Aaron Sloman: What is Life? Information, Intelligence, and the Ineffable within Science

Aaron Sloman is Emeritus/Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at University of Birmingham, UK. He is a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour and European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. In 2018, he became a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Sussex University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Science in July 2006. The Sloman Lounge in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham is named in his honour. In 2020 the American Philosophical Association (APA) awarded him the K. Jon Barwise Prize "for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing". He has published widely on philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.TIMESTAMPS:(0:00) - Introduction (0:15) - Rethinking the term "Information"(8:50) - What is Life?(11:32) - Limits of Fundamental Physics (ft Anthony Leggett)(18:13) - Role of Philosophy in Science(21:50) - Aaron's diverse body of knowledge(25:40) - Information without Bits(28:20) - Cognition Before Language(32:52) - Intelligent Systems vs Consciousness(35:00) - Machines vs Biological Complexity(40:50) - Toward a Unified Theory of Life & Mind(44:25) - Exploring Science with a Novel Body of Knowledge(50:00) - The Mind-Body Problem(53:00) - Human Augmentation & Telos(56:44) - Aaron's Legacy(1:00:00) - What is Life by Erwin Schrödinger(1:02:15) - Building Upon the Shoulders of Giants(1:06:00) - Final Thoughts (1:08:14) - ConclusionEPISODE LINKS:- Aaron's Website 1: https://cogaffarchive.org/misc/whatlife.html- Aaron's Website 2: https://cogaffarchive.org/evol-devol.html- Aaron's Publications: https://tinyurl.com/43nb4xx2- Aaron's Books: https://tinyurl.com/45wynvrzCONNECT:- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com - Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- YouTube: https://youtube.com/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
Aaron, your work, it spans AI, philosophy of mind, biology,
physics, all centered in one powerful idea.
And that is information. Not just matter and energy, but
rather that information lies at the heart of what makes
something alive. So I think I thought we could

(00:26):
start off this podcast by exploring the central thesis, by
first defining life through information.
Could you explain how your conception of information, not
in the similar set in the Shannon sense, but in the way
you describe it, departs from traditional functionalist or
computationalist slash physicalist models?

(00:47):
Yes. Well, it's perhaps worth saying
that the Shannon model called Shannon worked for Bell
Telephone Company, was based on a technology for storing,
transmitting and transforming information in digital circuits.

(01:08):
And therefore it's all based on bits.
And many people have thought that all information has to be
based on bits because of what Shannon did, but they don't
realise that that was just because of the technology he was
using and the purposes for whichhe was using.
The purposes for which biological organisms use

(01:28):
information are very different, including controlling growth and
movement and all kinds of thingsthat we will talk about.
And one particular example we'lltalk about is the metamorphosis
of an insect, which decomposes part of the insect and then
creates new structures and new abilities and so amazing stuff.

(01:51):
We can, we'll come back to that later, but there's nothing like
that in the Shannon system. And so one should not expect
Shannon information to be terribly relevant.
Many people do not understand that.
Shannon, I think, was not confused, but many of you that
admirers, I think, have been confused by the success of what

(02:13):
he did into thinking it was muchmore general and much more
widely applicable than it actually is.
And that's a serious mistake that I think many people have
made. It when in your work you you
sort of argue that the defining feature of life isn't just
metabolism or reproduction, but the use of information.

(02:35):
What? What do you mean by that?
Well, in I suppose information is always about something.
So you can't just have information without having some
context content, something that is referred to something else

(02:57):
about what the information is. And that can vary in enormously
wide range of ways in organisms.And I think the earliest
organisms were ones that had only 1 cell.
They were able to somehow interact with the immediate

(03:22):
environment using chemical and other interactions.
And gradually, as living forms became more complicated than the
number of cells increased and the numbers of forms of
information transfer increase and so on.
But all along there was the factthat there was something that

(03:43):
had to acquire information and something that was using the
information, sorry, something from which the information was
acquired. And I, I, I believe that this is
not widely understood and as a role of people jumped to the

(04:05):
wrong conclusions about how animals work.
So we could perhaps go back to thinking about what the earliest
organisms might have been. Perhaps just single cells doing
what, what would a single cell want to do in a, in a world?
Well, one thing might be to justexist.

(04:27):
And for that it might not have to do anything at all, or it
might need to exist and use up energy in some way, or exist and
grow or move or something. And for each of these extra
functions, if it need extra competences.

(04:49):
And somehow, over time, biological evolution provided
ways in which these simple single celled organisms could be
extended into more complex structures, partly by combining
with other single cells in increasingly complex ways.

(05:14):
Sorry, continue well. Just going to say that.
And that process continued not only for a very long time, but
in very different ways, different parts of the planet.
Who knows what happened on otherplanets if if it did, and
there's eventually a huge variety of consequences of this

(05:39):
or follow-ups to this very earlylife.
It's kind of life form. But I think one of the things
that is generally misunderstood is the belief that somehow the
synapses in brains of animals are helping the neurons to do

(05:59):
the real work of, of taking information and deciding what to
do and so on. And the synapses enable the the
neurons to connect with one another because the way they
join up with the synapses, and I'm saying it's the other way
around. If the synapses are doing all
the important reasoning, decision making and so on.

(06:21):
And the neurons enable them to communicate with other parts of
the body and get information andtransfer information.
And so the belief that most people have is back to front in
you could say, and I have found,I have not yet found anyone else

(06:44):
who's exactly formulated that idea, although various people
have come close. At the moment I can't remember
them but come back later. When you say that this, let's
take it front to back. If you think about this, the
information being carried along these synapses in what?
How should someone who does not,who let's say he's not a

(07:05):
biologist, how should they sort of imagine this type of
information being carried? Where is it?
What is it? What type of space is this
existing in and how is it being transmitted?
Well, the synapse is a cell which has molecules, and when

(07:26):
you have lots of molecules, theycan form different structures,
different forms of combinations of structures which are forming
or changing, and they can in that sense differ quite a lot,
even though they're all a singlecell with a lot of molecules.

(07:50):
So what goes on in those cells may vary from 1 cell to another,
even though they may be close together in the same Organism.
So I'm now saying that somehow the formation of these
collections of molecules and theways in which they behave and
interact encodes information about all sorts of different

(08:15):
things, including information about the animal's history.
Also information about the current environment, which is
coming in through various channels, information about
goals and so on, and those formsof information that need to be
combined in various ways. I'm suggesting all make use of

(08:36):
chemical processes, biochemical processes deep down in synapses,
and that people who think it's all done by neural networks are
just getting it badly wrong. OK, let's break this up into
living systems and then non living systems because you, you
contrast things like non living systems like tornadoes or rivers

(08:59):
to, to that of, of, of things like life.
And why, in your view, have our scientific models been so
inadequate when it comes to capturing informational
dimensions of life? And, and I think while we're at
it, how would you define life? How would I define life?

(09:21):
Well, I don't think there's any simple definition.
It's what we have many examples of with a huge variety of forms
in which the various instances of this life are acquiring

(09:43):
information and using it both totransform themselves in various
ways by growing structures in themselves and whatever, and
also by linking up with other such organisms.
But also they transform the environment to meet their needs.
Now tornado can transform the environment, but it doesn't look

(10:05):
at the environment and find out what's there and work out how it
needs to be changed in order to enable a tornado to achieve
something that it's trying to achieve.
Tornadoes cannot represent possible futures for themselves
and use that in order to make choices.
They are very complex interactions of processes going

(10:28):
on, but not with that kind of use of information that we find
in life. And the same thing about
volcanic structures and continental drift, where you
have very large structures in the earth moving around in

(10:48):
various ways. They don't have any goals.
They're not trying to achieve anything.
They're just doing what happens because of the physical forces
and the configurations they're in.
Whereas organisms have goals, they have needs, they have
preferences, and they're acquiring and using information
in order to achieve goals, preferences and also just to

(11:11):
stay alive. Do do you think that we perhaps
need a philosophical reorientation?
So almost like do you see the emphasis on biological
meaningful information as as a flawed ontology?
So what I'm trying to ask is, isdo you think that we should

(11:33):
consider information as more fundamental where it's it's
fundamental throughout space-time matter.
This is what we should be looking at when we're talking
about anything. Well, I'm not sure quite sure
what the weight of the word fundamental is, but it's
certainly all pervasive in life.You could not have life without

(11:55):
information. But the information is of many
different kinds. It serves many different
purposes. It's used in different
mechanisms and the various ways of combining information or
different for different parts ofthe same Organism and for within
different organisms and also between organisms and non

(12:18):
organisms. Organisms can manipulate matter
that does not use information orwant to do anything, but the
organisms can use the matter to do something that the Organism
wants, and it manipulates matterfor that purpose.
What one of the questions I had for you was the challenges your
work has on physics. For example, when you make the

(12:41):
claim that, Oh well, when you discuss the evidence behind
insect metamorphoses, where organisms disassemble and then
reassemble itself with minimal energy in spaces, how does this
pose a challenge for physics andhow does it sort of portray all
the gaps within physics? Well, I don't know about all the

(13:02):
gaps, but some gaps. The So what?
What happens during metamorphosis is that an
Organism that has a lot of structures that have been
developed, possibly in an animalthat has been crawling around
and feeding on matter that's around it, eating stuff,

(13:24):
digesting in, building structures and so on.
And then after a while somethingtriggers a process that begins a
very complex change of structures.
So this Organism that that had all sorts of parts starts

(13:49):
dissolving some of those parts and reusing some of the
molecules to build new parts that were not there before.
For instance, in the case of an animal that previously was
calling, it might build wings which it did not have
previously, and it might build new feeding structures.

(14:13):
For example, animals that sort of crawling in and essentially
chewing food in their needed environment may develop an
ability to fly to a flower whereit feeds by putting a long
proboscis down into the nectar. And in the process it also helps

(14:36):
the flowers. It doesn't know it's helping the
flowers, but it picks up pollen and so on.
And when it goes to the next plant, it can transfer some of
that pollen. And in that process where it's
helping to, to helping the plantto reproduce and, and share
genes and so on, it doesn't knowit's doing it.
The, the insect doesn't have anygoals of that sort, but it

(14:58):
happens to have evolved in such a way that achieves that.
So there's a lot of cooperative Co evolution going on in this
this mindless world, almost as if there were intelligence
controlling it. I'm not saying there is any
intelligence controlling it. I'm saying there are amazing
mechanisms that act as if there are intelligence controlling it.

(15:22):
And those are things that we don't yet understand.
And it may well be that the forms of control cannot yet be
accounted for by current theories in fundamental physics.
For instance, the forms of control needed to decompose the
parts of a of a cocoon of an of an Organism in the Cancun.

