Episode 109: Genes, Emergence, and Platonism (round table with Sadia and Ivan)

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Peter: Hello out there. This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, we begin by discussing differing viewpoints about third-way evolution or a gene-centric viewpoint versus a more holistic view of natural selection. The discussion evolves into a deep dive into emergence and reductionism and many interwoven ideas. Truthfully, this is one of the deepest discussions I've ever been a part of, even as a listener. I personally found myself agreeing with whomever was speaking, and I am just in awe of how everyone expressed themselves. About our guests, Ivan Phillips, in what I believe is his third appearance on our podcast, is author of the book Textbook Rationality about Rationality Education, and a new book titled Counterargument from Design that counters arguments for design in evolution. Sadia Naeem, like Ivan, has a Ph.D. in Physics, and has one of the most interesting online presences of anyone I've known. I'm sure she has many accomplishments I don't know about, but her Facebook posts are epic, full to the brim of curiosity regarding the deepest questions regarding the nature of our universe. I hope someone enjoys listening to our guests as much as I did.

[00:01:28]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast. Hey, guys.

[00:01:31]  Peter: Hello, Bruce.

[00:01:32]  Bruce: And we got with us Sadia, yes, and Ivan.

[00:01:37]  Ivan: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

[00:01:39]  Sadia: Yeah, thanks for having me as well.

[00:01:41]  Bruce: We are going to have a discussion about, we had three episodes that we did in the past, where I first talked about kind of James Shapiro's viewpoint on evolutionary biology. He's part of The Third Way, probably more famously Denis Noble would be the name people would recognize as being part of The Third Way. James Shapiro's a big name in that too, but not as well known. Then we did a podcast on critique of Denis Noble and James Shapiro from Zach Hancock, which was, he's someone who actually works as an evolutionary biologist, and he's got a strong set of criticisms aimed at The Third Way. Then we did a third episode on Michael Levin, who does not identify as being a member of The Third Way, but his point of view seems to me to be very similar to it. So a lot of interesting things came out of that, and I find this topic particularly interesting. I was talking with Sadia, and I suddenly realized that she was way more enthusiastic about it than I was. And so then I was talking with Ivan, and he didn't necessarily deny anything, but he was kind of like ho-hum, yawning about it. And I thought, okay, this is great. I can get somebody who's more enthusiastic about than me on third-way anti-gene-centrism, and someone who doesn't think it's maybe as big a deal, and we can have a discussion on the subject. And I know Sadia reads about this quite a bit, so she probably has a lot that she wants to add that I wouldn't even know about. Maybe let's go ahead and I'll let, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let Sadia and then Ivan talk.

[00:03:21]  Bruce: Each of them can just take a moment to summarize, introduce yourselves first of all. I mean, I know both of you have been on the show before, but introduce yourselves and then maybe summarize your own viewpoints on this topic so that people know where you're coming from and what your biases are and, or, you know, for Ivan's sake, what your priors are. And then we can go from there into whatever topic we want to to talk about this and discuss it. So Sadia, why don't you go ahead first?

[00:03:50]  Sadia: Just a brief introduction. My background is in physics. I have a PhD in physics and I've been interested in foundational issues. But I've been interested in basically foundational issues, period. That's the nature of the beast. Like once you get into that, you find yourself all over the place and you start to see connections. And theory of evolution has particularly been of interest to me because I think there are interesting ways and interesting implications it could have even for cosmology. Like if we look at just Big Bang cosmology and why do we have the constants of nature we have. I won't go into too much of that, but that's kind of what brought me into this and my interest. And then I've been following the debate, this whole debate, with Denis Noble, Richard Dawkins. And I was thinking about these things prior to that, but I think Denis Noble highlighted a lot of stuff that I find that's been happening in the scientific community that I've observed too, which I think that's the thing that I think is really important, what Denis Noble has mentioned. And also the reasons, and there are psychological reasons behind why there are certain ideas that people, some people in the scientific community are really critical of, and it's really important to look at it from that point of view too, why there is a pushback.

[00:05:16]  Sadia: And then of course, we have to evaluate whether those ideas have any credence when it comes to when we, you know, is there evidence for it? And then having said that, it was kind of really good to listen to Bruce, the podcast you did, and I actually ended up listening to the last two episodes again, which I would highly recommend whoever is listening to this. You'll get a better idea about this. And interestingly, you know, when you brought up Michael Levin, listening to all that, all the way to the end, I had a smile on my face because I have precisely reached that point because I'm familiar with Michael Levin and have been following his work for a while. And I don't think a lot of evolutionary biologists, at least some of the people I've been talking to are paying attention to these things that are happening, that actually support, in a way, a lot of things Denis Noble is saying, and as you mentioned that Michael Levin has highly regards Denis Noble. He doesn't, even though he's not identifying himself with a third way, but he's very much in support if Denis Noble's...

[00:06:19]  Unidentified speaker: He's effectively supporting Denis Noble.

[00:06:21]  Sadia: Oh, yeah, totally. And the point that he's supporting on is precisely the point that doesn't sit well with some of the people who are reacting back, as we'll talk about it. So I think to begin with, I think the problem I have is, first of all, I think this whole notion of what a gene is, right? So if you really talk to some of these, you know, the sort of people you talked about in evolutionary biology were saying, you know, one of the things that people say about Denis Noble from that community and criticisms is, well, you're really not saying anything new. Either they'll say you don't understand evolutionary biology or you'll say, well, what you're saying is nothing new. All you're doing is this is just straw manning. There's this straw man argument. We don't need any of that. I'm going to give you my understanding of what Denis Noble is saying. Again, don't hold me to whether that is it. I don't want this to be about whether I've mastered Denis Noble or not. But this is my version of what I understand.

[00:07:20]  Unidentified speaker: Your interpretation of Denis Noble.

[00:07:21]  Sadia: My interpretation, which is my own theory, if you want to say it. This is how I think of genes and if my starting point is wrong, then obviously. The way I look at genes and where I think evolutionary bio, some view goes kind of wrong is this. I'm going to use a metaphor. I'm thinking about DNA in this metaphor as like a piano. A piano is there and you can play music, you can compose music, and compositions are not an opportunity to compose. The organism itself is the composer and piano is part of that organism, right, in this case. So there's something creative going on. So genes are basically compositions. But I think it's wrong to think that somehow, it seems like at least the layman view that the high school physics, which I was taught, and I have taken biology, high school biology, is that you somehow are given the view of as if the information is already in the DNA and somehow there is some sort of a bottom-up type causation that, you know, the information flow is that way. But when you really, you know, when push comes to shove, it seems like a lot of evolutionary biologists are saying, no, no, well, that's not the true version. We're not saying that, of course, it's much more complex, and we're not gene-centrist. But when you really push them, then again, they fall back, because if they didn't fall back, then one thing that they would accept is that there is a new form of teleology. There comes the bad word, the teleology, all right? They have a reaction right away without even wanting to understand what that means.

[00:09:02]  Sadia: Because in their mind, the idea of teleology is the old idea of some sort of a final cause, or sometimes you'll see intelligent design people will, because they want to say as if their evolution has some sort of a direction to where some sort of a perfection, because God is getting this evolution, directing evolution to some sort of a perfection. But we talk about goals and humans, right? We have goals, but nobody says that it has to be about something perfect. We have goals, we try to solve problems. That doesn't mean that if I'm trying to solve a problem, I already have solution figured out. I'm learning from my mistakes, so clearly there is the variation selection type thing going on in human learning, but at the same time, goals are important, all right? So how do we think about the goals? First of all, there comes the part that I want to be clear here. I'm not associating any type of consciousness to a cell. When I use the word agency, I'm doing it in much the way that Michael Levin does. You talked about it last time as well, that it's part of the system. It's something, for me, this is something intrinsic to the system. I don't want to get too much into, Michael Levin is the Platonist, but I take a very different approach. I am an emergentist. And there is this differentiation that's been made there.

[00:10:31]  Sadia: I think that we need to explain how things like that, how this new form of teleology, goal-directedness, emerges in systems, rather than saying that at certain point, brains or organisms become receptacle to some sort of thing from platonic spaces. To me, that's just kind of a very magical. Or that's almost like saying, no, I don't have to explain anything. I'll just put whatever I had to explain in a platonic space, so I don't have to explain it. But I am an emergentist because I feel like as a scientist, we should pursue, we should push our understanding. We should try to understand how these properties, the new types of properties emerge. To me, Platonism is sort of giving up. So anyways, I think the issue that I see with even, and I did watch that Hancock video, is that a lot of things that Denis Noble is saying, he doesn't seem to have issues, but at the same time, there's something that bothers them, people who are kind of in the Hancock, I'll say the Hancock camp from now. I think that what bothers them is this idea of purposiveness. So again, if they could just calm down and relax as to what's been said here, this is basically about causal powers. There is something on causality called powers. If you look at the history of the idea of causation, there has been two camps, one camp comes from David Hume, where those people, even if they accept causation, would say that causation is just something that appears to us, but it's not intrinsic.

[00:12:08]  Sadia: And then there is a New Aristotelian sort of camp that say that no, causation is something intrinsic. It's nothing like a life force or anything, right? It's kind of like saying, just like properties, there are other intrinsic properties that matter has, matter can have charge, right? Nobody denies that there is an issue with charge. So similarly, we're saying that there are certain aspects to, there are certain intrinsic aspects to entities and causation is part of that, that something can cause something else. And at the heart of, when it comes to teleology, so in this way, from now onwards, I'm going to call it teleodynamic, because [Devon?] takes the view of what's called teleonomy versus the way I go, because I'm an emergentist, is teleodynamic, because I think it's intrinsic, that goal-directedness. So why do I think there is goal-directedness? First of all, like I said, I think that genes are, my view of genes at least is that the organism is like the composer. There's a holistic thing. I'm not even creating a dualism between organism and the DNA. I'm saying DNA is part of the organism, but gene is something creative, like a composition. So when we say that there's a mutation that happens, imagine if you had a piano and some mutation could be akin to saying that maybe one of the key got totally out of tune with others.

[00:13:33]  Sadia: Now, if you're an organism and there is some sort of, and the organism is creative, then maybe you can come up with a new composition that is based in that mutated thing. Again, what we're seeing is that the causation is not from piano up. It's like both ways, piano is absolutely essential. So is the mutation, which in this case, as I mentioned what that is, and so is the organism itself. So organism is playing an active role and that's the important part. And I think in evolution, organism is playing an active part, which neo-Darwinism so far, even though if you kind of push them, they're taking into account all these effects that kind of does kind of direct that way, but they just don't accept it. All they have to do in what Denis Noble's point, main point is accept the organism as playing an active role. And I feel like that is something they're not willing to accept, as Hancock said, that this whole idea that he rejects purposiveness and so forth, and there's no room for it in evolutionary biology. So that's that. What was the other thing I was going to say here? So the thing is that I think you brought up some really good points in your podcast about that how for a layman term, we, you know, what Denis Noble is saying is correct, that most of us, the version of evolutionary biology we are taught at high school is wrong, right? And evolutionary biologists are saying, well, we the experts know, and yeah, we understand, like, you know.

[00:15:07]  Sadia: But the thing is, that they, and at the same time, people like Hancock say, well, we should not use words like purposiveness and all that, because that's going to mislead a public, a freaking misleading public. I'm sorry to say this, right? So give them the true picture. They ought to know what the organism is about. This is annoying. I wish that I was taught correct biology when I was a child. I don't think it would have been that hard for me to understand, because it's not that hard for our students to understand that AI is not like us. It's not like feeling and thinking, but we call it intelligent, right? So is it really that hard for somebody to really understand that there is a type of intelligence inherent in a cell even at the level of cell? But it's not like human intelligence. So why are we even, if wrong version is all we can teach at the basic level, but why does it lean towards a certain narrative, whereas it could have been closer towards the true narrative is my point, right? It's because there is this bias, this thing against the goal-directedness. And I think Michael Levin's work, to me, really kind of based in experiments and so forth, really highlights this type of causation, right? That there is another type of learning, that there is something going on at the organism level in bioelectricity. And I think there is some sort of a memory inherent there that is at play, which I think we ought to, and we're not going to understand it till we actually acknowledge there is such a thing there.

[00:16:41]  Sadia: So, you know, not only that, like, so I think Denis Noble's point is correct, that for the future direction in science, if we teach the wrong narrative and we keep avoiding this question, we're going to miss out on certain things, such as, and the ones who are dealing with it, like Michael Levin is openly kind of talking about this, and he has no issues with what Denis Noble is saying. So I'll stop at this point and maybe later on if other points come up. But I'm glad to see Ivan, you're here, because I know that you've also had a pushback against my idea, and it's always good to have somebody who is critical.

[00:17:15]  Unidentified speaker: So please do push back.

[00:17:17]  Unidentified speaker: That was great, Sadia. Wow.

[00:17:19]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[00:17:20]  Peter: And wait, just so I'm clear, what is playing the genes in this piano player metaphor?

[00:17:27]  Sadia: Organism as a whole has genes. It's part of it. There is no dualism. But what I'm saying is the composer is the entire organism itself. That's what a gene is. So even though, yes, there is mutation. I'm not denying that there is a mutation and selection going on. But when organism plays an active role, then things change. It's not like how we were taught that selection is just totally like, it's not, you know, it's like, okay, there's a mutation and you're part of an environment, whatever, you know, can adapt. But here, the thing is that if an organism is dealing with some sort of, like if there's a mutation or there's something happening in the environment, then organism is trying out, like, sort of similar. And again, I don't want to anthropomorphize, but I think it helps people understand using analogies. Just like when we encounter a problem, right? Just because we have goals in life, like if I want to get to work, if I want to eat food the next dinner, how to prepare it, do I have groceries or not, you know? That doesn't mean that just because I’m purposive, it doesn't mean that I have reached some perfection, I have the answer and I'm gonna get it, right? It just means that I am gonna try, I'm gonna use strategies actively. And then there is a certain element that I'm at the mercy of nature, right? You know, I may not get the goals that I like, but at least me playing that active role is important. And another really, before I actually move on, this is what I wanted to bring.

[00:18:56]  Sadia: So how do we understand the purpose of this is also another interesting topic I wanted to get into it. So Terence Deacon has written this awesome book that I highly recommend. It's called Incomplete Nature, where he gives this new version of teleology. The word is teleonomy. Even he had a pushback on that, even though he's not invoking anything supernatural, all he's saying is that, you know, he goes through a lot of things that Michael Levin is saying, like something called morphodynamics, like, you know, where Levin looks at it, morphological spaces, but he's talking about that these processes are part of the dynamics. He's not talking about any platonic spaces. That's why I like Terence Deacon's approach, the New Aristotelian-type approach. So his view is in terms of constraints, that he views this, whether you want to look at goal-directedness as sort of constraints. I'm not saying that's the complete picture, but I think I feel like that's the right direction. The other thing I wanted to bring up, which really kind of, I hate to say this, pisses me off, is that we were also told that the origin of life isn't a big deal. Like, it's all figured out. It's just a bunch of detail. Origin of life is one of the biggest mysteries we have right now. I mean, it's only in the recent years. And after reading actually a book that a biologist, sorry, a physicist wrote on quantum biology, that I first came across, what were the issues in the origin of life, because he thinks that quantum mechanics might solve that problem just because of that.

[00:20:27]  Sadia: Otherwise, you always only heard, like, intelligent design people talk about it. So I never really looked at that. But then when I heard that from that physicist, I started investigating. It's been really hard to actually find some of that material. That's the weird part, too. So there is this, at the heart of the issue of, and I think there is a really deep connection between origin of life and the evolution. We cannot overlook the origin of life in there. Because the idea is this, that there is such a strong emphasis on the replicators, right? On the DNA replication and selection. But if you look at the origin of life, one of the biggest issues which comes from the RNA hypothesis, which I think is the more DNA-oriented type of, even though that's not DNA, but it's kind of a more in line with that, is something called eigen-catastrophe. It's to do with the fact that at some point, life had to be robust enough that any errors that accumulated, like if your mutation rates were high, then you may reach a dead end where you may not even be able to keep going in terms of evolution. I'm trying my best to explain this.

[00:21:39]  Sadia: But if you want to look up eigen-catastrophe, then it should be easy to find that one. The thing is that to me, that kind of, and here I'm going to give my hunch, I think because if you talk to an evolutionary biologist, you'll probably see that some of the things I'm associated with goal-directedness is something they'll say, oh yeah, evolution through variation selection eventually led to that type of thing. I actually shared a paper with you where, I mean, that's still kind of very new right now from 2023 about mutation biases that we might have found, that there are some mutation biases. I don't want to go too much into it, but my point is that I think what the origin of life was, was the origin of goal-directedness alongside this variation and selection, because without that type of constraints, those type of constraints that don’t come with goal-directedness, I don't think life would have taken off, let alone evolve. For life to evolve, there had to be robustness. And I think some people have tried coming up with that, like Stuart Kauffman has an idea called Auto-catalytic sets. But we still haven't really found a good, we don't really have any idea of any good theory of origin of life right now. All of them have some issues. So I think this is a problem for emergence.

[00:23:08]  Sadia: At some point, either some sort of a phase transition occurred through which, at the same point, replicators as well as some sort of constraints and goal-directedness emerged that together actually led to the evolution. And I think the evolutionary biologists are missing out by not accepting this new form of which I'm going to call teleodynamic. All right.

[00:23:31]  Unidentified speaker: Now I'll stop.

[00:23:32]  Bruce: All right. So thank you. That was excellent, Sadia. Ivan, would you like to maybe introduce yourself and give your point of view on this now?

[00:23:43]  Ivan: Yeah. Like Sadia, I have a background in physics. I have a PhD in physics, so not a biologist. But I did recently publish a book on evolution versus design. So I have a lot of thoughts about what we should infer from evidence for evolutionary biology.

