Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces

[Federica]

Speaking of how science is slowly evolving away from reductionism and a deterministic theory of evolution, I have stumbled upon this popular article about British biologist Denis Noble, who proposed (2014) an alternative to Darwin's theory that rely on purpose and cognition called the third way of evolution (TWE): not darwinism, not creationism. I have not read the details, but I wanted to pin this down for now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210120095 ... noble.com/

[AshvinP]

Speaking of how science is slowly evolving away from reductionism and a deterministic theory of evolution, I have stumbled upon this popular article about British biologist Denis Noble, who proposed (2014) an alternative to Darwin's theory that rely on purpose and cognition called the third way of evolution (TWE): not darwinism, not creationism. I have not read the details, but I wanted to pin this down for now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210120095 ... noble.com/

Thanks for sharing, Federica! It is always great to see scientists moving away from reductionism and toward scale-relative understanding. It reminds me of this from Tomberg's first meditation in MoT:

"To perceive and to know, to try and to be able to, are all different things. There are mirages above, as there are mirages below; you only know that which is verified by the agreement of all forms of experience in its totality—experience of the senses, moral experience, psychic experience, the collective experience of other seekers for the truth, and finally the experience of those whose knowing merits the title of wisdom and whose striving
has been crowned by the title of saint."

This is great from Noble's Wiki page

He contrasts Dawkins's famous statement in The Selfish Gene ("Now they [genes] swarm ... safe inside gigantic lumbering robots ... they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence") with an alternative view: "Now they [genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence". He then suggests that there is no empirical difference between these statements, and says that they differ in "metaphor" and "sociological or polemical viewpoint".[25]

[Federica]

And here's another biologist who challenges classical darwinism, Stephen Meyer.

"The theory of intelligence design affirms that life and the universe are best explained by a designing intelligence, rather than by undirected material processes, such as in the biological realm natural selection, acting on random variation.

And it's it's quite different from young Earth creationism in that it is making no claims about the age of the Earth - most proponents of intelligent design think as I do that the Earth is very old - but it's it's an age neutral proposition. It's saying that life is designed, as opposed to merely giving the appearance of design, which is what many darwinian biologists say. In fact, that is classic darwinian. Richard Dawkins has said that biology is a study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose, but the the claim that the darwinists make is that that the appearance is an illusion, because even though life looks as though it was designed, the appearance of design is a product of an unguided undirected mechanism namely natural selection acting on random variation.

So our challenge to the evolutionary establishment (...) is about this idea that there's no evidence of actual design in life - the claim that life is the product of undirected processes such that the appearance of design is an Illusion. We named our theory "intelligent design" to contrast it with that idea of darwinian apparent design."


https://stephencmeyer.org/

[AshvinP]

I don't know if this discussion was shared before, but it's fascinating. I am halfway through and essentially it has shaped into a sort of debate between the spiritual-phenomenological idealistic perspective (Levin) and the analytic idealist perspective (BK). BK takes issue with Levin because he is making 'epistemic projections' of higher-order cognitive functions, i.e. teleological agency, onto simple living organisms, which BK basically conceives as instinctive macro-programs within MAL. The criticism begins around 26 min. Levin then launches into a series of penetrating insights that, frankly, I think sail right beyond BK because the first-person cognitive perspective is thoroughly in the blind spot. Levin points out that what BK is calling 'epistemic projection' is what is always happening because "everything is a perspective of some agent, everything" and projection of agentic qualities is therefore another way of speaking about how agentic relative perspectives interface with one another.





BK even roots his criticism in CGOL and the fact that simple mechanical rules can give the appearance of complex functioning systems but to attribute such systems with agency or goals would be 'epistemic projection'. He then tries to apply that across the board to the goal-directed behavior of living organisms. It shows how the depth gradient simply isn't suspected by BK, which is something that Levin also mentions, that everything is on a spectrum. I think Levin also intuits that there may be some connection between lower elemental cognitive perspectives and potential higher-than-human cognitive perspectives with much more temporally extended 'light cones', of which the elemental perspectives are reflections, but it remains nebulous and not something he can speak to directly through his empirical research.