(15:44):
How? What is there in physics that
says you can tell bits of this structure to start decomposing
themselves and to move around toform new structures?
And I suspect that there isn't anything at present that gives a

(16:05):
complete explanation of that. I have a colleague whom I may
have mentioned to you in e-mail messages, who is a scientist
with whom I became friendly whenwe were students originally, who
has had similar ideas. But he also does not know what

(16:28):
those mixons might be. Tony Liggett, Anthony Liggett
he, we met his students at that point, he was more a philosopher
and doing history of, of philosophy and so on.
But he later switched to physicsand he eventually ended up with

(16:48):
a Nobel Prize for his work on on, on in physics.
But we kept in touch and every now and again we would meet up
and talk about these things and to some extent degree and
sometimes perhaps disagree or atleast we we might feel that
there are things that can't be explained and agreed that can't

(17:10):
be explained, but not have ideas, similar ideas about how
to move towards explanations. And I don't think he had ever
thought about metamorphosis until I started challenging him
to provide explanation for the which he I don't think he or
anyone else at the moment can do.
It's incredible how the people you meet as a student can can

(17:33):
fundamentally shape the way you are and it reminds me of the
story you once told about when you were a student.
This was before you went into philosophy and how much you used
to go into the religious lectures and just sort of try
and counter argue until one day one of the your philosophy
friends told you to read a book by Russell and you were like,
OK, this is a pretty fascinatingjourney.

(17:54):
What is that like to to, to to finally read a philosophy book
that really takes you and grips you, not necessarily changing
your view into some sort of a religious dogma, but showing you
that actually philosophical arguments play a very huge role
within science? Well, he, I think he let me the

(18:16):
Bertrand Russell's history of science.
History of science, Yeah. And when I read it, at first I
thought Russell must be the greatest scientist who'd ever
lived. But gradually I started finding
things that didn't quite satisfyme, and I started wondering what

(18:37):
else there might be and learningabout other things that Russell
didn't mention. And one of the things came
through Immanuel Kant and David Hume.
I'm not sure I can remember the precise details, but David Hume

(18:57):
was examining what theologians and other people had claimed and
had written. And he came up with a kind of
slogan that your theories shouldeither be things that can be
based on observation, where you go around and see what is there

(19:21):
in the world or whatever. Or alternatively, you can
collect lots of observations andthen combine them using forms of
logic and, and using logical induction and so on.
And he had a slogan. Unfortunately I can't now

(19:46):
remember exactly what it was, but he he did that to challenge
these people. And Immanuel Kant came across
what Hume had done and he said this work came from his dogmatic
slumbers because he realised that not all the forms of

(20:08):
knowledge that we have and that he can't was interested in.
Could be handled by the mechanisms that David Hume said
were OK. In particular can't thought of
forms of reasoning that could not be based on collecting
statistical data and then finding patterns in the

(20:32):
statistics. Examples were, for instance,
discovering that if you have a glove that fits onto a right
hand, you cannot make it fit onto a left hand, go from a
right hand to a left hand without first turning it inside
out, and then it will work. And, and what kind of thing is

(20:57):
that impossibility? And he, he said he, he thought
that this was very hard to explain.
And I think he used a phrase like concealed in the depths of
the human soul. We would never be able to
understand what's going on there.
And what I've been trying to do is to kind of bring it out from

(21:18):
the depths, but inspired by Kantand using many of his examples
and transforming them, but trying to combine those ideas
with ideas that I'm getting fromother people, including
physicists and and some of my own hunches and so on.
You've been you've been at it for so many years and and your
work has been incredible. You've done so much within these

(21:42):
fields of biology, physics, philosophy of mind, AI, how your
work at the moment when you go onto your website and you see
that you you've been posting actively as a work in progress
in your later years now and now going through what you're going
through currently. How's the journey been when you
see that, the incredible amount the body of knowledge you have

(22:03):
and how your ideas are changing and shaping as you currently
produce content right now? Well, one of the problems is
that as my brain brain slides downhill, it gets harder and I
have to make more use of computational aids of various

(22:23):
sorts. And that is a problem.
But another, another factor is that I've come to the feeling
that there's something deep going on that we haven't
understood and that nobody so far has understood.
And I'm not claiming that I've understood, but I'm, I'm groping

(22:45):
towards something that perhaps someone cleverer, younger with
ideas that I haven't had will beable to come up with, with some
new, new, new answers to some ofthese questions.
But these are questions about the the process we've been

(23:05):
talking about and how they're controlled and what it is in the
physical world. What is it in the nature of
fundamental physics that makes it possible for them to work?
And I leave open the possibilitythat there may be have to be
changes in fundamental physics that I can't anticipate.
I can't myself claim to be a physicist, and I can't say he

(23:29):
has a bit of physics that we mayneed to change.
But perhaps someone looking at this work who has a deeper
knowledge of physics will be able to look at it and say, yes,
this is now what we need to change in current physics.
To show how the processes of metamorphosis can be controlled
in that amazing way that goes oninside, the decomposition of an

(23:52):
insect inside, and then the reconstitution of the new forms.
Maybe someone will come up with something, but I can't offer you
a suggestion as to what it mightbe.
And if I could, I would be that great new genius, but I'm not.
How do you think some people like Professor Josh Bongard,
Michael Levin, their work has been sort of has it been adding

(24:16):
to your ideas in any way or or changing them?
I think by and large, they produce examples where I find
there's something missing. And so that gives me a new kind

(24:39):
of application or a new challenge to say what exactly
have they not got right? What is missing in what they're
saying, and what form could the answer take?
And I may not be able to answer that, but by so posing the
challenge, I'm hoping I might beable to provoke cleverer younger

(25:00):
brains to come up with ideas. And I may be able to understand,
or may not. But maybe through that kind of
interaction with the community, through things like what you're
just organising, may come entirely new ideas and that in

