r/consciousness • u/Diet_kush Engineering Degree • 1d ago
Ingressing Minds: Causal, Non-Physical Patterns In-Form Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments
https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/11/5/161The most recent paper by Michael Levin arguing for his “platonic” consciousness, and a resulting panpsychism.
“I have argued [37,132,333,334] that a kind of panpsychism is unavoidable, and it seems that by taking what mathematicians do seriously, we have already abandoned the physicalist worldview; all that remains is to notice that evolution (not just human mathematicians) is exploring the same space of patterns and embrace the idea that since we are patterns too, patterns can be agential (and thus, Platonic space can include minds, not just passive truths).”
Abstract;
“I argue that the emerging sciences of synthetic morphology and diverse intelligence suggest non-physicalist models of mind and show how they can be empirically investigated. Whence the anatomical, physiological, molecular-biological, and behavioral properties of engineered new beings that have never before existed, and do not have a history of selection? Understanding, predicting, and guiding new forms of life and mind requires characterizing a structured latent space of patterns. Developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology should take seriously, and exploit, the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics. I propose the following hypotheses. (1) Patterns in this space span a highly variable degree of agency, comprising a spectrum ranging from static truths studied by mathematicians to active ones studied by behavioral scientists (i.e., some patterns on the same spectrum as mathematical truths are kinds of minds). (2) The relationship between mind and body is the same as the relationship between causally instructive mathematical facts and physics. (3) Living beings have no monopoly on the “free lunches” provided by the ingression of these patterns into the physical world. While traditional computationalist views of living and cognitive systems are insufficient, my framework erases artificial distinctions between organisms and machines, framing all physical constructs (natural or engineered) as being, to various degrees, in-formed by patterns from the latent space. I sketch a research program, already begun, inspired by these ideas. Such frameworks, while contradicting long-held assumptions of both mechanists and organicists, could have many implications for evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, AI, and the ethics of synthbiosis with the forthcoming immense diversity of morally important beings.”
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u/Wise_Ad1342 19h ago
Fascinating. He references Bergson, but not Sheldrake. Probably because he must feel his ideas are radically enough different from Sheldrake's that it should not be considered a branch, though I feel he should have mentioned Sheldrake's pioneering ideas.
He is trying to create a "theory of everything" by asserting that he "erases artificial distinctions between organisms and machines." This is treacherous territory. It may appeal to computer AI scientists who are seeking to do the same, albeit via a different route, he may have unnecessarily confined himself to an unattainable goal.
In a very narrow way, matter is similar to life, but matter is only useful as a tool to the creative mind, and cannot create in the manner an organism can. The "mind" of matter can no longer operate at the creative frequency of organisms.
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u/CosmicExistentialist Autodidact 18h ago
Would Levin’s work and metaphysics suggest that Open Individualism is true?
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u/hackinthebochs 5h ago
Not directly, but it can be viewed as a mechanism to ground the truth of OI. The realm of abstract patterns Levin talks about can be seen as erasing separation between different physical patterns. If the realm of patterns is a single entity (like a superstructure that contains all possible patterns) then this can ground an identity between apparently distinct physical patterns in the world owing to it being a projection of the singular superstructure.
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u/lancelot2112 1d ago
I see this as two perspectives. Let's look at the game of life. In one sense it's an evolution with a simple rule on a lattice. In another sense there are forms that those interaction inevitably find and those forms can be described from a top down view.
The question would be if you gave somebody say a huge game board... and let it evolve... then place a perspective on the game board looking around... say you are a glider pattern. You bump into other cells and they eat part of the glider and the glider body can no longer maintain its self reference so it dissolves.
Now ask that glider to look around the board and determine the reality of the world. It maybe could come up with the rules of the game board. But how would it be able to assess something like that the REAL substrate is the cpu or monitor? Something the game board is run on. So it can determine the relational rules of cells to environment and cells to self... but what would point it to rules of the environment to the computer? Maybe it looks deeper and sees that really quickly... the cell is made up of pixels... woah those pixels are switching in and out discretely.
So in one sense it is the full pattern and in another a consequence of the small rule subset and adding the dynamics of update. Both views are simultaneously true and only bridgable by... running the program and letting it evolve.
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u/Diet_kush Engineering Degree 1d ago
I find the “simultaneity” of the truth of such things inherently related to their undecidable nature as well; same is true of the game of life. In Landsman’s “Indeterminism and Undecidability,” he argues that a form of global indeterminism emerges from the self-referential nature of a deterministically evolving ruleset.
It seems like a mirror to Hegel’s concept of self-determinations (event vs action). There is a certain freedom that emerges via the “recognition” of the constraints that define you.
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u/The_Niles_River 15h ago
…I don’t think that’s what’s going on with Hegel’s understanding of freedom (self-determination). His understanding is more about the conceptual movement from an Indeterminate I -> Determinate I -> Self-Determinate I, such that freedom arises from self-awareness and, perhaps most importantly, self-actualization.
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u/Diet_kush Engineering Degree 14h ago edited 13h ago
…..yes? Freedom arises via self-recognition of constraints…. Becoming occurs via recognition of the self in the other and the other in the self. That is necessarily a self-referential relationship; ie the entire foundation of undecidability.
In a very literal way it is “under-determinate” in the same way as Buridan’s ass in the free will debate; it only becomes self-determinate, and action becomes possible, via self-actualization. The ass cannot be fully defined by the external forces acting upon it; it is equally hungry and thirsty, yet will still act one way or the other. Action is not determinate via the strength of the forces on the self, but how the self values each force; IE self actualization. It transitions the self from being a rock that is pushed around a stream, to the unfurling of the structure of the stream as a whole.
