Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces

[AshvinP]

Is this the full story about ML? I get the flattened approach that doesn't suspect the existence of cognitive modes other than intellectual. That's what moved me to reactivate this thread in the first place. But there's also something else, right? At least he strives not to passively accept the usual slots and pathways of typical reductionist modeling. Maybe it's just my positive bias towards this kind of innovative thinking that doesn't take the conceptual forms and their piecing together for granted, and the fact that he's way more truth-oriented than meaning-oriented doesn't help. But do his efforts simply boil down to other equally flat arrangements? He feels like he's descovering a new fire with these hidden properties. Is this secret really only a plain materialistic Ahriman-fueled impulse? Ashvin likened it to the Christ impulse, which I can't wrap my head around either. So what is this exactly?

Just to be clear, what I likened to the Christ impulse is exactly what you write in bold, particularly the striving and ideal for Truth. It is cognitive activity that seeks to courageously explore unfamiliar territory of its own inner structure and dynamics, and to do so for the ideal of healing individuals and communities, out of compassion for their obvious predicaments and plights. The secret Ahr impulse is what pulls this otherwise noble desire off-center, and continually seeks to externalize and reduce the cognitive investigation to the elemental dynamics, a reductive process which can only support infernal (self-seeking) aims rather than true healing through concentric alignment with the higher contextual Minds. The adversaries cannot really generate new impulses in spiritual evolution, only appropriate and divert the existing ones.

[Federica]

Is this the full story about ML? I get the flattened approach that doesn't suspect the existence of cognitive modes other than intellectual. That's what moved me to reactivate this thread in the first place. But there's also something else, right? At least he strives not to passively accept the usual slots and pathways of typical reductionist modeling. Maybe it's just my positive bias towards this kind of innovative thinking that doesn't take the conceptual forms and their piecing together for granted, and the fact that he's way more truth-oriented than meaning-oriented doesn't help. But do his efforts simply boil down to other equally flat arrangements? He feels like he's descovering a new fire with these hidden properties. Is this secret really only a plain materialistic Ahriman-fueled impulse? Ashvin likened it to the Christ impulse, which I can't wrap my head around either. So what is this exactly?

Just to be clear, what I likened to the Christ impulse is exactly what you write in bold, particularly the striving and ideal for Truth. It is cognitive activity that seeks to courageously explore unfamiliar territory of its own inner structure and dynamics, and to do so for the ideal of healing individuals and communities, out of compassion for their obvious predicaments and plights. The secret Ahr impulse is what pulls this otherwise noble desire off-center, and continually seeks to externalize and reduce the cognitive investigation to the elemental dynamics, a reductive process which can only support infernal (self-seeking) aims rather than true healing through concentric alignment with the higher contextual Minds. The adversaries cannot really generate new impulses in spiritual evolution, only appropriate and divert the existing ones.

Yes Ashvin, I should have placed the reference to you straight after the bold. Still, I think and feel it is not out of compassion that he seeks to explore the unfamiliar territories. Rather, it's out of his ideal to explore and know the unfamiliar territories that he lands on the endeavor of compassionately healing individuals and communities. Somewhat as if compassion was yet another property ensuing from his search for truth (the scientific impulse) rather than the scientific pursuits ensuing from compassion. It strikes me how he speaks of "the radius of compassion"...

You may think this is simply another expression of my contrarian bias. But these are not new thoughts, they date back to before you brought in the Christ impulse in ML's attitudes. By the way, in relation to the argumentative mode, I have recently been trying hard to explore to which extent this curvature is true. In fact, in the process of taking in new ideas, I have been able to ‘spot’ myself rushing as a priority to finding out all the various ways in which the contention at stake could be wrong, or have drawbacks. And I’ve found the elastic metaphor to be absolutely fitting to describe the situation. There was definitely attraction, I have seen it. So there is some truth to what you said. With this said, I think it’s useful and necessary to search for contrast and flaws, as a way to move forward and avoid the åh so common - and I want to say elemental - tendency to assent by mere weakness of judgment, of independent, willed thinking. But I agree that a conscious balance needs to be sought here, and I definitely need to learn how to find that balance, so that I don’t get pulled by that curvature overwhelmingly.

