Michael Levin

It's an old idea of a dualistic worldview, right, where the mind was not in the physical body and that it in some way interacted with the physical brain.

So I just want to be clear, I'm not claiming that this is fundamentally a new idea.

This has been around forever.

However, it's mostly been discredited.

And it's a very unpopular view nowadays.

There are very few people in the, for example, cognitive science community or anywhere else in science that like this kind of view.

Primarily, and already Descartes was getting crap for this when he first trotted out, is this interaction problem, right?

So the idea was, okay, well, if you have this non-physical mind and then you have this brain that presumably obeys conservation of mass energy and things like that, how are you supposed to interact with it?

There are many other problems there.

So what I'm trying to point out is that first of all, physics already had this problem.

You didn't have to wait till you had biology and cognitive science to ask about it.

And what I think is happening and the way we need to think about this is coming back to my point that I think the mind-brain relationship

is basically of the same kind as the math-physics relationship.

The same way that non-physical facts of physics haunt physical objects is basically how I think different kinds of patterns that we call kinds of minds are manifesting through interfaces like brains.

Yeah, sort of.

Sort of.

I mean, so Descartes got some stuff wrong, I think.

But one thing that he did get right, the fact that, yeah, actually, you don't know what you can poke and what you can't poke.

The only thing you actually know are the contents of your mind and everything else might be.

And in fact, what we know from Anil Seth and Don Hoffman and various other people, it's definitely a construct.