Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman discussing consciousness

[Papus79]

Really glad to see Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman in discussion here. The only downside with this interview is there's frequent audio drops from all speakers but they're brief and you don't lose the gist of what they're saying.

Quick list of their credentials for anyone not familiar:

Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. Levin is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman discussing consciousness in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.

In this they're discussing the overlap in their work, findings, and theories. Levin comes from a non-reductive base that's relatively agnostic to whether or not it's materialist, it's physicalist in terms of sufficient causation (really any theory needs that) but his main thrust is that ion channel communication, particularly best known for it's use in cell differentiation in embryos, came before neurons and Michael would argue that consciousness and a plurality of conscious 'selves' go all the way down from highest to lowest collation of consciousness in a fractal / holographic manner. Hoffman would agree with all of this but his work, with Chetan Prakash and his team, focuses on an absolute idealist frame but absolute idealist in a very granular, functionalist kind of way where he ends up in somewhat the same advaitic place as Michael Silberstein just that I don't know that I've ever heard Donald Hoffman say that his and Chetan Prakash's theories are Minkowski eternal block in the way that Silberstein's adynamic global constraints would be, I think Hoffman might be non-committal with that because he doesn't want to close the door to whether they find something even stranger - his and Prakash's main idea is to look at the decorator permutations that feed into Nima Arkani Hamed's amplituhedron to see if they can pull all of known physics out of that structure as they also have a strong sense that their theory ties into that object.

Also yes, for those who are familiar with Karl Friston's work with Markov blankets as well as Chris Fields, Levin has a close working relationship with both of them as he's working similar ideas to their own from the experimental end.

[jacobprince]

his and Prakash's main idea is to look at the decorator permutations that feed into Nima Arkani Hamed's amplituhedron to see if they can pull all of known physics out of that structure as they also have a strong sense that their theory ties into that object.

[Papus79]

his and Prakash's main idea is to look at the decorator permutations that feed into Nima Arkani Hamed's amplituhedron to see if they can pull all of known physics out of that structure as they also have a strong sense that their theory ties into that object.

Their November 2022 paper titled 'Fusions of Consciousness' addressing that further:
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/1/129

[Alan Masterman]

On the other hand, I don't think either of them sufficiently addresses the implications of the monodenchronous extra-poropogatory extension to the Wiener-Schnottburger-Schnitzel hypothesis. What do you think?

[Papus79]

On the other hand, I don't think either of them sufficiently addresses the implications of the monodenchronous extra-poropogatory extension to the Wiener-Schnottburger-Schnitzel hypothesis. What do you think?

If they did a lunch order on the sly I missed it.

[Lagayscienza]

I've just been reading Donald D. Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He writes that the only window we have on the world is the user-interface bestowed on us by Evolution. We don't see reality as it is. I can sort of swallow his Fitness Before Truth hypothesis but in Ch. 6 "Spacetime is doomed" he writes that objects do not exist when unperceived. This I find very hard to swallow.

Does anyone here agree with Hoffman?

I’m going to try to read the paper Fusions of Consciousness even thought at first glance it strikes me as pretty intimidating.
I'm no physicist and no neuroscientist so I'm in no position to make an informed judgement about whether all we see is a user-interface, whether spacetime is doomed and whether consciousnesses merge. It all strikes me as a form of Idealism about which I have been reading a lot lately, but I’m not convinced of that either.

So it would be great if anyone who knows more about this than me (probably everyone) could tell us whether and why they these ideas are or are not feasible.

[Papus79]

I've just been reading Donald D. Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He writes that the only window we have on the world is the user-interface bestowed on us by Evolution. We don't see reality as it is. I can sort of swallow his Fitness Before Truth hypothesis but in Ch. 6 "Spacetime is doomed" he writes that objects do not exist when unperceived. This I find very hard to swallow.

Does anyone here agree with Hoffman?

I tend to think Hoffman uses clunky metaphors in a lot of places that don't work well.

For example with what you mentioned in Chapter 6, he's been talking about the amplithuhedron (Nima Arkani -Hamed's finding) and decorator permutations being the system that reality comes from. My interpretation of that is that the structure of everything is real / nonillusory. What I think he's saying might fall along these lines - the real trick behind the double slit / quantum eraser experiment is that the waveform never really collapses, we ourselves sort of 'hallucinate' that collapse but a better way might be to say that we pull on a particular location (seems to be arbitrary where) and get something that looks and feels like local realism - at least at the day-to-day experience level. To take garbage collection of objects (ie. the moon doesn't exist unless you're looking at it), and I think he's agreed with corrections to this metaphor in interviews I've watched, that there is a reality to all objects but that it's not 3D space-and-time orientation the way we assign them - ie. what we do is a drastic redux, as far as we can without losing the critical details, and in that weak sense he describes a person's 3D space-and-time rendering of the moon or other objects as being garbage collected.

Tom Campbell is another kettle of fish though, ie. he seems to take the simulation hypothesis a lot more seriously and would suggest that a sort of conscious panentheistic mind is spinning all of this up as a kind of VR where, like No Man's Sky, it's only there when you're looking at it and in maybe data storage of some kind when you're not.

The reasons I think there's something to Hoffman's take is a combination of having seen for myself that consciousness is divisible and can even have these loosely knit experiences including the kinds of things that happen with high dose acid trips, dreams (which I think are almost identical to DMT trips but moderated differently thus less alarming), and I think that divisibility doesn't come up often because, like talking about the subconscious or animal / rider where people have to admit that they might be mostly subconscious, or looking at determinism and considering that they don't have free will, people tend to get the ick and run without sorting out whether it's true.

The other part for me, having had some really hard to explain experiences that strongly suggested to me higher amalgamations of mind (of the sorts that could twist reality in ways that sheer reductive material 'consciousness only on neurons' can't do). Such effects seem to happen within tight enough constraints to fall under the range of possible physical effects (information is maybe where this less so but definitely true for physical world relationships) suggests to me that all of it is physically bound and stuck with physical rules. That ties out to a lot of the 19th century Hermetic occultism as well as a lot of the well known Victorian GD and post-GD practitioners and the consistency of their observations, ie. that the stable parts of what they describe very much smacks of functionalism with multiple realizability (ie. nested and overarching conscious entities) in something like an idealist, neutral monist, or dual-action monist context. Hoffman and Prakash, ie. Conscious Realism, is the only thing I've heard that gives a very easy-to-understand structure of functionalism with multiple realizability by grounding it in two-bit conscious agents amalgamating to make cells, tissues, organs, bodies, communities, nations, planets, etc.. Obviously I know that I'm on slightly edgy ground in that I don't think functionalism with multiple realizability cuts the Dennet / Dawkins / Carroll smell-test in that it's not reductive materialist 'consciousness only exists on neurons' but that's precisely my problem with reductive materialism - it tries to politically exorcise rather than understand the exceptions (at least when they won't go away) which that's started to change in the last decade and Michal Levin's work is inadvertently working on one of the same core issues as Hoffman - ie. the combination problem - and even seems to have just as luckily solved the cell differentiation problem in embryos, ie. a sort of bioelectric template that spins up between the gap junctions of the cells in the embryo that act as a communication network for guiding which cells do or become what and he can demonstrate this by putting eyes on tadpoles in places they shouldn't be and things like that.

[Lagayscienza]

Yes, the idea that the waveform doesn't really collapse was my understanding, too. And what we get, "without losing the critical details" is the "realism" that enables us to survive in the wild. Other than a vague feeling of losing "self" in meditation, I've never had any experiences like you that might suggest to me that their "idealistic" take on reality is true. And not having a physics/mathematics/neuroscience background, I am in no position to know whether their hypotheses hold water or whether everything really "is physically bound" so that [we are] stuck with [the] physical rules" of materialistic, reductionist science. As I understand it, their idea is that brain activity does not create consciousness but that, rather, consciousness creates brain activity. In order to understand whether the ideas of Hoffman et al are supported by science, I guess I'll have to wait until more science is done and then read accounts of it in popular science mags so that I'll be able to understand it. In the meantime, I'll keep an open mind. And I will have a look at what Levin has to say about consciousness.

[Papus79]

Yes, the idea that the waveform doesn't really collapse was my understanding, too. And what we get, "without losing the critical details" is the "realism" that enables us to survive in the wild. Other than a vague feeling of losing "self" in meditation, I've never had any experiences like you that might suggest to me that their "idealistic" take on reality is true.

I'll see if I can give you a kind of export - in case it's of any help.

I had a lot of Grant Morrison type experiences sprinkled throughout my life like spinning jacks as a kid, watching one disappear when it hit a closed book, examining the book, making fun of myself when I shook the pages out and - out it fell. When I was 19 or 20 when I'd trip with friends, at least when I was with them, really strange things happened like a bunch of kids running through the woods with flashlights and TP'ing the neighbor's house, being in a garage and hearing a knock on the garage door, two kids ran off, we chased after them, suddenly there were police everywhere and we were giving a report of what they looked like - they'd recently punched a cabby, dodged payment, and were trying to find a garage to hide in. Another time we were at another guy's place, chatting on his back deck, the house was on a major road, think old duplexes on a wooded hill with a ridge behind them and a drop into the back yard - there was a pickup truck in the back yard spinning their tires, turned out the girl next door was running away and the boyfriend was trying to catch clothing out the window.

