Michael Levin
speaker
1,198 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Michael Levin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thoughts and thinkers are quite different things, right?
So let's say in the Turing machine kind of thing, you have the actual agent is the physical machine, and then you have passive data.
You have patterns in some excitable medium, and the agent works on, you know, they they it modifies those patterns.
Uh perhaps an observer could see patterns in its uh cognitive medium, right?
You know, thoughts of of various kinds uh uh as as patterns in that medium.
And so
Uh what I've been what I've been thinking about is is is is flipping it or or more accurately dissolving the the distinction and asking to what extent can we ascribe the the agency or to take the perspective of the pattern itself as opposed to to the to the machine, to the thinker.
So the idea is uh if we if we look at it from the per the okay, so on the Turing machine side, if we look at the machine.
at it from the perspective of the data is actually in charge.
It's active data.
The machine does whatever, whatever, whatever the data you know says, but it and and the machine is in some way just a scratch pad in the world for for the for for what has actual agency, which is the pattern in the, you know, in the in the data.
And then you could imagine sort of um uh a continuum of different uh different soph different degrees of sophistication of these patterns.
I mean we know in different media
Mediums, uh some or different media, some patterns just sort of come and go and they dissipate immediately, others hold themselves together, others might compute or process information, but but in all of these cases, uh it's it's the actual pattern in the medium that's that's doing this.
And so I wonder to what extent
You know, we can say like like in a in an embryo or in a uh or in a cognitive system, you could say that it is maintaining um it is maintaining a story by operating on these data and sort of c uh uh concocting a c a consistent s uh uh story that that goes through time.
But to what extent could we actually take the perspective of the pattern itself and to say that it's it's the pattern that propagates across
And that uh the degree of continuity you have, and again, it's not a fixed thing, it it consist it continuously changes, but but the continuity is provided not by the the physical machine that's doing it, not by the thinker, but by the by the pattern that in some way
pulls along or resonates with right the the the the structure that either can or cannot maintain it.
And if it cannot maintain it, then you get birth defects and psychiatric uh you know d d disruptions and so on.
Showing 621–640 of 1,198 · page 32 of 60
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