(25:24):
1020 or 100 years from now we'llbe able to trace it back to some
of these things. But they will be very different
from anything we can imagine. Well in details.
Some of the details may be very different from anything we can
imagine now. One of the concepts you talk
about, and I think you might have mentioned it briefly, was
information with outputs. You know, in part of the

(25:45):
critical idea behind your work. Could you give us an example of
of what this might look like? How would information without
bits exist and operate in systems without any symbolic
encoding? Without bits, well, I don't

(26:06):
think that the earliest organisms, these single celled
things, had bits in anything like what we have in our
electronic systems, but they didhave molecular structures of
various sorts. And those molecular structures

(26:28):
were based on aspects of fundamental physics about which
I perhaps don't know enough, butit may be that fundamental
physics needs to be enlarged andnobody yet knows exactly what it
is that it may enable those fundamental particles in the

(26:50):
very earliest organisms to actually they do.
But whatever it was, it's clear that in the very earliest
organisms, there were kinds of interactions going on that
enabled things to come together,to work together, to do things
together, and to interact with their environment in a

(27:12):
cooperative way, which was able,which enabled them to form new
structures and to do things thatthey couldn't previously do.
So if someone can go back and say something new about the
prehistory of science, the the very earliest forms of of not

(27:39):
life, but precursors of life or proto life of what you want to
call it on the planet, that might come up with entirely new
ideas that nobody else, and certainly not I, have so far
been able to articulate. But I can't at this stage say
what that would look like. If I could, I might get a prize

(28:00):
from some sort from that. You and Jackie Chappell propose
a theory of metaconfigured genomes, which is a framework
for understanding and how development and learning are
intertwined. Could you walk us through what
what this what this theory is and how it advances our
understanding of both evolution and intelligence?

(28:22):
How does a metaconfigured genomedo that?
Or can it do that? Yeah.
Well, meta configured means thatit has abilities that depend on

(28:45):
something more than just what's there in the genome as normally
understood. And what that something more is,
is basically what I'm saying. We need to find out.
And I'm not yet able to say whatit is, but it's, it will involve

(29:05):
abilities to interact in complexways, in ways that allow things
to combine to achieve things that they could not achieve on
their own using mechanisms that have yet perhaps to be
discovered. And maybe next year you'll have

(29:28):
an idea of what that might be. And you can thank me for putting
you into, but I don't know, maybe someone else will, who
knows? Well, that then that brings me
to sort of the topic of cognition before language, when,
when you talk about cognition arising, well the ability to

(29:48):
share information and use it long before language as part of
an evolutionary process. How does that then affect the
way we perceive other mammals, animals in general and the way
we consider them in terms of do we, do we attribute
consciousness to this being cognition, intelligence?

(30:08):
How do we define and differentiate between these when
looking at ourselves and maybe other animals as well?
Well, it's clear that there are very many intelligent animals,
but with different sources of intelligence.
And so the intelligence of a of a horse is very different from

(30:31):
the intelligence of a chimpanzee.
Horses cannot climb through trees.
On the other hand, when a new horse is born, that horse can
very quickly go get up and standand go and suck its mother.

(30:51):
And this is really quite important because animals like
horses and deer and so on may bechased by predators and the
young need to be able to run. And the mothers cannot pick them
up and carry them the way that in many other species the the

(31:13):
parents can pick up and carry the young.
A horse cannot carry a baby horse.
So from a very early stage, the horse, even just after birth,
has to be able to get up and go and suck.
And that's is part of an amazingprocess of biological evolution

(31:37):
that I don't expect anybody currently understands in detail.
But it it makes possible this ability of the horses to, to the
newborn horses to run to the herd, but they still may need to
be protected. I mean, when, when a collection

(31:58):
of, of deer or whatever is beingchased by other animals, they
may stand around their young andhelp to protect them.
I think elephants can do some ofthat as well, but they can't
pick them up and carry them and so on.
So they have to be able to help them in that way.
But I don't think I'm saying yetanything very specific.

(32:23):
I'm just saying there's a lot ofresearch to be done to work out
the details of how all of that works, and maybe that will
change some of some aspects of Current Biology in ways that
nobody can currently understand or anticipate.
Or maybe it'll just be a small changes that that will not make

(32:45):
a huge difference. I suspect there may be some deep
changes required, but I can't say what they are.
When you look at intelligence systems, at what point do you
start to sort of differentiate, not to say that you do consider
this a binary distinction, but at what point do you look at an
intelligence system and think, OK, this system is possibly

(33:06):
conscious or has some sort of a what is it like to be
experienced versus something that doesn't?
I don't like the phrase What it is like to be.
I don't remember where they camefrom.
Thomas Nagle. Yes, a long time ago.
Well, is it like anything to be an earthworm?

(33:29):
I don't know what that means. But the, the, the thing that we
can ask is what kinds of information can such a thing, an
earthworm or whatever acquire and use and, and how does it use
it and what does it use it for? So what's the information, how

(33:54):
is it acquired, how is it transformed and what is all that
used for? What does it achieve?
And that'll differ enormously across different species.
And so there's no simple answer.There'll be lots of a wide
variety of species, species specific answers and there may

(34:14):
be some patterns which we can find if we start sending them
and saying there's a, there's a group of organisms that share
this kind of way of acquiring and using information.
And there are others that don't do that.
They do something very differentand as a result their life forms

(34:35):
can be different. They can live in different
environments, for example, living in trees as opposed to
living in the ground and so on. So there's a huge amount of
filling in of depths in our current knowledge that might
come from further work of the sort that I'm trying to do.