[Cleric]

However, the Ahrimanic ideal basically says "If I don't understand the reasons for my thinking going spin-up or down, this could only be because I have an incomplete view of the elemental nature. There are hidden variables. There's no need to postulate different causal planes. The more I unveil the elemental view, the more I'll see that all processes are fully comprehensible as causal flows within the elemental plane." This is what secretly pulls ML. The more we can see all characteristics of life and cognition simply as unexpected patterns resulting from the iterations of simple rules, the more the need for other sources of causation becomes unnecessary. In the end, one will conclude that these planes are simply temporary placeholders for the as-of-yet veiled variables of the elemental view.

Is this the full story about ML? I get the flattened approach that doesn't suspect the existence of cognitive modes other than intellectual. That's what moved me to reactivate this thread in the first place. But there's also something else, right? At least he strives not to passively accept the usual slots and pathways of typical reductionist modeling. Maybe it's just my positive bias towards this kind of innovative thinking that doesn't take the conceptual forms and their piecing together for granted, and the fact that he's way more truth-oriented than meaning-oriented doesn't help. But do his efforts simply boil down to other equally flat arrangements? He feels like he's descovering a new fire with these hidden properties. Is this secret really only a plain materialistic Ahriman-fueled impulse? Ashvin likened it to the Christ impulse, which I can't wrap my head around either. So what is this exactly?

With the above I didn't aim to 'anathemize' ML. I stand behind my words at the beginning of this thread that his approach (or anything with scale-relativity) is probably the most fruitful for the intellect to discover the depth of inner space. Thus I also have the same positive bias toward his innovative thinking. However, this proves to be an archetypal battle. We can imagine pictorially how on one hand his inner being instinctively probes the inner depth, from whence the valuable insights come, but then the Ahrimanic nature immediately snatches the condensing thoughts and puts them in the edifice of the intellectual kingdom.

I don't exactly what's the full story with ML, but there's certainly an issue there. Consider this:



Look only at the first timestamped chapter "Biggest Myths of Biology". I almost feel uncomfortable for CJ because he asked the same question several times in different ways. It's painful to see how ML circumvents confronting the question directly. I'm not saying that he does that on purpose (as, for example, a politician would try to evade a question). It's really his earnest attempt to see things in a different way. He doesn't want to put things into separate categories, he likes to see everything on a gradient, etc. But the question here is very straightforward. It's basically "Does a glider in CGOL do anything more than what the basic rules already do?" As explained already, in the past I imagined that he firmly explores the idea that something new manifests, which doesn't result from the basic rules alone. And this is reinforced by the fact he speaks of Platonic realms and their probing. But when he speaks of computation and AI, one can't help but think "Maybe after all he believes that the basic rules are the master control." Then the higher levels are only glider-like patterns. Maybe he believes that cognition is simply how these higher and higher-order patterns feel like?

Obviously, the only way to find out would be to converse with him about what our thinking is. Is our thinking fundamentally the result of the basic rules, while our conscious experience is simply a view at a higher glider level? Or our cognitive glider plane indeed can be causally active at its level? To this day I haven't heard him address this question.

[AshvinP]

Is this the full story about ML? I get the flattened approach that doesn't suspect the existence of cognitive modes other than intellectual. That's what moved me to reactivate this thread in the first place. But there's also something else, right? At least he strives not to passively accept the usual slots and pathways of typical reductionist modeling. Maybe it's just my positive bias towards this kind of innovative thinking that doesn't take the conceptual forms and their piecing together for granted, and the fact that he's way more truth-oriented than meaning-oriented doesn't help. But do his efforts simply boil down to other equally flat arrangements? He feels like he's descovering a new fire with these hidden properties. Is this secret really only a plain materialistic Ahriman-fueled impulse? Ashvin likened it to the Christ impulse, which I can't wrap my head around either. So what is this exactly?

