The Meaning Code

Brad Bilski, a designer of testing equipment, joins The Meaning Code for a discussion of the measurement problem and the need for a covenant between language and truth.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro (reading from Paul Feyerabend's 1975 book, Against Method

04:00 Can facts exist outside of a narrative? A response to John Vervaeke

11:25 Gauge block: "We call it a Master." ANSI

19:45 Calibrations differ; error exists

29:45 Rooted in Christ

31:30 Copenhagen interpretation? Or Many Worlds?

40:30 The sliding scale from mercy to justice

52:15 The dystopian world that arrives if we destroy our ideals

1:00:35 Subjective and objective and the issue of measurement. The limits of our perception

1:10:00 The anomaly is a gift

1:17:30 The focal point creates the meaning. The part must measure up to the Master.

A meeting of two great minds moving from considerations of choice and agency to free will and wisdom. Books and authors mentioned follow timestamps.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

03:30 Decision making and competent behavior do not imply high level cognition 05:20 The value of higher levels is context-dependent

06:30 Be careful not to all into patterns that lead to collectivism

07:07 Composite agents harness their parts toward an action they wouldn't normally be doing on their own. The scaling of cognition.

09:30 A. Juarrero's notion of constraint. Causes are events, happenings. Constraints are conditions and orderings of probability. Bottom up causation, top down constraints. Aristotle's impact on Juarrero: participating the tree structure. Hierarchies presume a single ontological relation. We have to get beyond simple models mapping onto each other. Two kinds of constraints: Selective (reduce probabilities) and Enabling (increase probabilities) counterbalance each other.

14:03 Emergence without emanation is epiphenomenalism: an ontological oxymoron, a monster. We are crypto privileging the level at which we do science.

16:22 We need to acknowledge the importance of the higher levels, but there is not a simple mapping.

18:00 A symphony of choices over time. Constraints as a way to generate creativity. Selection is a way to ignore stuff in order to prevent combinatorial explosion. 21:00 Acknowledging continuity - the problem with extending agency all th way down. Deep identities hypothesis

23:45 Self-constraints are related to behavior shaping

24:30 Choice, agency, decision making as a continuum. What is a decision? It is a decision to the extent that you need to consider a radius of events in space and time to figure out what just happened.

31:45 Not just explained by local forces. Distiinction between causation and causal relevance. What caused the sinking of the Titanic?

33:00 If we allow choice to map onto the causal event.... We need a sensitivity to causal relevance

34:52 the idea of will goes alll the way down to primitive agents

37:02 I am an agent that does things, using the same coarse graining on myself. The need to tell stories, to build internal models.

38:25 The basic physics of being an object. Active inference is also for cells and molecular networks. The critical thing is the difference that makes a difference. 40:05 What does attention look like in the molecular pathway in a cell?

41:20 Will, active inferencing, free energy all bound up together.

45:13 When you zoom in to any event, there are only 2 choices. Determinism or true quantum randomness. If you zoom in... no big shocker! If you zoom in, all you see is physics. Free action (free will) is stretched over long periods of time.

47:30 Free will is exercised over years in small increments

50:00 Free will only applies to extended beings. From here, they go into a discussion of wisdom.

Books mentioned by John:

Shaun Gallagher: Enactivist Intervention

Brian Cantwell Smith: On the Origin of Objects

Alice Juarrero: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26272797/ (paper on constraints)

Drew is a music teacher at the International School in Tunis in Northern Africa. With a Master's in Ethnomusicology, Drew is able to consider music as an art form within and across cultures, considering the harmonious interplay of patterns and the musicality of intelligibility. We hear Drew's life story and then consider various aspects of music as communication, music as an aesthetic form and music as communitas and worship.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:13 Drew's Story 14:20 Arriving in North Africa, Master's in Ethnomusicology

15:45 What drew him to The Meaning Code?

18:30 Using music as a bridge to meaning

20:25 Correspondence between color theory and music theory

27:00 Sound colored by overtones

33:58 Is birdsong strictly just communication or is it an aesthetic experience for the birds as well as for humans?

42:00 Visual arts and music as two different dimensions

47:00 Music, timelessness, unity and multiplicity

54:30 Atomization of modern society and musical silos

58:45 Deeper into the Weeds conversation of Peterson, Vervaeke and Pageau The musicality of intelligibility. "Music is the most representational of art forms." Jordan Peterson

1:02:31 Or, is music the most abstract?

1:07:45 Unity in music, plus multiplicity, diversity, variety

1:09:00 Scale is essential

1:10:45 Pageau, "Consciousness is a pattern perceiving patterns."

1:21:15 What songs does Drew use when leading worship?

