective. So we humans investigate things. God knows maybe also, I don't know, maybe cats also, they have their own science and they have their own communication between them that they actually completely miss. They have their own internal university thinking and we have no access to it. So our access is necessarily through our own perspective.

And I want to go back to your four things that you said. So you said the clock, the thermostat, and then dog and the humans. Do you see a fundamental difference between these four elements? Well, I think they're on the same spectrum in that there is a scaling process that gets you from one to the other. I don't think they're radically different natural kinds, but I do think that there are significantly different approaches and those approaches overlap, right? Much like the shovel and the spoon, they overlap at some point where you can sort of

get some utility out of both. So fundamentally, I think fundamentally they are not different, but in practical terms, we have different bags of tools that give you different options with different ones. Because for me, what strikes me as big there is just like we humans, we do clocks and thermostats, but we don't do dogs.

So we don't make dogs. We make clocks and we make thermostats. So there is an interference, partly coming from our way of putting matter together to do a thermostat and to do a clock. We don't find clock naturally in nature. So if human doesn't exist it, clocks didn't exist it. And the same with thermostats. Maybe dogs can do the thermostats if they could do it a different way and a different type of niche. They construct this complicated, you know, animals do this, they transform the environment

and this is what we do as well. But I think it's important to bear in mind that certain of the systems that we use to map this like continuum, actually this is part of the system that we use to map this like continuums, actually this are part of the system that we are using to map the continuous, right? So this is part of the lens that we use, which is fine. This is the only way to do it because we don't have other ways. But I think it's always important to be aware of that. Okay, so I created the lens that I'm using to map reality. I don't find

the clock in the universe and then I put it on the scale of evolution and trying to figure out where exactly I find myself in this because actually I put it there and I put this, but I didn't put the dog, you know, it's not something maybe you are going to put now, you're going to put the cenobots and you know, we'll say, okay, so here is another thing I can put between dog and, you know, the human. It's a different thing. Yeah. It's like, but again, it's not completely coming just from you or from us humans or

completely coming from the humanity and hence the carrot cake, right? So it's not complete clear layer. Here is a human, here is a nature. I think whether we like it or not, we're kind of like mixtures, yeah? A mixture of composed beings all the time for better and for worse, right? And I personally find it, I know some people find it like, I don't know, not disturbing, but unusual or I can't find the word, but I find it more relaxing the fact that I know says, okay, it's not really my responsibility. I'm part of something bigger.

I just need to figure out how I go to the flow, but I don't have to basically be in control and create stuff. It's just like, I need to figure out on the fly and there is something big happening, bigger than me, and I'm just part of it. And I find this reassuring. I think that's the word, right?

Rather than me being some sort of centred, it's everything around, human-centered, special case, anthropocentric of you. And actually, I want to share this very quickly, going back to – this is why I like when I do science right now to go back to the history of science, because well, it's like in the scale of humanity, 400, 500 years ago, it was nothing. So we literally thought the same 400 years ago, we have the same needs and everything. So you see how the same problems come back again through different forms, but it's basically the same problem. So it was something very funny because back then they were saying that the Earth is the

center of the solar system and hence the center of the universe. And everything revolves, the sun basically revolves around the earth. That was like they receive you and there was like fights against people, lost their lives, they were like burned because Giordano Bruno, there is a place in Piazza dei Fiori where he was burned because he was dead, say otherwise. So it was a serious thing. But then they realized it because they put the hell at the center of the earth, because it's the fire. And then after a while they realized, wait a minute, if the universe and the sun is revolving around the earth, and if the center of the earth is the hell, then everything revolves around the hell. That was like the logical conclusion.