Overall, it is a fascinating case study of how, an intuitive thinker starting from a strictly phenomenological and even 'materialist' perspective, or at least a perspective rooted in the transformations of perceptual phenomena through experimentation, can reach the insight of reality being comprised solely of 'competing and cooperating agential perspectives', while an analytic thinker starting from a metaphysical and idealist perspective can gradually occupy the position of the materialist reductionist, waving off all insights rooted in disciplined and assumption-free empirical investigation as "epistemic projection" simply to preserve a rigid metaphysical position. BK even says plainly he is an "extreme reductionist", trying to "reduce the complex to the simple".

With that said, #2 in this series was more concerning because it showed that neither Levin nor BK see any ethical issues with plunging forward into regenerative medicine and transhumanist technologies. Some of the stuff he mentions and applauds in terms of body modeling, purely based on the gratification of immediate desires, is downright scary to think about. This is why someone like Levin desperately needs to encounter the perspective of esoteric science and the principle of 'as below, so above', because otherwise, he has no reason to suspect there are better, more organic, and harmonious inner ways to address the illness and suffering in the World. Instead, he will attain remarkable clinical results within a matter of a few years and then there will be absolutely no incentive to pause and reconsider what's at stake.

[AshvinP]

I think Levin also intuits that there may be some connection between lower elemental cognitive perspectives and potential higher-than-human cognitive perspectives with much more temporally extended 'light cones', of which the elemental perspectives are reflections, but it remains nebulous and not something he can speak to directly through his empirical research.

Levin mentions some really interesting things toward the end of the discussion. He references a current philosopher named Patrick Grim, who I had never heard of before. This guy seems to have some really fascinating work that could be relevant for a spiritual orientation. Levin was referencing him as an inspirer of his efforts to model the archetypal 'Platonic' realm of ideal potential which incarnates cognitive capacities in various physical configurations. Levin seems to be trying to elaborate a visual model that reflects the very manner in which we think and connect thoughts to one another, since he feels this could be analogous to whatever is going on in the archetypal realm before the cognitive potential incarnates in physical configurations. Of course, that is essentially a more recursive intellectual approach to the ES or 'firm point' that is intuitively approached through PoF.

I am wondering if this could be a way for Levin's attention to be drawn to PoF and esoteric science. Particularly of note is this book edited by Grim, Philosophy of Science and the Occult. (I just ordered a copy)

This book both introduces the philosophy of science through examination of the occult and examines the occult rigorously enough to raise central issues in the philosophy of science. Placed in the context of the occult, philosophy of science issues become immediately understandable and forcefully compelling. Divergent views on astrology, parapsychology, and quantum mechanics mysticism emphasize topics standard to the philosophy of science. Such issues as confirmation and selection for testing, causality and time, explanation and the nature of scientific laws, the status of theoretical entities, the problem of demarcation, theory and observation, and science and values are discussed. Significantly revised, this second edition presents an entirely new section of quantum mechanics and mysticism including instructions from N. David Mermin for constructing a device which dramatically illustrates the genuinely puzzling phenomena of quantum mechanics. A more complete and current review of research on astrology has been included in this new edition, and the section on the problem of demarcation has been broadened.

I am pretty astonished at how deeply Levin is following the threads of his intuitive thinking in these domains when he could just as easily stop at the insights reached so far and elaborate those for plenty of practical medical aims. The problem, of course, is always whether someone's attention can be drawn to the overlaps between their intuitive thinking and the results reached through the methods of spiritual science. I sent him an email pointing to some of this overlap, particularly with PoF, but I'm sure he gets hundreds of those each day and won't have time to read it. Anyway, here are some of the explicit overlaps that I have found so far between Levin's insights and those of spiritual science, based on things Levin has remarked in his various interviews, and I am sure there are plenty more.

Memory as engrams etched into the living body

What matters is this. Having sharpened the soul’s power to see things in the spirit, you see—you can observe this in the spirit just as you observe things in the world outside—that something else is going on at the same time as we form an idea based on something we have perceived. It is not the process of forming the idea but this other, unconscious process running parallel to it which produces something that does not come directly to conscious awareness but lives on in me. So if I have an idea, a subconscious process develops that is wholly bound up with the physical body. When occasion arises to call this process up again, the idea forms again because the soul now looks to this process, which is a purely bodily one. A remembered idea is a new idea created from the depths of the living body. It is like the earlier idea because it has been called up in the unconscious process that had been produced in the living body. The soul reads the engram engraved in the body, as it were, when it recalls an idea. (GA 73, I)

Biological organs as perceptive agents

When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart — again, in an unconscious way — that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance — as an inner sense organ. (GA 84)

Expanding cognitive light cone through moral development (Boddhisatva vow)

Only through such an experience is the student able fully to comprehend—for it now becomes a serious matter to him, as it were—that personal interests must pass into world-interests if he really wishes to see accurately in the Spiritual world. It is actually the case that before attaining this stage he cannot thoroughly believe this, for the personal interests are against it; but now having reached this point he sees it... Only by progressing, and making this penetration into another more and more spiritual, and the renunciation by the astral body which has expanded to world-interests, of this penetration into another's being, only by leaving his constitution quite untouched and placing his interests higher than our own, can we make ourselves ready for higher knowledge. Moreover, we cannot recognise a being of the hierarchy of the angels, for instance, if we have not reached the stage when the inner being of the angels interests us more than does our own. As long as we have more interest in our own being than in the being of the angels, we cannot recognise them. Thus we must first educate ourselves up to world-interests, and then to interests that go even further, so that another can be more important and of more consequence than oneself. (GA 145)

[Cleric]

I don't know if this discussion was shared before, but it's fascinating. I am halfway through and essentially it has shaped into a sort of debate between the spiritual-phenomenological idealistic perspective (Levin) and the analytic idealist perspective (BK). BK takes issue with Levin because he is making 'epistemic projections' of higher-order cognitive functions, i.e. teleological agency, onto simple living organisms, which BK basically conceives as instinctive macro-programs within MAL. The criticism begins around 26 min. Levin then launches into a series of penetrating insights that, frankly, I think sail right beyond BK because the first-person cognitive perspective is thoroughly in the blind spot. Levin points out that what BK is calling 'epistemic projection' is what is always happening because "everything is a perspective of some agent, everything" and projection of agentic qualities is therefore another way of speaking about how agentic relative perspectives interface with one another.


BK even roots his criticism in CGOL and the fact that simple mechanical rules can give the appearance of complex functioning systems but to attribute such systems with agency or goals would be 'epistemic projection'. He then tries to apply that across the board to the goal-directed behavior of living organisms. It shows how the depth gradient simply isn't suspected by BK, which is something that Levin also mentions, that everything is on a spectrum. I think Levin also intuits that there may be some connection between lower elemental cognitive perspectives and potential higher-than-human cognitive perspectives with much more temporally extended 'light cones', of which the elemental perspectives are reflections, but it remains nebulous and not something he can speak to directly through his empirical research.

Overall, it is a fascinating case study of how, an intuitive thinker starting from a strictly phenomenological and even 'materialist' perspective, or at least a perspective rooted in the transformations of perceptual phenomena through experimentation, can reach the insight of reality being comprised solely of 'competing and cooperating agential perspectives', while an analytic thinker starting from a metaphysical and idealist perspective can gradually occupy the position of the materialist reductionist, waving off all insights rooted in disciplined and assumption-free empirical investigation as "epistemic projection" simply to preserve a rigid metaphysical position. BK even says plainly he is an "extreme reductionist", trying to "reduce the complex to the simple".

With that said, #2 in this series was more concerning because it showed that neither Levin nor BK see any ethical issues with plunging forward into regenerative medicine and transhumanist technologies. Some of the stuff he mentions and applauds in terms of body modeling, purely based on the gratification of immediate desires, is downright scary to think about. This is why someone like Levin desperately needs to encounter the perspective of esoteric science and the principle of 'as below, so above', because otherwise, he has no reason to suspect there are better, more organic, and harmonious inner ways to address the illness and suffering in the World. Instead, he will attain remarkable clinical results within a matter of a few years and then there will be absolutely no incentive to pause and reconsider what's at stake.

Thank you, Asvhin!

Great talk indeed. ML's elaboration on the Platonic processes was new to me. I hope he can hold on to that direction.

Alas, it is clear that there's something still missing in the comprehension of spiritual activity. I've gone through his article on the sorting algorithms. To be honest, BK's objections were not without warrant (the objections concretely to the sorting algorithms work, not in general).

If ML doesn't recognize what he's doing in that case, the door is open for a very pernicious kind of superstition. The whole sorting algorithms simulation can be symbolized at a higher level of abstraction as a function, let's say f. The initial distribution of the numbers can be represented as x. Thus, f(x) is the applying of one step of the simulation. Then we take the result and apply the simulation step again, thus we have f(f(x)). This is a simple iterative function system IFS. Here we have seen many times how such repeatedly applied functions exhibit certain attractors. There's nothing mystical about this, it's not that different from the fact that 1/x tends to zero as we increase x. It's simply the quantitative behavior of the expression. Functions are mappings. They map x -> y. When the mappings are not linear, it's fully possible that certain x-es land more closely together in y-space, others further apart. Those that land closer together we say are 'attracted'. Of course, it would be misleading if we imagine that some forces or strings pull the points together.

In this sense, the fact that the two algotypes seem to 'group together' is no different than looking at an IFS fractal and recognizing that the video feedback accumulates in certain positions, depending on the positions of the L frames. So BK is right to call this out. Suggesting that these groupings are exhibits of basal cognition, delayed gratification, etc. is really a very superstitious thing to suggest.

And to an extent this is understandable. ML is divided between his higher intuitions and his classical habits of a behavioral scientist. We can often observe that. Even though he speaks of minds and cognition, most of the time he is in a purely behaviorist mode (if it quacks like a duck ...). In other places, when he speaks of the first-person perspectives, things go very nicely. So there's a clear sign here of the hysteresis process/bistable condition that hasn't yet found its resolution.

I think it was a talk on Curt Jaimungal's TOE channel where I heard for the first time ML use that CGOL analogy. CJ tried to push more in that direction but ML was quite vague. It struck me that here things didn't reach the crux of the matter either, even though at one time BK mentioned weak and strong emergence. Both on CJ's show and here, ML speaks as if indeed at the lowest level we have only the basic rules of the cellular automata. In true CA (as CGOL), the rules don't 'know' or 'care' whether their cells are in the shape of random noise, a glider, or a Turing Machine. Here I completely agree with BK, that in this particular case, the higher-order shapes in CGOL have significance and meaning only for our own cognition. ML tried to point out that for the structures it makes a difference whether they see themselves at a higher level of abstraction or not, yet he agrees that in the end the fundamental rules are all the same and at the lowest level. This is the point that really hurts me and which it seems ML consistently overlooks.

It is so easy to get this point straight, and it really saddens me that neither CJ, nor BK led the conversation to the crux of the matter. ML simply needs to come clean about the fact whether a higher-order perspective can will its transformations in novel ways informed precisely from this higher-order view of the World flow. If this higher-order perspective is nothing but a passive view of the CA World flow, where everything is still propagated on the lowest level by the basic rules, then the whole thing about higher-order structures is irrelevant. If I have God-level consciousness of the World flow but this flow is fully determined by a handful of rules at the lowest level, what difference does it make? We can speak of passive consciousness in this case but no real agency that originates at that level. Any perceived agency would be only the playback of an illusion resulting from the fundamental rules (this is the basic reductionist attack on free will). It would make a difference only if my higher-order view also gives me a correspondingly novel leverage point through which I can will the transformations of the flow in a different way. In other words, the perspective of the higher-order minds has factual significance only if they can bend the World flow in ways that can never be accomplished from the basic rules alone.

This is the difference between weak and strong emergence. It's nothing new. Weak emergence is simply the fact that we recognize patterns that are meaningful to us, while the rules are fixed at the lowest level. Strong emergence is the view that the higher-order patterns incarnate completely new rules of transformation that can never result from the basic rules alone.

From everything that ML speaks about one would say that he's most certainly all in for strong emergence. I personally have always thought that he implies it. But when he speaks of the CGOL examples I'm puzzled. I almost think that his reductionist and intuitive self are waging inner battle. He feels that higher-order perspectives should exhibit novel behavior (and this is even confirmed by his Platonic examples), yet when he needs to go down into the details, he is tempted to flatten everything and say "Well, fundamentally it's all just physics following simple rules". I'm not sure how conscious he is of this inner conflict. I really hope he faces it and resolves it, because otherwise, if his reductionist self stays in power, superstitions like those implied in the sorting paper, are only to grow more out of control (here is included also his views that AI/computation can also be considered a form of cognition - this is precisely the behaviorist ML speaking, who only looks at the quacking). I really hope he doesn't go down that road because everything else in the talk was really great. There's so much potential in his work to raise consciosness (putting aside the dangers you mentioned about modifying our bodies technologically, which are indeed another downroad).

And as always, it all stems from the fact that the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is missing, which alone could spiral the hysteresis into unity. Without it, one continues to bounce between intuitive, yet still instinctive flow, OR 'objective' behaviorist flattened view of reality.

On the other side, BK seems to have really embraced his dissociation. It has practically become a dogma, and naturally, all intellectual strivings are now seen simply as mere floating abstractions that can't even say what a 'thing' is. But I'm glad that he enters talks with ML. Even though he doesn't seem innerly moved (even though he acts politely), I hope that he can take something home for meditation.

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Asvhin!

Great talk indeed. ML's elaboration on the Platonic processes was new to me. I hope he can hold on to that direction.

Alas, it is clear that there's something still missing in the comprehension of spiritual activity. I've gone through his article on the sorting algorithms. To be honest, BK's objections were not without warrant (the objections concretely to the sorting algorithms work, not in general).

Thanks for providing this elaboration, Cleric. I probably should put aside my hesitation and work through his articles/papers

I think that, because I assumed that Levin understood the irreducible configuration spaces as we discussed previously, I simply imported that assumption and believed he wasn't flattening everything out to the basic physical rules in this discussion. But looking back, his comments do seem to suggest that and it didn't register for me at the time.

As you point out, that is a dangerous superstition, because, among other consequences, it gives us the feeling that these simple physical rules can 'explain' all kinds of cognitive-moral impulses of human+ agents (like sacrifice i.e. 'delayed gratification'). This flattened view makes sense of why Levin often gives the impression that the highest human ideals can be reached simply through technological manipulation of the elemental spectrum without any corresponding inner development. And his view that sentient AI is right around the corner. It goes to show that it's not simply about whether we reach the intuition of cognitive agents existing everywhere, but how we reach that intuition. It should always proceed through remaining faithful to the truthful flow of experience.

Do you think BK was calling it out because of that or, rather, because he has a priori ruled out that cognitive functions of a higher self-referential order can exist at the elemental level? In other words, no matter what the research into living processes reveals (beyond just CGOL-type simulations), I am wondering if BK would still see it as an epistemic projection because of his metaphysical conviction. Of course, the research would need to become spiritual scientific to truly reveal the cognitive essence of elemental processes.

And to an extent this is understandable. ML is divided between his higher intuitions and his classical habits of a behavioral scientist. We can often observe that. Even though he speaks of minds and cognition, most of the time he is in a purely behaviorist mode (if it quacks like a duck ...). In other places, when he speaks of the first-person perspectives, things go very nicely. So there's a clear sign here of the hysteresis process/bistable condition that hasn't yet found its resolution.

Right, this becomes clearer to me in the discussion now that you point it out. It's interesting how we are all going through this inner warfare in modern times. The only hope is to become clearly conscious that the bistable oscillation is happening. The one thing I feel Levin definitely has going for him is that he remains open to where scientific research, informed by intuitive thinking, may take him. He hasn't constrained his thinking in certain philosophical/metaphysical pathways yet. However, that could change quickly as he gets more and more financial incentive to default into a flattened physical view, which ends up being a kind of 'panpsychism'.

I think it was a talk on Curt Jaimungal's TOE channel where I heard for the first time ML use that CGOL analogy. CJ tried to push more in that direction but ML was quite vague. It struck me that here things didn't reach the crux of the matter either, even though at one time BK mentioned weak and strong emergence. Both on CJ's show and here, ML speaks as if indeed at the lowest level we have only the basic rules of the cellular automata. In true CA (as CGOL), the rules don't 'know' or 'care' whether their cells are in the shape of random noise, a glider, or a Turing Machine. Here I completely agree with BK, that in this particular case, the higher-order shapes in CGOL have significance and meaning only for our own cognition. ML tried to point out that for the structures it makes a difference whether they see themselves at a higher level of abstraction or not, yet he agrees that in the end the fundamental rules are all the same and at the lowest level. This is the point that really hurts me and which it seems ML consistently overlooks.

It is so easy to get this point straight, and it really saddens me that neither CJ, nor BK led the conversation to the crux of the matter. ML simply needs to come clean about the fact whether a higher-order perspective can will its transformations in novel ways informed precisely from this higher-order view of the World flow. If this higher-order perspective is nothing but a passive view of the CA World flow, where everything is still propagated on the lowest level by the basic rules, then the whole thing about higher-order structures is irrelevant. If I have God-level consciousness of the World flow but this flow is fully determined by a handful of rules at the lowest level, what difference does it make? We can speak of passive consciousness in this case but no real agency that originates at that level. Any perceived agency would be only the playback of an illusion resulting from the fundamental rules (this is the basic reductionist attack on free will). It would make a difference only if my higher-order view also gives me a correspondingly novel leverage point through which I can will the transformations of the flow in a different way. In other words, the perspective of the higher-order minds has factual significance only if they can bend the World flow in ways that can never be accomplished from the basic rules alone.

This is the difference between weak and strong emergence. It's nothing new. Weak emergence is simply the fact that we recognize patterns that are meaningful to us, while the rules are fixed at the lowest level. Strong emergence is the view that the higher-order patterns incarnate completely new rules of transformation that can never result from the basic rules alone.

From everything that ML speaks about one would say that he's most certainly all in for strong emergence. I personally have always thought that he implies it. But when he speaks of the CGOL examples I'm puzzled. I almost think that his reductionist and intuitive self are waging inner battle. He feels that higher-order perspectives should exhibit novel behavior (and this is even confirmed by his Platonic examples), yet when he needs to go down into the details, he is tempted to flatten everything and say "Well, fundamentally it's all just physics following simple rules". I'm not sure how conscious he is of this inner conflict. I really hope he faces it and resolves it, because otherwise, if his reductionist self stays in power, superstitions like those implied in the sorting paper, are only to grow more out of control (here is included also his views that AI/computation can also be considered a form of cognition - this is precisely the behaviorist ML speaking, who only looks at the quacking). I really hope he doesn't go down that road because everything else in the talk was really great. There's so much potential in his work to raise consciosness (putting aside the dangers you mentioned about modifying our bodies technologically, which are indeed another downroad).

And as always, it all stems from the fact that the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is missing, which alone could spiral the hysteresis into unity. Without it, one continues to bounce between intuitive, yet still instinctive flow, OR 'objective' behaviorist flattened view of reality.