I've had mystical visions while meditating, been woken up in the middle of the night with unusual things going on (very much a sense of 'others' playing with me - also as a guy you can probably extend that further), a lot of heat in my spine to which I'd admit that I've had kundalini syndrome since my early 30's in which I'll feel heat going up my spine (no beans needed) quite often.

What I trust the least for 'literal' value are entity encounters, mainly because I do think that each one of us are legions of subpersonalities that we see interact with in dreams and especially in border states like very tired / sleepy deep meditation, falling asleep, waking up, waking up in the middle of the night, I still have not found any convincing evidence that any of these encounters were anything but subpersonalities or Jungian complexes but I had some very unusual things happen that I've heard other people talk about before, ie. intense energy pouring in through your head and down your spine to your feet. Synchronicities, especially the really loud and consistent ones that have come during rare perhaps week-long periods of my life a few times, seemed to feel very much like the cosmos was actively playing with me or pulling my chain (sort of like Donny Darko or The Joker but not nearly as dark).

To clarify - 99.9% of my life is not experiencing strange edge-cases or paranormal necessarily, it's very predictable and very physicalist in its behavior, most of life is relatively meaningless, but maybe I'd add as well that synchronicities - if I had the gauge the intelligence behind them - seem quite low level, surface, solipsistic, it very much smacks of the kind of surface imitations you'd get if it were a purely subconscious system.

A lot of that is where I got to thinking - okay, this is like a sort of haunted / sparking materialism where it's quite cold, gaunt, and brutal in a lot of ways (ie. the alienness of the physical and environment), until enough social energy gets together... it does have a biocentric flavor in that whatever 'it' is seems to not have a form unless it can sort of pour into the subconscious of people (I really think we're feed-forward systems in the sense that I don't believe in free will and I also think there are all kinds of things pouring into our subconscious minds that we'd never register). Michael Silberstein's contextual emergence / neutral monism has those kinds of flavors but edifying egregores, China Brains, etc., even describing what I think of as exogenously received mystical experiences some people have (ie. 'entity contact') as being something like the stack of consciousness pouring down into a person rather than a person moving a finger in some form of their own downward causation that they don't typically think strangely of - Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash seem to offer the most satisfying description of functionalism of that sort.

One other thing I'll add, bringing up Bernardo Kastrup for a moment, while he's enjoyable to listen to I've never been wildly impressed by the philosophy but I will say this - for his idea of alters or us as minds dissociated from mind at large, I remember watching a video about a lady in Australia who has thousands of personalities (really dark story to how that happened) and when she was asked if she'd ever created a subpersonality for fun she said no - no matter how transient they were they all had a purpose. That last bit, I've heard that kind of language used in the religious context - ie. that 'God gives us all a purpose'. That connection of course is incredibly speculative, I'd also admit that I don't believe in an Abrahamic deity, the world looks like redundant misery with no purpose to me (Darwinian hell hole if I'm honest), but there's also the question of just how alien other minds could be, especially those who'd prioritize the formation and / or maintenance of a universe like this one.

But anyway - if I were to try and deliver the best I could what kinds of impressions that I've gotten from my experience it's that - ie. that conscious barriers are leaky and there's probably a much wider array of interactions with conscious agents than we know - just that separating that from our own subpersonalities, homeostatic systems, subconsciously-sourced projections, etc. can be tricky - that is unless synchronicities themselves might be an authentic signal of our own panning of 'the void' to assemble the next moment's board and fitness landscape.

And not having a physics/mathematics/neuroscience background, I am in no position to know whether their hypotheses hold water or whether everything really "is physically bound" so that [we are] stuck with [the] physical rules" of materialistic, reductionist science. As I understand it, their idea is that brain activity does not create consciousness but that, rather, consciousness creates brain activity. In order to understand whether the ideas of Hoffman et al are supported by science, I guess I'll have to wait until more science is done and then read accounts of it in popular science mags so that I'll be able to understand it. In the meantime, I'll keep an open mind. And I will have a look at what Levin has to say about consciousness.