It was like, oh my God, that can't be that. We can't put the universe to revolve around the hell. It has to be the good. And I think slowly but surely they just dropped this idea. And there's something I think interesting about this idea that we should be extremely careful not to put whatever concerns us the most at the center of anything like the human, the earth, the hell thing, the views that we have. Rather, I think we should take a more open and porous way to be open to the possibility to actually to see whatever interconnects us

with other systems rather than what makes us special. And by understanding what makes us connected with other system, I think we'll get our specialness for free. We will get it through for that. But rather if we focus just on what have as special, then we're going to miss the rest of, you know, the connectedness with the environment. And I think that's problematic. Hi, everyone. Hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like-minded pilgrimers.

By joining, you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here, hit subscribe, and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, Kurtjaimangel dot org. Well, let me tie heaven and hell together along with your work and a Dostoevsky quote.

So Dostoevsky said, modern man strives not for an attainment of heaven from earth, but for an abasement of heaven to earth. And so he was saying that, well, what is the paradise we use? We'll say, well, we'll be bored in the next paradise because we tend to think of it in these earthly terms. Even if all that would occur would be you would eat cake and speaking of cake, tying cake together as well. All you would do would be eating cake and then busying yourselves with the continuation

of the species. Then the man would deliberately break it. Okay, now in that busing yourself with the continuation of the species, pregnancy is there and you have some views on the self and pregnancy. Earlier you talked about in order to understand the first you have to understand the second. Now you said the second and not a second, not like another, as if there was a privileged second. So are you referring to the mother? Are you referring to something else? Please talk about pregnancy, what it means to be a self and how that comes about.

Yeah, so I don't remember saying this self, the other or a other. Sorry about that. I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm trying to do my best with the English I have. Thank you for asking me this question because I think this is a very important point. So when typically people talk about pregnancy, they're automatically associated with a certain category of people that have the ability to carry babies in their bodies. But if you think of the pregnant state through the perspective of developing human, all of us here shared our body with the body of another person. Hence the pregnant state is universal state.

Whether we like it or not, this is how we come to the world. So this means that the pregnant state is a universal state. And this is why I'm trying to say it's like, we can't get rid of the other with other, right? So the other is there from the very beginning, hence we need to change the unit of analysis from the individual to the individual within another individual, which is within another society, being an everything else. So basically you already have the interconnectedness.

So and this is fascinating because again, if you're going back with fascinating work that Mike is doing, just forget for a second about neurons. Just like let's forget a bit of obsession with neurons in the brain and go back to the humble origins of our bodies as cells because this is where it's incredible wisdom there. Just like fascinating things are happening at the cellular level. Way before actually you can't even get neurons if you don't have the cells function a certain way from the very beginning. So let's start with the humble origins of it, which are actually not that humble.

They are sophisticated and super, super smart. And I think this idea, again, this is a very opening parenthesis. I think this idea that actually we're starting very small and scale up, I think again, it's very naive. So for instance, like we say, oh, at adults, we have a better perception of the environment. Actually babies, they have a sense of smell like dogs, way more development than adults. It's like the nature gives you the means that you need at a certain stage, the best means babies, they have a sense of smell like dogs, way more development than adults. The nature gives you the means that you need at a certain stage, the best means to relate

to the environment and at that stage, food is very important. Your sense of smell will be highly developed, more than an adult. So you have basically a better smeller at the beginning than later on and then you lose it because you don't need it much. You focus on vision and other things. So I'm now on closing parenthesis. So this idea that somehow we have like a linear thing, it's like cells are very dumb, but neurons are very smart.

I think that's naive, yeah. I think the different type of intelligence that you need to have in place and to communicate to each other from the very beginning. And if you take the pregnant state and going back again to the self. you need to have in place and to communicate with each other from the very beginning. If you take the pregnant state and going back again to the self, so if you take the pregnant state at the cellular level, then you realize, okay, so inside the system which grows, again, I'm talking because I'm using the language and it's like a discrete language with words and saccades, but in reality, there is no end point and starting point,

as everything is happening as a continuum. So in this continuum, which is the system at the level of cellular system that tells which one is you, which one is not you, that's the immune system. So you need a very good immune system in place very early on to make sure that the interaction that you have with the environment, because you have it all the time, is not going to give you some sort of viruses. And then you let in the cells stuff that you shouldn't let in, and then your life journey is ending.

So you need to make decisions very early on. And actually, the pregnancy is a decision that two organs take together. It's like, oh, shall I get in? Shall I get out? It's like, let me get you in, let me get you out. It's not, and actually the first trimester of the pregnancy is the period where you have the most miscarriages because sometimes that's the negotiation, the tough negotiation what is going on. It's like, we're going to have the resources shared for a moment or not. Interesting. And basically you have three and then and there you have two immune systems within a

single organism, a single, you know, we have the pregnant person and you have two immune system communicating with each other trying to like a violin, you know, make the concerto work. And it's fascinating because you have the placenta and placenta is like the intermediary relational organ in between, and that has its own immune system. So basically have a hybrid immune system within one single system. And again, I'm telling you this, this is universal. It's like all humans go through this process. Yeah. So this means that you have this two system communicating and then you need to make decisions and roughly have three stages.

The first one is the inflammatory one. And hence, many pregnant people, they'll tell you, for many of them, it's like they have nausea and stuff because it's like, you know, inflammation. And then they have the second stage was like, please stage because they reach an agreement. And then you have the third stage, which is like, okay, so now you're getting to be get out. Yeah. So you need to have the inflammation again to make the childbirth happening. Yeah. So it's like, so, and this is a very carefully crafted mechanism.

I find it fascinating. I think we should have more work on this because, again, what I'm trying to say is this is how we get into a life journey through this dialogue. So the very first thing we learn as individuals is how to negotiate with another individual, another organism. And that's negotiation. From that negotiation, we can have life, healthy life, life, not healthy life, or death. And yeah, so that's a bit of the balance that we have from the very beginning. Michael, because we've been talking about the self and we're going to continue talking

about it, it would be useful to define it. So why don't you define the self and then we'll see if it comports with your definition. Wow, yeah. I actually have a definition that I crafted. It's on my website. I can't remember it, of course, verbatim. So, I mean, I think one of the most let's go back for a second. At one point, I tried, and this is in this 2019 CELFs paper, I tried to create a rubric on which you could simultaneously place very diverse intelligences.

So I'm talking about human cells, artificial beings, aliens, swarms, robots, I mean, all of it. And so I tried to ask myself, what do all these things have in common, right? So not what they're made of, not how they got here, not their composition or provenance, but what do they all have in common? And what I thought interesting agents have in common is some degree of goal directedness. So that means that what you could do is you could draw what I call a cognitive light cone,

which is basically, it's kind of like a poor man's Minkowski kind of cone where basically what you're showing, you collapse all the space into one axis, time is the other. And what you're showing you collapse all the space into into one axis time as the other and what you're trying to draw is the scale of the biggest goals that the system can pursue not not how far does it sense not how far can it act not the not the range of interactions you know it's like the James Webb telescope has massive sensory range but but but not that but but the size of the goals right so what is the goal? So what I mean by just to give an example, if I know the scale of your goals

and the scale of things that stress you out, I roughly know your degree of recognition. So for example, if you tell me that all you care about is the local sugar concentration in a little tiny area, you're probably a bacterium. And if you tell me that you've got a forward looking, so there's some memory and then some predictive capacity and what you're really interested in is maintaining a particular state

over a range of a few hundred yards, you might be a dog. And you're never gonna care about what happens four months from now, 10 miles away, it's too far, right? That you've got a, it's too far, right? That you've got a, there's a certain range that you can do. And if you tell me that you, you're working actively towards world peace and the state of the financial markets a hundred years from now, you're probably a human. And if you tell me that in the linear range, you can exert compassion for all the beings

of the planet, not like a small number the way we can, but like all of them, then, then you're, you know, you're some sort of body software or something or beyond human rights. So from the scale of your goals, you can kind of tell what you are. So that's the basis, that's where I start. And so we can say that, so to define a self, you can define a system, and by the way, all this is plastic. So the most salient thing about selves is that they're a process. They're not a fixed thing, so they change all the time. So all all this is plastic. So the most salient thing about selves is that they're a process. They're not a fixed thing, so they change all the time.