Exactly, it is very puzzling. On the other hand, the inner battle always intensifies when one approaches the Guardian, and I suppose Levin is approaching it more directly than most in his own instinctive way. ML simply needs to recognize what people like him are doing as higher-order cognitive perspectives. He is not a passive witness of the elemental rules but is actively working to reshape them for medical purposes, in ways that they would never reshape themselves without his active research.

[Cleric]

Do you think BK was calling it out because of that or, rather, because he has a priori ruled out that cognitive functions of a higher self-referential order can exist at the elemental level? In other words, no matter what the research into living processes reveals (beyond just CGOL-type simulations), I am wondering if BK would still see it as an epistemic projection because of his metaphysical conviction. Of course, the research would need to become spiritual scientific to truly reveal the cognitive essence of elemental processes.

In this particular case, I think he was pointing precisely at computation and the AI hype that has already generated a lot of superstition in the popular consciousness. He has always maintained that with the example of the computer-simulated kidney that can't be expected to urinate (in the same way computation can't be expected manifest consciousness).

I don't remember the talk, it was a young person who was interviewing him (probably one of those YT channels with less than a hundred subscribers) and tried to confront him because BK was getting emotional about how absurd and stupid it is that people imagine computers can be conscious. The interviewer said something like: "OK, but in your own theory, for example, the human body is what consciousness looks like. In the same way, you maintain that Nature as a whole is what MAL looks like. In other words, the appearance of Nature feels like the inner experience of MAL. In that sense, the computer running the AI code - being a part of Nature - must feel like something in MAL." I don't remember what exactly BK responded but he somehow smeared out the situation.

In the video with ML, as he was speaking about how we can't even say what a 'thing' is and whether it exists as something real or is only a cognitive construct in our own mind, he said that there's only one thing that we can be certain of. At this point I was expecting him to say "the core subjectivity" but I was rather surprised when he said "life". I'm not sure what's going on in his mind, but it seems he's also struggling, except that from an opposite direction than ML. He's under the Schopenhauer spell and the intellect desperately needs to find a boundary where the blind will attains to self-reflection. Clearly, his present answer is biological life. Why exactly - I haven't heard him explain. Maybe there are videos where he talks about it. Which is another example of quite arbitrary (not to say superstitious) thinking, especially considering the flat view he supports. In depth MAL, it's obvious that the sensible biological arrangements are only the condensation kernel for the higher order processes (life, soul, spiritual), which progressively musically cohere the elemental experiences into an unitary experience (and in the reverse direction they build the biological form). From this view it is completely understandable why simply making a machine that quacks, doesn't mean that it will be able to connect with higher principles that can cohere a conscious perspective. But when the view is flat, and matter is everything that MAL looks like, it's hard to say why a different than biological mechanical process shouldn't feel like something with self-reflection within MAL.

At this time there are so many conflicting ideas in BK's philosophy that it is hard to choose from where to start enumerating them. For example, on one hand he and DH maintain the dashboard metaphor, how space and time are convenient illusions and the reality of MAL may have nothing to do with them. But at the same time, the visually perceived compartmentalization of beings into well-separated islands, even though read from the illusionary dashboard, is taken for a fact and now the inner nature of MAL is pictured as spatially dissociated, having boundaries, and so on.

[AshvinP]

This is a nice interview with Denis Noble. The discussion of genetic vs. epigenetic inheritance is interesting, and it seems to symbolically point toward the difference between real-time (or closer to real-time) spiritual activity influencing the germ line (and physiological/biological processes in general) and greatly receded spiritual activity, which has 'come to rest' in collective hereditary lines as it were, directing inherited characteristics. In other words, modern research into epigenetics is a result of thinking consciousness becoming more resonant with what it is doing presently within its modulations of psycho-physical curvatures, rather than only attending to what it did in the far-receded past and extrapolating that into the study of all biological processes. 