[00:24:10]  Ivan: Like Sadia, I enjoyed your podcast episodes covering this topic because I've only been following it from a distance. I thought you did a really good job of explaining what the third way is, and what the criticism of it is, and then your ultimate episode on what you think is still missing from the conversation, perhaps. My own view, I guess I'm spelling out my biases here. I am a physicalist, and I'm a reductionist, and I'm a Bayesian, which makes me pretty hardcore, I guess. And my own view on this third way is that it doesn't contradict neo-Darwinism. That it does sort of contradict the idea that we taught in high school that you have just a collection of genes and you get random nucleotide mutations, and that over long periods of time, this ends up creating all the life we see. Obviously, the way life functions, even in single cell life, is much more complex than that. But the question is, for me, does this contradict naturalism or does it contradict neo-Darwinism? It's easy to imagine a story in which the very simplest life operates perhaps in the way that we were taught in high school. But then mutations occur that alter the rate at which mutations can occur in certain parts of the genetic code. So now you have differential rates of mutation. But evolution found this solution. So it doesn't seem to contradict the basic idea. Now what is interesting obviously is that it does seem that the machinery within cells is much more complex than we thought. So the ability of electric fields, for example, to condition the way cells respond, that seems very new and surprising.

[00:26:44]  Ivan: So I feel like the lesson that we're learning is that the machinery of the cell that performs the DNA copying and other functions within the cell has just been optimized by evolution to do a lot more things than we might have naively thought. This is a good lesson to have learned, but it doesn't seem like it really changes the picture. So one of the things I've been asking myself, and I don't think I've quite come up with the answers yet, is what kind of evidence would change my mind? Now, one of the things that makes me uncomfortable is this talk of teleology. I'm not denying that there's goal-directedness in life, right? So if you have a bacterium, the bacterium can navigate towards food. Well, that is a kind of decision-making. You could say that it is goal-directedness. But it's not goal-directedness as in the way humans normally implement goal-directedness, right? It's more like an automatic reaction. So when humans have a goal that they want to achieve, I imagine, oh, I need to move this furniture down into the basement. And then I start planning out how to do that, right? I don't think that simple life is doing that. I think that simple life is reacting. So the question is, like, it does a thermostat, for example, have goal-directedness in its behavior. There's a way in which you could say, well, yes, it does. But it's not the same kind of thing that humans have. Humans create abstractions and then use these abstractions to get to solutions.

[00:28:42]  Ivan: And mammals, many mammals can do this also to a more limited degree. So goal-directedness is a thing. But it seems that goal-directedness, this goal-directedness that we're talking about here, is not new to neo-Darwinism. It's not as if biologists didn't know that animals had goal-directedness before. We knew that. It seems to me that goal-directedness would only be relevant to evolution if individuals were thinking as part of their goal what they wanted the next generation to have, what they wanted their genome to look like in the future. And I don't think that life can do that. I don't think that, I think it's very difficult even for humans to do that. So there is also this switching, switching to a sort of a different level here, the philosophical level. One of the things that I noticed about Karl Popper and critical rationalism and David Deutsch is that their philosophies are not just about epistemology. They have a sort of moral philosophy or maybe a moral theory of, a moral unified theory about how the universe works or how we should think about things. And there's something that I've heard Peter bring up a few times, which is this idea of genetic determinism. That I feel like the critical rationalist point of view is kind of libertarian, in a sense. Like free will is pretty important to the position. And so one of the, this is just a feeling.

[00:30:39]  Ivan: It may not be completely reasonable, but I feel like the goal here is to get away from genetic determinism and that it may be that genetic determinism is wrong, right? That the selfish gene theory, I never took selfish gene theory to be identical to neo-Darwinism, but it seems to me that even if you get away from genetic determinism, it's still a biochemical determinism. I am a compatibilist when it comes to free will and determinism, so to me, it's not a problem. But I think that for many people, it is, and I wonder to what extent that's driving part of the conversation. To get back again to the questions that I have, it comes down to where would I draw the line? What would we need to discover in a cell that would change my point of view? So if we were to discover, for example, that there is a mechanism whereby cells know or can somehow predict the outcome of what a genetic change would be, and then move towards that in advance, like have some sort of precognition of what is going to happen, that would change my point of view. But it seems to me that reality is so complex on life and the environment in which any given individual is going to find itself is so unpredictable that the outcome of a genetic change is simply unpredictable, right? The randomness is there because we can't actually deterministically guess what the right answer is.

[00:32:35]  Ivan: We can certainly, you know, our cells can guess that, hey, if you take this gene that allows me to consume food and destroy that gene, that I will, the next generation will just die. That is something that you could know, right? You could know that certain genes are essential. But I think that when we are seeing genetic changes and mutations take place, they are mostly random. They may be, the randomness may be different for different segments, for different parts of the genome. But they are random because even humans can't predict what's going to happen in the next generation. I don't think bacteria can do it either. To me, the thing that I'm always on guard for is, when we come up with some new formulation or some new philosophical position, is it somehow proposing that the universe, at fundamental level, is anything more than simple laws of physics? To me, that's how I define naturalism is that the laws of physics are, or that the laws of the universe are fundamentally non-mental. Now, I don't take it as, it must be this way. It's not something that I'm demanding ahead of the evidence. We could have found ourselves in a world like Harry Potter's world, in which magic is real and in which mental concepts are fundamental. The conservation of energy can be violated based on folk psychological concepts like good and evil and joy and things like that. I don't think that that's the universe that we live in. When I see this third way, I'm always very suspicious of it because it looks like people are trying to smuggle in something that's non-natural into the process.

[00:34:47]  Ivan: Now, I'm not accusing you all of doing that, but that's the thing that makes me question where is this going? What would be the next step? What could we find? What would be a possible answer to any of these questions, and would it change our naturalistic picture of the universe?

[00:35:12]  Bruce: Let me ask a follow-up question on that. So, I would interpret James Shapiro in particular as actually arguing at least to a degree, we can talk about to what degree, because that might matter to how you're going to perceive this, but at least to a degree that cells, DNA, etc. do make decisions about how to utilize the information that exists inside the DNA, and that there is a directedness towards what types of changes they want to make. So, let's take the most simplistic example, and one that is not at all controversial. It would be the immune system. So, the immune system, it's true that it makes random mutations, within the life of the cell, it tries changing its DNA, the cells, it replicates a bunch of cells, the cells that are going to be the antibodies, and they all try randomly changing their DNA, towards a goal of trying to find the right combination to defeat this pathogen, right? So, there would be a case that's kind of like what you just said would change your mind, where there's an actual knowledge and directiveness in the cell, where, in the cells, where they are actively trying to make a change to themselves for a specific goal, with a certain degree of precognition. We know we've detected there's a pathogen. We know there should be some sort of way to defeat this pathogen. Let's try to find this. On the other hand, this example is so simple, I think you could make an easy case that actually this fits into the whole Neo-Darwinian scheme without too much trouble. So, could you comment on that?

[00:37:00]  Bruce: And, in general, your thoughts on James Shapiro's claims. Let me try to summarize his claims, as I understand them, just so you've got something to bounce off against. He is claiming that cells have knowledge of their DNA, that they know how to genetically engineer themselves for purposes. Okay? It's maybe questionable how much they do that. But I don't think there's any doubt. He gives examples of where this is true. Uncontroversial examples. The examples tend to be either like the immune system, which I just explained, or they tend to be like bacteria. Right? I mean, like, there's known examples where natural genetic engineering is an actual thing in those two areas that I just mentioned, and we could probably mention a few others. Okay? And he has suspicions that it's far more ranging than that. Okay. So could you maybe comment on your thoughts on that? Would that be an example, if he were to turn out to be true, of maybe falsifying your views and forcing you to change your views on this?

[00:38:08]  Ivan: It doesn't change my view because this is just differential mutation rates, right, that are triggered by environmental conditions. So suppose that you had just purely random mutations, like where...

[00:38:34]  Ivan: So one of the things that we've learned, right, is that it's not... The mutations that are occurring in cells, it's not just knocking out single nucleotides from the DNA chain and then randomly replacing things. I mean, it can be something like that, like a copying error or something along those lines. But a lot of what happens is genes being shuffled around, right? So instead of randomly switching out letters in a sentence, it's like rearranging word order or adding existing words, repeating words and things like that. Well, if you have a system like this, this is where mutations can occur with equal frequency anywhere. But some of these genes are also controlling gene expression, or they're controlling the mechanisms that do repair of DNA, like that do error repairs. It's easy to imagine that you could get mutations that would alter the rate, that would, for example, suppress the rate of error correction under certain circumstances. In these circumstances, initially, this mutation rate, mutation, the mutation that changes mutation rate, could be something that depends on, it might depend on different environmental conditions, but you'll have generations where it will create this mutation, but it will be responding to the wrong input. But if this mutation arises in response to signals that the body is under attack from a virus, then now you've got like something that's occurring that's going to act like an immune system, right? So this is not the DNA or the body knowing, it doesn't know what the solution is.

[00:40:54]  Ivan: It's just a mutation rate that is different as a function of environmental conditions. It doesn't, so the way you phrased it was that the cell knows what the DNA contains, but it doesn't know that, right? You don't have DNA, I don't—at least I don't think that the DNA contains a map of the DNA, like it's got an index of the genes on the chromosomes, like there is no index chromosome. It doesn't know that, right? What you mean, what they mean is something like the genes are expressed at different, they turned on and off and expressed as, as the life form matures, right? So it's, it's something where, cause you can't have all the, all the genes in the cell just expressing at the same rate all the time. That would not work. But that's not how, how the cell operates. So it seems to me that there's nothing inside the cell that can create the abstractions necessary to know what it's doing, right?

[00:42:15]  Unidentified speaker: So in a thermostat, the thermostat doesn't know, doesn't know what the temperature is. It doesn't know what a temperature is or why.

[00:42:21]  Sadia: I just want to quickly throw out a question and then I'll let you take over, Bruce. So would you, I know that you said that you don't, don't go by the selfish gene narrative that I would say, but would you describe yourself as a gene centrist, like somebody who sees himself as, like whose view is gene centrist?

[00:42:44]  Ivan: I would say that descriptively, having gone through standard high school biology, that's what most people are going to come away with. So I would say that that would be my, like descriptively, my default position, having not thought about it in great detail. It's an interesting question to ask.

[00:43:04]  Sadia: I noticed you using the language and I wanted to see how much you meant it when you said genes control and that's where I feel like a lot of times even, I feel like the evolutionary biologists kind of fall back to that, even though when you push comes to shove, they recognize all that the cell is doing, but somehow they always end up somehow falling back on gene centrism and then they turn around and they deny, no, no, we're not gene centrist, but push comes to shove, they turn out to be that way. Like I said, like the analogy I gave of the composer, in that case, genes aren't really controlling, but genes are a result, a holistic result of causation at multilevel causation, where the entire organism is already participating. So to me, it's not an issue there.

[00:43:54]  Peter: Well, what is the difference between a gene centric view and a selfish gene view? Is that easy to summarize?

[00:44:03]  Sadia: Being in gene centric view, you're just merely saying that the information flow, like the causation flows asymmetrically from genes up as if genes are somehow in control, right? Even though, yes, the mutation selection happens, but that's where, as if that's like the source code, like if you want to think about it, the program is there and the organism is a passive automaton that's run by that code. But what I think Noble is saying, or at least my version of Noble is saying is that no, there is no automaton and there isn't even a dualism. It's the entire organism that should be taken into account. And genes are merely part of what happens and that includes evolution.

[00:44:43]  Peter: But the selfish gene version is a stronger version of gene centrism?

[00:44:48]  Bruce: Yes. But she's right that it's not quite the same thing. So they're associated. That's why you're associating them in your mind. So there's this idea of the selfish gene, that the organism exists for the sake of replicating the gene, where the giant lumbering robots, what's the term that comes from the selfish gene from Richard Dawkins that everybody always quotes. So you've got that idea, which is very, very gene-centric, right? But you wouldn't have to accept that to be gene-centric. So I think probably the best way to understand gene-centrism, keep in mind that these are bucket terms, suitcase terms that people use to mean lots of different things. And we've got to be very careful because they don't mean a single thing, right? But I like the way Levin uses the terms. So Levin isn't denying gene-centrism in the sense that genes do could be thought of as driving everything causally. What he's saying is that's one choice of how to view it and that there's other choices at emergent levels that you could view it differently that are honestly going to turn out to be a lot better ways of viewing it. So he gives the example of the rat and you're trying to teach the rat to dance or something. And so you could try to like look at the particles in the rat and you could try to like figure out how to move those particles to move its muscles to cause it to dance. Or you could just train the rat.

[00:46:23]  Bruce: And the gene-centric view would be the reductionist view. Keep in mind, I don't mean this reductionism in the negative sense that David Deutsch has taken on or Popper's taken on. This is actually a correct view, that you can view things from a lower level of emergence, right? Or you can view them from a higher level of emergence. The real thing that Levin raises, I think correctly, is why is it that almost all of biology looks at almost everything from the gene's eye view when there's multiple levels of emergence? It's not that the gene's eye view is wrong, right? You could probably, in principle at least, try to work things out from the gene's eye view and that would not necessarily be an inaccurate way to look at it or that's Levin's argument anyhow. But that is, there's just no reason to look at every single thing as if somehow that's some privileged way, some privileged level of explanation. So Levin would be non-gene-centrist, not because he's denying the gene-centric view, but because he's saying, you've got a really not as rich view because you're looking at exactly one level of explanation and there are some really more powerful levels of explanation that exist that you've totally ignored. And because of that, you just don't understand the system as well.

[00:47:41]  Peter: Is this the quote you're thinking of, Bruce? It says, we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules.

[00:47:50]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, that's the one. Yeah.

[00:47:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:47:53]  Unidentified speaker: Everybody quotes that.

[00:47:55]  Sadia: I think the way I look at it is that if you're saying one view is the complete view. So there's a difference. I mean, I want to get this clear that if you're saying that everything could be explained in terms of genes, right? But that kind of goes against Michael Levin's work, right? Because in his work, he's shown that part of what he did with planarian worm, has nothing to do with genes. So, it's not just that there are these two explanations, which are compatible with each other. It's just that one explanation seems to be completely lacking. There is another actually thing going on, that you can also have a causation level, which means that if in reality, if those two are working together, then together there's something more going on. It's not just complementary ways of looking at things. Like, there is the bioelectrical level of things, where things are going on. And then there is the gene level of things, and they work together. That's kind of how I view it.

[00:48:59]  Bruce: So, let me... There's two things here. One could be, what did Levin actually say? I can think I can clarify that for sure, because I remember what he said, and it was a big part of my podcast. Then there's the question of whether he's right or not. So, let me first clarify Levin's viewpoint. The way he expresses it. So, he is claiming you could look at it from a gene’s-eye view if you wanted to. That could be thought of still as a complete view, but it would be an anemic view. So, now the example he uses isn't actually the gene-centric view. Instead, intentionally to make his point, he takes the atom-eye view, where you could try to train this rat by looking at each of its atoms and trying to figure out which atoms to stimulate to cause the muscles to move so you could make it to dance, or something along those lines. What stimulations we would have to do on the eyeballs of the rat to get it to move its muscles the way you want it to. And of course, it's a ridiculous idea, okay? But like in principle, you could probably do it, but as he puts it, and this is what he says, you know, the sun would explode before you actually work this all out because you're working at a level of emergence that's just so down far. And then he says, even this is a level of emergence. Like, why are you trying to privilege that level, the atom level? Instead, maybe you should be going to quantum foam. You know, and of course he's doing this to make a point, right?

[00:50:24]  Bruce: So, he is claiming that all the different levels of explanation, in theory, they can translate between themselves. Now, let me take the example of the planarian, since you say his work contradicts that. It doesn't really, but you'd have to understand that he's intentionally trying to show the ridiculousness of trying to take the genes eye view in certain cases, even if in principle you could do it. So, for example, with the planarian, you would have to take the genes eye view. Let me clarify. What she's referring to is that you can cut the planarian so that it has two heads, such that, sorry, you can program the planarian to have two heads so that its tail becomes a head. You've got a two-headed planarian. And then you can cut the planarian and it will grow into a two-headed planarian, even though the genes have not changed. Okay, so on the surface, this might seem like you've broken the genes eye view entirely. But in fact, you haven't. Okay, and this is a problem I get into trying to talk with the CritRats, particularly the Deutschian CritRats, because they will immediately move to what I call the Credit Assignment Argument. Well, they'll say, well, sure, maybe you're right. That's not actually the genes that determine the morphology. But it is the genes that determine the algorithm, that determines the bioelectricity, that determines the morphology, right? And they will go down any number of that they need to, to somehow reassign credit back to the genes.

[00:51:50]  Bruce: Because to them, they've entirely thoroughly bought into this idea that you only look at things from the gene-centric view, right? And so they will find some way to do this. And they're never wrong. I mean, like in theory, what they just said is correct. They're missing the point entirely, right? This is a profoundly stupid way to try to make sense of what's going on. And it messes them up. They get to the point where they just can't understand what's going on to a lot of scientific questions because they're insisting on coming up with this way to try to go back to the gene-centric view. So Levin, I think, would argue, yeah, sure, you could find, you know, that maybe thousands of credit assignments that you could come up with that you could eventually get back to the gene-centric view if you really wanted to. But why? Why are you even doing this? It's such a silly way to go about trying to explain something. That's how I understand Levin's view on this.

[00:52:45]  Sadia: Then like he's saying, I mean, it seems like an inconsistency in what he's saying, because if he's saying that we're not finding, which I've also read him say that, you know, at the level of genes, you're not going to find anything different when we're playing at the level of bioelectricity, right? Bioelectrical signals. Then like, you know, clearly if the two things, if what happened had an explanation in both, then we should have seen something correspondingly different, unless if you're saying that the same gene, that the gene just has nothing to do with it. But then that's the point though, right? That there is a type of learning that's happening, which genes just has nothing to do with it.