(34:57):
But I've only I think that I've only started and I'm hoping
other cleverer younger people will will be able to extend long
after I'm not able to. Well, you mentioned trees and a
part of your work you highlight the astonishing feats that birds

(35:18):
or insects, I mean the things they can do, navigating dense
forests, flying through moving branches and doing all these
amazing things with these tiny little brains.
What do you think we're missing in terms of neuroscience or even
AI for? For example, can machines ever
match biological complexity? Do you think that we'll ever

(35:40):
reach a point where a machine can do something similar to a
metamorphizing? Is that even a word?
A metamorphosising insect. Well, if by a machine you mean
something made in a factory out of plastic and wire and metal
and so on, I doubt that we'll beable to do something of that

(36:03):
sort that can do most of the things that animals can do.
They may do small subsets, but there's one thing to be able to
make such things and another thing to be able to explain how
the existing ones work. And I'm perhaps more focused on
trying to explain how the existing things work rather than

(36:27):
claiming we could make new ones like that.
Although it may be possible in future laboratories, that was
thought that I can't right now imagine that they will be able
to somehow or other start assembling from collections of
chemicals of some sort or whatever.

(36:48):
Assembling organisms. I suspect not.
I think again, they'll always have to start from what nature
has produced and perhaps combinethose in new ways to produce new
things. But I'm not, I don't know.
I mean, you can never know what future scientists will think up.
There was something there that Ithink I was supposed to go into

(37:09):
and I didn't follow up. Is there a gap you're aware of
in what I was saying? Well, the the thing about trees
came when I was I just happened to be looking out of a window
and noticing some butterflies orother things that that they seem

(37:32):
to be moving through the trees while the trees were swaying a
lot. And I wondered, are they able to
keep out of the way of these moving things or do they they
just get pushed around and it doesn't matter because they're
soft enough and they don't get damaged and they survive?

(37:56):
And I couldn't really tell. So I was left with an open
question there about whether there have clever ways of using
some sort of insect intelligenceto react to all this motion in
order to protect themselves or whether they are just built in
such a way that they don't get damaged because they are soft

(38:19):
and flexible and so on. And they don't need to be using,
they don't need to use any special kind of intelligence.
There may be people who already know the answer to that, but at
the moment for me, it's just a question.
I don't know of anybody else who's they've asked that
question. Let's see.
When you think about them flyingthrough these trees and doing
what they're doing, a part of mewas thinking about you.

(38:43):
You speak about how organisms can store and manipulate
information externally. Does does this sort of align
with the 4E cocci idea of extended or embodied cognition?
Do you do you feel like this informational perspective can be
called some sort of an extended or embodied information?

(39:06):
Well, it's very clear that for many organisms, they do create
information outside of themselves, either for use by
other members of the same species, by using signals of

(39:27):
various kinds, and so on, or by.Sharing in some ways with other
species that they interact with.Where I've given the example I
gave previously was flowers and and insects.

(39:49):
In the they they not only the the insects cannot only get the
nectar from the flowers, they also get some information from
them. Because of they, the flowers
have developed ways of attracting.
The insects, so in some sense the flowers are saying are

(40:09):
providing information saying come to this place if you're an
insect, a flying insect of of the sort.
And then you'll be able to get your, your, your, your juice or
whatever you're looking for nectar and they don't say.
And therefore you'll also get some of my pollen.

(40:31):
That's a side effect. The insect isn't particularly
incident getting pollen or doinganything with it, but the, the,
the flower needs it, the insect to collect the pollen and
transfer it when it goes to the next flower and so on.
So I think I'm answering your question, but with a bit of hand
waving going on. While reading a lot of your

(40:52):
work, a question that came onto my mind was, are you trying to
move toward a unified theory of life and mind?
Is this sort of an overarching goal that you have right now is
to build a sort of unified theory that integrates biology,
information theory, AI, and physics, almost like a theory of
everything? What are your thoughts on that?

(41:15):
Well, it would be nice to be able to claim that I'm at least
contributing to that. I don't know whether I have a
right to say that, but if I I suspect that if there ever is
such an complete theory, I was some of the a lot of the things

(41:40):
that I've been talking to you about and been writing about.
So will be important fragments of such a theory, but they might
have to be revised and improved and extended in order to play a
full role in the whatever final theory, if there ever ever is a
final theory, comes out and thatwould be a.

(42:02):
It would be nice to think that one could contribute to
something like that, but at the moment I don't.
I just don't know. And you may have a view about it
perhaps, but we we can wait and see.
When you I'll put a link to yourwhat is life and and all the

(42:23):
papers that you originally try and put as much as possible.
But as you write this, when you when someone else clicks the
link has a look at it as a read.What would you like them to take
away most from the work you've done so far?
Well, I'm hoping that some of them will discover gaps that I
haven't noticed and then ask questions that I haven't asked

(42:46):
about how to fill the gaps. Also, some of them may have been
seen the question that I've asked and see that the answers I
have tentatively proposed are not deep enough or have gaps or
have flaws of some sort, and they may then be able to come up

(43:07):
with suggestions for improving the answers.
So I see this is a possible collaborative perhaps long term
process over time. And what I hope is that our
educational systems and political systems and other
systems do not interfere too much with the ability of humans

(43:34):
to collaborate in in that sort of way, in in extending human
knowledge for good, interesting,worthwhile purposes, as opposed
to what are all, all the many other nasty purposes that human
knowledge is being used for at the moment.
I think it's, it's pretty admirable when, when, when
you're, when you ask someone, I mean, what they take away from

(43:56):
your work and they, and they main answer is just to point out
your flaws. It's a, it's a good way to be a
scientist. It's a, it's a great answer.
I just thought I'd mention it when you, when you think about
the missteps, because I'm talking about you being a great
scientist. And that's a great way to think.

