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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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal · Michael Levin and Anna Ciaunica: Consciousness Beyond the Brain · 29 Jan 2025 podcast

You know, the actual at any given moment it it's like infinitesimally small amount of free will.

But if you keep showing up and keep at it, you will you will shape yourself and the information you have and the world you live in, whatever, in a way that is more in accordance to your values.

That that I think is a useful form of free will.

The other thing the other thing to point out, and this is kind of a really weird um

uh uh uh kind of direction that we've that I've been going in lately is that

There are actually uh two two ways of thinking about this.

One way of thinking about this is as the being that is interpreting memories.

And so so this gets into a whole thing of who's the machine and who's the data.

So so we have this this uh standard kind of touring paradigm where it says, okay, this this is the the physical organism that the or the machine, this thing takes actions, and then there's passive data, and it sort of process run, but you know, processes the data, maybe interprets it, maybe stores.

it maybe generalizes it to form a you know some sort of um um uh an Ngram or something.

But I actually think for for reasons that we could talk about w that the patterns themselves and perhaps the memories themselves have agency of their own.

And this is William James kinda nodded at this when he said the thoughts are thinkers, right?

This this distinction, this fundamental people tend to make a very fundamental distinction.

I I'm a real physical object and then I have patterns of of uh you know of activity in my excitable medium that are thoughts.

It's it's I think it's

much deeper than that.

And I think I think what we could ask is, yes, the m yes the the uh the the agent is interpreting those memories, but some of those memories as patterns, as we we are, we are metabolic patterns ourselves, have some amount of agency to

alter the way that they get processed.

So so and the so so I realize this is like a very s strange uh idea, but I I actually think the memories are not passive data.

And you can also you can uh you can you can warm up to this a little.

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