[00:53:25]  Bruce: Okay. So keep in mind that Michael Levin is making fun of this viewpoint. But since the crit rats make this argument to me consistently, let me explain how Michael Levin is making fun of the crit rat view, okay? But it should clarify the difference here. So the crit rat would say, well sure, nothing changed in the genes, but the genes created the program that runs the bioelectricity, and it's the bioelectricity that determines the morphology, and therefore this actually was the genes that caused that morphology change to take place. And you say, well no, it didn't, it was actually Michael Levin sent a signal to it and told it. Yeah, but see, the genes had the language that Michael Levin was able to send to it, and that was existed as part of the genes overall program. So it's actually still the genes that deserve the credit, okay? Now, I've just, I've had tons of crit rats make this argument to me, all right?

[00:54:25]  Unidentified speaker: The Deutschian CritRats.

[00:54:26]  Sadia: Yes, clearly what they're saying is, as if there's a program in the gene and the bioelectricity, all it's doing is triggering a program. Again, it's all bottom up type causation.

[00:54:35]  Bruce: That's exactly what they're trying to say, right? And Michael Levin isn't denying that. He's not saying, yeah, if you really want to, you can come up with thousands of ways, you know, some thousand levels of, well, this was caused by this, which caused by this was caused by this. Go to a thousand of those and you'll eventually get back to some sort of causation with the genes. Michael Levin is not denying that. So even in a case where the genes haven't changed and the morphology is different, you could still come up with some narrative or story. Of course you could, right? Where you say, well, this was caused by this, was caused by this, was caused by this. And you could just keep going until eventually you reach the genes. And then you could choose to stop at the genes. In reality, there's no reason why you should choose to stop at the genes because the genes themselves are caused by something else, you know, atoms or something. I don't know, you could keep going. So for some reason, crit rats and biologists in particular have this tendency to stop at the gene. They want to get the causation back to the gene, they want to stop the narrative. And that would be the gene-centric view. It's not incorrect, according to Levin. It's just weird. It's a really strange choice.

[00:55:46]  Sadia: Levin is doing something completely different though, right? Because Levin isn't just saying, I think they're, I mean, I may be wrong about Levin in this, that it sounds like he's kind of being sarcastic there about going to the level of that. Because to me, he clearly, I mean, I can share some views of his, like I've read papers, where he actually goes against physicalism. He's a Platonist. He's not even a physicalist. And the reason why he's a Platonist is because he thinks that you can't explain how all these patterns and morphologies, how does life get access to those. So he's not saying that it's determined by anything, genes or bioelectrical signal. He just merely says that there is an interface that exists once you have the right type of flight, when you have brains or when you have cells, that they make an interface and kind of somehow embody those patterns, I guess. So and I think the interesting part about that to me is that it shows further. There is this mystery in there that needs to be explained rather than like saying that, all right, everything is good, which is not bad because now we've got some work to do, right? But I don't think my reading of whatever I've read of him, I may be wrong. I don't think because I think the view that you're saying a lot of times, Deutsch kind of talks about those, how there are these different levels of explanation and they are, it's kind of like a compatibilist view for free will that there are these levels which you can give one narrative or another, it's just two ways of talking about the same thing.

[00:57:17]  Sadia: But as an emergentist, I will say that there is only one correct way to talk about it. The other one is lacking. I mean, so that's kind of where I'm going to. I think Levin says the same thing, but he's a Platonist, so what's lacking comes from the Platonic spaces for him.

[00:57:31]  Bruce: So let's make another distinction. So just as we needed to make a distinction between gene-centricism and selfish genes, even though selfish genes is a kind of part of gene-centricism, but it is not itself gene-centricism, we would need to make a distinction between genes as blueprints and gene-centricism. Okay, so there's this idea that the genes contain all the information precisely for how to build that morphology. Okay, Levin would not agree with that, but that's not the same as gene-centricism. So that would be a certain more extreme version of gene-centricism. It is absolutely true, just like with Denis Noble, that he believes that genes don't really represent a blueprint. And so I think even like Zach Hancock would probably argue that, technically speaking, they're not blueprints, right?

[00:58:28]  Sadia: Means that that wouldn't be the explanation then, right? That that explanation would be lacking, in other words, if you move towards...

[00:58:33]  Unidentified speaker: Because that is a false explanation.

[00:58:36]  Ivan: Well, a blueprint would be the wrong metaphor, right? Because the genome does not contain plans. What it contains is something like a recipe, as well as a mechanism for responding to signals in the environment. Right? So when a cell replicates or if we take a... Let's say a mammal is replicating, right? It has to reset the genome, the epigenetics to some extent, so that when the cell starts... When the... After the egg is fertilized and it starts to divide, it starts to create a copy of that being in the right order. It has to create the right cells, the right stem cells in the right order to create the whole pattern, right? And the way this is done, it's done with signaling compounds as cells mature, and they've chose, they've start differentiating. They have certain chemical signatures, that's part of it, but there's also some epigenetic effects, which are being passed on to their offspring, which then control which genes get expressed. So it's more likely a, you know, you've probably heard that term, evo devo, where the gene is more like a recipe for constructing more copies of that life form.

[01:00:24]  Sadia: Interesting the way you set it with genes, and then you straight up went towards the environment. And I think that's where our difference lies, and my difference with others, and Noble's difference, because we forget that there is a constraint, like in other words, we bypass the idea that, where did the organism fall in? I mean, is organism part of the environment, and then there are the genes? Or does organism itself, that there is a boundary? And that's where the agency comes in. I mean, I'm not saying that the boundary is all that's needed to define agency, but there is something about the boundary means that these constraints give this organism a sort of autonomy, which clearly, like we're not saying that the environment isn't influencing and causing things, just like, again, and I don't want to anthropomorphize this, but I think that the version helps, just like, when I make decisions, I'm not denying that the environment doesn't influence me, but at the end, I make the decisions. Now, in my case, of course, I use brain, but in the case of organisms, they don't have brains, so it's, again, part of their constitution, but it's holistically, autonomously, where the organism is making, and even kind of putting the recipe in there, I think, is going a little too. But I won't say that. I mean, my analogy is kind of like the composer versus a piano, right? That the piano itself doesn't have the composition. The composition needs to be played, and that's where the active role of organism comes in.

[01:01:55]  Ivan: I was just going to say what I found interesting in what you just said, Sadia, is that when you're making a decision, it's not just the environment.

[01:02:08]  Ivan: So the way humans make decisions, it's almost as if the parts of the brain that are talking to each other and deciding, I have this grand goal of I want to be entertained, and so then what it does, and it may have this goal of being entertained as some high-level goal, and then it will start bouncing around and saying, well, I could watch a movie, or I could read a book, or I could listen to some music. And I'm not saying that there might be nothing like that in a cell, but I think that it's almost entirely like, so when I was talking about how the genome is reacting to its environment, I meant as the environment, its immediate environment is inside the cell, right? That the nucleus of a cell is not talking directly to the outside world. Everything is going to be mediated by the cell. But some of those environmental signals might just be, hey, this cell has now matured to the state where now it needs different kinds of inputs. Or maybe the cell is aware that it needs to consume resources versus store resources or something along those lines. I treat the environment in a general way there. Although I grew up with a very gene-centric view, I don't—I'm a bit agnostic on to what extent I want to say that everything is gene-centric. How important is that?

[01:03:52]  Ivan: Maybe where I might draw the line is, when cells are replicating and they're passing information on to future generations. I think what Richard Dawkins is arguing is that, after thousands of years or a very large number of generations, where is the information that defines that species being stored? Is it in the DNA or is it in the bodies of those individuals? And I don't know. I'm not sufficiently fluent in biology to know the answer. I don't know if the answer is even known. To what extent is information stored in those bodies and not in the genome and not in epigenetic? It's stored epigenetically in like methylation on DNA. So it could be that the bodies are much more important, in which case you could say, well, yes, I've passed on these genes to future generations, and these genes are a very important part of the puzzle, but perhaps the machinery which is carrying those genes is also passing on information that is not in the DNA, but is equally important. Now, I don't know to what extent that's true, but I'm a bit agnostic about that. To me, it doesn't seem very important, which way it doesn't seem to be that relevant. It doesn't seem to change neo-Darwinism.

[01:05:31]  Bruce: By the way, that was one of the... So can I make two comments here? So first of all, in the debate between Noble and Dawkins, that was one of the main things that they discussed, and I'm a little unclear if they disagreed or not. Dawkins makes the claim that if you had the DNA, you could, you have all the information that you need to be able to grow that organism again. And Noble challenges him in the debate, and he says, that's not really true. You would have to also have the egg that contains the machinery that knows how to utilize it. So it's not really self-contained on its own. And it's not really super clear what they were disagreeing over or even if they were disagreeing. They were certainly wording things as if they were disagreeing, if that makes any sense. So I think the way Ivan just explained it was actually better than either of the two professors explained it, right? That Noble did not go so far as to say, there is information contained within the egg that is not in the genes, that is just as important. He never says that, at least not in the debate, okay? He seems like he's hinting at that, though, that maybe there is information contained within the cell that's not contained within the DNA, and so the DNA is incomplete in that case.

[01:06:58]  Sadia: Clear to me. That part is totally clear to me after reading his book, by the way.

[01:07:02]  Bruce: Does he say that in his book, that that is what he's saying?

[01:07:05]  Sadia: He doesn't specifically mention that example, but what he's talking, he talks about circular causation. And, you know, he's talking about multi-level causation, so he's clearly saying that there is causation at all these other levels. So it applies to egg as well, and that's where his point is coming from.

[01:07:21]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:07:22]  Bruce: So causation at multiple levels would not actually be the same as if the DNA contains all the information or not, because…

[01:07:32]  Sadia: No, it is. When we're saying there's causation, then there has to be some property. Like, when we talk about causation, that really means another way that information flow, you know, which way the information is going.

[01:07:44]  Bruce: So it could be… I don't know what… I'm admitting here I don't know what Denis Noble's view is.

[01:07:51]  Unidentified speaker: He's a causal realist.

[01:07:53]  Bruce: Okay, but you could have all the information contained within the DNA, and yet there could still be a multiple flow of causation with information flowing in multiple directions. That wouldn't actually be incompatible with the idea that all the information is contained within the DNA. So I don't actually know… I haven't… I've only read one of his books. I read one of his papers. I watched the debate. Maybe he does make the claim that not all the information is contained within the DNA. But it could be that all the information is contained in the DNA, but there's a flow of information with multiple levels of causation. That wouldn't actually be an incompatible viewpoint. So I'm not actually sure. And that was actually one of my questions after watching the debate, was whether he was or wasn't making the claim. So if he says… He may say it in a book somewhere. It's like he may have gone on record saying, and I just don't know. Oh, okay. But so it is possible Ivan that he is making the claim that not all the information is contained within the gene. And to Ivan, to your point, you're probably right that that maybe doesn't change as much really ultimately as it might first sound like. So you may be correct about that. Let me just, just as far as the blueprint goes, let me actually read something from the Jerry Coyne blog that links that I had set out. So here's a quote, Jerry Coyne quoting Denis Noble.

[01:09:18]  Bruce: And then I'll give you Jerry Coyne's response. So he says, when the, this is, this is Denis Noble now. When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an instruction manual for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don't have a preset function that can be determined from their DNA sequence. Okay, so that's the quote from Denis Noble. Now here is Jerry Coyne's response to that. Well, the genome is more or less a blueprint for life. So it's interesting that Jerry Coyne actually does try to equate the genome with a blueprint. But he then nuances it. He says, he goes on to say, for it encodes how an organism will develop when the product, when the products of its genome during development interact with the environment, both internal and external, to produce an organism. Then he says this, Dawkins has emphasized, though, that the genome is better thought of as a recipe or program for life. And his characterization is actually more accurate. You can reverse engineer a blueprint from a house and engineer a house from a blueprint. It works both ways. But you can't reverse engineer a recipe from a cake or a DNA sequence from an organism. So, notice that he first does liken it to a blueprint and takes issue with Denis Noble claim that it's not a blueprint. Then he says, well, actually, that's not the best metaphor. And he uses the recipe, the same recipe metaphor that Ivan does. I thought that was interesting for a couple of reasons. One of them is he's kind of agreeing with Denis Noble.

[01:11:03]  Bruce: And I think this is one of the things that I find frustrating about these debates is that the actual facts that they seem to disagree with each other over seem to be very, very minimal. And in fact, I often have a hard time even figuring out what facts they're disagreeing over. It almost seems to me that most of the disagreement is over what words were allowed to use. And maybe I'm wrong about that. I personally find that frustrating.

[01:11:29]  Sadia: Actually, I came, independently came to the exact same, that's exactly what I noticed even when I listened to the Hancock's thing. That what on earth is the problem here? And it is, really, I'll be honest with you, it's the word, the T word, it's that really gets to them, right? This whole notion. And I think, to Ivan's point of being agnostic and why that's important, to me, it's important to acknowledge this because it shifts our focus and also opens up now to new type of research programs where you could test these ideas, right? But to begin with, one denies to the point that you don't even find it interesting. Why would anybody even want to test such an idea, right? You first have to be curious and acknowledge that there are some interesting questions, possible questions at least, right? That, you know, possible things for the research to go in that direction. But otherwise, we just shut it down if we just totally say, well, that doesn't even sound plausible. Let's just forget about it.

[01:12:36]  Bruce: So let me just make it why I say there is a distinction to be made. Like it could be that Denis Noble accepts, I don't know. He probably actually thinks that all the information is not contained in the DNA. That would be a very Denis Noble thing to believe. But let's say that that's not the case. Let's say that he actually believes all the information for life is contained within the DNA. Why do I say that's not the same as multiple levels of causation? Let me use an example of a computer program. So we have a very computer program centric view of things when we talk about software. We think of the software as driving things, okay? You don't have to think of it that way. You could think of the hardware as the prime driver if you really wanted to, right? Or you could think of the user as the prime driver. So you could say, oh, the program did this or you could say, no, the program didn't do that. I as the user gave this input and I did that. And trying to get into a debate over which of those is the correct statement is pointless because all of them are true simultaneously because that's just the way causation actually works, right? The user did cause it, the program did cause it, the hardware did cause it, right? And so there could be multiple levels of causation and yet nobody would really deny that all the information is contained in the program. So that's why I'm trying to say those aren't necessarily the same thing. The multiple levels of causation isn't quite the same question as does the DNA contain the entire program or not? I'm just making that clarification.

[01:14:18]  Bruce: For the record, I strongly suspect that Denis Noble is claiming DNA is not like the program. It does not contain all the information. But he never comes out and says it in the debate.

[01:14:29]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm not sure.

[01:14:31]  Sadia: Can I also point out, this is where I made the point earlier about the whole debate on causation and philosophy. This is a pretty, like, you know, I recently actually read two books on this. I've been really interested in causation. That the two views, the Neo-Humean view, a lot of people who come in, who actually, there are some Neo-Humeans who are realist towards causation, but they say that what they're calling causation is something just an appearance. Whereas the Neo-Aristotelian view says that there's something intrinsic to the actual object, such as properties of that object that give it that causation, right? So one takes, you know, an ontological stance for when it comes to realism towards causation. And the other one is more of an apparent view, you know, like that it looks like there's causation, but in reality, we can think of it some other way. But you know, we're just, it's a convenient way to talk about it, type thing.

[01:15:28]  Unidentified speaker: Right. I'm sorry.

[01:15:31]  Unidentified speaker: I don't want to forget what I—[I think that?] Denis Noble is making a stronger claim here, because he is New Aristotelian.

[01:15:36]  Bruce: He probably is. You're probably right. I wish he had come out and said it.

[01:15:40]  Unidentified speaker: I wish he had come out and said it.

[01:15:42]  Sadia: He has. We can share maybe later on too. But I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty confident that that is what he's saying.

[01:15:48]  Bruce: You've read more of him than I have, so you're probably right.

[01:15:51]  Sadia: It's that I don't remember exact quote here, but it pretty much seems like that.

[01:15:56]  Ivan: I'm not sure how, if this is even relevant for, I'm not saying it's not interesting, but I don't see it as very relevant to causation in a practical sense, right? So in a practical sense, when we talk about causation, we mean there's a regularity, and it is as if A causes B, and there's a higher philosophical debate to be had about what causation means. But I think that we would still have the same questions under either view, either deep philosophical view of causation. The question is, what is the regularity? If you have a regularity at some low level, that is capable of explaining the higher level behavior, then you have your explanation. Whether that regularity is just an appearance to us, or whether there's something ontologically special about it, that kind of doesn't matter to the explanation, perhaps?

[01:17:08]  Sadia: The reason why I'm kind of interested in that is because I think that it does matter because of the problems I'm interested in. And I think that really it comes down to the sort of research programs that people actually follow. Whether you are looking at theories, see my interests are from cosmology, like in physics even, you know, when it comes to causation. And it is interesting within physicists to see the different kind of views in causation, the approaches they are taking, and what type of theories they are trying to try out is different. So the views, the metaphysical views, always have implications for the type of theories people, so that's kind of the physical implication of that. I think the debate kind of helps when people are kind of deciding, all right, where should I invest my time? And at first, it's kind of a guesswork, but slowly, you know, and then we, you know, part of the thing is that we learn something about nature, like what is autonomy? Is there such a thing, you know, when it comes to identity in the universe, you know, are there autonomous entities or, you know, or is there a different way of looking at the world where everything is just relational, purely relational and nothing more to it? So that's where I think the debate has very big implications and that's why I'm interested.

[01:18:28]  Ivan: There's one more issue I want you to bring up, and this has to do with abstraction, right? When we talk about goal-directedness or the T-word, teleology, is we have some abstract idea of what we want. When we're talking about teleology as a human, an entity that has intelligence like a human does, we have very high level abstractions like, I want to be entertained. Being entertained is a pretty high level abstraction. And within that, you can look at examples of things which fall, which would be recognized as forms of entertainment. And humans do this because we have neural networks, and neural networks can do this kind of classification. They can support abstraction. It's not clear to me that cells have anything like this. Cells can react to things, but do they have anything that behaves like a neural network that can do classification in a very broad sense?

[01:19:38]  Bruce: Levin specifically has argued that it's not the cell that has that ability, but it is the collection of cells that actually contain something equivalent to a neural network. That's the bio-electricity. So I sent you that paper. I don't know if you remember it, but he points out that all the correlates of neural networks pre-exist neural networks, and that they are part of how cells communicate through the bio-electricity. So everything that a neural network can do, cells can do as a collective, but just at a slower pace. This is one of Levin's claims, is that everything that we associate with neural networks pre-dates neural networks. So he calls into question if we can really say neural networks are as special as we think they are. You know, let me use, so I tried to use the example of the crit rats. Let me actually give the specifics because it might actually be helpful here. So I did a whole series of podcasts where I talked about whether David Deutsch is two-sources hypothesis was correct or not. The two-sources hypothesis from David Deutsch is this idea that there's only two sources of knowledge, genes and human ideas, let's say. Usually we say genes and memes, that's actually a little inaccurate because human ideas can be knowledge without being memes. And this is something that is almost, it's just almost outright dogma for Deutschian crit rats. So I've pointed out to them that there's really clear counter examples to this, like super overtly clear counter examples that easily refute this.

[01:21:20]  Bruce: The most obvious one, I've given multiple examples on this podcast. The most obvious one is animal memes. I mean, even David Deutsch admits animal memes are real. So David Deutsch will say, and crit rats will buy this and they will not deviate from it, they'll say all an animal's knowledge is in its genes. That is absolutely completely false, okay? Because animal memes are knowledge, a meme is by definition knowledge, and it is knowledge specifically outside the genome, okay? So animals can learn, they can create knowledge through their learning processes. They can learn from each other. Certain animals can learn from each other. They can learn to copy each other like the great apes can. And so they will pick up these memes over time that are not part of their genetic programming. But it's something that gets passed down from parent to child or something like that instead. Not unlike with humans, the difference being that humans use explanations to do it, and the animals, at least according to Richard Byrne, they use it through some sort of predictive model, something maybe more similar to machine learning. And so you have this really straightforward counter example that absolutely refutes the two sources hypothesis. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

[01:22:37]  Bruce: Now bring it up to a crit rat, and give it to them as a counter example, and watch what they do, okay? And this is also one of the main things that led to me to start to realize that crit rats don't have the same epistemology as me, even though I'm a critical rationalist. They will say immediately, well, you see that those animal memes, they had to learn it, and it was the genes that gave them the ability to learn it. So, I think we should count that animal meme as being knowledge in the genes. And they will go to great lengths to figure out how to retake that story of that knowledge that was clearly outside the genome and figure out some way to assign credit back to the genome, which you can always do. Like, obviously, the way causation works, you're not going to find some sort of cause. Essentially, the genes contain the knowledge that contained a learning algorithm. And that learning algorithm was what then could create created the most proximate knowledge of how to pass along these memes. Okay. And so what they're going to do is they're always going to find some way to say, well, the genes created the learning algorithm and the learning algorithm created the knowledge. So that means the genes created the knowledge. And they're going to find some way to get back to the two sources hypothesis. Now, I'll point out to them, I'll say, you know, if you're allowed to use the credit assignment argument like this, then we don't need two sources anymore. We can simply claim that absolutely all knowledge comes from the genes and that humans do not create knowledge either.

[01:24:15]  Unidentified speaker: Exactly.

[01:24:15]  Bruce: Okay. It's a completely dumb argument. Okay. And then you have to watch and see how they respond to that. Okay. They immediately come back and go, oh no, airplanes were not created by the genes. And it's like, okay, I just throw my hands up in the air at this point, right? Like you're, there's something just dogmatically wrong with how they're going about this, right?

[01:24:36]  Ivan: So, so why do they hold that view? Do you think?

[01:24:39]  Bruce: It's because he says so in the book. He says in the book, there's only two sources of knowledge. There's only genes and there's only memes or human ideas would be more accurate. And that is almost an article of faith for that, that subculture, right? So, they absolutely cannot imagine that he could have gotten that wrong.

[01:24:57]  Sadia: Let me attest to that, there is that type of culture around David Deutsch. I hope he listens to it, but yeah, sorry, David, you've got a following that does that. It's very much like taking on a prophet.

[01:25:10]  Ivan: Is that really the explanation, or is it something, or are they trying to say something about the superiority of human beings? Is it just sort of a blind...?

[01:25:22]  Bruce: So, okay, good question, good question. You're right, they are trying to say something. When we talk about somebody having a belief system, and I do think we are talking about a belief system here, there's an interconnected of knowledge, right? There's like this web of knowledge. And so, they believe several different things. So, one of them is that they believe that animals don't create any knowledge, and therefore, they're automatons. They probably don't feel anything at all. David Deutsch has questioned that a little bit in like the case of dogs. But they probably don't feel anything according to this belief. And so, therefore, it's okay to eat them, and there's this moral aspect. And then there's this idea of the superiority of humans. Humans evolved creativity. There was no other creativity other than with genes. So, you've got that aspect that plays in. And then you've got this aspect of what I call is really just a kind of broken version of the problem of open-endedness. It's obvious that genes and memes are special in some way, right? And I think that that's what they're latching on to. They've got this idea. Deutsch is explaining his explanation for why genes and memes seem so special, seem so central to knowledge creation, okay? And so, they sense that that is true. And it is true. Genes, maybe let's not call it genes because that's maybe too gene-centric. Biological evolution and human evolution of ideas, they are open-ended in a way every other learning algorithm that creates knowledge on the planet is not. Okay?

[01:27:09]  Bruce: There's some sort of extra jump of universality that takes place. So, there's this desire to maybe say, well, these two are clearly special, so those are the true creation of knowledge. And this other thing where you're talking about animal learning, saying, oh, they're so limited compared to what evolution as a whole can do, and compared to what a human can do. So I refuse to call it knowledge. It's fact it's so, I had one of them actually argue this, I'm not making this up. It's so uninteresting, I won't even talk to you about it. I won't even look at your examples. They're just so completely, I used the example of the immune system. I said, look, the immune system literally comes up with a recipe, which is literally as per constructor theory, knowledge creation, okay? It's a blatant counter example where knowledge is created. And then I immediately had the crit rat say, that is so uninteresting what it does. It's nothing like creating airplanes. I won't even consider talking with you about further about this example. And I'm like, okay, but like, isn't it still creating something? Like even if you refuse to call it knowledge, can't we at least, if you go, no, it's so uninteresting, I won't even discuss it.

[01:28:28]  Bruce: And it's like, okay, there's clearly some sort of dogmatic article of faith going on. And I think the problem is, is that this has been put into the middle of a stake of several other important beliefs within the belief system, right? That if you were to admit the immune system or is a type of knowledge creation, if you were to admit that animals pass along knowledge outside the genome through memes, right? Even though we all know they do, right? Nobody's denying that. If you were to just call it knowledge, I feel like maybe it feels like it burns the filaments away of the web. And it forces you to go, well, wait a minute, does that mean that maybe animals do fill things? Yeah, that means that. It means that you've drawn a conclusion that's actually false. I don't know that animals do or don't fill things. I'm not claiming to know. Your explanation for why they don't is wrong. And so you need to be more humble epistemologically about this, okay? And I think it does burn away quite a number of parts of the web that it feels bad, right? When you start to realize some of your worldview might be oriented wrong. And I think that's exactly why you have such a huge resistance here. Does that mean maybe humans aren't as special, right? I mean, clearly humans are special, but maybe they're not as special compared to apes as David Deutsch claimed, right? I don't know why that makes that much of a difference.

[01:29:55]  Ivan: Maybe they are assemblies of much more simple mechanistic things, right?

[01:30:00]  Bruce: So I do think that there is like this one happens to exist as a central stake that just connects to too many other items that they're not prepared to give up yet, that seem just intuitively filled right to them, if that makes any sense.

[01:30:17]  Peter: But Bruce, don't you think that a lot of their position can be salvaged by just adding the word open-ended?

[01:30:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, that is exactly…

[01:30:29]  Unidentified speaker: Before knowledge.

[01:30:29]  Unidentified speaker: That's exactly correct.

[01:30:30]  Unidentified speaker: It's not like they're completely off base.

[01:30:32]  Unidentified speaker: No, they're not.

[01:30:33]  Unidentified speaker: It's just a subtle shift, really.

[01:30:35]  Bruce: Right. So I've tried to explain that to them, right? Look, don't call it knowledge, call it simulknowledge, right? Simulacrum of knowledge. You know, and I've tried suggesting that, and nothing, like, I absolutely cannot budge any of them on any of these points at all. And it's too bad, because you're right. The reason why it intuitively feels so right to them is because there was verisimilitude to their position. But they've got a mistake in it, right? To try to call there to be only two sources of knowledge when what you really want to say is that there's only two open-ended sources of knowledge. Those just aren't the same thing. They really do have different implications.

[01:31:21]  Peter: And you don't think you're just kind of nitpicking about the different definitions of knowledge?

[01:31:26]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, absolutely not.

[01:31:27]  Unidentified speaker: Really?

[01:31:28]  Unidentified speaker: Absolutely not.

[01:31:30]  Unidentified speaker: Right. It is. I could give you specific examples.

[01:31:32]  Peter: It's not clear to me that David Deutsch would disagree with that, though. I mean, he's...

[01:31:37]  Bruce: He's way more open-minded on these things than I think a lot of the people who read his books. When you actually talk with him, like, when I talk with him, I said, you know, what about, like, a robot? And I was kind of working towards the example of the walking robot that he uses. And he goes, yeah, I've got, like, this vacuum robot that, like, learns, you know, sorry, not a vacuum, a mowing robot, and it learns how to mow my lawn. I've got no problem calling that knowledge. I mean, he was way more open to how we referred to things and, you know, how we discuss things. And then he would go, but it's not really what I have in mind. What I have in mind is that, you know, it only does exactly what you tell it to do. And I'm thinking more, you know, open-endedly than that. And so I, but I think that there is a problem here, right? Is that he's trying to, on the one hand, define knowledge physically in constructor theory, and then he wants to latch the word also onto open-endedness. And they aren't the same thing, right? One's a process for how it gets created, and the range of the search, one's literally the range of the search algorithm, and the other one's the output of the search algorithm. And to try to equate those two together absolutely strips you up, and you have a misunderstanding that you're going to have to get past if you will not see that those are two different things, right? Even though there's some verisimilitude to it, [there's just no?] denying that he's on to something that was correct, but he just didn't quite get it right.

[01:33:08]  Sadia: Bring in another thing, because I've kind of diverged away from his views, because the knowledge is defined according to him in a very specific way, in very computational type of terms, and I think that's just stretching the metaphor too much, because I think there are other things that we get overlooked. Even though, I don't think David Deutsch kind of, he admits to the problem with the understanding what qualia is, but kind of he also sidesteps that too, because humans, the way they create knowledge and what reasoning means to human. I feel like whenever I talk to the critical, or ever had exchanges or looked at what they say about reasoning, is very much computational way of thinking about it. Whereas, human reasoning involves a lot of value, it's very value-laden, it involves emotions. I mean, reason can't be understood as kind of like some sort of an algorithm, I'm sorry, because of this value-ladenness that plays out. But anyways, yeah, that might take us too far from what we're discussing here, maybe some other time.

[01:34:19]  Bruce: You had to put in your non-algorithm pitch right in there.

[01:34:24]  Sadia: Yeah, exactly. I had to say that I have some strong disagreements here, but I'll just hold back.

[01:34:31]  Bruce: So Peter, you raised an issue and I can't do it in this podcast. I'd have to stop and think about it. I could give you probably tons of examples of where this subtle difference is not just nitpicking, that it absolutely makes a gigantic difference in how you understand knowledge creation ultimately. It makes a big difference on how you go about searching for AGI and how to solve the problem of AGI. That's why I've actually made a big deal about it. It may sound pedantic to people, but there is a huge difference between insisting that all an animal's knowledge is in its genes and admitting that all the animal's knowledge is not in the genes. It has giant epistemological implications that actually do matter if you're someone like me who's interested in the concept of AGI and AI and things like that.

[01:35:24]  Sadia: I do want to throw in something about what Denis Noble says, because this whole idea of substrate independence, even Levin is kind of on board with that, but it seems like Denis Noble from my reading of his book and stuff very much does place importance on the substrate. He's talked about water molecule, which I really didn't find any convincing. But I also kind of, I see myself as a materialist in the sense that I think this whole, almost like there is a dualism that is suggested by the way David Deutsch looks at it, like there's the substrate and then there's this abstract information. I think that's not a very good way to look at things. That substrate matters. This is why I've kind of turned against the idea that AGI is going to be possible. Because, first of all, with human knowledge, there is, we do have qualia and machines are very different from us, like the computers and so forth. And I don't think we fully really understand, because as I said, I think reasoning, the values play a part in reasoning, and there is a problem of meaning when it comes to algorithms. So I see using this whole terminology of algorithms, machine learning or whatever towards life as a very, like, very kind of, you know, for if we don't have a better metaphor, just as a metaphor, we can use it, but not to get too carried away with it.

[01:36:52]  Sadia: But, you know, even going back to the whole, the T word, and let's, I'm just gonna call it teleodynamic, because I don't believe in the original sense of teleology at all. This whole notion of teleodynamics and how do we, look, I'm not denying that there couldn't be a mechanism, that at mechanistic level, that we could, I'm a materialist, I'm not a physicalist, I'm a naturalist, but I'm very much of a materialist. I think material, we really don't fully understand material, which is why we keep running into this type of dualism, of abstraction versus matter, hardware versus software. I think that dualism should dissolve once we have a better understanding, but that's just my hunch there. But to understand teleodynamics, I'm not saying that if this is intrinsic, that that means there are two ways in which teleodynamic could be intrinsic. We see this type of stuff, for example, in physics, when systems go through phase transition, new law-like properties emerge. Similar to that, biologists also talk about these organizational principles that emerge. So, nobody is saying that it has to be like, you know, I mean, I'm not saying that there's some life force that suddenly emerges out of it. But there is something that emerges that may be irreducible to the lower level, whether it's physics or biology.

[01:38:15]  Sadia: As we see in physics as well, I think a lot of people are not aware of this issue, which has been talked about a lot by condensed matter physicists about phase transitions and how the properties that emerge. I can actually mention a book, which I highly recommend. It's by Robert Laughlin, the Nobel Prize winner in condensed matter physics, which is a different type of universe. But if you look up Robert Laughlin's book, you will find it and we can put it in the link as well. But basically, that new types of organizational principles can emerge, new types of properties maybe even emerge. See, we don't really talk about properties. What do I mean by property? Just as in physics, charge is a property. What is charge? We don't have any mechanistic explanation for it. We just take it as a brute fact. Why couldn't it be that there are emergent things in the universe that are brute facts? That will also push us to reconsider that where is this that we are missing in our ontology, and that is what I'm interested in personally. I'm kind of thinking along those lines that there's something that's got to be missing in our ontology from which new stuff emerges. Even space itself, when we say space is expanding, what does it emerge out of? What is the emergence of space? For me, a lot of these things, intuitions from physics, a lot of knowledge from physics, feeds into where I'm thinking about biology as well. Because in physics, we have pretty good examples of emergence there and we see that in biology.

[01:39:57]  Sadia: It's just that some people just deny that there is such a thing and reductionism frankly is just wrong. I mean, it's just easily refutable. From a practical point of view, I'm not even saying as some philosophical point. Science works with reductions. Reductionism is a philosophical stance and people do not differentiate between the two. That is something that I've over and over again emphasized. I even gave a talk on this. Reductionism and reductions is not the same. Science works with reductions as well as holism. It has science takes into account even physics top down, bottom up levels of explanation. That is the fact. So if somebody is going to say reductionism is true, then that does not line up with real physics.

[01:40:44]  Unidentified speaker: I just want to really highlight that.

[01:40:46]  Unidentified speaker: If I may disagree.

[01:40:48]  Ivan: Sadia and I have had some discussions about this online. My own view is that there's this notion of weak emergence versus strong emergence. Weak emergence is the idea that maybe some collective property of matter emerges from the low-level physics just as a causal necessity, that you have some simple laws that apply to individual particles, and that when you have enough particles, it may be computationally intractable, but the behavior of the bulk property is just something which is necessitated by the lower-level property, right? And sometimes all we see is maybe we cannot prove from our low-level physics how the higher level, the bulk property behaves, but it's consistent with that. Strong emergence is the idea that when you have large numbers of particles together, now there's some new law of physics that isn't necessitated by the lower-level physics. In other words, that this new property that you observe in bulk materials is not something that is necessitated, but just intractable for us to figure out. It's that literally there is a new law of physics that applies when you have three particles instead of two, let's say, or a million particles instead of 10.

[01:42:27]  Bruce: New law of physics as opposed to a new kind of behavior. You're not denying that there could be a new kind of behavior.

[01:42:35]  Ivan: Correct. We know that there's some new behavior. There's some new bulk property of this material. But the question is, how do you derive this bulk property from the theory of individual atoms or electrons? It could be that this bulk property, you know, it applies when you have billions of particles. And now it's computationally intractable. So there's the question, does this bulk property, was this bulk property necessitated by the low level physics? And it's just that we can't compute it. Or is it something that the universe requires an additional law that you could never have predicted, even if you had all the computational power? And my own view is that this latter idea that there is some new law, it's called strong emergence, is kind of giving up. That it's saying that there is no explanation, there is no deeper explanation. It is just a brute fact that this is the way the universe is. And I don't think it's, you know, it's not impossible for such a thing to occur, right? It's, it just seems that if you are going to have strong emergence, you don't have to have the strongly emergent behavior be consistent with the low level behavior. So you have conservation laws that we see at the level of individual particles. Should the bulk material also obey that law? Like, why can't it violate that law? It seems like it should be able to.

[01:44:18]  Bruce: It seems like it should be able to if strong emergence was true, you mean, right?

[01:44:22]  Ivan: If strong emergence was true, right? So if strong emergence was true, you could have Harry Potter magic, right? Where, because I now have a, you know, a potion, something, you know, for as long as I have enough potion to fit in into a goblet or something, and I say certain words, now I can get some new effect that violates conservation of energy. There's nothing like logically impossible about this. It violates the low level of the physics, but there's nothing in Harry Potter magic, like there's nothing like logically inconsistent about it. But if, on the other hand, it's just weak emergence, then the emergence has to be consistent with the low level physics. And what we always see is that consistency. And that's one of the reasons why I think that reductionism, even if I believe what Sadia is saying is that the reductionism is something that we're partially blind to because of the intractability. But I would say that if weak emergence is the case, then we should expect the bulk properties to be consistent with the conservation laws at the micro level.

[01:45:44]  Unidentified speaker: And that's what we see.

[01:45:46]  Unidentified speaker: So, Ivan, can I?

[01:45:47]  Unidentified speaker: Go ahead, Sadia.

[01:45:48]  Sadia: No, I was just going to say, what if I said to you that there isn't any of the inconsistency issue, but what I'm saying is how science works and reductionism is not true. Because then would that convince you? Because to be honest with you, nobody's denying that the lower level physics doesn't act as kind of a scaffold, right? That when you're building, obviously, for example, biological life form, life, all the life is, living creatures are made up of atoms. And like I said, I'm a materialist, right? So my body is made up of atom. And if you look at my body and you removed an atom, the atom is going to behave the way it does. But do all the atoms and molecules behave the way they behave as free particles? See, that's where I think there is this idealized version of science that people have in mind. That just simply is wrong. Because in biological, and you take any objects, even if it's a phase of matter, right? Some sort of new phase of matter. The point is that the particles don't really behave as they do when they are free particles. Because the whole point is that now the system is under different constraints. So what does it even mean to say that do they obey the laws of physics? What law of physics are we talking about? Are we talking about the law of how a free electron behaves? A free atom behaves?

[01:47:19]  Sadia: Or a molecule behaves? They are right there, because it's as if, the problem is that I think we are almost imagining as if there is this platonic physics that just should be the same at every level. But that's not true, because physical laws are always domain dependent regularities. And the regularity matters, like you have to look at what type of state a matter is in to see what type of regularity applies. So it's not even a consistent problem. What I'm saying is that the only explanation at that point is going to be a mixture of reductions of the relevant levels and top down constraints, constraints and that. And that is always how we do science. There are hardly any fully reductionistic theories. We always have top down bottom up together. So that is how science is done. That supports the first argument that I'm kind of at least on that side, I think that supports me being on the right side of science and the other being merely a belief that reductionism should be true. Secondly is, even if there are strongly emergent properties, they merge, you know, their scaffolding on that substrate, the substrate is already there, but there are these new features and they can only, all you have to do is look at them as new constraints, right?

[01:48:40]  Sadia: Again with those constraints, when we study that system, when we study that relevant emergent law, we're not talking quantum forms, quantum fields, you know, we're talking about something more complex anyways. So it doesn't make sense to say, well, does that follow quantum field theory? Well, are we really talking about quantum field theory of free particles? Clearly that's not the case because these are not free particles. I don't know if you get my point. I think this is where the reductionists don't carefully think about these arguments. They have this weird platonic version of science that they don't think about these things in a clear way where I don't think there is anything magic. And secondly, the thing is, where does this stuff emerge from, right? That's an interesting question. And you said that, well, are haven't we reached a dead end of explanation? I would say no, actually, I think that we may have reached the dead end of certain types of explanation, but not all explanations. I think emergence needs explanation. And I think, and that is something that I've been kind of working on the side too, that how to think about this, what type of ontology are we thinking about? What does it tell us about the universe? You know, as I said, like one of the questions that really intrigues me is, what does the space emerge from? Right? And what does it mean to be part of space? And is it possible for there to be ontology that is spaceless and formless?

[01:50:09]  Sadia: These are the type of questions that I think it runs us into. And in philosophy, and then again, I think there's this deeply rooted thing that comes from empiricism, that we think that philosophical explanation can't be legit, that only a scientific explanation can finally be that, you know, concretely put everything down. But I think that's also wrong, that philosophically, which I think David Deutsch kind of does a great job, that when it comes to good explanations, we can definitely put explanations, rival explanations and decide out of which, which one is the better explanation there. So I think we should be able to push further in our understanding, maybe if not in the type of predictive way that science works.

[01:50:52]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:50:53]  Ivan: I just have one short short response to that, which is I think that every proper explanation is predictive. If it's not predicting something, it's not explaining something because otherwise, it would just be re-stating what you've observed.

[01:51:09]  Sadia: But is biology that type of, does that type of evolutionary biology give us those type of predictions? Isn't that based on explanations? And we see certain things, but the whole idea that all the life forms have evolved is very explanatory, right?

[01:51:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, but it's also predictive.

[01:51:29]  Unidentified speaker: Ivan, give some examples of what you mean.

[01:51:31]  Ivan: Yeah. Well, for evolution specifically, and I talk about this in my book, is let's suppose you wanted to say, there are some very specific predictions that get made in evolutionary biology, things like Tiktaalik, this fossil that was discovered that is a transitional fossil between fish and land-dwelling animals. And they predicted in what approximate time period they should see this fossil, and then they went to rocks of that age and found it. So that is the kind of prediction that's made within the context of life on earth. But what I would say is that if you were looking at evolution generally, what would you expect to see on every world where life evolved? And I came up with eight predictions. The first prediction is descent, that you're going to need to copy information from one, you know, you need backups. You can't just have one life form with a genetic code, because if there's anything wrong in that code and it dies, you've lost everything. So you need replication, which means you need descent, right? You can't create a factory. A factory requires that you have some sort of abstract idea of what the life form is. So descent is predicted, common descent. Then there's what I call common composition, which is the idea that evolutionary biology reuses technology. So all the animals on earth use ATP as their primary energy carrier, right? And it's difficult for evolution to change that, because all of the cellular appliances use that energy source.

[01:53:36]  Ivan: It's like trying to switch from 110 volt to 240 volt or something. You'd have to change all of your appliances to work that way. So then you have things like the only utility of life is survival. If every species on earth was collaborating to create beautiful music, like if even the microbes on the planet were contributing to this effort, and you didn't have species trying to eat each other and kill each other, we'd be like, this could not have evolved. Another prediction of evolution is that everything that life knows, it must have been able to learn either genetically or through experience. If life had been designed instead, like my Wi-Fi router didn't learn how to route packets, it was designed that way. It came from the factory. If life had been designed, we could expect to find, for example, we could expect to find rabbits that know everything about quantum gravity, even though they could never have learned it. There are a number of predictions that evolution predicts we should find on every planet, like having millions of species. That's a prediction of evolution. There's no way that evolution could create a planet that's populated exclusively by rabbits.

[01:55:05]  Bruce: Ivan, I really hate to burst your bubble on this, but my daughter's rabbit does in fact know quantum gravity. Ivan, can I ask you some questions about some stuff that you said? Before I go too much further, I'd like to actually clarify a few things that you said. One of the things that I have pushed on this show over and over again, is that there is a big difference between words and concepts, that there are far more concepts than there are words, and that so it makes sense that we have to reuse words to, for sometimes not the same concept, okay? Because of that, and I've really harped on essentialism, this idea that a word has a single meaning or definition. It's impossible. It doesn't happen in real life. Maybe we could make an exception if we're talking specifically Euclidean geometry, or something where we've created an artificial space for it to happen. But just in terms of natural language use, we should expect that every single word has different meanings depending on context, or that even people are using them differently to point to different concepts. With that out of the way, I would like to ask you about your claims around reductionism. So let me explain my own view on reductionism. Mine's really no different than David Deutsch's on this. Now, again, I want to be clear. The word reductionism can mean different things depending on who's talking and what the circumstance is. So I'm not trying to claim this is the correct way to understand the word reductionism.

[01:56:39]  Bruce: There is no correct way to understand the word reductionism. But when I think of the term reductionism, for me, usually what I have in mind is the Deutschian idea that for some reason, explanations about smaller parts level down in the hierarchy of causation, or I don't even know what to call it, okay? That for some reason, those are privileged. And so those are better explanations just because they explain things in terms of smaller parts. And I don't doubt that reductive explanations have been wildly successful. Therefore, reduction is a super important part of science. But I also don't doubt that there are emergent explanations that are not reductive, that have been every bit as important in science. Okay? I don't know if that's the same as what Sadia means by holism.

[01:57:39]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe it is the same as what she means by that.

[01:57:41]  Sadia: Which is a really important distinction. Can you clarify that what you're saying is purely epistemic or ontological? See, that is important. If it's ontological, then you're a strong emergentist. Otherwise, you're a weak emergentist.

[01:57:54]  Bruce: Good question. Let me get back to that. So I would like to finish my question to Ivan here. So I accept this idea that reductionism is wrong. But when I say that, I mean something conceptually very specific, that there is no privilege in terms of reductive explanations over emergent explanations. It doesn't mean that I accept strong reductionism. And in fact, I do not accept strong reductionism. And I completely agree with you, Ivan, that strong reductionism is giving up. We might as well just expect Harry Potter.

[01:58:31]  Unidentified speaker: Strong emergence.

[01:58:32]  Bruce: Sorry, strong emergence. You're right. Strong emergence. My bad. So which probably is the answer to Sadia's question. I don't know how to answer the question, epistemic versus ontological, but I do not. I accept that strong emergence is basically a stance that not everything's explainable and that I don't accept that. I accept the Deutschian view that we should expect everything to be explainable. Or at least it's our best explanation that everything's explainable right now.

[01:59:03]  Sadia: Is the counter question on that or do you want to first finish? Yeah, let me finish.

[01:59:07]  Bruce: I haven't actually gotten my question to Ivan yet. So Ivan, with this further explanation as to how I understand normally the word reductionism, are you talking, like when you say you believe in reductionism, like do you believe in it the way I'm thinking of it? Or do you have a totally different understanding of that word in mind?

[01:59:28]  Ivan: I have a slightly different definition, which is that I think that there's the idea of what I would call fundamental law, right? So you were talking about sort of explanations, right? And I think it's, is it Deutsch that, I can't recall if it's Deutsch or Popper, I think it's David Deutsch was talking about, you know, the copper atom on the end of the nose of a statue of Winston Churchill, right? Like, why is that there? And that atom is there for abstract reasons, right? But those abstractions are not fundamental in the sense of, it's not the, within a bottom-up framework, you can have top-down causation. That is what biology and what evolution is about when it's evolving nervous systems, right? The nervous system evolves to perform top-down causation. So you can have top-down causation within a bottom-up causation like supervenience. So the world fundamentally is driven by simple non-mental laws, but within that environment, you can grow life forms that have mentality, that have abstractions, that can then perform actions for reasons. So that's the way that I would do it. So it's not that the only explanation that could make any sense is bottom-up. It's actually that what I'm really saying is that if you have these bottom-up laws, the standard model plus gravity, something like that, that starting from that, you will get the rest.

[02:01:35]  Sadia: Could I ask, because that will clarify it. So the question I have for you is, would you say that every decision, let's say we make right now, was, is pretty much determined by the initial conditions of the universe and the laws, the fundamental laws of physics then? Is that what your reductionism point boils down to? Would you say or no?

[02:01:54]  Unidentified speaker: Um, I, I would say that on a technicality, no,

[02:01:58]  Ivan: because it's possible that quantum, like my preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics is many worlds, which is deterministic. But we could have an interpretation which is not deterministic, right? And in such a universe, the outcome of some quantum event is something that is, like, ontologically random, like there's no way to predict what that outcome was, which is like having, like the universe, having a boundary condition at that point. So if we talk about, like, you know, a deterministic universe where you have some initial conditions, those initial conditions are like a boundary, right? And then you use the laws of physics to evolve everything from that point. But if quantum mechanics has truly random, ontologically random events, it's like there are boundary conditions everywhere, wherever there is some quantum transition.

[02:03:05]  Unidentified speaker: Now, if that's the case, then the universe is not deterministic.

[02:03:09]  Sadia: But God's view of the multiverse, if you were an Everettian, would be a fully deterministic thing, right? If you knew the wave function. See, when I say initial conditions, I'm saying the initial wave function and the laws of physics.

[02:03:22]  Ivan: Yes, but what I'm saying is that I'm actually, although I favor the Everettian picture, I'm not like, oh, I'm 99% sure that's the right answer. I'm something like maybe 70% confident. Like it seems like the best explanation that I've seen. So it could be like I'm still somewhat agnostic as to whether the universe is deterministic or not, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Like, does it make a difference?

[02:03:54]  Sadia: Yeah, because how can you be a reductionist if determinism is not true is what I don't understand. Because I think the two have to go hand in hand.

[02:04:06]  Bruce: Yeah, I guess I don't see why they would, but go ahead Ivan, maybe explain.

[02:04:10]  Ivan: Yeah, I mean, if the laws of physics are probabilistic, right, like in Copenhagen, it's still, it's still reductionist.

[02:04:22]  Bruce: It's still fundamental is what you're saying. You're still saying that is the most fundamental law from your point of view.

[02:04:27]  Ivan: You have some fundamental, non-mental law that that governs the evolution of the universe. And, and within that, but it just so happens that evolution of life and then abstraction and so on.

[02:04:42]  Bruce: But it just so happens that fundamental law is non-deterministic is what you're saying.

[02:04:46]  Sadia: But, but if you don't make an ontological commitment such as to Everettian then you have to admit randomness, right? Then you're saying that if at any one point there is an openness, right? Like, because, you know, when we say fully deterministic, we really are talking about the wave function actually evolving. But measurement will destroy that type of thing. Which I'm not sure, maybe I'm wrong, but I think that should kind of maybe, and maybe you're right, that somehow, I don't know how reductionism would work with Copenhagen, but.

[02:05:18]  Ivan: So, yeah, I don't think they're incompatible. It's just that to me, the Everettian picture just seems to make more sense. I will say that the work of Barandes, recent work on, you probably are more familiar with this than I am, Sadia.

[02:05:41]  Sadia: I love that guy. That's awesome. Yes.

[02:05:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:05:44]  Ivan: It's very interesting. I can't say that I've been won over by him yet.

[02:05:49]  Sadia: Exactly. But he's giving us something. He's tempting to get rid of all sorts of stuff that's just kind of very magical. Even though you might think what I'm saying is magical, which I don't think, but anyways, but that's definitely a thing.

[02:06:05]  Bruce: So let me finish my question to you then, Ivan. So David Deutsch, and again, this is an area where I agree with David Deutsch. I have obviously have many disagreements with David Deutsch, but he's got this idea. So you're using this term fundamental, right? It's not like I don't understand what you mean by that. You're trying to say that physics is more fundamental than chemistry, right? Or chemistry is more fundamental than biology. And that certainly is the normal way that people look at science. But Deutsch makes an argument in Fabric of Reality that there's this idea of fundamentalness tries to put an importance on, say, physics that it doesn't really hold. That in theory, this idea that you could... The idea is that if I know those physics, then at least in principle, if not in practice, I could work out chemistry and biology. But Deutsch points out that the reverse could be just as much true. It could be that by knowing, you know, certain emergent laws, let's say chemistry, you could then work out what physics is. That there's really no reason to believe you couldn't do that. Therefore, there isn't a privileged position, and the whole idea of fundamentalness is problematic, is what he's arguing. Now, if you simply use the word fundamental to mean at a lower level, more reduced level, then I guess I wouldn't have a problem with you saying physics is more fundamental. And that's why I say I know what you mean when you say it. But usually the term implies a level of importance that I don't actually think is true.

[02:07:45]  Bruce: And I guess my question to you is, do you mean it only in the sense that it is more reduced, and you just happen to use the word fundamental to mean more reduced? Or are you literally making the argument that the reduced level, the more fundamental explanations have a superiority in this way? And in that they can explain the emergent explanations, but the emergent explanations can't explain the reduced explanations.

[02:08:14]  Ivan: So, what I mean by fundamental is that they're sufficient, that they would be sufficient to predict my existence, they're sufficient to predict the abstractions that I use, they're sufficient to make sense of explanations like, okay, well, Winston Churchill was this human being that led Great Britain in World War II and all the rest, that it's compatible with higher level explanations of behavior, right? So the reasons why humans do things are usually for abstract human reasons, but there's nothing incompatible between those. As far as the idea that you can go from higher level abstractions down and then somehow derive the lower level ones, that I don't agree with at all. I don't follow that. I mean, if you're saying there's this notion of importance, right? You could certainly say that high level abstractions are as important to us as the low level ones. We wouldn't be able to function in life without talking about people, or ideas, or political systems, or money, or those things. Those things are important to us as are, as is the importance of things like chemical reactions and, and, you know, creating, you know, useful compounds like sulfuric acid or those kinds of, of things are all important. But it's not clear to me that, that if you start from high level abstractions, you can, you will somehow necessarily end up at the standard model that I don't understand.