So all of this is plastic. The scale of your goals are plastic. The competencies with which you pursue those goals can change the problem spaces into which you project your activities and those goals can also change. But a self is like this, I think a useful version of the self is a process that has several

interlocked features. And one of those features is the ability to remember and to pursue goals in the cybernetic sense. You may not be aware you have goals and you may or may not have the metacognition to change your goals, but you're a goal pursuing agent. That comes with some machinery to try to draw a computational boundary between yourself and the outside world. So you have some idea, some hypothesis about where you end and where the outside world begins, which again helps you set goals because your goals are mostly about a particular region. And then there's something else which is important. I don't know how deeply you want me What you have access to are the engrams that the past,

that previous you has compressed the various experiences into structures in your brain and body. And at every given moment, you have to reinterpret those memory structures, whatever the medium is, and continuously tell and retell a coherence story about what you are, how you got here, what the outside world means, what you do next. This is a constant process of construction.

So I think a self is that ongoing basically kind of self-referential process that attempts to tell a story about an ongoing thing with particular boundaries, with particular goals, and in particular, always projected forward, right? I don't exactly know what happened in the past. I'm going to do my best to kind of confabulate a consistent story on the fly. But what I do know for sure is that I need to make decisions right now. I mean, I need to decide what do I do next? And so that kind of forward looking, self-constructive process that continuously interprets the

memory affordances given to you to try to figure out what you're going to do next. That to me sounds like a useful concept to myself. And I want to get to your concept, but I do want to delve a tad more into this. So you mentioned that we're constantly constructing our memories. Are we constantly in control of that? Is it us that's constructing the memory? Now, some of this has to do with control, like free will. Is this just automatically happening? Do we have some degree of autonomy or degree of direction that we can place on it?

So, I mean, so doing a proper discussion of free will can take, you know, an infinite amount of time, but, but, but just to say something relevant is, is, is two things. One is I think a useful sense of free will is very time extended. You don't, you don't have right now complete control of whatever your next thought is going to be. And in fact, you know, as you think about free from what? Free from, from past experience? No. And you about free from what? Free from past experience? No, and you don't want to be free from past experience because then you don't learn, you know, free from the laws of physics? No free free.

So what do you really have at the moment? Like within a narrow timeframe? Maybe not much, but over the long term, by the application of consistent effort, what you can do is shape your own cognitive structure so that in the future, new things are open to you, your own structure allows you to do new things. So I think free will exists in the time extended sense where the one thing you have free will over is consistent effort to modify yourself and your environment so that future you is more in line with whatever your values are than otherwise it would be. That's what you have. You have the ability to apply consistent effort. I think about it almost like calculus. It's infinitesimally small, but eventually you end up with something, right? And

that's what I think it is. At any given moment, it's like infinitesimally small amount of free will, but if you keep showing up and keep at it, you will, you will shape yourself and the information you have in the world you live in, whatever, in a way that is more in accordance to your values. That I think is a useful form of free will. The other thing, the other thing to point out, and this is kind of a really weird kind of direction that we've, that I've been going in lately, is that there are actually two ways of thinking about this. One way of thinking about this is as the being that is interpreting memories. And so this gets into a whole thing of who's the machine and who's the data. So we have this standard kind of Turing paradigm where it's like, this is the physical organism

or the machine, this thing takes actions. And then there's passive data and it sort of processes the data, maybe interprets it, maybe stores it, maybe generalizes it to form some sort of an engram or something. But I actually think for reasons that we could talk about that the patterns themselves and perhaps the memories themselves have agency of their own. And this is William James kind of nodded at this when he said the thoughts are thinkers, right? This distinction, this fundamental, people tend to make a very fundamental distinction.