I've had a nagging speculation, for most of my life, that if nonphysical background consciousness is 'real' I can't think of any reason why it would be impossible for science to figure out. When people have said that it's impossible out of hand with certainty I've always questioned that, and precisely because if they're coming from the materialist direction - somehow our consciousness is able to control our own bodies and use them like tools, there would be no way for that to happen without some direct causal relationship between the two, however I do think some of these connections could be so heavily Fourier transformed that it would be very difficult to spot their inbound / outbound activity without a much deeper understanding of what's going on in the brain. While I'd still debate whether or not consciousness is completely free of the body (particularly while we're alive) I would subscribe to the idea that either consciousness as-is or precursors / components of consciousness exist out in the wild, even beyond the biological, because I don't think 'wetness of water = strangeness of consciousness' arguments really hold well, ie. there's absolutely no reason for there to be anything that it is to be any physical entity, particularly considering that there's nothing 'magical' about neurons, Michael Levin I think has proven that as well if he's right that ion channels are an older / less advanced equivalent of neural communication, it stands to reason that it is conscious all the way down and when I think of the RNA world hypothesis there's an uncanny moment where RNA starts behaving 'funny', like it has goals. The nature of that is tricky because we typically don't find really overt goal-orientation until you at least get single-celled organisms, but there seems to be uncanny similarity there.

I think you'll enjoy Levin because he's an experimentalist, biologist, and he's been doing radical things like making xenobots (skin cells from frog embryos), making one verses two-headed flatworms by manipulating ion channels, all kinds of really illustrative stuff. Instead of trying to create philosophic models he's got replicability on his side and the stuff he's finding is fascinating.

[Lagayscienza]

Ok, Levin, he's the guy I'll be reading next! Thanks for that and thanks for the long post. It clarified couple of things for me.

Re synchronicity, I, and probably a lot of others have had odd things happen, or normal things happen at strange times, and it does make one wonder if there is something more than just coincidence behind it. And I like the idea of stuff filtering through into consciousness from "elsewhere" - I know that feeling. The problem is proving that it is from "elsewhere", if there is an "elsewhere". I guess these guys would say it's not really "elsewhere" it's where everything is at but we don't realise, we can't see it.

I've still left the door ajar for idealism and it will be really interesting to see where Hoffman et al wash up. Kastrup's Universal Consciousness and dissociated "alters" I found difficult to take on board. He used examples like dissociative disorder but I guess I don't understand enough about it to come to any conclusions about whether it supports his theory. Time will tell. I hope they figure it out, at least partly, while I'm still around. I'd really like to know before I go.

[Papus79]

And I like the idea of stuff filtering through into consciousness from "elsewhere" - I know that feeling. The problem is proving that it is from "elsewhere", if there is an "elsewhere". I guess these guys would say it's not really "elsewhere" it's where everything is at but we don't realise, we can't see it.

Yep, especially so when it seems like so many of our thoughts come from a black box that sort of hides any distinction between things behind it. That's also what bothered me about the new age and even a lot of the Hermetic community when I was involved with that, they'd often just drop the distinction and dive in thinking that whatever signal they got was good. I wanted to tell them - there are parts of your own mind that'll also make like ChatGPT, make up imaginary characters, stories, plots, if your subconscious likes the story it may very well take on a life of its own within you and come back from behind the black box, which used to lead to the kind of thing Manly P Hall talked about where people start feeling like they're meeting ascended masters, lead through all kinds of initiations, they start getting the sense that it's a lot of eye candy with a lot behind it, then their interpretations took a dark turn and they ended up getting wrecked that way and a lot of harm could have been avoided if they would have realized that it was just a positive feedback loop they were giving to their subconscious and not anything 'demonic'.

One thing I didn't get a chance to mention in the post above - I did have a very bright / lucid dream back in 2015 of being in a classroom and someone who I couldn't see making a particular vocal sound ('Pssst') but jarringly loud and I couldn't spot the source. I'd never heard that before, until several months later when a new girl started where I worked and after a few weeks when she got comfortable with us she started doing that a sort of self-deprecating 'Yeah, I'm the new girl and I need help with something'.

It's not proof of anything but I feel like I get a lot of out looking at how these things rhyme together and certain odd-angles, particularly how arbitrary the importance of the information carried is or how it doesn't seem to superintend the wellness of culture (millions of Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and Chinese would have appreciated that back in the middle of the 20th century), seems to suggest that if there's anything there it's not intelligent in any way we're used to thinking of, perhaps it has some basic feelings or can get tickled into sneezing (synchronicity) but that's about it.