Michael Levin and John Vervaeke, Part 2 - Free Will, Constraints and Causal Relevance

Sep 27, 2022

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INSIGHT

Scaling Cognition Across Parts

Composite agents harness parts to do things those parts wouldn't do alone, creating coordinated agency across scales.
Evolution produced hardware that can scale cognition from molecules to multicellular systems.

INSIGHT

Constraints Are Bidirectional Trade-Offs

Constraints act both downward (top-down) and upward (bottom-up) and must be treated as distinct relations between levels.
Two constraint types exist: selective (reduce probabilities) and enabling (increase probabilities), producing trade-offs.

ADVICE

Use Constraints To Boost Creativity

Use self-imposed constraints to shape creativity and avoid combinatorial explosion when generating ideas.
Shape your future behavior by designing barriers and frames that make desired actions easier and undesired ones harder.

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

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23:45 Self-constraints are related to behavior shaping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books mentioned by John:

Shaun Gallagher: Enactivist Intervention

Brian Cantwell Smith: On the Origin of Objects

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