Consciousness

There is a paradox which points out that if a species fails to change, it will die out, but if it changes, it likewise ceases to exist. The same issue faces all of us: if we do not change, learning and growth is impossible. If we do change, does not the current Self cease to exist, in an important sense?

Michael Levin • Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue

And someone like Piaget has studied this phenomenon in the development of the drawing styles of young children, and believes, then, that a child essentially—in the spirit of the old song that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the child develops through these cultural phases. You know, from the iconic hieroglyphic to the flattened—I can’t remember... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

Damn. I’ve always wondered about this. “ontogeny recaps phylogeny” - how does that fit in with Ken Wilber’s “levels of thinking” stuff?

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

—John Stuart Mill

Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process

I believe—and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated—that nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales; very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. A solar system is a star with atoms... See more

Culture and Ideology are not Your Friends

Would it be wrong to call this some kind of multi-layer competency architecture?

He is introspecting, but he’s not introspecting by meditating on his existence or talking to a therapist (though maybe he should); he’s introspecting by acting on the world. He’s introspecting by doing stuff and then observing how it makes him feel—as if he was running a million small experiments trying to figure out the composition of this object... See more

Henrik Karlsson • Two Kinds of Introspection

There’s some parallel here to how Michael Levin is thinking about testing intelligent systems. You can’t be a “passive observer”. You have to actively change the environment of the system and see how it reacts.

I often think about the example of the electromagnetic spectrum. So prior to having a good theory of electromagnetism, we used to first of all think that static electricity, lightning, magnets, and light were all completely different things. They certainly seemed like different things. We had different words for them. The vocabulary that we used

"Nothing in biology makes sense without teleology" by Michael Levin

Dissipative structures are these special situations which arise in nature where order is actually preserved far from equilibrium. That’s the technical way of saying it. In other words, equilibrium is where you get to when you let go, and then you drift toward death, disintegration, decay, equilibrium. And sooner or later, in the old paradigm, all... See more

Build Your Own Damn Wagon

This is blowing my mind. This stuff in combination with Levin’s work is very, very interesting.

We talk a lot—and I’m sure there are people in this room who are well versed and connected into the world of virtual reality, which is a very hot topic and may have all kinds of implications for our future and the evolution of consciousness—but it’s worth pointing out that we have been making virtual realities for a very, very long time. That... See more

Dreaming Awake at the End of Time

Terence McKenna

I think law allows freedom because freedom means you go outside of law. But law doesn’t allow novelty, exactly. That’s a slightly different concept. So if you take seriously this idea that the concept of law can be replaced by the idea of habit, then suddenly you’re not in a Newtonian machine, a soulless cuckoo clock of natural laws. What you’re... See more