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techstepgenr8tion
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10 Oct 2022, 1:46 pm

This is really interesting stuff in general, ie. what's going around - especially with respect to Michael Levin's work but other people as well who are thinking in similar ways.

This is Marshall Perry, saying very similar things about consciousness and self-awareness being fractal through different layers of biology and discussing ways in which evolution happens even through life within systems, both in adjustment to pathogens and gene damage, adding my own two cents here - I'd assume that much of biology has internal opponent processes (I don't think they'd disagree but it's just not stated here), similar to what we use to scale up neural networks, and that these help bootstrap some of the more expensive cognitive processes we have such as vision. Something they're saying in this discussion (Karen and Perry) is that as the state of a system is best understood as homeostasis plus goals, the goals are a bit like what I've heard Bret Weinstein describe as 'search spaces', and if there are interruptions to those goals those interruptions are interruptions to homeostasis as well, and what seems to come in as a result is patches to homeostasis through patches to resistance in goal attainment. This is where homeostasis, emotion, consciousness, etc. seem to all work together - where consciousness apprehends certain things about external and internal environment and martials resources to act accordingly whereas homeostasis seems more like it's the churning of subconscious / unconscious processes which will then feed instructions back to consciousness.

The combination problem, ie. why we experience trillions of cells as something like a contiguous 'I', is interesting although Michael Levin's said something in his interview with Sean Carroll on Mindscape about gap junctions being part of how cells directly share internal metadata and in turn share identity as a pair, group, or even as a tissue.

This sort of work makes things much more interesting because it's evaluating biology in a way much closer to how we experience it, ie. dynamic recursive processing happening at many layers and many levels, and to that degree it ends up being self-correcting. The bit about Barbara McClintock and her research into DNA self-repair in irradiated plants was really interesting, although quite sad that she had to pay the typical price one does for being ahead of their time (add also wrong time / wrong gender).

This also very much makes me wonder if a new sort of life will be breathed back into certain types of Jungian psychology, ie. I listen to 'Jung to Live By' and so much of what they discuss is the psychological model ramifications of these sorts of systems and really a whole spectrum of systems mapped through self-analysis from conscious awareness to complexes down to archetypal images, Pankseppian instincts, down to genes at the base level (and as Karen suggests that Michael Levin had been in dialog with Mark Solms, Mark has also been on Jung To Live By as well).


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techstepgenr8tion
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10 Oct 2022, 1:48 pm

Some of the other Michael Levin interviews if anyone's interested (as well as one where he's in dialog with both Karl Friston and Chris Fields):




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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin