Michael Levin
03 Jun 2023 - 05 Nov 2026
- The Levin Lab: Home He's an embodiment guy.
- Speaking at 13:43 quick capture: Pushing the Boundaries Symposium – Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership looks like fun.
- Forms of life, forms of mind | Dr. Michael Levin | Platonic space: where cognitive and morphological patterns come from (besides genetics and environment) (via Jacob Foster )
- Extremely annoying that selection is disabled, I made my own version!
- Forms of life, forms of mind | Dr. Michael Levin | A short argument on Platonic Space: variable-agency patterns that in-form physics, biology, computer science, and cognitive science
the insufficiency of physicalism
- cite The Platonic Representation Hypothesis which argues that LLM convergence proves the existence of Platonic representations (the points on which they converge upon).
make a specific proposal for understanding causation and interactionism (the claim that the mind:brain relationship is the same as the math:physics relationship
- that sounds...iffy
broaden the usual dualistic framework, in ways that neither materialists nor organicists tend to like by arguing that the non-physical patterns that drive advanced cognition are drawn from the same space as those that drive minimal physical and computational systems. In other words, that there are no truly dumb machines and dead matter, nor any magical divide that makes us unique in being more than our formal models of algorithms and physics.
- That on the other hand I have no argument with.
- He is a patternist basically. He's at Tufrs, wonder if Dennett was an influence.
- He's down on emergence for some reason – not explanatory enough?
we still have to say why one pattern “emerged” rather than another, and to whatever extent there’s an explanation, it’s not emergent anymore but has an upstream structure we can understand. If so, there’s our Platonic Space of patterns.- Copied from thoughtforms.life
- I don't quite get it. In his view the forms are all pre-existant and are discovered; in emergence they are actually created in time?
Some of the patterns in that space are low-agency, like some mathematical facts that just sit there (e.g., value of e); some are slightly better, being simple dynamical systems (e.g., Liar paradox oscillators). Others have simple learning capacity as we showed for systems of coupled ODEs. Others are so dynamic and capable that behavioral scientists would recognize their competencies as behavioral propensities; i.e., they are kinds of minds.
- Ah OK here the ugly dualism rears its head.
Like with all thin-clients, studying the front end interface will be only part of the story, if the important information is on the back end of the server. I suspect almost everything we know is now up for revision, because we’ve been focusing on only one end of the story – the physical end.- Copied from thoughtforms.life
So what does the Platonic space actually offer – what degree of free lunches? How do we exploit them, in a measurably consequential form? This is a major part of the research program. We know the space offers static forms (value of e etc.) but perhaps also dynamic behaviors (policies)-
- Now starting to touch on protocol territory