Not sure about you, but it seems like I spend most of my time in the future. We're told to live in the present, of course—and I try. But at any opportunity my mind just races ahead, like an eager puppy. I'm planning my next meal, dwelling on that looming deadline, imagining the possibilities that lie ahead. In one sense, all this time spent puttering around tomorrow-land is kind of regrettable. But in another sense it's really quite extraordinary. When we think ahead, when we cast our thoughts into the future, we're exercising an ability that some consider uniquely human.  My guest today is Dr. Adam Bulley. Adam is a psychologist and Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the University of Sydney and Harvard. Along with his co-authors Thomas Suddendorf & Jonathan Redshaw, Adam recently published a book titled, The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight. In this conversation, Adam and I talk about two constructs central to the book—"mental time travel" and foresight. We discuss how these constructs relate to memory and to imagination. We dig into the question of whether our abilities to think ahead are really uniquely human. We review the archeological evidence for the emergence of foresight in our species’ evolution. And we also touch on—among other topics and tidbits— hoarding behavior in squirrels, tool use in chimpanzees, the Bischof-Köhler hypothesis, the control of fire, Incan quipus, hand axes, and longtermism. Foresight is one of those especially tentacly topics. It connects to so many different other abilities and to so many questions about minds, culture, evolution. Both in the book and here in this conversation, Adam proves to be quite a skilled guide to all these connections.  There's also something else notable about Adam: he's an alum of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI). In fact, he was a participant in the first iteration of the program, back in 2018. So if you too aspire to do cool research, write cool books, and be interviewed on the coolest podcasts around, you might consider applying. Just note that review of applications begins soon: Feb 13. More info at: disi.org  Alright, friends, on to my chat with Adam Bulley. Enjoy!    A transcript of this episode is available here!    Notes and links 3:30 – A paper comparing performance on the “forked tube task” in human children and great apes. 6:30 – A now-classic article by Dr. Suddendorf and Michael Corballis on “mental time travel” and the evolution of foresight. 13:00 – An article by Dr. Suddendorf directly comparing memory and foresight. Another take on the same question. 22:00 – A recent paper by Johannes Mahr on the functions of episodic memory.  27:00 – A recent review article on the notion of “cognitive offloading.” The study by Adam and colleagues looking at the development of cognitive offloading in young children.   32:00 – For an earlier discussion of animal caching behavior, see our episode with Dr. Nicky Clayton. 35:00 – An examination of the Bischof–Köhler hypothesis in rhesus monkeys. 40:00 – A recent chapter by Adam and Dr. Redshaw reviewing the evidence for future thinking in animals.  41:00 – For a brief discussion of delayed gratification in cephalopods, see our episode with Dr. Alex Schnell. See also a recent research paper on the question in fish, and a recent paper by Adam and colleagues looking at the psychology of delayed rewards in humans.  45:00 – For an extended foray into (allegedly) uniquely human traits—aka “human autapomorphies” or “human uniquals”—see our earlier essay on the topic.  47:30 – The exchange in Trends in Cognitive Sciences between Dr. Suddendorf and Dr. Corballis on the question of foresight in animals.  49:30 – A book by Richard Wrangham on the role of fire and cooking in human evolution. A more recent article by Dr. Wrangham on the same topic. 54:00 – An episode of the Tides of History podcast about Ötzi the Iceman. 59:00 – For our earlier discussion of bags with Dr. Michelle Langley, see here.   1:03:00 – A book on the Incan quipus. 1:13:00 – The classic treatment of “displacement” in human language, by Charles Hockett, is here. 1:18:00 – Recent books on long term future thinking include What We Owe the Future, The Good Ancestor, Longpath, and others.   Dr. Bulley recommends: The Gap, by Thomas Suddendorf The Optimism Bias, by Tali Sharot Know Thyself, by Stephen Fleming You can read more about Adam’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.  **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.  For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called ChatGPT. There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me, you’ve probably also been wondering: What’s really going on here? What are ChatGPT—and other large language models like it—actually doing? How much of their apparent competence is just smoke and mirrors? In what sense, if any, do they have human-like capacities? My guest today is Dr. Murray Shanahan. Murray is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London and Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He's the author of numerous articles and several books at the lively intersections of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Very recently, Murray put out a paper titled 'Talking about Large Language Models’, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. In the paper, Murray argues that—tempting as may be—it's not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Not yet, anyway. Here, we chat about the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work. We discuss how a model that—at its base—simply does “next-word prediction" can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT. We talk about why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”—at least as we currently use those terms. And we discuss what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities. Along the way, we touch on: emergence, prompt engineering, embodiment and grounding, image generation models, Wittgenstein, the intentional stance, soft robots, and "exotic mind-like entities." Before we get to it, just a friendly reminder: applications are now open for the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI). DISI will be held this June/July in St Andrews Scotland—the program consists of three weeks of intense interdisciplinary engagement with exactly the kinds of ideas and questions we like to wrestle with here on this show. If you're intrigued—and I hope you are!—check out disi.org for more info. Alright friends, on to my decidedly human chat, with Dr. Murray Shanahan. Enjoy!   The paper we discuss is here. A transcript of this episode is here.   Notes and links 6:30 – The 2017 “breakthrough” article by Vaswani and colleagues. 8:00 – A popular article about GPT-3. 10:00 – A popular article about some of the impressive—and not so impressive—behaviors of ChatGPT. For more discussion of ChatGPT and other large language models, see another interview with Dr. Shanahan, as well as interviews with Emily Bender and Margaret Mitchell, with Gary Marcus, and with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT). 14:00 – A widely discussed paper by Emily Bender and colleagues on the “dangers of stochastic parrots.” 19:00 – A blog post about “prompt engineering”. Another blog post about the concept of Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback, in the context of ChatGPT. 30:00 – One of Dr. Shanahan’s books is titled, Embodiment and the Inner Life. 39:00 – An example of a robotic agent, SayCan, which is connected to a language model. 40:30 – On the notion of embodiment in the cognitive sciences, see the classic book by Francisco Varela and colleagues, The Embodied Mind. 44:00 – For a detailed primer on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, see here. 45:00 – See Dr. Shanahan’s general audience essay on “conscious exotica" and the space of possible minds. 49:00 – See Dennett’s book, The Intentional Stance.   Dr. Shanahan recommends: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell (see also our earlier episode with Dr. Mitchell) ‘Abstraction for Deep Reinforcement Learning’, by M. Shanahan and M. Mitchell   You can read more about Murray’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Welcome back, friends—and a very happy new year! For our first episode of 2023 we're going big. We're examining the minds of some of the most massive, majestic megafauna around.  My guest today is Dr. Joshua Plotnik. Josh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College, and the director of the Comparative Cognition for Conservation Lab. His work focuses on elephants—Asian elephants in particular. Josh studies how these creatures perceive and think, how they solve problems and make decisions. As you’ll hear, Josh and his colleagues are doing this work, not just to better understand elephant cognition, but also to inform elephant conservation. In this conversation, Josh and I do a healthy bit of Elephants 101. We consider a few of the most widely repeated ideas about elephants—ideas you’ve probably heard, like that they have exceptional memories and that they mourn their dead. We talk about the three different species of elephants and what we can say about the differences between them. We talk about how elephants use their tusks and their ridiculously dexterous trunks. We talk about how elephants communicate and what their social lives are like. We touch on Dumbo (the well-known Disney character) and Happy (an elephant at the Bronx Zoo who recently became the focus of debates about animal personhood). We of course discuss many of Josh’s fascinating findings on elephant cognition—including his findings about mirror self-recognition, consoling behavior, cooperative problem solving, and personality. We also touch on human-elephant conflict, convergent evolution, and the importance of taking the elephant’s perspective.  One of our resolutions for the show this year is to grow, to find ways to reach a bigger audience. You can help us do that, if you like, by recommending us to a friend, leaving us a rating, or maybe even writing a review. (We're actually really hurting for reviews, folks—we haven’t had a new one in ages, so any help on that front would be most gratefully appreciated.) Another resolution we have is to connect more with you, our audience, and learn more about what you’re interested in. So we’d love to hear from you—you can find us on social media or reach out to as at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. One last bit of housekeeping: applications are now open for the 2023 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, or DISI. The institute will be held this summer in St Andrews, Scotland. If you are interested in the kinds of stuff we talk about on the show—mind, cognition, intelligence broadly construed—you should definitely consider applying. More info at: disi.org. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Josh Plotnik. I think you'll agree that Josh is quite the genial guide to the elephant mind. And he gives us a ton to think about here. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 5:00 – The Mythbusters episode about whether elephants are afraid of mice. 6:45 – An academic article about the possibility that elephants populated certain land masses by swimming to them. 8:30 – A research article about elephants’ concepts of death; another on the same topic. 17:30 — The researcher Shermin de Silva works on elephants in Sri Lanka. 19:00 – A first study finding that African elephants can follow human pointing gestures. A later study by Dr. Plotnik and colleagues finding that Asian elephants do not follow human pointing gestures. 23:00 – A study quantifying different aspects of the elephant brain. 24:00 – For some of the latest findings about cephalopods, see our episode ‘The Savvy Cephalopod’ with Dr. Alex Schnell. 25:30 – Elephants in Africa may be becoming tuskless due to poaching. A research article on the topic. 26:30 – A research article on “handedness” (aka laterality) in elephants. 27:30 – The elephant trunk is extraordinarily dexterous, in part because of its “fingers.” A recent study of the basis for this dexterity. For example, elephants can peel bananas (video) and also use their trunks to suction up objects like chips (research article). 30:00 – A research article on the production and interpretation of “periscoping” behavior in elephants. 32:30 – A popular article about Joyce Poole’s research on the elephant “ethogram.” A fuller article on elephant communication. 33:45 – A study by Dr. Plotnik and Frans de Waal about elephant consolation behavior. 35:00 – Images on Twitter of young elephants sucking their trunks, presumably as self-consoling behavior. 37:00 – A research article on elephant’s “seismic communication.” 42:00 – The original study by Dr. Plotnik and colleagues about mirror self-recognition in elephants. See also our audio essay about mirror self-recognition, including some criticisms of the paradigm. 53:00 – A popular essay by Jill Lepore about Happy the elephant, and the legal case surrounding whether or not she should be considered a “person.” 55:30 – The original study by Dr. Plotnik and colleagues on cooperative problem solving in elephants. 57:30 – A later study by Li-Li Li, Dr. Plotnik and colleagues on how elephants are able to sustain cooperation. 1:00:00 – A review article about research on Theory of Mind in animals. 1:01:00 – A study by Sarah Jacobson, Dr. Plotnik, and colleagues using puzzle boxes to understand elephant innovation and problem solving. The same study examined personality factors that predict success on the task. 1:04:00 – See also our recent episode on animal personality. 1:07:00 – See a recent review paper by Dr. Plotnik and a colleague on elephant cognition in the context of human-elephant conflict. 1:09:00 – Other studies by Dr. Plotnik’s group that we did not cover include work on the elephant concepts of quantity and elephant bodily awareness. 1:10:00 – A paper by Dr. Plotnik and (former guest) Nicola Clayton on the idea of convergent evolution in diverse species and taxa. 1:16:30 – Along with colleagues, Dr. Plotnik founded the organization Think Elephants International.   Dr. Plotnik recommends: Elephants, by Hannah Mumby (see also earlier books by Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Joyce Poole) A Primate’s Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky Chimpanzee Politics, by Frans de Waal (see also de Waal’s more recent books)   You can read more about Josh’s work at his lab website and follow him on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

We're off this week but are excited to share a thought-provoking conversation from our archives, about the long-standing puzzle of why we (and other creatures) dream. Happy holidays from the Many Minds team! --- You may not remember much about it, but chances are last night you went on a journey. As you slept, your brain concocted a story—maybe a sprawl of interconnected stories. It took you to some unreal places, gave you superpowers, unearthed old acquaintances, and twisted your perceptions. Meanwhile, billions of brains all around you, up and down the tree of life, were probably doing something very similar—dreaming, that is. But why do we do this? What could possibly be the function of these nightly ramblings? My guest today is Dr. Erik Hoel. He is a writer and a neuroscientist at Tufts University. In a paper published earlier this year, Erik presented a new theory of why we (and other creatures) dream. It's called the “over-fitted brain hypothesis”; the basic idea is that dreaming helps us stay cognitively limber, adaptable—less tied to the particulars of our previous experiences. Erik and I discuss how he came to this new theory. We talk about how his account develops an analogy between the "overfitting" problem in machine learning and the "overfitting" problem that biological brains face as well. We discuss how his hypothesis can account for the bizarre nature of dream experience. And we consider Erik's provocative suggestion that dreams are really just one type of fiction—biological fictions, if you like—and that other types of fiction may serve similar purposes. Erik is a fascinating, wide-ranging thinker (there aren’t a lot of neuroscientists who also write novels). And this is a conversation I'll be chewing on for some time. It takes on one of those timeless questions about human experience—why we dream—from an angle that feels fresh and energizing. Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Erik Hoel. Hope you enjoy it!   The paper we discuss is available here. A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – Dreams have been in the news recently, with reports of an uptick in strange dreams during the pandemic. 9:30 – An early study on “dream deprivation.” 11:00 – An article on the idea that dreams serve memory consolidation. 23:00 – A study showing that we don’t dream about reading or writing. 27:30 – An attempt to solve a Rubik’s cube with a robot hand. 32:00 – An influential paper articulating the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. 38:30 – A recent paper on the question of whether animals like octopuses dream. 42:00 – We’ve discussed Pinker’s “music is like cheesecake” analogy in previous episodes, most recently in our discussion of the evolution of music. 46:00 – For more on these ideas, see Dr. Hoel’s essay ‘Enter the Supersensorium’—and be sure to check out his new novel The Revelations! You can find Dr. Hoel on Twitter (@erikphoel) and subscribe his newsletter on Substack.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from assistant producer Cecilia Padilla. Creative support is provided by DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock's display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can't hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we're oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock's display, what other sounds might we be missing out on? My guest today is Dr. Karen Bakker. Karen is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. In the book, Karen dives into rich realms of sound that, for one reason or another, humans have tended to ignore. In this conversation, Karen and I discuss the twin fields of "bioacoustics" and "ecoacoustics." We talk about "deep listening" and "digital listening", "infrasound" and "ultrasound." We discuss why sound is such a ubiquitous signaling medium across the tree of life. We consider the fact that scientific discoveries about sound have often been resisted. We touch on debates about whether animal communication systems constitute languages, and discuss new efforts to decode those systems using AI. We also talk about turtles, bats, plants, coral, bees, and—yes—peacocks. If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. It’s really bursting with insight, science, and stories—all presented with unusual clarity. Another year of Many Minds is drawing to a close and we're about to go on a brief holiday hiatus. But first a little end-of-year ask: What topics or thinkers would you like to see us feature in 2023? If you have any ideas, we’d love to hear them. You can email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. Alright friends, I hope you enjoy the holidays. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Karen Bakker.   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!). 4:30 – The winner of the 2014 ‘Most Beautiful Sound in the World’ contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia. 10:30 – A popular article profiling the relatively young field of “bioacoustics.” A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about “conservation acoustics” in particular. 11:30 – A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations. 17:00 – A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays. 23:30 – A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds. 28:00 – A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles. 31:00 – A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing. 35:00 – A recent historical study of Karl von Frisch and his work with honey bees. A recent study suggesting the possibility of play in bumble bees (not honey bees). 42:00 – A popular article profiling the field of “biosemiotics.” 48:00 – An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it. 53:00 – Dr. Bakker recommends books by Indigenous scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening), and John Borrows. Dr. Bakker recommends: A number of examples of the “sounds of life” are collected at Dr. Bakker’s website, here. The same site also includes recommendations for getting involved in citizen science. In addition to the books by Indigenous scholars listed above, Dr. Bakker recommends work by Monica Gagliano. You can read more about Karen’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now also subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

When we talk about AI, we usually fixate on the future. What’s coming next? Where is the technology going? How will artificial intelligences reshape our lives and worlds? But it's also worth looking to the past. When did the prospect of manufactured minds first enter the human imagination? When did we start building robots, and what did those early robots do? What are the deeper origins, in other words, not only of artificial intelligences themselves, but of our ideas about those intelligences?  For this episode, we have two guests who've spent a lot of time delving into the deeper history of AI. One is Adrienne Mayor; Adrienne is a Research Scholar in the Department of Classics at Stanford University and the author of the 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology. Our second guest is Elly Truitt; Elly is Associate Professor in the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the 2015 book, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art.  In this conversation, we draw on Adrienne's expertise in the classical era and Elly's expertise in the medieval period to dig into the surprisingly long and rich history of AI. We discuss some of the very first imaginings of artificial beings in Greek mythology, including Talos, the giant robot guarding the island of Crete. We talk about some of the very first historical examples of automata, or self-moving devices; these included statues that spoke, mechanical birds that flew, thrones that rose, and clocks that showed the movements of the heavens. We also discuss the long-standing and tangled relationships between AI and power, exoticism, slavery, prediction, and justice. And, finally, we consider some of the most prominent ideas we have about AI today and whether they had precedents in earlier times. This is an episode we've been hoping to do for some time now, to try to step back and put AI in a much broader context. It turns out the debates we're having now, the anxieties and narratives that swirl around AI today, are not so new. In some cases, they're millennia old.  Alright friends, now to my conversation with Elly Truitt and Adrienne Mayor. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:00 – See Adrienne’s TedEd lesson about Talos, the “first robot.” See also Adrienne’s 2019 talk for the Long Now Foundation. 7:15 – The Throne of Solomon does not survive, but it was often rendered in art, for example in this painting by Edward Poynter. 12:00 – For more on Adrienne’s broader research program, see her website; for more on Elly’s research program, see her website. 18:00 – For more on the etymology of ‘robot,’ see here. 23:00 – A recent piece about Aristotle’s writings on slavery. 26:00 – An article about the fact that Greek and Roman statues were much more colorful than we think of them today. 30:00 – A recent research article about the Antikythera mechanism. 34:00 – See Adrienne’s popular article about the robots that guarded the relics of the Buddha. 38:45 – See Elly’s article about how automata figured prominently in tombs. 47:00 – See Elly’s recent video lecture about mechanical clocks and the “invention of time.” For more on the rise of mechanistic thinking—and clocks as important metaphors in that rise—see Jessica Riskin’s book, The Restless Clock. 50:00 – An article about a “torture robot” of ancient Sparta. 58:00 – A painting of the “Iron Knight” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.   Adrienne Mayor recommends: The Greeks and the New, by Armand D’Angour Classical Traditions in Science Fiction, edited by Brett Rogers and Benjamin Stevens In Our Own Image, by George Zarkadakis Ancient Inventions, by Peter James and Nick Thorpe   Elly Truitt recommends: AI Narratives, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon The Love Makers, by Aifric Campbell The Mitchells vs the Machines   You can read more about Adrienne’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter. You can read more about Elly’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

We're taking care of some housekeeping this week, so we're sharing a favorite from our archives. Look out for a new episode at the end of the month! --- Preferences, decisions, goals. When you hear these words, you probably think of humans. Or, if not humans then maybe charismatic animals—you know, great apes, certain species of birds, maybe dogs. In any case, I bet you think of creatures that are more or less cognitively sophisticated. I know I do. But, according to some researchers, this is an outmoded and over-narrow way of thinking. They propose that decisions and goals—not to mention other fancy-seeming constructs like memory, problem-solving, and intelligence—can usefully be ascribed to an astonishingly large array of agents. Not just humans, not just animals, not even just organisms. My guest on today’s episode is Dr. Michael Levin. He’s the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University; he directs the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. In recent years, Mike’s been developing a radical reconsideration of the nature of mind and intelligence. He argues that it’s not just humans and other smart creatures that traffic in all this classically cognitive stuff. It’s also cells, tissues, organs, colonial organisms, and much more. He sometimes summarizes his view as “cognition all the way down.” Here we talk about how Mike came to this perspective. We discuss his empirical studies of bioelectricity, including some pretty astonishing experiments on planaria. We dig deep into two of the conceptual models he uses in talking about his “mind everywhere” framework: the “axis of persuadability” and the notion of the “cognitive light-cone”. And we talk about why Mike rejects the criticism that this is all mere anthropomorphism. In fact, he makes a compelling case that it’s time we retired that term altogether. In the intro to Many Minds way back when, we talked about how the terrain of mind is vast. But as I’ve learned about the work of Mike and others, I’ve become convinced that the terrain of mind is actually vaster than I imagined then—maybe vastly vaster. I think you’ll like this one, folks. And even if you’re not convinced, there’s little doubt you’ll be provoked. Enjoy! A transcript of this episode is available here. Notes and links 4:10 – Dr. Levin mentions the caterpillar-to-butterfly transition in the introduction to a recent theoretical paper. 8:00 – Dr. Levin’s work on bioelectricity and regeneration are the focus of a recent profile of his work in the New Yorker. A recent perspective piece on bioelectric signaling by Dr. Levin is here. 8:50 – The book The Body Electric was an early influence on Dr. Levin’s interests. 10:30 – The term “basal cognition” refers to minimal cognitive agents like cells and slime  molds. It is also the label for a newly formed subfield or researchers who work on such systems. Read the introduction to a recent special issue on the topic, written by Dr. Levin and colleagues. 13:45 – Much of Dr. Levin’s early work (described, e.g., here) was on the generation of left-right asymmetry, a thorny issue in morphogenesis. 15:45 – Planaria are a popular model organism in biology. For a fun conversation about their curious properties, see this episode of the podcast Ologies. 20:30 – Dr. Levin and colleagues’ experiments with two-headed planaria were first reported here. 25:30 – Here Dr. Levin mentions Shuffle Brain by Paul Pietsch. 26:40 – See Dr. Levin’s recent discussions of “scale-free cognition” and “cognition all the way down” (the latter piece was written for a general audience and co-authored with the philosopher Daniel Dennett). 32:00 – Dr. Levin’s notion of the “axis of persuadability” is discussed here.   42:00 – Dr. Levin’s light-cone model of cognition is sketched here (see especially Figure 2). ­52:00 – Dr. Levin has applied his ideas to tumorigenesis (e.g., here). 52:45 – For an intro to Umwelt theory, see our earlier episode, ‘Me, my Umwelt and I.’ 58:00 – Dr. Levin discusses ideas about the anthropomorphism objection here.   Dr. Levin recommends books by: Scott Turner Denis Noble You can find Dr. Levin on Twitter (@drmichaellevin) and keep up with his latest research on his lab’s website.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Isabelle Laumer. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Some of us are a little shy; others are sociable. There are those that love to explore the new, and those happy to stick to the familiar. We’re all a bit different, in other words—and when I say “we” I don’t just mean humans. Over the last couple of decades there's been an explosion of research on personality differences in animals too—in birds, in dogs, in fish, all across the animal kingdom. This research is addressing questions like: What are the ways that individuals of the same species differ from each other? What drives these differences? And is this variation just randomness, some kind of inevitable biological noise, or could it have an evolved function? My guest today is Dr. Kate Laskowski. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis. Her lab focuses on fish. They use fish, and especially one species of fish—the Amazon molly—as a model system for understanding animal personality (or as she sometimes calls it “consistent individual behavioral variation”).  In this episode, Kate and I discuss a paper she recently published with colleagues that reviews this booming subfield. We talk about how personality manifests in animals and how it may differ from human personality. We zoom in on what is perhaps the most puzzling question in this whole research area: Why do creatures have personality differences to begin with? Is there a point to all this individual variation, evolutionarily speaking? We discuss two leading frameworks that have tried to answer the question, and then consider some recent studies of Kate’s that have added an unexpected twist. On the way, we touch on Darwinian demons, combative anemones, and a research method Kate calls "fish Big Brother." Alright friends, I had fun with this one, and I think you’ll enjoy it, too. On to my conversation with Kate Laskowski!   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 3:00 – A paper by Dr. Laskowski and a colleague on strong personalities in sticklebacks. 5:30 – The website for the lab that Dr. Laskowski directs at UC-Davis.   7:00 – The paper we focus on—‘Consistent Individual Behavioral Variation: What do we know and where are we going?’—is available here. 11:00 – A brief encyclopedia entry on sticklebacks. 13:00 – A video of two sea anemones fighting. A research article about fighting (and personality) in sea anemones. 15:00 – A classic article reviewing the “Big 5” model in human personality research. 17:00 – The original article proposing five personality factors in animals. 22:30 – A recent special issue on the “Pace-of-Life syndromes” framework. 27:00 – A recent paper on evidence for the “fluctuating selection” idea in great tits. 29:00 – A 2017 paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues on “behavioral individuality” in clonal fish raised in near-identical environments. 32:10 – A just-released paper by Dr. Laskowski and colleagues extending their earlier findings on clonal fish. 39:30 – The Twitter account of the Many Birds project. The website for the project.   Dr. Laskowski recommends: Innate, by Kevin Mitchell Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie   You can read more about Dr. Laskowksi’s work on her website and follow her on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