As usual, Steiner was way ahead of his time and understood the shortcomings of the modern fixation on heredity without accounting for present soul-spiritual activity in shaping the living body and its processes. When Levin asks DN what the most important thing to focus on is, he responds 'rewriting the standard textbooks'. That is important, of course, but even more important is rediscovering the 'textbooks' that are already written which elucidate the inner experiential basis for these differing aspects of the biological organism. The longer this inner wisdom is ignored, the more the 'unique levels of causation', even if abstractly recognized, will continue to be flattened onto the intellectual plane for all intents and purposes. It is only the TM fallacy that prevents these modern researchers from taking their own ideas more concretely and seriously.

The body which we have from birth till the change of teeth is, in a sense, nothing else than a model that we take over from our parents; it contains the forces of heredity, our forefathers have helped to build it. In the course of the first seven years we thrust off this body. And what have we then? A completely new body comes into being; the body that man has after the change of teeth is not built up by the forces of heredity, but entirely by the spirit-and-soul which has descended. The human being has his body of inherited substance until the change of teeth, and no longer; but while he is thrusting off this body, he builds up a new body, working from out of his own individuality. Thus only since the change of teeth have we had what we may call our own body. But the inherited body is used as a model; and according as the life of spirit-and-soul is strong or weak, will it either be in a position to proceed in a more individual direction when confronted with the inherited form, or be subject to the inherited form—in which case the soul will be compelled to shape the second body like the first, which was shaped by the parents. What is usually adduced in the theory of heredity is really nonsense. For it is assumed that the laws that underlie man's growth up to the change of teeth simply continue into later life; whereas the truth is, that the influence of heredity has to be reckoned with only until the change of teeth, and no further; the individuality then comes in and builds the second body.

We must therefore distinguish, when speaking of a child, between the body of heredity and the individual body which is its successor. The individual body—and this body alone can truthfully be called the personal body of the human being—develops by degrees. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the very strongest activity of which the individuality is capable goes forward. Either, the individuality conquers during this period the forces of heredity, and then it can be observed in the child that, after the change of teeth, he begins to work his way out of the forces of heredity—the fact will be clearly perceptible, and we teachers must take note of it—or, the individuality is completely subject to the forces of heredity, to what is contained in the model, with the result that the hereditary likeness to the parents simply continues beyond the seventh year. But it all depends, you see, upon the individuality, not upon the forces of heredity. Suppose I am an artist and you give me something to copy and I change it very considerably. Just as little as I can say that you are responsible for my picture, just so little can it be said that a person has acquired through heredity the body he bears from the seventh year onward. This truth we must master thoroughly, and then be able to know for ourselves in any particular case how strongly the individuality is working.

[Cleric]

Thanks Ashvin,

I also looked through one of the latest Essentia videos:



On the surface, things seem so so similar to what we are speaking of. Even the diagram with the spheres of Free Intelligence/Embedded Intelligence/Embedded Technology looks so much like what we used in the Stretching stuff as Macro-Meso-Micro spheres. This only shows how these things are 'in the air', so to speak, knocking on human hearts and minds. Yet once again things remain in the blind spot. One very easily declares "I'm the Intelligence that tries to know itself in the embedded state". However, if we question what is the real-time thinking process that utters this statement, one would immediately snap to the other half of the bistable condition, and now suddenly the Intelligence is seen as some kind of obscure Natural force that causes the thinking process from within the mysterious abyss (that is, one quickly succumbs to Schopenhauerism). Intelligence assumes that it is somehow responsible for the thinking process but believes that it cannot find this creative responsibility in the thinking process itself, that is, the thinking process is only a later reverberation of a more fundamental process of Intelligence (i.e. thinking reduces to that process). This more fundamental process, however, is nowhere to be found as a direct experience that can be traced as transforming from some more fundamental thing into thoughts. Thoughts seem to simply emerge at the horizon. Thus Intelligence either declares that it forever remains in the dark about its fundamental process or it expects that in some miraculous way it will reach that process in the future, while in the meantime it has to put up with mere modeling.

To be sure, I don't know how Bill would respond if led into this rabbit hole, but based on our experience so far, this is pretty much what we can expect.