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
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?
—John Stuart Mill
Henrik Karlsson • Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process
Culture and Ideology are not Your Friends
Would it be wrong to call this some kind of multi-layer competency architecture?
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
... See more"Nothing in biology makes sense without teleology" by Michael Levin
Build Your Own Damn Wagon
This is blowing my mind. This stuff in combination with Levin’s work is very, very interesting.
Dreaming Awake at the End of Time
Terence McKenna