My first conversation with Michael Levin, a developmental biologist revolutionizing how we think about cellular collective, agency, and life in general. One of those conversations where I feel we dive deep and only scratch the surface, at the same time: nested agents, birth, aging, and death, third person and first person science. Related episodes:Embodied AI: https://youtu.be/JZ8GTucClpMAlexander Ororbia: https://youtu.be/N83vBfz7_BIBaudouin Saintyves: https://youtu.be/NmvzEpz9R84Laura Desiree Di Paolo: https://youtu.be/9txUwVtAOBkAnna Riedl: https://youtu.be/w2ZiSWZNQsgAnna Ciaunica: https://youtu.be/x1QHwhlCn-8Giuseppe Paolo: https://youtu.be/R7tEd65e2i800:00 Intro.04:11 Agency. Cellular cognition. How to prompt cells?18:45 Nested agency. Interpenetrating ecosystems, vertical and horizontal. The life of persistent patterns.23:46 Nested cognitive light cones: how do goals grow in collective agents?31:34 What do the parts think about the whole? How does higher level meaning manifests itself at lower levels? The shamanistic method of first-person "science".38:33 Why do we die? Layered ontology and Bard's process and event: the dynamics of nested agents. Birth, death, self-transformation. Psychological theory of aging. Vervaeke's reciprocal narrowing.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1:01:31
Embodied AI with Giuseppe Paolo and Jonas Gonzalez
Meet my two wonderful colleagues with whom we wrote a position paper last year "A Call for Embodied AI". We talk about the limits of the current "internet AI" paradigm. We agree that singularity, if even a thing, is very far, LLMs will not lead there, but that social media AI is already an embodied AI that is seamlessly rewiring us.Paper: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/paolo24a.htmlRelated episodes: Yogi Jaeger: https://youtu.be/5UJ4y2L2qpkAnna Riedl: https://youtu.be/w2ZiSWZNQsgAnna Ciaunica: https://youtu.be/x1QHwhlCn-8Alexander Ororbia: https://youtu.be/N83vBfz7_BILaura Desire di Paolo: https://youtu.be/9txUwVtAOBk00:00:00 Intro.00:02:54 Why are we interested in embodied AI? Robotics and philosophy.00:12:10 The ingredients of embodied AI.00:15:30 Affordances. Seeing the world as a set of meanings rather than a set of objects. Who is setting the goals?00:28:29 Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle and Active Inference. Open and closed worlds. The hardware challenge. Filtering and relevance realization. Jaeger's non-computationality argument.00:39:36 Lecun's JEPA and our criticism: representation is not objective, it is transjective. Babies learn interactively. The importance of love (binding) and self-sacrifice. Levin's TAME. Multi-agent emergence.00:52:23 AGI. What do we want from AGI to be? Life? Slaves? Asimov's I, Robot, and the impossibility of propositional alignment.01:01:50 The issue with optimization: timescale. Levin's cognitive cones. The only answer is love.01:07:44 Social media AI. The Algorithm, feed, companies, advertisement. The subconscious of internet. The danger. How are they embodied? They are spirits. I want access to the Algorithm at an intermediate level. I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1:34:50
Alexander Bard part 3
This is the brainiest of my three episodes with Alexander Bard.The deepest analysis I know of the US election, from a centrist/neutral point of view, from the psychoanalytical to the anthropological.A look at AI from an anthropological angle. AI cannot do abduction, lacks emotional intelligence thus creativity. Hallucinations, Wikipedia, and the St Tropez nude beach. Dreams and the psychoanalysis of AI. Netocracy and consumariat. The first part of our conversation: https://youtu.be/Y8cuqy6y0foThe second part of our conversation: https://youtu.be/eASbv9WA-TQProcess and Event seminar series on Parallax: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSc7jFP5VeNHTwj4vzq7Tv6UIhAPCC4vpAlexander Bard is a philosopher and futurist specializing in the relationship between humanity and technology, with a profound interest in psychoanalysis and anthropology to understand the impact of technological change on interpersonal relationships.00:00:00 Intro.00:03:32 Bard's anoject: the anonymous subject with which we like to identify. It takes off our responsibility for our acts and beliefs. Kristeva's abject: the scapegoat who we blame. Psychoanalysis meets society.00:24:41 The hyperject: Moses the hero who leads us out of our misery, or Jesus, the scapegoat turned messiah who saves us by his existence. Anoject and hyperject are the ultimate extremes of subjectivity. The test: is the power player heroic, or playing into my resentment.00:31:15 How do we know that when we talk about Man (as an anthropologist), we don't fall into anojectification? Democracy is about the king not getting killed when losing power, not about the will of the people.00:39:14 AI. How the mechanisms of fear, resentment, ano- and abject and hyperjectification, shape our technological world. Social media creates lynch mobs. 00:58:16 AI cannot do abduction, lacks emotional intelligence thus creativity. Make AIs compete. Hallucinations, Wikipedia, and the St Tropez nude beach. Dreams and the psychoanalysis of AI. Netocracy and consumariat.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1:23:17
Alexander Ororbia
We get deep into identity and death. If you are fascinated by Michael Levin and Jonathan Pageau, this conversation is for you.Fascinating discussion where we go beyond the Free Energy Principle, and even Levin's cognitive cones, and postulate that crucial internal structures, a subset of me, are what define identity. If they get damaged, I lose my identity. Deep self-transformation may also rupture my continuity. When does it happen, when do I die, as opposed to my subsystems dying? Very much a sequel to my conversation with Yogi Jaeger (https://youtu.be/5UJ4y2L2qpk). The paradox of self-preservation vs self-sacrifice. Maverick computing and organoids.Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. He directs the Neural Adaptive Computing (NAC) Laboratory where they work on developing new learning procedures and computational architectures that embody various properties of biological neurocircuitry and are guided by theories of mind and brain functionality. His research focuses on predictive processing, active inference, spiking neural networks, competitive neural learning, neural-based cognitive modeling, and metaheuristic optimization.Alexander's webpage: https://www.rit.edu/directory/agovcs-alexander-ororbiaPaper link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09589Biological learning survey: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.0925700:00:00 Intro00:01:37 Geoff Hinton's "mortal computation" idea: what if software and hardware were inseparable? Cybernetics, thermodynamics, 4e cognitive science, basal cognition.00:11:20 Hinton's energy consumption argument.00:21:01 The self-preservation directive is the source of intelligence. The free energy principle. The non-equilibrium steady state is your identity.00:32:21 The paradox of the membrane: a permeable separation of inside and outside. The nestedness of inside and outside: fractal structure. Beyond FEP: identity-defining internal structures. Subsystemic death. Bottom-up and top-down causation.00:52:12 Why mortal (as opposed to living) computation? The crucial role of finite time horizon.01:01:49 The paradox of self-preservation vs self-sacrifice. Life drive vs death drive. Is death a must? Maverick computing and organoids.01:15:38 My take on embodiment and mortality.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1:20:24
Alexander Bard part 2
This is my second conversation with the philosopher Alexander Bard. Yoga and alignment, downwards in the body and upwards in the sociont. Archetypology and rituals. Tantric sex and the sex/religion/spirituality triad. The masculine drive towards the project. Collective purpose and men's work. The first part of our conversation: https://youtu.be/Y8cuqy6y0foProcess and Event seminar series on Parallax: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSc7jFP5VeNHTwj4vzq7Tv6UIhAPCC4vpAlexander Bard is a philosopher and futurist specializing in the relationship between humanity and technology, with a profound interest in psychoanalysis and anthropology to understand the impact of technological change on interpersonal relationships.00:00:00 Intro00:03:19 My Yoga experience and the general notion of alignment. Relation to the sociont and tribology. Relation to couple therapy. The chemistry of a music band.00:12:31 Archetypology. Psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, data anthropology. Internal family system. Families, clans, and tribes.00:25:51 Rituals: Eliade and Van Gennep, idiosyncratic nuclear family. Event/process in wedding/marriage.00:29:10 Sex. The sexualized process and event. Sexuality and spirituality. Taoist sex. Meditation vs absolute bliss: sexuality and psychedelics.00:38:09 Tantric/Taoist history and modern teachers.Mantak Chia, David Deida, John Wineland, Kim Anami. Dualist Islam Sufism and monist Zoroastrian Zufism.00:42:15 Alexander's six-episode course on Process and Event, relation to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. But P&E doesn't avoid the bliss like AFTMC. The ego appears in the dialectics of the pure experience (meditation) and bliss (tantric sex).00:45:20 Purpose. My tribal experience in the Pierre Auger experiment. Monastery = tribe + mission. Project precedes subject and object.00:54:46 Relevance realization, where the project comes from? 01:01:27 Collective purpose, flow, and men's work.I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/balazskeglArtwork: DALL-EMusic: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.