I'm a real physical object and then I have patterns of activity in my excitable medium that are thoughts. I think it's much deeper than that. And I think what we could ask is, yes, the agent is interpreting those memories, but some of those memories as patterns, as we are, we are metabolic patterns ourselves, have some amount of agency to alter the way that they get processed. So I realize this is like a very strange idea, but I actually think the memories are not passive data. And you can also, you can warm up to this a little bit.

There's a couple of ways to warm up to it. One is to think about, look, here's a continuum, a fleeting thought, right? There's a mental pattern that comes and goes, it's gone. Meh, not much agency there. Well, you get some persistent and repetitive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of and they do something interesting. They do a little, and you may have more to say on this than I, they do a little bit of niche construction on the brain. If you have certain kinds of thoughts, they will actually modify your brain such that you will have more of those thoughts, right?

So ecologists would say that's niche construction. Then we can go past that and we can think about something like a personality fragment or an altar, right? Not a full human personality, but also not just a repetitive thought. It's got a little bit of, you know, it has some goal directedness. It will actually do stuff in the world that sometimes screws stuff up for some of the other personalities. Like it really has some agent and then you have a full, a full human personality and maybe pass that some sort of a transpersonal thing

that people have talked about. So, so we can easily see how, how there's a continuum here. And I think that some sort of a transpersonal thing that people have talked about. So we can easily see how there's a continuum here. And I think that some of these thoughts, and you can imagine as patterns within the cognitive medium, think like an easier way to think about this is the caterpillar to butterfly transition. Right, so you have a caterpillar, it's a soft bodied creature with a particular control,

right, soft body means you can't push, there are no hard elements to push on like you would with a robot. Do you have with a hard bodied robot? You have to do different things and it lives in basically a two-dimensional world that crawls around and it eats leaves. You can, you can, um, and this is, uh, this is some old work by Doug Blackison and the number of other people. You can train those caterpillars to there's a certain color cue and then

you could, they crawl over and they find some leaves and you know, they're happy. That caterpillar has to become a butterfly in order to become a butterfly. That's a hard bodied creature. It lives in a three dimensional world. The brain is completely different. So as to tear down most of the brain, most of the cells die, most of the connections are broken and you make a new brain, you make a, you make a butterfly. The memories persist. Now that's amazing enough, because you're like, wow,

how do memories persist when you're refactoring the whole medium? But it's actually much more interesting than that. And I did only, it took me years to actually get to what's really interesting about this, which is that the actual memories, the fidelity of the memory is actually not what you need here at all, because the actual memories of the caterpillar are useless to the butterfly. It doesn't move the same way. It doesn't care about leaves. None of the details matter. The details are completely irrelevant. What you do inherit as a butterfly are kind of the deep lessons that the caterpillar learn. And so you have to not only keep the information,

you have to remap and reinterpret that. Whatever engrams survive the brain refactoring, those engrams cannot be used the way the caterpillar used them. You have to reinterpret them in a completely new way, remap them onto a new sensory motor architecture and everything else. So one could imagine that if there's that process, if a particular memory as an agent wants to survive that process, you cannot stay the same. It's the same paradox that affects us all.

If you don't change, you will die. If you do change, you're no longer yourself. So you're also not here, right? Like that, it applies to species, it applies to everything. It's the paradox of change. If you are a memory that wants to survive that process, you cannot remain exactly how you are,

but you might have certain features that would make you more easily interpretable by the butterfly brain, and, the, the butterfly brain. And thus you will make it into this new world, not the same as you were, but some, you know, to some, to some extent you will, you will remain. Right. So, so I think, so I think there's two things going on in this, in this process that you asked about one is, uh, the, the agent is, is, is shuffling

and reinterpreting these memories. And our current model of this is like this bowtie model that you see in, for example, in autoencoders and neural cellular automaton, things like this, where the process of learning compresses into a generative seed, into an engram, that thin middle layer of that architecture. And so that's an algorithmic process, right? You generalize instances into a rule. But then the right side of that bow tie, the expansion side, that's creative,

