for: Michael Levin - slime mold experiment, question - new theory of consciousness from a single cell

question

• is it possible that a theory can be constructed to explain consciousness from the behavior of a single cell organism such as a slime mold?

for: quote - Michael Levin, quote - MET of individuality, quote - memory wipe, quote - cancer therapy - MET of individuality

quote: Michael Levin

• this is a cancer approach that we work on which is to not to kill those cells but to force them to re reconnect to their neighbors and when they reconnect to the neighbors they once again become part of the collective that's working on making nice skin nice muscle they stop being metastatic and they they go back

comment

• Michael refers to cancer as a "memory wipe" where they have forgotten the normative programmed narrative of bodily / collective / multicellular unity

for: social superorganism, MET, major evolutionary transition, MET of individuality, Michael Levin, Roy Baumeister, Adam Omary

insight

• this talk inspired an insight:
  • The contrast occurred to me with this talk especially, due to the respective areas of the two guests and Michael Levin's own interest of whether the signaling and policies within the collectives within a physiological body generalize in any way to larger social collectives that are outside of those physiological bodies. Rob Baumeister, being a social scientist is the perfect person to have such a conversation with.
• In this case, those policies are composed of informational signals and it would seem the signals currently have nowhere near the cohesion that millions of years of evolution have resulted in within the biological body of a multicelllular organism

• Michael does not know what the format of the answer to the hard problem would be
• Attempting to explain the experience of consciousness begs the question
  • what is explanation?
• The explanation often attempts to rely on measurable 3rd party observations and the scientific theories and models behind those observations
• However, as Michel Bitbol points out, the models themselves emerge from the same awareness of consciousness
  • https://hyp.is/gQt0wlg_Ee6ftXcrEi3Z-g/docdrop.org/video/bzPu_USZ-0o/
• In spiritual teachings, it is often claimed that the observer is actually an expression of the universe that see's itself
• Seeing itself - what does this mean in scientific terms? Could it mean resonance, like the kind used by musicians to tune string instruments like guitars?
• Do all the patterns that we sense become sensible precisely because they are all an intrinsic part of us, and vice versa?

for: Michael Levin, Michel Bitbol, Karl Friston, Chris Fields

comment

• Recommend adding Michel Bitbol to the next talk between these researchers.

reference

• https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbzPu_USZ-0o%2F&group=world

for: question, question - hard problem of consciousness, question - Micheal Levin - Michel Bitbol

question

• What would Michel Bitbol think of what Michael Levin claims here?
• What does Michel Bitbol think about Michael Levin's research and the hard problem of consciousness?

quote: Michael Levin

• the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist.

comment

• adjacency between
  • nondual awareness
  • self-construct
  • self is illusion
  • singular, solid, enduring control agent
• adjacency statement
  • nondual awareness is the deep insight that there is no solid, singular, enduring control agent.
  • creativity is unpredictable and spontaneous and would not be possible if there were perfect control

example - control agent - imperfection: end

triggered insight: not only are thoughts and actions random, but dreams as well

• I dreamt the night after this about something related to this paper (cannot remember what it is now!)
• Obviously, I had no clue the idea in this paper would end up exactly as it did in next night's dream!

source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

summary

• a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
• very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
• this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology

• it's kind of a miracle that a collection of individual cells with their own agendas and their own ability to pursue various goals in physiological space and gene expressions, that there is a way to arrange those things that give rise to this emergent new self that operates in a different problem space

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfrEDUv29r0&t=159s

comment

• He also points out how contradictory many of the behaviors of the emergent, composite self is to the wellbeing of the individual parts.
• We are all aware of the many destructive behaviors that the emergent, composite human superorganism can participate in such as:
• drug addiction
• violence
• suicide
• poor diet
• lack of exercise
• destructive emotional behavior
• etc

• Indyweb would enable Michael to trace all public interactions with his papers so he WOULD know.

• interesting adjacency between:
  • Buddhism and
  • biology:
• Adjacency statement
  • The bodhisattva vow is a commitment to enlarge your cognitive apparatus, your cognitive light cone of compassion to enable the pursuit of bigger goals

• If you're going to have a collective intelligence, what is it going to care about? We don't have a good science of that

• Michael Levin has been interested in Eastern thought, philosophy of mind and compassion for a long time
• the idea of care seems to have been stimulated by his child's project to build a robotic cat. He wanted the cat to have the attribute of caring.

• this was a surprising adjacency to discover Levin connecting Daisetz Suzuki's concept of Beginner's mind to his research. It demonstrates a broad perspective of research
• adjacency between
  • Suzuki's Beginner's mind
  • foolbodied
  • wisdom signaling
• adjacency statement
  • I just finished annotating Gyuri's referall to Wisdom commons article in which the author introduced the notion of foolhood and wisdom signaling
  • These are saying the same thing as Suzuki's concept of beginner's mind

• all intelligence is collective intelligence

author: Michael Levin

comment

• Major evolutionary transition (MET) are milestones in evolution in which collections of distinct individual life forms unite into one cohesive collection due to improved fitness and begin to replicate as a new individual unit
• hence the Deep Humanity term individual / collective gestalt, developed to deal with the level of human organisms and the societies and groups they belong to, applies to evolutionary biology as well through the MET where a new higher level individual is formed out of a collective of lower level indivdiuals

source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full

annotate

for: self, self - computational boundary, Michael Levin

title: The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition

• If one zooms in, you find out that we are all in fact collective intelligence

for: Michael Levine, developmental biology, human superorganism, multi-scale competency architecture, eukaryote multi-cellular superorganism - interlevel communication, interoception

definition: multi-scale competency architecture

• a complex living organism is not simply nested structurally in terms of cells which comprise tissues, comprising organs, and bodies, and then ultimately societies. Each of these layers has certain problem-solving competencies.

comment

• The HUMAN interBEcomING is a multi-level system.
• It would be insightful to learn if there are ways our human consciousness level can communicate to each level, including the social level

• literature review of research on specific areas related to the level of human consciousness communicating with other levels of the superorganism
  • perhaps called "interlevel communication of multi-level superorganism
  • interoception signals?