Just to be clear, what I likened to the Christ impulse is exactly what you write in bold, particularly the striving and ideal for Truth. It is cognitive activity that seeks to courageously explore unfamiliar territory of its own inner structure and dynamics, and to do so for the ideal of healing individuals and communities, out of compassion for their obvious predicaments and plights. The secret Ahr impulse is what pulls this otherwise noble desire off-center, and continually seeks to externalize and reduce the cognitive investigation to the elemental dynamics, a reductive process which can only support infernal (self-seeking) aims rather than true healing through concentric alignment with the higher contextual Minds. The adversaries cannot really generate new impulses in spiritual evolution, only appropriate and divert the existing ones.

Yes Ashvin, I should have placed the reference to you straight after the bold. Still, I think and feel it is not out of compassion that he seeks to explore the unfamiliar territories. Rather, it's out of his ideal to explore and know the unfamiliar territories that he lands on the endeavor of compassionately healing individuals and communities. Somewhat as if compassion was yet another property ensuing from his search for truth (the scientific impulse) rather than the scientific pursuits ensuing from compassion. It strikes me how he speaks of "the radius of compassion"...

You may think this is simply another expression of my contrarian bias. But these are not new thoughts, they date back to before you brought in the Christ impulse in ML's attitudes. By the way, in relation to the argumentative mode, I have recently been trying hard to explore to which extent this curvature is true. In fact, in the process of taking in new ideas, I have been able to ‘spot’ myself rushing as a priority to finding out all the various ways in which the contention at stake could be wrong, or have drawbacks. And I’ve found the elastic metaphor to be absolutely fitting to describe the situation. There was definitely attraction, I have seen it. So there is some truth to what you said. With this said, I think it’s useful and necessary to search for contrast and flaws, as a way to move forward and avoid the åh so common - and I want to say elemental - tendency to assent by mere weakness of judgment, of independent, willed thinking. But I agree that a conscious balance needs to be sought here, and I definitely need to learn how to find that balance, so that I don’t get pulled by that curvature overwhelmingly.

Thanks, Federica, I appreciate you taking this initiative with the curvatures. And I hope it's clear that I don't consider myself immune to the elastic elemental macros either, far from it. All we can do is strive to first become more conscious of them through strategic resistance. What curvatures become inwardly conscious, even if we are still flowing with them here and there, can never rule over us in the same way and extent they do when they remain unconscious.

Certainly the deeper soul states are always entangled with the scientific thinking states ('entangled' used here as an invitation to concentrative experience, not as JW's energetic metaphysical explanation of thinking ). Therefore we can't neatly delineate them into which comes first. Generally speaking, the moods and feelings overarch and contextualize the thinking states, providing the curvatures along which the latter unfold. A certain temperamental and personality disposition, for example what is called trait 'agreeableness', may be woven into our soul being from pre-incarnation and lead to high degrees of feeling empathy/compassion for fellow souls. Of course this won't be an isolated trait but is blended in with others, like 'openness to experience' and 'conscientiousness'. Then our scientific pursuits and thinking states are contextualized by that soul constellation. But the former also feeds back into the latter and can heighten our feeling of compassion, or perhaps bring out an otherwise latent compassion into the explicit outer expression of healing pursuits. In all cases, we should imagine these are curvatures of our soul being that are vastly greater than our self-image, i.e. our concepts of "who I am" and "what qualities I have". They are practically archetypal like the hero mythic narrative, a living 'center of gravity' around which many souls revolve.

I don't like to speculate too much on what's going on in this respect with any particular personality. There are way too many complex karmic factors involved. That's why I just speak of the general impulses and curvatures, and how certain aspects of those come to expression in various outlooks and ideas.

[Federica]

With the above I didn't aim to 'anathemize' ML. I stand behind my words at the beginning of this thread that his approach (or anything with scale-relativity) is probably the most fruitful for the intellect to discover the depth of inner space. Thus I also have the same positive bias toward his innovative thinking. However, this proves to be an archetypal battle. We can imagine pictorially how on one hand his inner being instinctively probes the inner depth, from whence the valuable insights come, but then the Ahrimanic nature immediately snatches the condensing thoughts and puts them in the edifice of the intellectual kingdom.

I don't exactly what's the full story with ML, but there's certainly an issue there. Consider this:



Look only at the first timestamped chapter "Biggest Myths of Biology". I almost feel uncomfortable for CJ because he asked the same question several times in different ways. It's painful to see how ML circumvents confronting the question directly. I'm not saying that he does that on purpose (as, for example, a politician would try to evade a question). It's really his earnest attempt to see things in a different way. He doesn't want to put things into separate categories, he likes to see everything on a gradient, etc. But the question here is very straightforward. It's basically "Does a glider in CGOL do anything more than what the basic rules already do?" As explained already, in the past I imagined that he firmly explores the idea that something new manifests, which doesn't result from the basic rules alone. And this is reinforced by the fact he speaks of Platonic realms and their probing. But when he speaks of computation and AI, one can't help but think "Maybe after all he believes that the basic rules are the master control." Then the higher levels are only glider-like patterns. Maybe he believes that cognition is simply how these higher and higher-order patterns feel like?

Obviously, the only way to find out would be to converse with him about what our thinking is. Is our thinking fundamentally the result of the basic rules, while our conscious experience is simply a view at a higher glider level? Or our cognitive glider plane indeed can be causally active at its level? To this day I haven't heard him address this question.

Yes, LM skips the question, especially when CJ uses the architecture metaphor, ML literally answers the reverse of the question. As I see it at this point, he is not decided. He doesn’t believe either or. He feels he doesn’t need that. (At minute 12:38 he says “humans have enormous cognitive light cones, and whatever’s beyond that). Again, and again I receive the same impression that the reason why he is open to the possibilities and likes to see things on a gradient is because his primary focus is not on meaning. The focus is on what can be obtained from the research in terms of concrete transhumanist (freedom of embodiment) technology. I’ll list some wording of his that keeps reaffirming this stance. (Only from a 6 minute section of the talk!)

• “Looking forward as to what these explanations let you do”

• “Not sure what we can do with that kind of ladder”

• “There’s a lot of utility in considering the autonomy of these higher levels”

• “The most interesting thing is that you can use paradigms from behavioral science and that lets you do way more than if you restrict yourself to mechanisms.

• "The fact that you often can tell a physics story doesn’t mean there is that much value in it necessarily (in playing the next chess game, in developing new biomedicine, new discoveries)"

• "What ties it all together, the center focus is, we are trying to understand embodied mind"

He’s clear that for him “all these ideas should not remain philosophical musing” they have to “facilitate new advances” (at 15:00). Evidently, he’s not on CJ’s scene to search for meaning, but more like an influencer, to build consensus around his center focus. Probably the question “what our thinking is” would interest him only to the extent that it may facilitate new advances. And he’s not yet come that high in the scales. There is still so much more he can usefully find out at the lower scales to facilitate freedom of embodiment.

That much for what he's aware of and expresses. The fully story that includes what he's unaware of remains mysterious.

[AshvinP]

The focus is on what can be obtained from the research in terms of concrete transhumanist (freedom of embodiment) technology. I’ll list some wording of his that keeps reaffirming this stance. (Only from a 6 minute section of the talk!)

• “Looking forward as to what these explanations let you do”

• “Not sure what we can do with that kind of ladder”

• “There’s a lot of utility in considering the autonomy of these higher levels”

• “The most interesting thing is that you can use paradigms from behavioral science and that lets you do way more than if you restrict yourself to mechanisms.

• "The fact that you often can tell a physics story doesn’t mean there is that much value in it necessarily (in playing the next chess game, in developing new biomedicine, new discoveries)"

• "What ties it all together, the center focus is, we are trying to understand embodied mind"

He’s clear that for him “all these ideas should not remain philosophical musing” they have to “facilitate new advances” (at 15:00). Evidently, he’s not on CJ’s scene to search for meaning, but more like an influencer, to build consensus around his center focus. Probably the question “what our thinking is” would interest him only to the extent that it may facilitate new advances. And he’s not yet come that high in the scales. There is still so much more he can usefully find out at the lower scales to facilitate freedom of embodiment.

