How tiny agents bias randomness to build complex agents

One of the conversations I enjoyed the most, where we explored AI, hardware, Platonic patterns, and nested agency in a free flow, and got somewhere together, with Glen Reuschling, a retired electronics engineer with whom I often converse here on X.

Related episodes:

Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/3zqI0iG428c

Mark Solms: Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/Rltfm-vWvgM

Kevin Mitchell: https://youtu.be/nqxq-BiCr-M

Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/0nMXYdayQIU

Embodied AI: https://youtu.be/JZ8GTucClpM

Alexander Ororbia: https://youtu.be/N83vBfz7_BI

Yogi Jaeger: https://youtu.be/5UJ4y2L2qpk

Baudouin Saintyves: https://youtu.be/NmvzEpz9R84

Laura Desiree Di Paolo: https://youtu.be/9txUwVtAOBk

Anna Riedl: https://youtu.be/w2ZiSWZNQsg

Anna Ciaunica: https://youtu.be/x1QHwhlCn-8

Giuseppe Paolo: https://youtu.be/R7tEd65e2i8

00:00:00 Intro: Glen's electronics engineer background and his interest in embodied AI.

00:07:11 Why Embodied AI is not mainstream? The anxiety of the pure Platonist AI researcher.

00:08:31 Michael Levin and his Platonic turn. Jonathan Pageau's fractal ontology. Idealism vs transjectivity. Static top-down fractals vs dynamic bottom-up cellular automata. Had patterns existed before the world was born? Or they transjectively realized each other?

00:17:47 Molecular and quantum agency. Randomness, determinacy, and free choice. What if what looks like random from the outside is in fact a conscious decision of an agent, from the inside.

00:33:00 Omnipotence or finite attention and information bottleneck all the way up? Conway's caution of free will. Nondeterministic universe.

00:44:10 Is God eternal or emerges as everything else? Are patters eternal or they also emerge? Do they have agency?

00:51:04 Symbols and hardware. Logical gates and binary logic are abstractions, what really happens is a flow of electrons.

00:54:54 Is ChatGPT conscious? If not, what's the fundamental difference between me and ChatGPT. Integrated vs isolated layers of abstractions.

00:59:23 Computation = physical process in which a language acquires agency?

01:06:11 Herding randomness in living bodies vs eliminating randomness by error correction in machines. Hardware is more capable than we're using it for. Agricultural robots. Nested languages. Conversational computation. The role of feelings.

01:19:36 For AGI, we will need to rethink the whole computer science stack, not only the top software layer.

01:22:35 Glen's programmable pacemaker.

I, scientist blog: https://balazskegl.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/balazskegl

Artwork: DALL-E

Music: Bea Palya https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp3qcFZdU1yoWIRpMSaZw

https://youtu.be/gjlLnvci30w

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