(44:16):
There's obviously missteps in science and.
Sorry, I missed that. This is obviously what.
Sorry, Aaron, there's obviously in science there are missteps
and backs and so moving backwards, let's say.
Mistakes. Yeah, right.
Yeah. And when you think about our
current assumptions, when you'veonce said to be careful of what

(44:41):
people claim is obviously true. And I think that's something
that we should always be carefuland look out for because if
someone claims something that's obviously true, we should always
be sceptical. What do you believe are some of
those assumptions within AI, biology or cognitive science
where it is just a fundamental truth that people work on their

(45:05):
dissertations, their PhDs, etcetera, but is a is an error
in thinking that needs revising urgently?
Well, the one that I have reallyheavily emphasised in some of
the stuff we've been talking about is what seems to be an
obvious truth to many people, and namely that neurons do most

(45:29):
of the reasoning and the synapses just help the neurons
to communicate and collaborate. And I'm saying it's the other
way around and they've got it completely wrong or almost
completely wrong in some way there.
There are probably others that if I sat and thought for a while

(45:51):
I could come up with. But I think at the moment, the,
the, the, there may be no peoplewho are asking questions of a
sort that might relate to the things that we've been talking

(46:12):
about and the things that relateto what's going on in these
complex biophysical and biochemical systems and what
might be happening in other parts of the universe.
And how that what might differ and how that difference might
relate to some of what we've been talking about.

(46:36):
And I have no idea. I can't.
I'm just raving my hands. I can't say.
This is how things might be different in another part of the
universe from what I've now beentalking about.
Instead of the biochemical constituents of organisms and so
on that we now have, there mightbe something different going on

(46:59):
in other parts of the universe. I have no idea if that makes any
sense at all or whether it mightcome out.
But perhaps one day someone might be able to, to provide an
answer that somehow, either by doing thought experiments or by
collecting evidence from, you know, things that get sent out
to other parts of the universe and send back messages.

(47:20):
And and somehow these messages might include clues that sort of
things happening of a type that nobody has ever thought of in
this part of the universe. But I don't know.
Yeah, it, it reminds me of Carl Sagan and when they sent out
Voyager into space with our our golden record just to try and

(47:42):
carry out some information if ever a species got spotted and
interpret what we wrote. But it begs the question, I
mean, are we going to be speaking the same language?
How, how important is that goingto be when when it comes to
encountering something like that?
Yes. How?
How do you start communicating with something, with a language

(48:03):
that's so different, very different from anything you've
ever met before? And there may be techniques that
that I haven't thought of or that some people have thought of
that. But there may already be things
around us that we don't notice, we're not aware of that are

(48:27):
using forms of language that we don't understand and we can't
communicate with them. Although I don't have seen any
specific reason to believe that.But it's, it seems theoretically
possible in some way. But right now all I can say is
here are here's a collection of ideas.
Here are ways I can suggest for extending those ideas by doing

(48:51):
new thought experiments, by trying out new combinations of
the ideas and so on. And perhaps if enough people do
that in flexible and cooperativeways and challenge one another
and talk to one another, maybe some entirely new things will
come out of the results. And maybe you will be a part of

(49:15):
the process that makes that happen.
Well, hopefully we'll see. We can see what happens.
Aaron, what would you call this?This informational process, this
idea of the synapses controllingall the information rather than
the the the neurons themselves, How What would you call this in
terms of a theory or a proposal?When you introduce this idea to

(49:38):
people, how do you define it? Well, I don't think I've given
it a name, a label, if that's what you mean.
Maybe tomorrow or next week I might think of a label, but the
phrases I've been using are the closest I can get to that.

(50:00):
Phrases like form the forms of communication that I've been
talking about that that involve collaboration across different
kinds of mechanisms. But I'm just bumbling away
without really coming up with ananswer to your question, I

(50:21):
think. No, I will look hopefully, but
at some point you won't come up with a nice catchy name.
It always has to have some sort of a catchy name and then people
sort of grip, get a grip of it abit more, but something else.
Have a nightmare tonight? I'll come up with a name and
I'll e-mail it to. You send me that e-mail and I'll
try and make it the the, the thumbnail of the the video.

(50:42):
OK, When you think about the mind body problem as a
philosopher, as a scientist, howdo you conceptualize this
problem? Do you think it is a problem?
Do you think there is a mind body problem?
And don't worry, I know the podcast is called Mind Body
Solution. I will not take offence even if
you think there is no problem but but what are your thoughts

(51:03):
on the on this concept of the mind body problem?
Well, it's clear that animals have bodies of various sorts.
It's clear that at least some animals have minds.
But if having a mind is having the ability to acquire you

(51:24):
transform and process information, then maybe in some
sense all animals have minds of a sort insofar as they do those
things. And so there will be not one
problem, but many problems of about explaining how those
different sorts of minds work. Explaining what the different

(51:46):
sorts of information or that they have access to, explaining
the different ways they can be used, explaining the different
ways in which they can collaborate and compete,
explaining the different ways inwhich they can evolve into new
forms, which you can do things in in different ways and so on.
And these are all, there's a kind of recursive structure

(52:12):
there that I can't express very simply, but it's somehow
interacting, generating and producing more, which will
interact and then and generate more and more stuff.
And I don't know how much longerthat will continue, but I
suspect it can continue for a great deal, much more than it
has been happening so far. And exactly what it looks like I