1:23:00 Outro

Mentions: Stefan Alexander, The Jazz of Physics

Robin Sylvan: The Traces of the Spirit

Victor Turner: The Ritual Process

Songs:

Christ is Enough

There is No Other Name

Give me Faith

10,000 Reasons

Oceans

00:00 Intro

03:19 The difference between physical and corporeal, the solution to the quantum enigma

07:25 The corporeal enters into the measurement problem through the measuring device

08:50 John describes relevance realization, the 4 P’s of knowing, emanation and emergence

13:45 Reality is structured with things emerging (returning to the One) and emanating (coming from the One

15:50 If the corporeal is not real, we love conformity to Reality

17:05 We are both Platonists!

18:15 Studying Plato through the lens of the ancient thinkers

25:00 Why is James Gibson’s work important? How has it affected your work?

27:30 Wolfgang seeks to understand John’s ontology

32:00 Gibson and affordances - undermines nominalism. There are real relations

34:30 Opening the door to a new ontology

37:45 The vertical dimension cannot be excluded from the project of working out intelligibility

39:45 James Gibson’s reputation in the academic community is stellar among cognitive scientists but not among cognitive psychologists

44:00 Gibson’s breakthrough has still not penetrated into the physics world 51:00 Spinoza’s Religion

55:00 The undoing of nominalism and representationalism is epochal and we need to celebrate it.

1:01:30 The 1804 edition of Plato’s works with commentary by Thomas Taylor opens up a new way of understanding the ancient books. The Ptolemaic cosmology.

1:06:00 A quote from Cosmos and Transcendence

1:07:00 John discovering the Western wisdom tradition (convergence with Wolfgang)

1:20:15 Abandoning the view that all faiths look to the same source (Vedanta in the Light of Christian Wisdom)

1:28:50 John suggests we do this again!

Background material on Wolfgang Smith and John Vervaeke

A previous conversation with Wolfgang Smith Solving the Quantum: a Vertical Ascent: https://youtu.be/8NWHGX53agc

Wolfgang Smith (A sampling of his many books)

Vedanta in Light of Christian Wisdom

Physics: a Science in Quest of an Ontology

Vertical Ascent

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions

Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief

The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key

Theistic Evolution: The Teilhardian Heresy

Science and Myth: A Response to Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design

and many others

And a movie made about his life: The End of Quantum Reality, available on Amazon

An earlier discussion with physicist friend Glen on Wolfgang Smith's ideas about vertical causation as well as a bit about Stephen Wolfram.

Toy Story as Metaphor for Quantum Measurement Problem: https://youtu.be/dFqGjvocYPw

John Vervaeke

The full series of Awakening from The Meaning Crisis w John Vervaeke: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ

John Vervaeke's 4 P's of Knowing https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuit-ucfcXN8QDPMc6DXbTHq

In Part 3 of this discussion regarding the role of the observer, Glen weaves together ideas of robust computing (demon horde sort) and distributed intelligence. He makes the claim that it could be mathematically verified whether or not computation is fundamental, and that if it turns out to be so, then language is also fundamental, since computation and language are inextricably intertwined.

We also learn that handedness (chirality) is hierarchical. links follow timestamps. Timestamps 0:00

Intro 0:15 Recapping the end of Part 2

2:00 Central Planning v. Distributed Intelligence

3:00 Responding to viewer’s comments

4:45 PBS Spacetime on the participatory universe

8:32 John Wheeler’s biggest question: Whose bit?

12:20 Implications of observers and the quantum mechanical universe

16:20 A vision of Wholeness

18:30 A challenge for mathematicians 20:35 If there is a point where entanglement does not affect the next layer up, that would solve the Wigner’s Friends paradox and would also illustrate that computation is fundamental.

24:00 Robodog as a way to explore learning systems and language in robotics

28:00 An exploration of group intelligence and the conversation as adaptable

31:30 Handedness is essential and implies Hierarchy

33:30 The language called Forth

38:20 Context Free Grammar, indexed grammars, natural language processing

41:35 The layers of Grammar

47:30 Field workers will probably never be replaced by robots, not a menial task, very complex

51:35 If computation is fundamental, we need a covenant between Truth and Language

53:40 Trust Networks and Cesar Hidalgo

57:50 Decisions at the level of the input output are more effective than centrally planned ones.

1:02:00 Questions about Darwin

1:07:20 It depends on what question you want answered

1:07:45 Questions about Space and Time, the reality of Possibilities and Options

1:11:15 Computational irreducibility is more intuitive if you talk about languages “The "Meta" Hard Problem of Consciousness and Quantum Babbling with Levin, Friston, and Fields,” https://youtu.be/J6eJ44Jq_pw

"Cracking The Nutshell," https://www.youtube.com/c/CrackingTheNutshell

"Do Electrons Have Free Will? The Conway-Kochen Free Will Theorem - Closing the Free Will Loophole,' https://youtu.be/7ZqUEAACfyk

PBS Space-Time, “Does the Universe Create Itself?” https://youtu.be/I8p1yqnuk8Y?t=600

"Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort (short version)," https://youtu.be/lbgzXndaNKk

"Forth the Hackers Language," https://hackaday.com/2017/01/27/forth-the-hackers-language/

Is the universe fundamentally computational? What is the observer? What is the role of the observer? A deep dive.

Timestamps 0:00.

Intro 2:00 Analyzing 2 different delayed choice quantum eraser experiments: Kim, et al and John Wheeler (Gedanken)

13:43 We never talk about what the observer is (we need to include the physics of the observer)

14:14 Maxwell's demon and the observer (a sequence of choices)

25:08 The Free Will Theorem 27:00 Multiple choices that are still consistent with the past history of the universe.

41:30 Observation does require a "concept" of consciousness.

49:25 Consciousness ends at the smallest composite systems capable of computation, those are the smallest units for which consciousness would apply. A sequence of choices based on a set of rules. Must be causally disconnected from the universe as a whole in order to be an observer.

1:00:52 If you take computation as fundamental, you can get an ought from an is, which Sam Harris says is impossible to do.

1:08:15 Computation is always a physical system. If you take computation as fundamental, information is downstream or an artifact of that. 1:09:10 If you think in terms of computation, you immediately get languages.

1:20:55 A review of computation

1:21:34 Exposition of music as a computational system

1:31:08 Introducing Dave Ackley of the Demon Horde Sort

The challenge. The Role of the Observer, Part 1: https://youtu.be/A5xtyRkp6HE Recommended research: More Glen and others on the Quantum Measurement Problem: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUa1nUq32fXuGvtTJFhLhN3d Glen on The Physics of Life: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoARw9zo4EUZhxqfaqYU5yjy0-Tr8RlB4

For all the links discussed by Glen, see the YouTube version of this talk:

https://youtu.be/xJtw5umXouc

Glen, physicist, mathematician and computer scientist, joins for an exploration of the role of the Observer in Physics. The history of the move from classical to quantum physics. If you want to do some homework before Part 2, links to everything are in the description to the YouTube version of this conversation: https://youtu.be/A5xtyRkp6HE

In the world of Alice in Wonderland, the role of the observer is the rabbit hole.

If the Observer can't be described quantum mechanically, what is it?

The paradoxes of entanglement

Before Schrodinger came up with the wave equation, what was he thinking about and looking at that led him to his conclusions?

Quantum mechanics - based on principle of least action Gave rise to la Grangian formalism which gave rise to Hamiltonian and then Poisson Brackets. Classical pushed to the limit leads to the quantum.

The wave function in a complex plane. Wave equation based on the principle of least action. Entanglement at the classic level needs a base of connection Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox

Schrodinger's cat - entanglement affects the observer Wigner's Friends Paradox The observer can't be a quantum mechanical system Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Experiment Correlations are products of wave functions Interference is sums of wave functions

Pierre Duhem wrote To Save the Phenomena and The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory Teaching should Edify, Explain and Encourage you to go deeper

Strong Free Will Theorem (Simon/Kochen) The future affects the past? Free choice should be called causal independence or causal decoupling

For a complete intro of these two guests, see their previous conversation. https://youtu.be/2vYfcotRRjk Timestamps 00:00 Musical Intro Affect is fundamental Unless we can make a conscious machine, we have not solved the hard problem Cognitive systems as predictive of the outside world 02:00 Mark Solms describes his project to create an artificial consciousness 04:15. The quest to find a neural correlate of consciousness (Francis Crick) 05:00 The wrong place to start 06:25 Children born without a cerebral cortex are still responsive and reactive 10:00 The mechanism of homeostasis, the periaqueductal gray, error signals 11:00 The architecture of the artificial consciousness 11:50 Autonomic regulation can be unconscious 12:30 Uncertainty triggers consciousness (ex: blood gases rising to conscious reaction), Uncertainty tells you how well you’re doing 15:00 Minimal conditions - self-organizing system - registers its own Markov blanket state (point of view) 3 needs 17:30 It needs energy, it suffers damage w/in tolerable limits, it needs rest & repair of structural damage - only purpose is to keep going 19:30 It wanders about is environment exploring and experiencing 20:43 An active inference agent, inferring its own state and state of its environment Error signals, updates, improving its model of itself in the world based on its 3 hemeostats Statistical confidence 23:50 Qualitatively distinctive categories 24:30 Calculating its expected free energy - the ability to look ahead 25:00 Equivalent of working memory, able to make decisions about how many steps needed to think ahead. 25:50 Create uncertainty by changing the environment. Its confidence in its policies is tethered to its affect. Environment changes & returns. Seasons. Explore and Exploit 28:20 How do we know when such a system has feelings? 30:20 Non-conscious is how we look at things that are in a different space than we are, but are they really non-conscious? Levels of “selfness” 32:40 Competencies in non-3D, problem spaces, transcriptional spaces, etc. In your virtual world is that level of consciousness as valid as physical organisms exhibit in 3-D space? 36:50 Measuring its own state in a qualitative sense Virtual v. Real agents Substrate v. Mechanism What new problems arise with embodiment? 41:00 Anomaly. Navigating morphospace Stress Changing set point. Rewritten the set point they gauge where to go. Second order monitoring system (metacognition) 43:30 We interact with our own representation of that state and our own internal bodily state The nerve impulses represent the state of a reality 45:30 The thermostat makes no resistance to changing the setpoint, but biological organisms need to resist, to monitor the set point. learning v being trained Has your set point been changed? Has someone else changed it? 47:40 The survival need of resisting change to your set point 50:00 Introduce other agents into the same environment to infer other agents. Isolation is a biologically implausible situation. 51:30. The problem of other minds 55:50 Zebrafish with hedonic condition place preference research See whether what motivates the entity is only a feeling. 57:30 Anxiolytics 58:50 Where does the desire to exist come from? "Affect is the fundamental (elemental) aspect of consciousness." Mark Solms There is an attempt to recast physics "to use the dynamics we use to look @ cognitive systems - a specific kind o predictive interaction with the outside world."