that's not algorithmic, because you've lost information. You've lost all the, you've sort of squeezed out a lot of the correlations, and now you're gonna interpret what those memories mean, and this is what I meant earlier when I said that, you know, a key thing of a self is to figure out what your own memories mean because you don't know, right? You, you, you are not tied to using them. And, and you know, what you were saying about this makes you fit. This, this is the thing that makes me sort of makes me happy is this idea that you are

in no way tied to the story that was told by your past self, even as far back as whatever, 300 milliseconds, you know, you, you, you are always in the job of reinterpreting and you can always tell a better story. And the way that the, your past self was, it was compressing and interpreting that information, you are now free to tell it differently. And this is also, I just said, you know, one last thing, this is also what happens in embryonic development with, with the genome, because every embryo, they look very reliable and it looks like all they're doing is interpreting the, they're following the same cues that their ancestors did all back in the lineage. So interestingly enough, that same information dynamic is true not only for

cognitive systems within their lifetime, but actually for embryogenesis and for evolution as a whole. Because we might think that embryogenesis is stereotypical, that basically every embryo just follows the same rules that the past lineage has. But what we see, and that's what normally happens under normal circumstances, but when you start investigating that cognitive system by putting barriers between it and its goal, meaning trying to deflect it from the thing it's trying to build, you find out that no, it actually has incredible creative problem solving capacity to, it doesn't take the meaning of that genome literally at all,

it takes the molecular mechanisms that are encoded by that genome as affordances, which it can reshuffle in new ways. And there are some amazing, I've talked about this before, but some amazing ways that embryos and other morphogenetic systems manage to make a new thing under a new environment in circumstances where all of its parts have changed, massive change. They can still figure out how to get the job done by not doing it exactly the way their ancestors did, but by creatively finding a new solution

in this problem space. So I think there are two aspects to this. One is that creative interpretation of what your memories, whether they be the genetic memories of your lineage or the actual behavioral memories of a mind, what do your memories mean? And then there's the other question of, okay, but you are a metabolic pattern,

you're a ship of theses that exists in various other spaces. These memories are other kinds of patterns. Some of them have some degree of agency as well, anywhere along that spectrum that we talked about. And what are their goals? Are their goals to proliferate through as many minds as possible? Is it to persist?

Is it to grow? Is it to change? I have no idea, but I think we need to be looking at it from both perspectives because it is not obvious who's the agent and who's the data. That's our framing, like you said before, that's a framing that we bring. And how you map that onto reality is there are multiple ways of doing that. Well, that's interesting and inspirational. Let me roughly state back what you said. There are tools that are given to us and there are the ways that our ancestors have used those tools and I'll call that the literal way.

We don't have to use those tools in the literal way because we have a goal. We can creatively use those tools and in fact cells do that as well. They don't literally look at the genome. They have a goal and they can change. There's some wiggle room. Now you're extending that further into memory that we don't have to look at the way that we have interpreted memory in the past. We can think about what is our goal now and then change our interpretation to serve us moving forward.

Yeah, basically because, so biology, both the kind that gives rise to our bodies and by extension what gives rise to our minds is committed to the idea that you don't know what your substrate meant to anybody, including your past self, because it is lay-by. The biological substrate is unreliable. This is one difference between us and our current computer architectures, where you work like hell to make sure that all the data at every level stays exactly how you put it. When you're programming a high level language, you don't think that your register are going to float off because the copper gets

warm, like the whole point of a good computer is that that does not happen. In biology, it's exactly the opposite. Biology commits from the beginning. The material is unreliable. We don't know how many copies of anything we're going to have. We don't know if our parts are going to be the same. In fact, you know, they're not, they will mutate over time. So, so all we're committed to is telling the best story we can right now.

And that's why I think, you know, all life is fundamentally a sense making process. It's a storytelling agent basically. And you don't know what your information meant to anything in the past. All you're going to do is make the best story of it you can now. And those differences may be small for a human unlike a caterpillar. Your brain mostly doesn't change that much, so the story doesn't float that much. But it can, significantly. And I'm sure you can talk about therapeutic situations where it changes massively.