(52:36):
can't obviously can't predict, but it I expect some of the
things I've been talking about will appear as important
fragments of what comes out. But exactly what else is there
as well? I can't say.
Earlier you mentioned how much you in in order to remember

(52:58):
things you sort of using, you'reextending your cognition by
using these tools to assist you these.
How do you see this as an augmentation to the human race
in the future when the more augmented we become with with
with our technological environment as an extension of
our minds? Do you think AI will play a
fundamental role in that? How do you foresee the future of

(53:19):
AI and its impact it'll have on on humankind and just
speculative? Well, I think I've more or less
said everything I have to say about that.
I'm sure AI will go on being extended.
I'm sure there will be lots of forms of shallow AI which are

(53:40):
used in perhaps in factories, incontrolling production ponds or
whatever. Lots of use of stuff by Shannon,
for example, and other things aswell.
Maybe more use of biochemical mechanisms in various kinds of

(54:02):
production. I'm sure there's a lot already
going on that that I only know vaguely about, and maybe if I
sat down and thought a bit I could come up with some
examples. But I see this all as an ongoing
process. It's it's by no means seems to

(54:23):
me to have come to its end. I don't have the impression that
everything has been done that can be done by humans or humans
and their tools and so on. I think of it as something that
will continue to expand and and diversify and I'm sure that will

(54:44):
continue for many years. When it comes to telos or
teleology, do you do you sort ofsee something like that
occurring where it's it goes beyond us.
This has nothing to do with us and we're just like a stepping
stone that's going to take that's going to take this.
I don't know this this experience forward into some
sort of a different realm. By that, I think you're hinting

(55:08):
at the idea of something else having purposes, and the things
we do help to serve the purposesof that something else.
At the moment I have no reason to believe there is any such
thing that could have such purposes that could use us in
the way that we're being used atthe moment.

(55:29):
I don't say that I can prove there isn't any such thing, or
that there cannot be any such thing, just that right now I
have no reason to believe there is such a thing.
But if there is, it's helping tomake a mess of the world at the
same time as generating a lot ofamazing new technology which is

(55:51):
being used in all sorts of different ways, including
enabling things like this interaction to happen.
And so on. Yeah, it's like a it's sort of a
give and take. So if we do see that way, if we
do see it that way, we're obviously going to have to take
the bed with it and then and sort of justify why this why
this has happened along the way.Yeah, it could be very
unnecessary, but I guess it it it.

(56:12):
With that being said, Aaron, when you look back at all the
work you've done, the work you're currently doing, what
what do you think people should know about your work that we
might have not touched on in this conversation so far because
there's so much to cover. And I tried to focus this on a
specific on this on the paper you sent me, but there's so much

(56:33):
you did send me prior to that that I wish we could touch on.
But it's obviously so much work over so many years that we can
touch on different podcasts. But if we're to towards the the
last end of this conversation, at what?
What part of your work would youthink is most important to
highlight and bring up now? Well, as you're saying, there is

(56:53):
a lot. I think I would like to know
that in the near future, some really clever people will be
looking at the stuff I've most recently been thinking and
writing about in connection withthe the forms of transformation

(57:18):
that can go on and the way in which the forms of
transformation can be themselvestransformed and so on.
And some of the limitations of what's going on in there, and
also whether that challenges current fundamental theories in
physics. So I'm hoping that perhaps
somebody will come up with answers to those questions.

(57:42):
We'll be able to say, yes, this bit of current quantum physics
is wrong. We didn't realize that this bit
needs to be changed or something.
I can't give any example becauseI don't know enough about
current quantum mechanics. But there are a few people who

(58:03):
have been claiming that current quantum physics is mistaken and
needs to be altered in some way.Anthony Leggett, whom I
mentioned, the old friend is, isone of them.
And there's another one who is often in the news, I've
temporarily forgotten his name. You may be able to remember whom

(58:26):
I'm thinking of. He, he has this view that the
universe has perhaps a succession of cycles.
And there's a there's a succession of big bangs.
And each time the universe evolves in some way and goes
through a whole lot of things. And then you know what I'm

(58:48):
thinking of. I think I do, I'm just trying to
get a statement to my head. Yeah, well, we can maybe later
look up the name and we'll come share it online and you can add
it somewhere somehow to. Try and put a link.
There, Yeah, yeah, but he and he's been doing this for quite a
long time. But at the moment my impression

(59:09):
is that there's quite a little hand waving there without enough
substance. And he has a collaborator who's
a neuroscientist who talks aboutstuff going on in particular
bits of, of, of the nervous system.
But I'm not convinced that they can do what he thinks they can

(59:29):
do. And so it's, it's possible that
some of that work will, will, will be improved on in some ways
as a result of the, some of the things that you and I are
talking about and Tony Leggett perhaps and others.
But at this stage I can't say how.

(59:51):
Do you feel that certain fields,or let's take quantum mechanics
for example, do you think that theories they're trying to
incorporate quantum mechanics into trying to understand is
something like information? They sort of reduce it to
something they just don't understand, and you find it a
little bit annoying that people try and explain everything using

(01:00:14):
quantum mechanics because we really just don't understand it.
Well, quantum mechanics is obviously very important and
there are various aspects of it.There's a book called What is
Life written by a a famous physicist.
I've temporarily forgotten his name now.

(01:00:35):
Owen Schrodinger. That's right.
Thank you. And he talks about aspects of
biology that he thinks might require extensions to
fundamental physics, including the use of catalysts in
processes of reproduction and soon.