[02:10:12]  Bruce: Okay. Let's, let's use a easier example, which would be chemistry versus physics. Okay. So let's say that you don't have the laws of physics, but you do have the laws of chemistry. Would it be possible starting with the laws of chemistry and assuming that there is some sort of explanation to then use that to work out what the, what the, it would constrain what physics are actually possible. Okay. And therefore maybe even work out with enough knowledge of chemistry, what the actual laws of physics are. In other words, could you do that? It seems to me like you could, at least in principle, probably as much in principle as you could work out chemistry from the laws of physics, which in principle you can do, but nobody would ever actually try to do it. Other than maybe in little tiny areas, because it would be so hard.

[02:11:07]  Ivan: I don't think you could go in that direction. So how do we get to the standard model from chemistry?

[02:11:20]  Ivan: We looked at the periodic table and we saw a pattern. And then we basically accelerated electrons to probe and find nuclei. And then we accelerated the electrons faster and faster until the wavelength of these electrons. We discovered quantum theory and then we got the de Broglie wavelength of these electrons small enough to fit within nuclei so that we could start pushing quarks out of these things. It's not clear to me that that's chemistry. We've left the realm of chemistry.

[02:12:01]  Unidentified speaker: We are now in physics, right?

[02:12:04]  Bruce: Of course, right? In the same way that if you were to try to use physics to explain an abstraction as to why there's the copper on the end of the nose, you would at some point leave the realm of physics, right? So it seems to me like the two are far more symmetrical than the word fundamental seems to suggest.

[02:12:23]  Ivan: Could you rephrase your question as something like, given our laws of chemistry, must the laws of physics be the ones that we found? Is that?

[02:12:34]  Bruce: So it wouldn't necessarily be specifically the laws of chemistry. It would actually be the collection of emergent laws, right? You could start with a bunch of emergent laws, chemistry being the example here, and it constrains which physics are actually possible. There would be other emergent explanations that would also constrain which physics are possible. So the way Deutsch tries to explain this, if I'm recalling correctly, is that the collection of emergent explanations has as much fundamentalness as the underlying reductive explanation.

[02:13:11]  Sadia: Back to that debate about even genes and the organism as well. This is exactly…

[02:13:16]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[02:13:17]  Unidentified speaker: It is.

[02:13:18]  Bruce: It is. It's the whole… This is a microcosm of the whole gene-centric thing, right? Is genes really more fundamental? They're not. Or at least that's the argument that Levin's making. Because you can actually… It's not just that we need the explanations, or that they're more important to us. It's not really that. It's that you can actually work… The direction goes both ways in a lot of cases. The emergent explanations pin down what the reductive explanations are, just like the reductive explanation pins down the emergent explanations. And so, they don't have a fundamentalness, or so Deutsch is arguing. I guess I'm not completely convinced of that. But it seems like it's a decent argument. That this idea of fundamentalness just doesn't exist, right? That you can't really cause…

[02:14:06]  Sadia: He said that something… Even if he said something was fundamental, then we would say that nothing else is missing, right? But if we say that some explanation is not fundamental, that means that there is a missing component. Like, let's say that if we are saying the physics explanation is not fundamental, you know, and if you're saying that, you know, like maybe the top-down constraints are an important ontological… like add some sort of ontological element there. It's not just epistemic, right? Because usually, you know, in the debate, again, people kind of don't make it clear whether they're saying epistemic or ontological. Epistemic means that kind of the intractability argument, right? Just because we, you know, if we could, if somehow, you know, it's just that there is intractability, but otherwise, reductionism is true. But the ontological point is saying, no, there is something at the higher level that is important.

[02:15:03]  Bruce: Based on that explanation, I think I can now answer your question to me. I'm epistemic going both ways. So I don't believe that reductive explanations are more fundamental in any way, shape or form compared to emergent ones. But I believe that it is an epistemic separation, not an ontological separation. So it is not just that it's intractable that I can't work out why that copper atom was on the end of the nose using the laws of physics. But I also can't work out what the laws of physics are, starting with how humans behave. But I believe that really I theoretically could. With enough emergent explanations, I would eventually pin down exactly what the laws of physics would have to be, at least in principle. So I think I believe it's epistemic going both directions.

[02:15:55]  Sadia: Epistemic or ontological? Because you mean like in reality, there's something there that both levels apply. Is that what you're saying?

[02:16:06]  Bruce: No, I'm saying that if I had enough emergent explanations, I could work out the laws of physics. So emergent explanations are, in that sense, as fundamental as the laws of physics.

[02:16:15]  Sadia: Okay. And see, with me, that's where I actually take the stance that no, we can't because we need the emergent level for the constraints and stuff for that causation, as well as reductions. See, I'm not a reductionist, [but I see reductions?]

[02:16:27]  Unidentified speaker: Obviously, you need both, right?

[02:16:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, okay.

[02:16:30]  Bruce: I said, once you take the stance that neither is fundamental, that does work out to be that you need both, right?

[02:16:38]  Sadia: Exactly, which is an ontological commitment, then that we are saying that something new has emerged. There's something new.

[02:16:44]  Unidentified speaker: No, so I'm claiming it's epistemic.

[02:16:47]  Unidentified speaker: I disagree with both of you.

[02:16:48]  Bruce: I take that stance, but it's epistemic. Okay.

[02:16:51]  Sadia: Can I just also add one other thing to this whole idea of people think that this is a dead end, to just say, to make any type of commitment, that there might be certain strongly emergent properties? Look, there are already things in physics that so far as we know are irreducible, like charge, electric charge. We just take it as a brute fact, but that doesn't prevent us from creating science around it. I don't see any reason why, even if there is strongly emergent phenomena, why we couldn't study it via its interactions once it exists. If things like qualia or the level of, whether we want to call it human consciousness, which is not a very well-defined concept, but let's say for a second, we're still working with these concepts, right? It's not like we're just totally in the dark about, we made a lot of progress in how we learn and so forth. So I don't think it's an explanatory dead end, but it's just that we have to be open to the fact that there are these novel things, and especially we have to be realistic. I'm not even saying just accept it. I'm just saying just be realistic. What is the science so far telling us about certain things? And I mean, it doesn't have to stop us from keep trying.

[02:18:10]  Ivan: Oh, well, I was just gonna say that my own view is that as a reductionist, is that the low level of physics is sufficient for the rest, that yes, it may be intractable, but that the low level implies the high level. It's not clear to me that the high level will take you back in the other direction. So, and I would think about this maybe a little bit computationally. Like, imagine you have a simulation, right? Presumably, there are many different kinds of physical universes, low level physics, that are compatible with simulating things at some high level, so that you could simulate, you know, abstract ideas, right? Or compute. There are many universes in which computation is possible, where the low level physics could be quite different. But if you start with the low level physics, you know, and the low level physics supports computation, then you can work in one direction, but not in the other.

[02:19:21]  Unidentified speaker: So you're right with computation.

[02:19:24]  Ivan: One constraint, there's a constraint going from low to high, but I don't see the constraint going from high to low. Not that there are no constraints, right? Now, obviously, there might be some constraints at a high level, if you look at like a biological system, if there are things that you could say.

[02:19:41]  Bruce: If you look at a single emergent explanation, computation is a good example, right? Computation is substrate independent, so there actually could be, you cannot, based on how a computer behaves, and looking at how you can program a computer, you can't determine what the innards of the computer look like, because it's substrate independent. So from that standpoint, I would agree with you. But my understanding of Deutsch's view is that he's talking not about any one particular emergent explanation, but the collection of emergent explanations. And if you really think about it, that is how we discovered physics, right? I mean, like, you physics didn't just... We were trying to answer questions at an emergent level, and we dug down. So those emergent explanations must have allowed us, assuming that the laws of physics have a high degree of verisimilitude, must have allowed us to eventually figure out what the underlying laws of physics were. So that does seem to me like there is a fairly good case that in real life, we actually did pin down the lower level explanations out of the higher level explanations. Which is why I think, Deutsch questions the idea of fundamentalness. You know, I'm doing this all from memory. I probably need to go find the actual quote from him that I'm thinking of, and like read it.

[02:21:01]  Sadia: But you too, that's my reading of him too.

[02:21:03]  Bruce: Because he may have said this in a much smarter way than I did.

[02:21:08]  Sadia: You know, the problem is, I've kind of nudged him on Twitter, here and there. Maybe I should just ask him, e-mail him. I just wish that he would clarify where he stands on emergence, in terms of epistemic versus ontological. I think he sticks more to the epistemic part. But a lot of times when he talks about determinism and stuff from where I gather, it seems like it is in the weak emergence camp, which is what British emergentist, if I'm not forgotten, was all about. It's kind of in that.

[02:21:41]  Bruce: Now that we've beat the horse to death on emergence, can I actually bring up Platonism, since that's something that Sadia raised right off the bat? Again, I want to emphasize that this idea that there is this thing called Platonism, that this word Platonism points to exactly one idea is absolutely, completely false and that could never be true because it's a word. And the reason why I'm going to say this is, she pointed out that Michael Levin is a, quote, Platonist. So this book here is called The Last Superstition by Edward Feser, okay? It is a, he's a Catholic, Thomist, philosopher. And I had a Catholic friend who sent this book to me because he, this was his philosophy, he wanted me to understand it. And he thought it was a super well-put-together book that undermined all sorts of things and proved Catholic doctrines, etc., right? So he's sending it to a Mormon friend trying to, you know, convert the Mormon friend to Catholicism, I guess. And this book explains the Catholic view of philosophy, Thomism from St. Thomas Aquinas, and it explains what Platonism is, at least how Catholics understand Platonism. Which, by the way, may be different than the way Plato understood Platonism. I don't know that they're necessarily the same thing. What I can tell you is, is that Michael Levin is in no sense a Platonist, not even slightly. If by Platonism you mean Feser's version of Platonism. And I don't think this is a small point, right?

[02:23:28]  Bruce: Let me actually read what Michael Levin says. So, let me throw out here that David Deutsch denies he's a Platonist in any way, shape, or form. Sadia often calls him a Platonist, okay, for reasons that maybe she can explain. But I agree with David Deutsch. He is not a Platonist, at least not in the way I would normally think of the term Platonist. I don't doubt that we could define Platonism in such a way that he becomes a Platonist. But I don't think the way you would normally think of that term, that David Deutsch would qualify. Now, David Deutsch does believe that mathematics has a reality all its own and that they are there. It is therefore part of reality, okay, because it kicks back at you. This is the argument that he uses. All right. Keep in mind that David Deutsch, as a non-Platonist, believes in this, that number theory or mathematics is part of reality because it kicks back at you, okay? Now, let me read what Levin actually says. He says, mathematics are already very, mathematicians are already very comfortable with this. The old idea, Plato, Pythagoras, etc., that there is a non-physical space of truths, which we discover, not invent, and that this space has a structure that enables exploration. I make the conjecture that this space contains not only low agency forms like facts about triangles and the truths of number theory, but also a very wide variety of high agency patterns that we call kinds of minds. In this view, physical bodies don't create or even connect to and thus have minds.

[02:25:11]  Bruce: Instead, minds are the patterns with their ingressions into the physical world enabled by the pointers of natural or synthetic bodies. Okay, other than the last half of that last sentence, there is nothing that Levin just said that isn't 100% compatible and in fact is identical to David Deutsch's non-Platonist view because all he's really saying is that mathematics has a reality of its own and that you explore it. Okay, David Deutsch wouldn't disagree with that as a non-Platonist. I would not disagree with that as a non-Platonist. And I think this is one of the problems is that is Levin a Platonist? He says he is and I'm not going to say, oh, he's not a Platonist. He clearly is in whatever he thinks of the word Platonism is meaning. But he's not even close to being a Platonist in the Feser sense, right? Because that's a totally different thing where there's this realm that's more real than the real world and you have a form of everything that exists there in a perfect form. Like, there's just no way that describes Levin at all. Okay. And I guess this is where I want to call some caution around this. The word Platonism can mean something way weaker, which I think Levin is a Platonist in that sense. And maybe most people are in that sense. Maybe David Deutsch would qualify as a Platonist in this super weak sense. The reason why David Deutsch and myself saying we're not Platonists, is because we're thinking of the Feser kind of, the original Plato view, which is clearly false. Okay. And just is not a true view.

[02:26:54]  Bruce: So I don't know how to answer Sadia's question sometime. She'll say, I think Bruce, you're a Platonist or whatever. And what I think she really just means is that I accept that mathematics has a reality of its own because it kicks back at you.

[02:27:06]  Sadia: I'm going to give you a statement, which is contrary to what I think, which makes it not Platonistic.

[02:27:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:27:11]  Sadia: That might help. So the way I look at mathematics is that the reality of mathematics only exists with human beings, right? Mathematics is something that humans do. Mathematics is extremely useful in modeling a lot of stuff that exists in nature. But mathematics itself doesn't exist in nature. The patterns exist in nature and those patterns, mathematics can serve to model. But quite often the mathematics also breaks down, like our models break down, physics breaks down. All our models are approximation. So when people think that mathematics exists out there, it's kind of, it does kind of, [it's not your?]—right, that it's not… I do think that if you're not taking the view as I'm saying, then you are thinking of it in some sort of an ideal way. Because if you're going to say in an approximate way, then the math really doesn't exist. It's just like something we do and it's useful for modeling. It's the same thing. I also have this problem with knowledge without knower. See, that's why I keep saying I'm a materialist. Like knowledge, mathematics, all these things, they belong to us. They only have any type of causal power through us. But if suddenly all the humans wiped out of the universe, mathematics would not exist. Just like physics won't exist anymore. But that doesn't mean the nature won't exist and do the things that it does. But mathematics and things are specific to us. So I think this is kind of a wrong way to put that. Like what does it mean, math exists out there, like it's real. Unless if you are on board with me, that if all humans died out, math dies out.

[02:28:53]  Ivan: I'm actually going to slightly agree with Sadia on this one. So there's a distinction in philosophy between essentialism and nominalism, which is the idea of, you know, is like an abstract class, like a universal, real, or is it just a label that we use to describe things that match a certain pattern?

[02:29:20]  Sadia: So the universals, that's the key word there. Platonists a lot of times do believe in universals, and I don't think there are universals. I think there are useful approximations. There are patterns. There are things that, but the idea of universals is a very idealistic word, and it really does fall back into the whole ideal platonic realm type thing, even if one doesn't make that claim.

[02:29:43]  Bruce: Okay, let me ask you guys a question. So the largest known prime number is the Mersenne prime number, which is some gigantic, gigantic number. Okay, two to the 136279841 minus one, or something like that, okay? If I were to ask you guys, is there a prime number larger than that? I'm pretty sure both of you would say yes. Okay, even though we may, Earth might get wiped out tomorrow, and it will never be discovered. Maybe nobody even bothers to discover it, because there's just no point, okay? And yet, I'm pretty sure you would treat it exactly like it actually exists, that there is a next prime number larger than the Mersenne prime number. That's really what David Deutsch is getting at, okay? It has a reality of its own in exactly the sense that there is a larger large prime number than the largest known prime number.

[02:30:41]  Ivan: That's true, but what you really mean by that, like this is where the word existence gets sort of bounced around in what I consider to be a rather improper way, is that people go, well, since this was always the case, it was always the case that there was a larger prime number that we discovered it. It was waiting to be discovered, and so it's eternal, and so it has this existence which is eternal. But that's not exactly the way we use the word existence when we're talking about physical objects like when I say that the moon exists.

[02:31:17]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, I agree.

[02:31:17]  Ivan: So what you really mean is something like, if we were to perform this calculation, what would we expect the result to be? Would we get the same result if we start from the same initial state and perform this computation? I think that there's a sense in which Sadia is right, that yes, if you went back in time 13 billion years and computed this, you would also get the same answer. But that doesn't mean to say that the answer exists in that sense. You're making a statement about a computation you could perform. It's true.

[02:32:06]  Unidentified speaker: We believe that if you have the same initial condition.

[02:32:09]  Bruce: Yeah, I think I'm making a statement that it actually does exist. I'm not saying physically exists and I'm not saying platonically exists in some platonic realm. And yeah, you could describe it as, if you did the computation, it would turn out to be this. I'm saying it has to turn out to be that because it's not that math existed in some platonic realm. We invented it. I'm with Popper on that. We absolutely invented the mathematical system and there's probably other mathematical systems we could have invented, okay? Once it was invented, it does kick back at you. It has certain implications that can be worked out, okay? So when you say, what I really mean is, is that we could have done the computation. That's not really what I mean. I mean, if you do that computation, whether it ever actually happens or not, there will be exactly one answer.

[02:33:01]  Unidentified speaker: That's what I really mean.

[02:33:03]  Ivan: Yeah, I agree with that. That's not necessarily Platonism, right? Platonism is the idea that that answer exists.

[02:33:09]  Bruce: It is not Platonism. It is not Platonism. I agree that it is not at all Platonism, unless you want to define Platonism to be that.

[02:33:18]  Sadia: But you know, when you look at the way, the reason why I call him Platonist, if you combine it with a lot of other intuition that he has and stuff that Sam Kuypers is working on as well, the whole idea of timeless reality and determinism, it all adds up to all the reality and everything that could possibly exist already just exists. So there isn't really, in a sense, then what's left is a weird question because I think that leads to weird type of absurdity, or maybe doesn't from their view. It's kind of like a God's view as if all that could possibly exist is there. I'm right now realizing one thing, and a few seconds later, what I'm realizing also somehow is already there. If time doesn't exist, then clearly all of that must already. Isn't that what the whole thing of eternalism is? So what I'm kind of making the accusation is all the people who are eternalists are very much, at least have a very strong Platonistic intuition. Even if you nudge them, they're going to get away from, no, no, no, that's not what we're saying. But the people who actually take this idea seriously and run with it will be like, I had a friend who was a Platonist who literally even said that Beethoven symphonies all existed even before he existed, right? When you go down that route, there is no stopping because if you stop, then I would ask you, why did you stop? It doesn't seem consistent then with your stance when you stop. So, but I have no problem in saying kicking back.