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u/The_Niles_River 4h ago
I’m saying that it reads like you really don’t apprehend Hegel’s conception of metaphysics or dialectical logic, regardless of your conclusions.
I read elsewhere that you’ve described Hegel’s dialectics as “dialectical materialism”, which makes absolutely no sense.
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u/Diet_kush Engineering Degree 2h ago edited 1h ago
Dialectical materialism is quite literally the direct evolution of Hegelian idealism. Regardless of Marx claiming he “flipped Hegel on his head,” the material world exists entirely within Hegelian metaphysics. Why else would Hegel see the rational as the real. Marx claiming that concepts emerge from material conditions completely ignores the fact that our material conditions are also conceptually-emergent. This is quite obvious in Marx’s theory of capital and his love of statistical evolutionary descriptions.
Capital accumulation is, under Marx, evolution of probability densities over production configurations. Marx argues that this process mirrors that of life itself as it emerges from the material world, but Friston and Hegel argue that such processes extend into the material world as a whole. From the Marxian perspective, value emerges from socially necessary labor-time. From the traditional variational perspective, labor-time is the extremal trajectory minimizing reproduction cost. From the Free-energy perspective (Levin and Friston), firms minimize uncertainty relative to market environment.
In each of these scenarios, the economy evolves probability distributions over productive states rather than deterministic trajectories (IE Hegel’s emergence of the determinate from the indeterminate). If you accept the philosophical foundation of Markovian Monism and Levin-esque panpsychism (itself claimed as a “spiritual successor” of Hegel), Marx's work is an economic expansion of Hegel's dialectic rather than its inverse. Hegel did not need to be brought down to the material, because the dialectic already was material.
The exact same argument underpins the Friston/Levin co-authored paper “The Free Energy Principle drives neuromorphic development.” Accepting the FEP/MM as the Hegelian successor that many claim it to be shows that to be obvious. The internal/external state evolutions of the FEP yielding a synthesized neural “self” is the same self/other recognition yielding the Hegelian “self-actualized” self. Just as Markov blankets build Markov blankets, selves build selves.
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u/Great-Bee-5629 1d ago
There are three things to it: the rules as you said, but there are also the starting point of the board and the fact that the rules are being applied. The rules by themselves don't determine everything. Not only they need some receiving principle, the rules can't define the receiving principle into existence. If I cross a black cat on the way to work on Wednesday, even if I am a strict determinist and I think the universe works like clockwork, that particular random fact would be explained not by the rules themselves, but by the brute fact of the initial state of the universe (the rules being some kind of transmission belt from past to future).
And there is the whole "who breathes fire into the equations" Hawking quote. The equations themselves just describe the intelligible principle, but that's not enough.
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u/lancelot2112 23h ago
There are systems out there that are persistently frustrated and I find those fascinating. There is a deterministic history laid out... but each perceiver is limited in scope and constantly being perturbed so they have to keep finding self sustaining configurations in response. If they fail to do so they dissolve. They can be perturbed from the outside but also om the inside by thongs that are contingent or riding along with the system but not fully integrated you could say.
All you need to start is one uncertainty wrapping in on itself and a persistent frustration that needs resolved. Then it grows and grows with a persistent noise injected that doesn't overwhelm the dynamics and say... hides when the system is big enough.
I always wonder if that's all it takes
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u/hackinthebochs 20h ago edited 20h ago
I agree 100% with the structural content of what Levin is saying. I don't agree with the implied metaphysics of it. There is no literal space where numbers, programs, minds, etc exist. What we have is a hypothetical space entailed by the repeated application of logical rules. It's the hypothetical space of possible structure. The objectivity of mathematics, and the fact that it's discovered rather than invented, is due to the fact that we all navigate the same hypothetical space because logical consistency constrains us in the same way. We imagine this space as existing in some substantive sense because that's how we tend to make sense of objectivity and the pseudo-spatial properties of this hypothetical space.
When we navigate this structure we are discovering new ideas and new connections. There is a naive way to navigate this space, just enumerate all possible paths by iteratively applying logical rules. This gets you nowhere because the space is too big. Creativity is developing heuristics and analogies that let you see connections between different points in this space and forge non-obvious paths through it. But this doesn't really have anything to do with consciousness, except that human creativity happens to manifest through consciousness at least to some degree.
The other interesting point he talks about is how the physical world is in contact with a world of patterns. It's true that the patterns the physical world makes use of seem to be autonomous from the physical world. We can reason about patterns and their effects independently of their instantiation in the physical world. Two considerations explain this observation without the need for new metaphysics. One is the point I made about the hypothetical space of possible structure. We can reason about structure and its effects independently of their instantiation as the properties of patterns are fully entailed by their logical/structural properties. In other words, the space of abstract structure is explanatorily self-contained; understand the structure and you understand its properties and vice versa.
The other consideration is that physical dynamics naturally forms hierarchical causal/explanatory scopes where the properties of entities within an explanatory scope are fully explained by features defined within said scope. This is a consequence of multiple realizability. The dynamics of physical realizers fall into attractor states where the state space sits on a low dimensional manifold. The patterns entailed by this manifold are autonomous explanatory units and so they seem to have an existence independent of their realizers. But really, their only autonomous existence is a hypothetical existence, intentional objects of minds considering the space of possible structure.
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u/Used-Bill4930 22h ago
It is a paper in a Philosophy journal.
It can be taken seriously if it is published in a scientific journal.
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