(01:00:55):
And then he later modified and extended his ideas and so on.
Now I was inspired by his work, but that took me in different
directions because I ended up postulating that there were
things that he hadn't lost and hadn't answered, and the things

(01:01:17):
that I was talking about addressed some of those things
that he hadn't. But I wondered what he would say
if I told him about these. And, and I don't know, really.
He might say, Oh yes, now that adds, but you have left out
something. And this bit of stuff that you
don't know about in physics willbe relevant to that part of your

(01:01:41):
problem that's not yet answered.I don't know.
There might be more interdisciplinary collaboration
that would help to extend what I've been doing in important
ways that I could not possibly do on my own and maybe nobody on
the planet at the moment can do.But some bright person reading

(01:02:01):
all the stuff and thinking aboutthe other people will come up
with ideas and and then come up with a a way of of extending
things that makes a big difference to the answer to the
questions. Well, I think it's pretty.
I think it's pretty cool. It's almost beautiful when you
think about it. I mean, having Schrodinger when
he writes what is life? You, you look at this and try

(01:02:24):
and and answer it and then thinkof so many new questions to ask
and answers to some of the questions.
And then you're also writing about what is life at this point
in your life and asking for the same thing from the next
generation moving forward. There's always going to be
someone who's going to add to that.
Ask what is life? Answer your question, ask a few
more questions. And that might, I'm not saying

(01:02:44):
there is a telos, but that couldbe a weird way of, of having
some sort of a purpose within informational systems, just
trying to consistently generate answers to these fundamental
questions. And I think it's pretty cool.
And even though I'm, I'm not calling it a teleological thing,
but it is the beautiful process that's happening at the moment.
And if it can go on forever getting more complex, that's

(01:03:07):
would be nice. But it may be that there reaches
a point where there's nothing more to add because you go
around in circles. If you if you add anything,
you'll find someone somewhere has already thought of that.
And this is what it does, but itdoesn't do enough.
Yeah, the Aaron, it's, it's beenan incredible conversation.
I mean, only today for some reason I've I realised that you

(01:03:29):
studied in South Africa, which is pretty crazy.
Do you ever, do you ever miss itback down here?
Not really. So do do I ever look what sorry?
I said only today did I realize that you actually studied in
South Africa. Oh, at Cape Town University,
yes, that's where I had my firstdegree.
And some of this all started because I was an atheist and I

(01:03:54):
used to go to meetings of the student Christian society.
And I thought that the people who were telling these students
things that they believed, I thought were, were, were making
unjustified claims. And I started asking questions
and challenging them and saying,how can you know that sort of
thing? And one of the other students

(01:04:16):
who was there who was also Christian, but he was, he's very
intelligent. He said, you're asking these
questions, but you might be ableto formulate better questions if
you read this book. And he lent me Bertrand
Russell's book, The History of Western Philosophy.

(01:04:39):
So I took that away and started reading it.
And the more I read I came, the more I believe Bertrand Russell
is the greatest philosopher, whoever lived.
And that went on for a while until I started having new
thoughts and thinking, no, Russell hasn't answered this
question. He hadn't answered that question

(01:05:01):
and that triggered new thoughts and so on.
So there, there's there's been alot of books and people and
things inspiring me and then triggering new things that
challenge the things that had previously inspired me, which
then challenged me to do more things that and then me to
challenge more things that challenged me.
And so there's been a lot of feedback in the system making it

(01:05:24):
more and more complex as time went on.
And I suspect that across collections of minds, that
process could continue. I think it's, it's, it's
wonderful in the sense that manypeople when you ask them when is
the last time you changed your mind, they tend to not really
know. But in your case, you've
actively done this for so many years.

(01:05:45):
It's a mock of a great scientistand a true philosopher in that
you're able to change your view,change your perspective, adapt
and move forward without taking it personally.
Yeah, we're thinking about metamorphosis in in insects
happened only a few weeks ago for the first time in the
precise way that I did it and. And that caused me to realise

(01:06:09):
that there's something going on there that I had never asked
about and I didn't know anybody else had ever asked about.
And I haven't found anybody who's that, that I've, you know,
in what I've been looking at that can explain how the process
of metamorphosis decomposes the structures that are already
there and then reorganises them to form these entirely new

(01:06:32):
structures. But maybe there is something
that I don't know about. So far I haven't found it.
Well, if anyone's watching or listening finds anything and
send, send us the links. Send me the links and I'll, I'll
definitely forward it to you. Aaron, thank you for joining me.
It's been such a pleasure. It's been a privilege.
Any final words from your side, Aaron?
Anything you you want to say before we close up?

(01:06:53):
Well, I need to thank you because it's, it's very nice for
me to know that someone is taking these ideas and helping
to helping me to communicate them using the technology that
you've got that I can't operate and so on.
And maybe that will help to extend the ideas through other

(01:07:18):
people taking it on and following it up.
And perhaps they will do it through you by saying, can we
have a meeting? Because we like, I'd like to
talk to you about some of the things that you did then and you
could take them further and maybe you invite me along later
to comment. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the
purpose of this channel. And that's why I started.
It was primarily to initially was because it was a great
opportunity to pick the brains of some of my favorite

(01:07:40):
scientists. But then also to realize that it
would be a great way to get their work out there to maybe
people who either would never have appreciated it or now
finally get to hear more about it in a different way.
And this is precisely the purpose.
And I hope someone watching thiscomes up with some sort of a
brilliant idea and they can share it with me.

(01:08:00):
And if I can share it with you and have you back on the show
and discuss it, it would be it would be exactly what this
podcast is for. Right, I don't know how much
longer I'll be able to function,but while I can, I'm willing to
try. Try my best to try and make it
happen as soon as we can. OK Thanks once again.
Really appreciate your time and.Thank you.