[02:34:47]  Sadia: Of course, if you have a program that you run and then, you know, it only kicks back when you enact a program, when it's in a physical system, when it emerges in a physical system. See, I'm not even saying [in stancy?]. I'm saying it's emergent. And there are, of course, regularities and so forth that mathematics is a study of kind of a universe that we can, to me, mathematics is a sort of universe we can just create in our heads. And there are these structures that definitely fit together in certain ways and not others. So that definitely is, there is a reality of that. But it's not in terms of, like, it doesn't exist out there. It's something that a human, an amazing thing about the human mind and the computer programs, that we can actually, you know, our imagination can stretch to places. Look, we can even think about it, like we think about infinities, certain infinities bigger than other. But there may not be, you know, such a thing may not have anything in reality, right? I mean, do infinities exist in reality? Physicists don't like infinities for sure.

[02:35:52]  Peter: Well, Sadia, what's the difference between composing a symphony and discovering a truth of mathematics then? I mean, is there one?

[02:36:02]  Sadia: Composing a symphony could be considered as, like, imagine all sorts of compositions and all variations of that, right? So if mathematics can exist, then why couldn't that? You know, and what are we saying? Like, to me, it only existed when Beethoven actually composed it and he left it behind. Like, if suddenly everybody got wiped out, including any written form or whatever, or recording, then it's gone from this universe, right? But somebody who leans towards mathematics existing, irrespective of whether humans exist or not, that's my important. But if you say that mathematics only exist to us, then I have no problem. Then in my way of looking at it, you're not a platonist. The problem I have is this saying that somehow it does. Like, what does that even mean? And even this whole idea of abstractions, right? What are we saying? It's almost like a ghost in the machine type thing, right? That when we say, oh, well, computer program, there's the hardware, there's software. Software is an abstraction. Laws of physics, as Deutsch says, are abstractions. What does that even mean? To me, they're irregularities. And that's where this whole debate of causal powers, causality, and looking at causation as apparent lies. Somebody like, such as myself, as a causal realist, says that properties, these type of things, they only exist [by virtue?]. That's why I'm a materialist. Like, this all exists with materials. And by materialist, I also include fields, right? I'm not just saying matter.

[02:37:31]  Sadia: I mean, like, you know, the stuff of this world. But laws of physics don't exist outside the stuff. They are regularities. There's something, there's something about matter. And that's, to me, the most interesting question. See, that goes to the question of memory. And that's why I'm so interested in teleodynamics, because I think there is some sort of inherent memory. Like, you know, we think in terms of fields, and fields are kind of like that, right? They play the role in physics of that, that an electron here behaves the same as an electron on the other side of the planet, or in Andromeda, as far as we know. So, these regularities are there. You know, and then the way we explain it is that a long time ago, universe was, everything was so close together, and, you know, at that time, information could have been exchanged. So, even if there is this memory, and these are, that's why we can stick to localism, and not say that electron has to somehow figure out, like, how other electrons are behaving through some non-local means, right?

[02:38:31]  Unidentified speaker: So, these are all kind of tied together.

[02:38:33]  Bruce: Let me just say, that even though Levin, the point I was actually getting at is, even though Levin says he is a Platonist, I, that he's using the term in a way that I'm less familiar with, and that I don't think is even close to what the word originally meant. And so, I guess I question, I question whether he is actually a Platonist, unless you're talking about a new definition of Platonism.

[02:39:01]  Sadia: Look, he even says that minds, he makes a distinction between minds and brains, and he says brains are interfaces to this Platonic realm. Like that's, I mean, I mean, to me, he's a straight up Platonist, like, like there, I mean, I don't know what else could be a Platonist.

[02:39:17]  Unidentified speaker: But again, you know,

[02:39:18]  Bruce: Okay, so let's, let's, let's actually take what he says. So first of all, I'm not sure, because I'm just going off of what he's written right here. But what he actually says is, here's the quote, the one that you just said, minds are the pattern. Okay, is that wrong? No, that's, that's absolutely true. That's true in a physical world. Okay. With their ingressions into the physical world, enabled by pointers of natural or synthetic bodies. Now I don't know what he means by that, because that's not a strongly meaningful way to end a sentence for me. But based on everything else he says in that paragraph before, it really looks to me like he might maybe, maybe is just simply saying that mathematics, exactly what I just said, that there actually is a next larger prime number. And that it's a real number that in some sense exists. Granted, I'm using the word exist here in a different sense than with the physical sense. Okay. But then why would I privilege the word exists to only the physical sense? Because that would be itself essentialism. Okay. Obviously, when I say the word, that other prime number exists, and everybody agrees with me, including you guys, it meant something. Okay. It doesn't have to mean it existed as a physical object. It doesn't have to mean it existed in a platonic realm that is more real than the real world. And I don't see anything in Levin where he claims at all that it exists in some realm where it's more real than the real world.

[02:40:54]  Bruce: What I see him actually saying is that these are patterns that exist in real life and that evolution has to stumble across these useful patterns that are determined by the laws of physics. That's what I see him as saying. Okay. And he calls that platonism. I don't.

[02:41:11]  Sadia: This question that might clarify. So, Fibonacci series, right? Like we see it kind of like the patterns in nature which kind of seem to follow that rule in approximate ways, right? So if I ask you, and that's part of mathematics, would you say that close to Big Bang when, you know, the matter, like as we know, the stable atoms didn't exist, which means that it wasn't like anywhere inherent in nature, would you say at that time that existed, that mathematics already existed?

[02:41:40]  Bruce: Mathematics is the creation of human beings. I agree with Popper on that, right? So obviously it didn't exist in the sense that nobody had invented it yet. Okay. But again, I feel like we're confusing the word existence. We're trying to make this word not recognizing that we're using it in multiple different analogous sort of ways, but we don't mean the same thing. When we talk about mathematics existing, we don't mean it as a physical existence.

[02:42:06]  Sadia: Does it exist in a timeless way or time—? See, to me, that is an important distinction.

[02:42:08]  Bruce: See, I don't even know. See, even the fact that you're asking, does it exist in a timeless way? To me, it's already confused, okay? Because mathematics is something that humans invent, okay?

[02:42:19]  Sadia: I think I wouldn't ask that question if I didn't get this confused type of statement that math actually exists. The reason why I'm asking is because I get these statements and because I get this statement from eternalists that timelessly everything that's going to happen, everything just exists.

[02:42:36]  Bruce: Okay, so let me ask you this. Is there a next larger prime number? Past the largest one [unclear]?

[02:42:44]  Sadia: If I knew the mathematics correctly, yeah, I mean, of course. Okay. Yeah, it's because I'm thinking about it.

[02:42:50]  Bruce: Okay, but now you're thinking about it, but you aren't. You don't know what that number is.

[02:42:55]  Sadia: In other words, that, okay. In other words, that question is only meaningful because we're asking it, right? Like we're asking it, unless if somehow that thing was already, you know, like there was something about nature that could be modeled on prime number, but even then, we are the one who are modeling with it. That doesn't mean the math is in it, right? That's what I'm trying to say.

[02:43:20]  Bruce: Let me ask you, okay, that's fair, but let me ask you another question, okay? Let's say humanity gets wiped out, okay? So, you want to now, do you want to now say, based on your theory, that that prime number never existed?

[02:43:37]  Sadia: I mean, like, where does it exist is my question, right? When the humanity gets wiped out, who's even asking that question? What does that even mean?

[02:43:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, so, are you taking it?

[02:43:48]  Sadia: Where is it manifesting itself, right?

[02:43:51]  Bruce: So, are you taking the stance that if humanity gets wiped out, that it's a meaningless question to ask if it existed, if there's another prime number larger than the largest current known prime number? Is that your stance that you're taking?

[02:44:05]  Sadia: Because the meaning is with humans, right? Like, yeah, when the humans are gone, certain type of meaning is gone.

[02:44:12]  Bruce: Okay. So, let's take that stance just for a second. Let me try to challenge that now. Okay. Let's say that there's aliens that show up. Okay. So, for the sake of argument, let's say these aliens don't currently exist. The earth gets, you know, humanity gets wiped out, but a lot of our records stick around. I don't know how that's possible, but let's just say it does. And these aliens evolve. They weren't around at the time we were. They come and they discover us. Okay, are they going to have a mathematical system where the question is there a, and they discover, you know, looking at our records that the largest prime number that we've discovered was the Mersenne prime number or whatever, right? Is to them, are they going to have an understanding of prime numbers? And are they going to have a, be able to think about this idea that there is a larger prime number than the largest prime number that we discovered? Maybe they haven't discovered it either for the sake of argument yet, okay?

[02:45:17]  Sadia: Depends on, there are lots of assumptions going, we already projected ourselves into the alien that they're going to be just like us. It's almost like saying, if there are other types of humans that exist, to me that is, but yeah.

[02:45:27]  Bruce: Okay, no, no, no, hold on. You're going in the right direction here, okay?

[02:45:32]  Sadia: And I'll also give you another example. If they actually happened to somehow by chance created a game of chess, they're also going to discover the moves that we had, right? But does that mean those chess moves already exist?

[02:45:42]  Bruce: Okay, here's the difference. Here's the difference though. It doesn't seem likely that they would happen to invent the exact same game of chess that we do, okay? But, could they actually... Okay, well, who knows? Is there... Would they need a number theory that's equivalent to ours, even if they called it by different things?

[02:46:11]  Sadia: Honestly, what I'm seeing here is that we've pretty much projected ourselves onto the aliens.

[02:46:16]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, [have/haven't?] we?

[02:46:16]  Bruce: Well, that's the question. Would their number theory be so different than ours that there's just no concept of prime number and they would have to then learn ours? Or, does reality constrain number theory in such a way that they would have to have something equivalent to our number theory?

[02:46:37]  Unidentified speaker: That's the question I'm asking you.

[02:46:38]  Sadia: Yeah, I think this question is loaded with all sorts of assumptions, which, I mean, to me, it's kind of like saying, why even go to humans like there are other alien life form, like there are other life forms on this planet. Do they think, like, does my cat know prime numbers exist, right? Of course not, because my cat is not capable of doing mathematics. But if you're saying there's an alien that might actually already be able to do math, then they are pretty much just like the, you know how David Deutsch uses the word people for AI, then they'll just be people. So we've already smuggled in the assumption that they are basically like us, and in math, of course they will.

[02:47:14]  Bruce: So I'm actually asking a deeper question to that, okay? So let's use a silly example from Doctor Who. They had a race where they could use words like spells. And then, because Doctor Who is at least ostensibly trying to be science fiction, not really, but the doctor that explains, he says, well, you guys use the language of mathematics and you can put a person on the moon and perform miracles that way. They just happen to use natural language instead. Okay. So to me, this is just pure fiction. You can't actually use natural language to create spells, right? And the analogy there is all wrong. But let's assume that these aliens show up and they didn't invent number theory. They invented some way to get to earth, but they never had math. They never had at least, maybe they even have math, but it's a totally alien kind of math that's not isomorphic to ours. Okay. Is, like, am I talking, and here's my question, am I talking nonsense that there could not be such an alien mathematics system? Or are we literally saying that if they've reached a level of universal explainership like us and they've developed technology to the point where they can come to our earth, that they must have necessity have discovered a mathematics isomorphic to ours?

[02:48:42]  Unidentified speaker: That's really the question I'm asking you.

[02:48:45]  Sadia: Or at least I'm saying, yes, of course, they would discover it because the thing is once you start to do mathematics, once you are developing it, you are going to, of course, figure out certain patterns. But those patterns are part of that. There is going to be a structure to it. But the main argument that I'm making is it's only when there is somebody who's actually doing it. It doesn't exist outside in some way. As long as we're in agreement, as long as if we agree that it doesn't exist in a timeless way, whether any entity existed or not that can actually do math, I have no problem. But I think Platonists do think that there is something timeless. There is some way of fear, which I'm not sure they even understand it, that these abstractions or the mathematics exists, whether we existed or not, just like my friend thought Beethoven's Symphony existed even before he composed it.

[02:49:37]  Ivan: Perhaps I can give an example that might explain the distinction that I think we want to make. It's something like, I am a collection of atoms arranged in a certain way. This collection of atoms, let's include the atoms in this room so that I can breathe and exist at room temperature. If 13 billion years ago, we assemble the exact same arrangement of atoms in a room with the atoms of my body in the form that they are now, I would be completing this sentence. Does this mean that my existence is eternal? Because if we were to arrange the atoms in the early universe, just like the room that I'm sitting in now, does that mean that I am eternal in that sense? And I would say that I'm not, right? That we're talking about a sort of if-then scenario. If this situation were to arise, then the sentence would get completed. And I think that what Sadia and I are saying about mathematics is that if you arrange a computer to compute this algorithm, you will find that there is another prime number after this. And we would expect there to be one. But that doesn't mean that mathematics is eternal, just in the same way that a human is not eternal in that regard.

[02:51:24]  Bruce: So, I don't disagree with what you just said, okay? But it seems to me like there's still something missing here, okay? So, Sadia will ask, is it timeless? Well, the word timeless itself, you have to unpack, right? That could mean it exists in a timeless Platonic realm that is more real than our world, okay? Or it could mean exactly what I just said, which is, if the aliens reach the Universal Explainership and decide to come to our Earth, even if we're wiped out, they will have a mathematics system that's isomorphic to ours, okay? Now, is this eternal and in a Platonic realm? No, not at all, okay? Does it mean that mathematics is more real, less contingent than, say, chess? There's almost no way that these aliens would happen to have a game of chess, that's exactly isomorphic to chess, because chess is almost entirely just contingent, right? But mathematics isn't. Or, I don't know, maybe it is or maybe it isn't. It seems to me that we're all agreeing that they would have to have a mathematics isomorphic to ours. That does make it more real than chess, right? There's something different about it, okay? That doesn't make it eternal or eternally existent in a Platonic realm, and it doesn't make it eternal or eternally existent in a physical realm. Neither of those is true, and I'm making no such claims. But there's clearly something deeper or more going on, okay?

[02:52:57]  Bruce: See, that's what I think, like Michael Levin's getting at, that the world happens to be such that certain patterns happen to exist, that we would expect aliens that maybe don't even exist today, to have mathematics isomorphic to ours. They would have a number theory isomorphic to ours, okay? That they would not be able to not have it, unless they never reached universal explainership, I guess, and they were just animals, right? As to Sadia's point on this. But if they reach the level where they've got technology, they can come here, then heck yeah, they're gonna have a number theory isomorphic to ours. And this is a kind of reality. It's not the platonic kind. It's not the physical kind. But it's something, right? Even if we don't have a good word for it. And this is what I think Michael Levin is saying. This is what I think David Deutsch is saying. Okay? This is my interpretation of them. I don't think it's necessarily at odds, Ivan, with what you're suggesting, right? In a sense, you're right. You could think of a human being as being eternal in this, whatever word is, because every single computer that's built has to be isomorphic to a Turing machine, and therefore there's always a table of programs that must exist, and that your program, assuming that we're correct with Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis, must exist within that set of programs that would exist on the program table. Okay?

[02:54:28]  Bruce: So yeah, if you want to claim a human being, which is a program, is eternal in this limited sense, I guess you could. It seems like that would be misleading language at best, right? But I've got no problem, as long as you nuance what you actually meant, saying that human beings are eternal, as long as you explain what you actually mean by that, and you don't mean it in a Platonic sense, and you don't mean it in a physical sense.

[02:54:54]  Ivan: Yeah, I sort of agree with that. I think that with the chess thing, there's actually not so much difference between chess and like number theory. The difference is that number theory is a lot simpler and you're much more like, it's almost inevitable that any life form doing mathematics is going to find the same number theory that we have. Whereas the probability that they find chess in particular seems like much lower probability because there are just so many games that they could play.

[02:55:32]  Bruce: Okay. By the way, we could imagine a different set of laws of physics than ours, where number theory would not be discovered, right? So there is actually something about physical reality. And this isn't different than what Sadia said. I'm not actually making a claim different than Sadia here. There are certain patterns that exist in nature, but those exist because of the laws of physics. We could imagine, this would be all purely hypothetical, but we could imagine some world where it just so happens the laws of physics are such that one plus one does not equal two, or something along those lines. And then those people that exist in that imaginary universe would not have a number theory isomorphic to ours. And instead it would be determined by the patterns that exist in their world. So I don't think it is still, I think that's really what we're getting at here, is that every intelligent alien race that builds starships ultimately ends up with number theory. Because reality constrains it such that you have to find it, right? That's the only one you can find. You can find it, it can be different in certain ways, but it'll end up being isomorphic.

[02:56:39]  Sadia: Why this thing really interests me, I'll give you, and maybe that might clarify and why I'm so much kind of I push back against Platonism and the idea of universals and so forth. This is what kind of comes to my mind, right? That we can look back in history and we've observed like what sort of things have come about. So, you know, we can say, oh, well, you know, sometimes it seems inevitable to us that certain things could have arisen. But is it really like, again, this is a really weird experiment. It's not even realistic. But imagine, like, if some how we were some entity that could have seen the universe when life didn't exist, right? Or even like, and nothing, you know, I mean, well, I guess if we are an entity capable of mathematics, we could have figured out certain patterns. But could we have figured out certain things about life, like where their subjectivity was going to come about, where these properties somehow would come about, that could be figured out? Could mathematics help with all of those things? See, this is where, and even Levin kind of pushes back on the idea of emergence. See, that's where the difference between emergentist and Platonist comes from, comes in.