Feel free to respond to any of what Mike said, but also your definition of the self. And is it consonant with what Mike said? So I fully agree with what you said Mike and but I want to go back to the cake thing with the carrot cake and the layer cake because I think this is super important. So how do you map a carrot cake if you want to map a carrot cake? So if you have a layered cake it's quite simple just like a measure you know distinction from A and B but a carrot cake you don't can't really map that. But you do have a reality carrot cake, way more than layer cake, actually. It's like clouds,

for instance, it's an object, but where exactly the cloud ends and begins. So there are some mathematicals who are not mainstream, but they're coming from the chaos theory and fractal theories, where they're trying to basically mathematically formalize fuzzy objects, like clouds, like caracades. Those are objects that exist, but if you want to mathematically formalize how you do it. And I would say, going back to your question about the definition of the self, I would say, within the theories, you have what they call an attractor, a state that attracts you. I would put that the self is that attractor state. So, something that in the midst of the change, in the midst of the inescapable change you

can have, which kind of like impinges over you, you need to push back and to keep the attractor state in a way. So basically, you negotiate with the environment, the negotiating like, okay, give me this, but I don't want this, I don't want the virus, give me just oxygen. And then I move to a different state. So it's an ongoing like tracking of an attractor state, which is ideas, which is like, I want to exist like the ecosystem. Yeah. And paradoxically, I cannot exist without the environment pushing back.

But in the same time, I need define the self as this highly desirable attractor state which at a certain point will catastrophically disappear. That's called death. And then the question would be, is the catastrophe also actually pushes us to life? So we are a desirable attractor states between two catastrophes. One is the birth and that one is like the death, yeah, like disintegration. And in the meantime, we try to keep this like state in the desirable position, which is like a certain range temperature for the warmth of the body, then the sugar level in the human body,

because otherwise you just like pass out and wanna pass out, yeah. So, and that attractor state has been not, you know, decided like that, it's like the fruit of like lots of interactions through the time, yeah. Figure out which one is the best attractive for that particular state. And that's I would say, but I would say again, going back to your first question, it's like, without the pushing back, there will be no tractor state, right? So it's like the two define each other, right, in a way.

Otherwise it would be just like flat eternity, infinity, which is going back to what Mike said, it would be so boring. You'd be like, okay, I need a catastrophe now. It's just like, because I need to be like, you know, the life thing would be like what lies in between. I'm confused about the attractor, because an attractor attracts something. So the person who's listening to this, are they supposed to think of their self as the attractor or as what's being attracted?

So I would say that what we call the self is an attractor state, right? As I said, it's something that within the chaos, within like the midst of the carrot cake, there is a state that you really want to keep in that yourself. Now the really interesting thing about this is that, as I said, you don't choose to be that attractor, right? It's like it's something that just exists, yeah. Because as I said, nobody asked my permission to be alive. It's just like, it's a part of something bigger.

So I'm connected as an attractor to another system that, you know, interacted, and then you have this new being. So it's a part of a chain, right? And it's the very fact of being part of the chain that defines me as it is. So hence this idea that you need a other before to be the self now. And so that's that be the main idea.

Is the reason for infantile amnesia when we don't access memories before too, usually, is the reason for that because we lack a model of self or is it because we lack language? So I'd push back against the idea that there is amnesia. So maybe there is no explicit recollection, but there is an encoding in the body that is really, really powerful and stays there. So children with non-verbal children, with abusive parents, there is a memory stored in the body and how they move their body around, which clearly shows, going back again to the body, it's like they haven't forgot about it.