There's an old view of the mind that goes something like this: The world is flooding in, and we're sitting back, just trying to process it all. Our minds are basically passive and reactive, always a step behind. Contrast that view with a new one that’s quickly gaining ground. According to this alternative, we don't just react to the world, we anticipate it. We’re not leaning back but trying to stay a step ahead—our minds are fundamentally active and predictive. And our predictions aren't just idle guesses, either—they're shaping how we experience the world. This new view is known as the “predictive processing framework”, and it has implications, not just for how we perceive, but also for how we act and how we feel, for our happiness and our well-being. My guest today is Dr. Mark Miller. Mark is a philosopher of cognition and senior research fellow at the Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies at Monash University. He's part of a new wave of intensely interdisciplinary scholars who are working at the intersections of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry. Here, Mark and I sketch the predictive processing framework and unpack some of its key pillars. We discuss how this approach can inform our understanding of depression, addiction, and PTSD. We sketch out notions of loops and slopes, stickiness and rigidity, wobble and volatility, edges and grip. And, on the way, we will have a bit to say about video games, play, horror, psychedelics, and meditation. This was all pretty new terrain for me, but Mark proved an affable and capable guide. If you enjoy this episode and want to explore some of these topics further, definitely check out the Contemplative Science Podcast, which Mark co-hosts. Alright friends, on to my chat with Mark Miller. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 4:15 – The website of the Hokkaido University Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN). The website of the Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies (M3CS). 6:00 – Dr. Miller co-hosts the Contemplative Science podcast, a project of M3CS. 7:30 – For one introduction to the predictive processing framework, see this article by Dr. Miller and colleagues. 11:00 – See Dr. Miller’s essay in Aeon on social media, co-authored with Ben White, as well as this more detailed treatment for an academic audience. 12:00 – See a paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on depression. 14:00 – An introduction to the subfield of “computational psychiatry.” 17:00 – Andy Clark’s “watershed” paper on the predictive processing framework. 18:00 – A recent book on “active inference” (which is largely synonymous with the predictive processing approach). 22:00 – A chapter on the idea of the “body as the first prior.” 24:30 – A demo of the “hollow face” illusion. 29:00 – On the potential value of psychedelics in jarring people out of trenches and ruts, see also our earlier episode with Alison Gopnik.   31:00 – See our recent episode with Dimitris Xygalatas. 34:30 – A popular article on children wanting to hear the same stories over and over. 38:00 – A paper by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues on horror fans and psychological resilience during COVD-19. 42:30 – A recent article by Dr. Miller and colleagues about the “predictive dynamics of happiness and well-being,” which covers much of the same terrain as this episode. 46:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues on the evocative notion of “grip.” 50:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues about video games and predictive processing. 57:00 – A paper by Dr. Miller and colleagues in which they discuss meditation in the context of the prediction processing approach.   Dr. Miller recommends books by the philosopher Andy Clark, including: Surfing Uncertainty   You can read more about Dr. Miller’s work on his website and follow him on Twitter.     Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Rituals may seem silly but they are central to human culture. Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas explains the significance of rituals, including extreme practices like fire-walking. They discuss the psychological state of fire walkers and the physics behind it. The use of physiological measures in public rituals is explored, revealing emotional alignments and heart rate synchrony. The role of pain in collective rituals and its benefits for social bonding is discussed. Implementing rituals in a lab and engaging in shared activities are explored as bonding experiences.