Emergence in general is basically just the measure of surprise for the observer.
If you look under the hood, all you ever find is chemistry and physics.
If cancer is that type of phenomenon—it’s a breakdown of that scaling and that basically individual cells just shrink their light cone back down to the level of a primitive microbial cell as they were once, and that boundary between self and world now shrinks; whereas before the boundary was that whole limb, now the boundary is just: every cell is the self—so from that perspective, they’re not more selfish, they just have smaller selves. So that’s really important. Because a lot of work in cancer models, cancer cell behavior from a perspective of game theory, they’re less cooperative and they’re more selfish. Actually, I’m not sure that’s true at all. I think they just have smaller selves.
Agents operate in their self-interest, but the size of that self can grow and shrink. So individual cells, when they’re tied into these large networks, they’ll be using electrical cues, chemical cues, biomechanical cues. They’re tied into these larger networks that partially erase their individuality. But what you end up with is a collective intelligence that has a much bigger local cognitive light cone; the goals are much bigger.
It’s the size of your cognitive light cone that determines what kinds of goals you can pursue and what space you pursue them in.
If we sort of ask ourselves what the point is, and why do we exert all this effort to exist in the physical world, and try to persist, and exert effort in all the things we do in our lives, one could make an argument that a larger cognitive light cone is probably better in the sense that it allows you to generate more meaning, and allows you to bring meaning to all the effort and the suffering and the joy and the hard work and everything else. From that perspective, one would want to enlarge one’s cognitive light cone.
In Buddhism, they have this notion of a bodhisattva vow, and it’s basically a commitment to enlarge one’s cognitive light cone so that, over time, one becomes able to have a wider area of concern or compassion, right? The idea is you want to work on changing yourself in a way that enlarges your ability to really care about a wider set of beings. And so from that perspective, maybe you want the larger cognitive light cone.
What’s the fundamental unit that exists in the world? Is it genes? Is it information? What is it that’s really spreading through the universe and then differentially reproducing?
Any agent that evolves under constraints of metabolic and time resources is going to have to coarse-grain: they’re going to have to not be a reductionist, they’re going to have to tell stories about agents that do things as a means of compression, as a way of compressing the outside world and picking a perspective. You cannot afford to try to track everything—it’s impossible.
You don’t have the experience of running your liver and your kidneys, which are very necessary for your brain function. You are also not aware of all the subconscious motivations and patterns and traits and everything else. So let’s assume right now that whatever our conscious experience is, there is tons of stuff under the hood—not just the thing that I just said, but everything else that neuroscience has been studying for a hundred years or more—there’s lots going on under the hood. And that doesn’t define you, it enables you to do certain things. It constrains you from doing certain other things that you might want to do. The hardware does not define you.
What happens to most people, which I think is quite interesting, is that, if they were to open their arm, and they find a bunch of cogs and gears inside, I think most people would be super depressed. Because I think where most people go with this is: I just learned something about myself. Meaning: I know what cogs and gears can do, they’re a “machine,” and I just learned that I’m full of cogs and gears, therefore I’m not what I thought I was. And I think this is a really unfortunate way to think, because what you’re saying is: your experience of your whole life (and all of the joys and the suffering and the personal responsibility and everything else that you’ve experienced), you’re now willing to give all that up because you think you know something about what cogs and gears can do. I would go in the exact opposite direction and I would say: amazing! I’ve just discovered that cogs and gears can do this incredible thing! Like, wow! And why not? Because why do you think that ions and proteins and the various things in your body—those are great for true cognition. Like, I always knew I was full of protein and lipids and ions and all those things, and that was cool. I was okay with being that kind of machine. But cogs and gears? No way.
If you find out that you are made of cogs and gears, all you should conclude is: well, great, now I know this stuff can do it as well as proteins can.
Pretty much no discovery about the hardware, no discovery about the biology or the physics of it, should pull you away from the fundamental reality of your being that, whatever it is that you are—groups of cells, an emergent mind pulled down from platonic space, or whatever—whichever of these things are correct, the bottom line is: you are still the amazing integrated being with potential and a responsibility to do things.
We need to give up this unwarranted confidence in what we think matter can do. We are finding novel, proto-cognitive capacities in extremely minimal systems—extremely minimal systems—and they’re surprising to us. They’re shocking, when we find these things. And I think we are really bad at recognizing what kinds of systems can give rise to minds, and therefore being depressed because we think that we are a particular kind of system, and there’s no way that system can be this majestic, agentic being. It’s way too early for that.
When you have collective intelligence, you need to have policies and you need to have mechanisms for enabling competent individuals to merge together into a larger emergent individual.
Evolution doesn’t just produce solutions to specific environmental problems, it produces problem-solving agents that are able to use the tools they have.
What’s a better example of intelligence than something that can use the tools it has in novel ways to solve a problem it’s never seen before? Right? Like, that is a version of intelligence. And that’s what is all over the place in biology: the ability to navigate these pathways not only to avoid various barriers and so on, but to use the tools available to them in creative ways to solve the problem.
IQ is not the property of whatever system you’re trying to gauge the IQ of. It is your best guess about what kind of problem-solving you can expect out of that system. So it’s as much about you as it is about the system.
When you make an estimate of the intelligence of something, you are taking an IQ test yourself.
Potential energy and least action principles are the tiniest hopes and dreams that there are.
Consciousness is one of those things that cannot exclusively be studied in the third person. Everything else you can study as an external observer, and you don’t change much as the observer by studying them. You can really only study consciousness by being part of the experiment: by experiencing it from the first-person perspective.
I think we should take very seriously the possibility that other subsystems of the body have some sort of consciousness.
How do you know if and when you are part of a larger cognitive system? How do we know if we are in fact part of a bigger mind?
I wonder if we could—having a degree of intelligence ourselves—if we could gain evidence that we were part of a larger system that was actually processing information.
The way you can think about it is simply: not why is there cancer, but why is there anything but cancer? So why do cells ever cooperate instead of being amoebas? Why do they ever cooperate? And so we know that the bioelectric signaling is the kind of cognitive glue that binds them together towards these large-scale construction projects—maintaining organs and things like that.