It's just like a store at a different level. And then you access it. Sometimes people say, it's like, when I walk, I walk past an old wall this way, and then I realize, why am I doing this? It's like, people don't do that. And then realize it somehow connects with certain patterns that they

experience when they were babies and stuff like that, which is like kind of inconceivable to explicitly recollect. But there is indirectly like storage because you need to keep track of those. So there is no, I don't think there is, you know, there is like this idea of there is with switch on, switch off, right? There is like complete darkness and at a certain point, boom, with the language, it's like you become, you know, aware or conscious aware. I think we do have experience all the time, as I said, as fetuses, sorry, as babies and, you know, pre-verbal children. So we have experiences at the body level. And that's, I would contest this idea

that there is an amnesia at the body level, the body never forgets, you know. That's like you shouldn't, because if you do, then you fall again in the trap. And you don't want to fall, you want to stay alive here. Does that apply even to episodic memory? I'm not sure. I mean, I would contest this idea that, as I said, it's like you have explicit memories on one hand and implicit memories on the others. I think there is really like a continuum and then you can access the different tools and languages, one of them. But you can access different feelings. I'm pretty sure you have this. It's just like sometimes accidentally do certain gesture and then you are triggering the different

state and then you retrieve a feeling. Proust would say about the madeleine, you know, it's just like you eat something, you don't have to talk. You just like eat the madeleine and then up, back into that state. What is the connection, right? It's just a pure sensory state. Yeah. And then you can explicitly explain it, you know, what's happened. But I think it's important to keep that as a continuum. Yeah. So now you're speaking directly to the audience. I want to know what are your parting words. And especially as we are speaking off air, you're referencing some of the ways that you

are getting emails, eliciting new ideas and new connections that didn't occur to you before. Yeah. I think that some of the most interesting conversations take place across disciplines. And I've now had a number of amazing connections with people that are in psychiatry, trauma, of course, computer science and machine learning and architecture, all kinds of, deep history, all kinds of interesting fields that where, I don't have any expertise, but where people hear

some of the stuff that I've been talking about and see interesting parallels to their work. Those connections, those interdisciplinary projects and so on are some of the most interesting and valuable I think for the world going forward. Because I think the era of distinct disciplines, departments, all of those barriers, departments,

all of those kind of barriers, I think that's gonna be increasingly less relevant as time goes on. And we have to understand the deeper patterns of nature and then all the tools in the toolbox are needed for that. Anna, what message would you like to leave the audience with? And keep in mind that our audience comprises a large portion of researchers.

So people who are prospective researchers and people who are in the field already of philosophy, computer science, AI, math and physics. Yes, so I think my main message would be you need to be aware of the tools that we are using because the tools we're using changes basically the reality we're looking at. So for instance, like take language. When you investigate things at others, we take language and we have categories and conceptualization, saccadic, you know, it's like one word after another. That's one way to map in reality.

But I mean, reality is a continuum. I don't think we have the conceptual toolbox to map this like continuity. And also because we are using language as adults, we tend to think of this type of understanding through language as being like the pinnacle. What I want to say is like perhaps we have more embodied way of understanding would not necessarily require this type of of conceptualization,

which are as smart as our high-level abstract thinking at the moment, but that they are needed at that particular time when we need to develop it to do things. So I think the take-home message would be to stop thinking very naively, like some sort of linear progression. You know, start with some very dumb and achieve something like very smart, like the other thing. On the contrary, I think we, life or nature, call it what you want, gave us the right tool at the right moment to get into the flow, right? Like a continuity. So I think that's important. So we need to put back the humble roots into the spotlight with the importance of an and transport the mind, the smart individual. On the contrary, I think what we call the mind is given that to make sure that this

body is safe and survive for a long period of time. So it's a collaboration, so to speak, and there is no continuity between being dumb and to being very smart, rather just like we have intelligence at very low level, which is actually very smart, to make sure that right now we can have this coordinated discussion at the level. Without that in place, we wouldn't be able to coordinate now the way we're seeing here.

So we need that continuity. I think that would be my message. Thank you. It was an honor to speak with both of you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. It was great.

Thank you. Thank you so much. New update, start at a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey Kurt you've spoken to so many

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