[02:57:55]  Sadia: See, to me, it's, when I'm saying an emergentist, especially if you're going down the strong emergentist path, then you would say that I'm kind of open to the suggestion that there might be some sort of inherent unpredictability to the universe, like saying that if you run the picture again, the whole thing ran again, would the same outcomes come about? Like humans, would the human still evolve? Or could the laws have been different? We even know that in physics, there had been these things called symmetry breaking. So we could say, well, maybe things could have taken alternative route, but it's still, you know, globally, like if you run to some multi-worlds, many-world type thing on universes even kind of branching, then we could say, well, there could be other realities that constitute the one that with a broken symmetry, maybe there's a universe that has that type of stuff and it would evolve into something very different. But really, we can't really experimentally test any of these ideas. So, I mean, I don't know, like, you know, I keep asking myself, would we even be able to differentiate? So, the only thing I can think of is at this point is that there are definitely two metaphysics at play here, right? There's the emergentist one and there's the platonist one. The question I keep asking is, which one is going to open more avenues for research and which might lead to more dead ends? And I'll tell you one thing. One thing why I so backfired on reductionism, well, one is that I do think it's wrong and and even platonism.

[02:59:33]  Sadia: Well, maybe platonism doesn't have that issue. Well, it actually does, right? So if you're a platonist and you even extend it to morality, then you will also say that moral laws even exist in some sort of a way and there's an inevitability. But you could just be a mathematical platonist, but not be a platonist towards morality and ethics. So it really depends what you can pick and choose as people do. Some people are just mathematical platonists, or they could be platonists about laws of physics or something like that. But to me, I feel like, I think we've done great injustice to this whole debate of free will agency because of this type of thinking, because we denied, I think if we opened up more to there being emergence and things, novel things that arise and not fall into determinism, then I think it might open up more revenues. I can't really think of right now, I had no idea we were gonna get into this debate, but I've thought about this so long and hard and I keep going back and forth. I was actually a platonist. I still have art hanging in my sitting room that's very platonistic. So I still, there's a part of me that kind of goes back and then it's like, no, no, no, no, but then I see other things. So really it comes down to that which one is gonna allow more open-endedness. And I think that this new computational paradigm is a new form of platonism. You see that when you actually look at Tegmark, who's a platonist as well as a computationalist. And if you read that, you realize, wow, interestingly, you know.

[03:01:13]  Sadia: And again, you know, just like we said that neo-darwinism may not mean the same thing to a lot of people. Similarly, platonism may not. But clearly, there's a certain direction, certain commonalities that platonists have that will be different from emergentists. And again, I think this, going down this route, people are closing themselves up to certain things. But I think only time will tell. I'm open, like I'm open to seeing, like, you know, I've said this before, I feel like if AGI turned out to be true, I'll probably revert to platonism, I'll be honest with you. At least the form, like, you know, which is not moral truths and stuff, but at least to the idea of, you know, mathematical platonism, computationalism, Deutsch-Turing thesis, I will accept that, that date, if AGI turned out to be true. And I do see it as kind of like a platonism.

[03:02:09]  Bruce: So, one of the main things that I argued in my three podcasts on this subject was that the term neo-Darwinism seemed to mean something quite different to evolutionary biologists like Zach Hancock and nearly everybody else, that there was this kind of version of neo-Darwinism that we all got taught in schools, and that unless you actually worked in the field, you probably had no idea that today it was considered by the true experts, the evolutionary biologists, to be something about the Price equations, which really isn't gene-centric. It could be any sort of inheritance, not necessarily genes. I had never heard that prior to listening to Zack Hancock's thing, right? So to him, neo-Darwinism isn't necessarily gene-centric, right? Because it is just the Price equations. It makes it completely neutral as to what the means of inheritance is. To nearly everybody else, and this would seem to be Denis Noble's main point, we just weren't taught it that way. That isn't the way most biologists think about it. It's not the way most scientists think about it. It's not the way a layman would think about it. And I gave examples of like David Deutsch having misunderstandings where he was equating neo-Darwinism to selfish gene theory, right? In his books, he literally refers to neo-Darwinism as selfish gene theory. I would actually like to maybe get your guys' thoughts on this. It seems to me that there's a great deal of confusion around what neo-Darwinism even is. And Zach Hancock gave a really good history of how the word has changed over time.

[03:04:00]  Bruce: Okay. So because of this, you've got this, this Denis Noble point of view, neo-Darwinism is dead, where he seems to really mean selfish gene theory is dead. Not even necessarily gene-centrism, although I'm sure he thinks that's dead too. But he very clearly equates neo-Darwinism with selfish gene theory, right? They've got, Zach had quotes of him. Whereas Hancock and Coyne and others, who are experts in this specific field, keep saying, no, no, no, no, this is still neo-Darwinism, right? Yeah, sure, Levin's brought this, this cool stuff in that we didn't know about, an agency and cell cognition and things like that. But none of this is really at odds with neo-Darwinism because we're thinking of it in a far more broader definition based along the Price equations. So really, if I recall correctly, it was just selection, drift and variation, selection and drift or something like that is what it boiled down to. I would kind of like your thoughts on this because when I've heard Ivan talking, he has said multiple times, this isn't really different than neo-Darwinism. And I've heard Sadia talking and she has said multiple times, yeah, you know, kind of neo-Darwinism has got a problem. I would like to know how you understand that term and what you really mean at a deeper level when you say, Ivan, that this is the same as neo-Darwinism and it really hasn't changed.

[03:05:34]  Bruce: And Sadia, what you mean when you say, yeah, I actually agree that neo-Darwinism has got problems and we need a new theory. Okay, and I'm leaving open this possibility that you have different understandings of the term neo-Darwinism. That was why I gave that giant preamble here. So it's not like one of you has to be right and one of you has to be wrong. I'm looking for clarifications of what you're thinking. Does that make sense?

[03:05:55]  Ivan: So my view is that by neo-Darwinism, like my intuitive sense of what it means is that you have some blind process where by blind, I mean that you can start with a process like simple chemistry, and that through what is essentially trial and error with genetic memory, that you can explain the species that we see on Earth. That we can explain how life evolves this way, and that you don't need any kind of forethought or design in order to explain how this stuff has arisen. Of course, we're taught in school a very simple model of DNA sequences and genes and a very simplistic model of mutation. But even within that picture, there's still the infrastructure of the cell, there are still exceptions to the rules, things like mutation rates being different under different circumstances. So it's not very surprising to me that we find that life over billions of years of single cell life where you might be getting multiple generations of cells within a single day, that cells become very sophisticated machines. So what would contradict that?

[03:07:46]  Unidentified speaker: Like what would count as not being?

[03:07:49]  Bruce: So you gave the example of what if, what if like the cells actually did have an index of the genes and could use that to run an algorithm to have forethought as to how to replicate or something? Okay. Would that, okay, so let me just point out that if that were true, that would still be very naturalistic. Like it wouldn't necessarily be at odds with Darwinism in general, right? But what I hear you saying is, is that's not what you see neo-Darwinism is, and that would refute what you're thinking of as neo-Darwinism. Is that correct?

[03:08:23]  Ivan: I think it would be fair. I think a lot of biologists would have to change their point of view if they found that cells had much deeper abstractions, like much deeper metadata on how they were processing information.

[03:08:45]  Bruce: We would see that as we're no longer doing neo-Darwinism at this point. We would now be some other new form. It would be neo-Neo-Darwinism at this.

[03:08:55]  Ivan: I think it would be such a radical change that we'd have to come up with some name and create some distinction for it. But the issue is that people would, of course, want to be very clear that this doesn't involve some greater external design. But the question is, what would that abstraction have to be? Or how deep would that have to be for us to change our language? So what would this abstraction actually be doing?

[03:09:34]  Bruce: We know that the cell has a level of abstraction of the genes. The fact that Barbara McClintock, that it knows how to take splice genes and put them back together again. It's got some level of knowledge of itself. This was James Shapiro's point. So if what we mean is that it has any level of understanding of itself, we already know that's true. But we don't know how deep it goes. And presumably the current theory is it doesn't go very deep, right? So for the sake of argument, let's say that it does in fact that one of the chromosomes actually is this big mapping thing that allows you to understand all the other genes and where to go find them. And so you can index them and you can use them. And the cells have an algorithm that allow it to look at mutations and say, you know what, this mutation would be a lot better if we shuffled it over to here, so that it didn't have a it had a positive outcome instead of a neutral outcome. I mean, James Shapiro almost hints he believes in that, right? That's where I'm getting this idea. But I'm imagining it maybe to a level that James Shapiro isn't advocating for. I could see, like, if that were true, it would still be a completely naturalistic explanation. It wouldn't even violate the Price equations. I mean, like, it would still be ultimately that inheritance is through DNA, right? So I don't know that it would violate, even though it's this drastic new thing, that I think you're right. It would be drastically at odds, and we would really want a new name for it.

[03:11:19]  Ivan: But I think the abstraction would have to affect the evolution in some conscious way for us to change the picture, right? So imagine that a giraffe, right, is thinking, like, I wish I could reach these leaves higher up. And somehow the intelligence in its body or in its cells goes, well, you know, if I shuffle these genes around in this way, I grow a longer neck. That kind of thing would be, even if it was completely natural, we would definitely say that is not [neo-Darwinian?].

[03:11:53]  Bruce: Okay. I would assume that James Shapiro is not advocating for that.

[03:11:58]  Ivan: Right. But the thing is, like, any other kind of abstraction, what is it going to do? Like, the only information it has is that it might have is like, hey, these genes are indispensable. I can't just mutate and throw these away. But you don't need big abstractions for that. You could probably do that with some sort of just like nucleotide sequence to control that. Or some sort of epigenetic process to control it, so that you don't lose those genes. There's a low probability of losing the most important genes. I wouldn't consider that the kind of level of abstraction that would make me change, say, oh, this isn't neo-Darwinism anymore.

[03:12:46]  Bruce: Okay, fair enough. That actually does clarify for me what you mean by neo-Darwinism. Do you want to take a stab at it too, Sadia?

[03:12:55]  Sadia: Yes, first I'll go from the point of view of epistemology that when do we say that a theory has changed or is no longer, I mean, like we say that the neo-Darwinism has gone through a lot of changes. But through those changes, do we say that it's the same exact theory that it was a while back in the day of Darwin? And now, well, it's neo-Darwinism, not his original theory. But so at what point, like when we say something is new and the old theory is overthrown, right? Because a lot of stuff has already kind of, a lot of new understanding has added. But I think to me, the big point, which to me would be a radical kind of a revision, would again be that where the organism as a whole plays an active role. I mean, again, I'm just going to kind of use the analogy of maybe even a machine learning algorithm, right? Where we say that if there's a machine learning algorithm which has a goal, it's trying to solve a problem. And then, you know, there can be these random mutations. But, you know, like when something is trying to solve a problem, oh my God, what is it called? [Not the word?] If I can think of it. I mean, you know, you can have programs that solve optimization problems. So I'm not here saying that the evolution has some program built into it which is trying to optimize. I think it seems to me more like if we look at the biological evolution, is that even though it's goal-oriented, but it's not like there is a one set goal, that the goals are also evolving and changing with time, right? But how do those goals emerge is the question.

[03:14:39]  Sadia: And I think that's where I'm going to kind of go back to the origin of life, that do we really think that completely blind selection is enough to account for evolution? I mean, could evolution even take off without with just that? You know, I think even there we need something, at least something like Stuart Kauffman's autocatalytic sets, where there's some sort of an emerging organizational principles at work. I mean, is that goal-directedness? I don't know. I mean, I don't think that's goal-directedness. But I don't see, at least I don't see the idea of there being goal-directedness in some sort of inherent program that's working towards certain goals, even if the goals are changing throughout, as anything magical, right? I mean, but it is something, it is an add-on. It says that we're saying that evolution is no longer blind, right? The key is organism is playing an active role. There's autonomy, there's agency involved. And that's the sort of stuff that, as I had said before, Hancock clearly backfired. So clearly the version of Darwinism that he has is what I'm saying is wrong, right? But if you're going to say neo-Darwinism includes that, yeah, if you're going to rename it, then sure, right? I mean, what's in the word, right? I mean, as long as we're at the same understanding, but clearly we're not. And neither is, you know, he's at the same page with Noble.

[03:16:10]  Ivan: Yeah, I guess my question to Sadia is, imagine like a really, you know, a throwback version of Neo-Darwinism, where, you know, we just have some simpler model of genes. You know, in this model, you know, there are still cats, right? And so cats are making this, they're goal-oriented. They want to eat the mouse. They want to catch the mouse or catch their prey. So the organism is goal-directed and has everything to do with whether those genes get passed on to the next generation or not. That's not new. That's part of neo-Darwinism from the start. Like, and those goal, the goal of the cat is not to evolve a better cat. It's to get its lunch. So I guess, like, I don't see that as new in neo-Darwinism.

[03:17:11]  Sadia: The evolution could entail some way of better getting to the lunch better. Just like the eye evolved, you know, if you look at the evolution of eye and how, you know. And of course, you know, in neo-Darwinism, we have that kind of explanation, right? But, I mean, I think it is interesting. I mean, you know, again, you know, we can lose certain functionalities, we can gain other functionalities. I still think it is interesting if you look at the evolution, that how it has led up to open-endedness, right? I mean, we do see that evolution has created, like when you look at the intelligence, has led up to an intelligence, which is suddenly now so open-ended, it can even tweak itself. Now we can actually have a goal to just go in and just directly just edit, start editing our genes, start doing whatever we want to ourselves. So at least that is there. But really the question comes down to how much, I mean, I think that's where we just need to have that type of an open-mindedness of, and the only way we're going to discover that is if you look at it with an open mind, like what Levin is doing, that is pointing us to something. So it's a good idea from a research point of view to have an open mind is what I'm saying.

[03:18:29]  Bruce: So let me actually explain why I'm asking this question. So let's say that the Lamarckism, and I don't mean the Denis Noble version of Lamarckism. I mean like the original Lamarckism. Let's pretend like we had discovered it was true. So literally the blacksmith, you know, passes on his big muscles that he worked on during his lifetime to his children. Or the giraffe stretches its neck, and then that causes its neck to grow, and then it passes that longer neck onto his children. And so let's say, and this is something that was in the Noble Dawkins debate, that literally we discovered that, you know, the cells go through the body and they take down information about what the current state of the body is, and then they move that information back into the germ line, and they pass that along to their children. Now, I don't believe this is at all true. Like, Lamarckism, at least in this sense, its original sense, is clearly a false theory, okay? But let's say it was true. It would still fit the Price equations. Like, as far as I can tell, it would still fit the Price equations. So it seems to me that Zach Hancock could, even if it turned out to something radical, like Lamarckism actually being true, the original version, you could still claim that it didn't violate neo-Darwinism. And I've thought about this for a while now, that he defined neo-Darwinism in such a way that I don't think it's possible for neo-Darwinism to ever be superseded because it's so general. As long as there's some sort of, you know, mutation selection and drift or whatever, that's it.

[03:20:15]  Bruce: You're going to have it, even if it turns out it's not DNA, even if it turns out it's some other total different mechanism of the information passing, etc. Based on that, it seems to me like there's almost no point in even talking about the term neo-Darwinism. You might as well just refer to Darwinism at this point, right?

[03:20:33]  Sadia: Even if there was goal-directedness, even then, you know, there wouldn't be an issue with Price equation. But the point is, the point that where you get him is, why did you, and I would ask him, then you just reacted so negatively against this whole idea of...

[03:20:47]  Unidentified speaker: Right, that's exactly what I was thinking.

[03:20:49]  Sadia: That's my problem, right? That means his new Darwin, I just disagree with his view, because part of that is explanatory, right? And that he's ditching that explanation.

[03:20:57]  Bruce: So, and he's, and I caught in the third episode with the Michael Levin thing, I point out how he says, we do not need the concept of agency or cell cognition. They're just misleading. And then I show that Michael Levin literally started, he says, he started with the idea of cell cognition and that was what led to his research program, right? So apparently we do need those concepts. And of course, we're nitpicking Zack to some degree. And I think he would say, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, if that was what led Levin to do his research program, then I guess for Levin, those were useful terms. But that doesn't change what I really meant, is what I suspect Zack would say, right? But it seems to me like, Sadia, what you just said is exactly what's been bothering me, is that on the one hand, he defines neo-Darwinism so generally that [cell/self?] cognition shouldn't have been an issue. Outright Lamarckism shouldn't have been an issue, right? And yet clearly, something's bothering him quite deeply, right? About what the Third Way is saying, what Denis Noble is saying, etc. Even though theoretically none of it's at odds with this very, very general idea of neo-Darwinism. And yet it's somehow at odds with something that is neo-Darwinism, even if it's not really the way he's defining it. There's kind of this emotional neo-Darwinism and then the official definition of neo-Darwinism, if that makes any sense.

[03:22:31]  Sadia: It's all down to the reaction to creationism. I think there is a big part that's being played there. And also a certain type of materialism where again these words like agency, free will, and cognition might not be so bad, but they are trigger words for a lot of people.

[03:22:53]  Peter: Well, this is getting to be like a Wagner opera kind of length here. I just want to say that this has, I think the hallmark of a good debate is when you're agreeing with whoever is talking. And I've had that feeling many times during listening, mostly to you all discuss this, that whoever is talking, I pretty much agree with. So well done. Now look forward to editing this and listening again. All right.

[03:23:32]  Bruce: Yes, thank you guys for coming on the show. This has been really interesting. I've actually found it very enlightening to try to hear other points of views on this.

[03:23:41]  Unidentified speaker: So I really appreciate you guys' input.

[03:23:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, thanks.

[03:23:44]  Sadia: Thank you very much for having us. This was fun.

[03:23:46]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I enjoyed it too.

[03:23:48]  Peter: Thank you, Ivan. Thank you, Sadia. Thank you, Bruce.

[03:23:51]  Unidentified speaker: All right. Bye-bye.

[03:23:58]  Unidentified speaker: Bye-bye.

[03:24:00]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together, so we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielsen01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[03:24:45]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.