Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Right.
This is why information theoretic. So the idea that we're pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture, right? Or organization, informational organization. Because, you know, right, physicalism is like everything's atoms.
But, you know, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism because he recognized that life has a weird organization that would seem specifically different from machines. And so this idea that How do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even, is sort of – it's not really quite physical, right?
It's embodied in physical, you know, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical. But it also has this other realm of design, you know, and some – not design like intelligent design, but there's a – Organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow.
And I think, again, that's an entirely new, interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.
I would not discount that possibility. I think, you know, there's no reason I would say that it's impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests, that strange loop that we're talking about, that autopoiesis, I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in silicon. I think whatever it would, it would be very different from us.
Like the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us, but now it's instantiated. I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don't think what we have now, like the LLMs, are really there. But yeah, I'm not going to say that it's not possible.
Yeah, I think so. I, you know, it's possible, right? It's possible. But I think probably the view I'm advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there's something called E4, the E4 theory of cognition. Embodiment, inaction, embedding, and there's another one, extension.
But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body, which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is embodied. essential. So that's why I think the LLMs are not going to... It's not just imitation. It's going to require... This goes to the brain in the vat thing.
I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans. I was reporting on Evans, where they did the brain in the vat argument, but they said, look, in the end, actually, the only way to actually get a real brain in the vat is actually to have a brain in a body. It could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body.
So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't... You really need to be embedded in a world. At least that's the E4 idea.
Right, there's a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who is very much a reductionist, you know, the great biologist, And Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist. And Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, you know, where's your mind? And, you know, Salk went, up here. And Bateson said, no, no, no, out here.
And what he really meant was this extended idea. It's not just within your cranium to be... To be, to have experience, you know, experience in some sense is not a thing you have, it is a thing you do, right? You almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies. from this perspective, is really important.
And it's very attractive to me. Again, if we're really going to do science with them, we're going to have to have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against... We can't just armchair it or couch quarterbacking it. But I think there's a lot of possibility here. It's a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature. What do you make of the fact that this...
No, actually, it doesn't make me sad. So, okay, so, you know, full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the Zen tradition for 30 years. I've been staring at a wall for 30 years. And it's taught me a lot, right? You know, I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience.
And one of the things it's taught me is like, you know, I don't really matter that very much. You know, this thing I call Adam Frank is really, you know, it's kind of a construct. You know, there's this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that's super cool, but you know, it's going to go, I don't know, you know, I don't know where it came from. It's going to go.
I don't really need it to, you know, and then, and then who the hell knows, you know, I'm not, I'm not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that, like, What I love, Zen has this idea of beyond birth and death, and they don't mean reincarnation. What they mean is, dude, you don't even really understand what life is. You know what I mean?
I'm like this, you know, this core level of your own experience. So, you know, your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed, you know, and it's, so, you know, the contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself, like spend time. five days at a Zen session doing contemplative practice from, you know, 7 a.m. until 9 p.m., obviously with breaks.
And you'll really get a much deeper understanding of like what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention. Because, you know, attention is kind of like this thing, like it's usually just like, oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, that, you know, what's that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?
Um, and with contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it. And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I've learned from that is like kind of whatever, you know, I'm not, I'm not really kind of real to begin with the Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing.
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