Is the Path Not Taken visible to God?

The narrative of the Garden as it relates to potential. Plan A or Plan B?

Does everyone want to be healed? Saved?

Looking at Jesus’ work in our lives through the story of Judas.

George MacDonald, “Our God is a consuming fire, and His fire is His love.”

https://www.amazon.ca/Beautiful-Constraint-Transform-Limitations-Advantages/dp/1118899016 Amazon link

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9057

Unspoken Sermons (George MacDonald)

Esther O’Reilly’s two talks with Paul

https://youtu.be/sOT6cP9tEnQ

https://youtu.be/QR_kwzF-9Ys

Shari Suter’s two talks with Paul

https://youtu.be/NYDJjVbG3mk first conversation with Paul

https://youtu.be/tfpXAZZq-wI second conversation with Paul

Karen’s two talks with Paul

https://youtu.be/HlMgGkwWUNY

https://youtu.be/ZC03aNsPHOQ

Dr. Michael Levin and Dr. John Vervaeke discuss findings on cognition, consciousness and placebo. Where is the line?

Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:30 “How do you define and differentiate cognition, intelligence, consciousness” 05:40 Mike 08:10 Can there be relevance realization at the cellular level? 14:00 The realization of the gradual development from oocyte to adult mind. Amazing plasticity. William James’ definition of intelligence 19:45 John asks about top-down causation rejecting just a bottom up approach. The whole has a causal power not attributable just to the parts. 21:00 JV Identity going all the way down and emergence going all the way up. How to identify the ontology? 22:00 ML Assume LaPlace’s demon could exist as a thought experiment. Tracking the micro states is an observer only, it cannot act. All the states are the same to you. But we want a worldview that helps you do things. A participatory worldview. 25:45 JV: I’ve been making epistemological arguments around the idea that any proper worldview has to give ontological status to scientists making measurements. 27:00 JV introduces neoplatonism, emanation down and emergence up as a way to integrate science and spirituality in an intellectually rigorous way 28:50 ML: Can't talk about Platonic worldview in the biology circles, only in a forum like this, focused on meaning. 30:00 Logic gates come with a truth table. Where does that come from? 30:55 An index into the world of possibilities. Where does the capacity come from for xenobots to form within 48 hours? 33:00 Evidence for fractal levels of cognition, information exchange… But have you ever looked at the placebo effect, which for a pure reductionist is a very hard thing to explain? 35:30 ML’s study on gene regulatory networks and the placebo effect. 38:30 Albert Mason on psycho dermatology 41:45 KW asks a “woo woo” question. Hilarity ensues. 45:00 JV Rigorous scientific research to verify “experience” 49:30 ML Biochemical and bioelectrical signals and how they could eventuate change across layers 52:00 ML Can we train molecular networks to stimulate healing?

Awakening from The Meaning Crisis: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ

4 P's of Knowing https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuit-ucfcXN8QDPMc6DXbTHq

Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/GVOxAOflRho Dr. Levin's work on limb regeneration: https://youtu.be/N9Oli5MPLbY The Levin Lab at Tufts U: https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/research/newdirections.htm Erik Hoel: a great Substack column in addition to his science. See section "b)" on https://www.erikphoel.com/science.html Albert Mason: http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/albert-mason-medicine-magic-hypnotism/ https://npsi.us.com/uploads/documents/MasonInterviewMRobinson2011.pdf

The Vertical Ascent by Wolfgang Smith

Dr. Wolfgang Smith, Renowned Physicist, on Vertical Causation, Irreducible Wholeness and Meaning https://youtu.be/8NWHGX53agc