That much for what he's aware of and expresses. The fully story that includes what he's unaware of remains mysterious.

If I may add a comment here. I'll say that the above is my general impression from when I first heard the interview as well. And I quickly felt the resonances with many of Steiner's statements, which I'm sure we are all familiar with, where he speaks about how we need to be flexible with our concepts (narratives) and use different conceptual approaches tailored for the physical, etheric, astral, etc. spectrums of experience. It is not about the explicit meaning of our concepts but their implicit functions in helping us achieve certain practical understanding of the lawful spectrum.

What I have also discerned, however, is that no one operates their thinking activity in a vacuum without an underlying philosophy/metaphysic/faith (tied to deeper soul curvatures), and it is precisely when that underpinning remains unconscious that we are most vulnerable to it steering our concepts in certain directions unwittingly, rather than freely utilizing such frameworks to orient our intuition of existence and corresponding efforts toward inner perfection. Actually, in the Q&A with BK, even ML states that an underlying philosophy is what informs our research questions, so he is somewhat conscious of that fact, but he seems to act like he's 'above it all' in certain interviews like this one with CJ.

So I think he would benefit from confronting the fact that, implicit in his conceptual lenses used for practical aims, is always some constellation of philosophical underpinnings. It could be as general as the philosophy that the Cosmos is lawful and amenable to cognitive inquiry, our faith that it is of Logos-nature and our questions to it aren't meaningless, but usually there are other more specific assumptions and ideas woven into it. We have seen the latter emerge the most clearly in his computational work, but the longer it remains unconscious, the more likely it is to spread along the full spectrum of inner activity.

[Federica]

Actually, in the Q&A with BK, even ML states that an underlying philosophy is what informs our research questions, so he is somewhat conscious of that fact, but he seems to act like he's 'above it all' in certain interviews like this one with CJ.

So I think he would benefit from confronting the fact that, implicit in his conceptual lenses used for practical aims, is always some constellation of philosophical underpinnings.

Yes he is well aware of this fact. As you say, he mentioned it in that discussion with BK, at 1:02:14:




I guess the only fruitful way to confront him with that fact and attract his attention would be at first: what expanded perspectives could guide research programs even more insightfully towards results "in the real world" and why. A sneak peek of the natural science of the future. Since the dichotomy real world / world of ideas is dominant in his view, the thing should remain anchored to implications in the physical layer, to start with.

[Federica]

Yes, LM skips the question, especially when CJ uses the architecture metaphor, ML literally answers the reverse of the question. As I see it at this point, he is not decided. He doesn’t believe either or. He feels he doesn’t need that.

Actually, I am checking his latest blog, and looking at the first Q&A. It confirms the bold: "Our practical work doesn't really require making any claims about consciousness yet..." He's not yet come at that high level of investigations in the scales.

[Cleric]

I think ML's latest article pretty well summarizes his present position.

On my view, mind precedes and is a superset of life, but we call “living” those things which are very good at scaling up the lowly competencies of their parts into aligned collective intelligences with bigger cognitive light cones that project into new spaces to which the parts have no access, thus bringing down new patterns and increasingly more sophisticated cognitive agents all of which coexist in one material embodiment.

On the one hand, it is a very fruitful intuition but then, alas, everything else shows how our own cognitive process remains cemented and unquestioned. Everything about investigating these other ideal patterns boils down to building intellectual models and testing them against physical experiments. In other words, one is eager to know these other minds, to interact with them, but only through the interface of biological or technological embodiment. Even though it is readily admitted that we are collective intelligences, somehow this is taken to apply to everything except our cognitive process. We accept that our cells and organs embody ideal patterns that are independent of us, yet our intellectual sphere remains self-enclosed with its mental images. It is not suspected that we can begin discovering the interference of intelligences right within our cognitive space.

Also pains me how he continues to profess the algotypes experiment as pointing to these Platonic ideas, clearly failing to see how it actually undermines the idea of embodying novel patterns (since the behavior of the algotypes is completely determined by the basic rules and thus there's no room for anything in addition to influence the system).

[Federica]

I think ML's latest article pretty well summarizes his present position.

On my view, mind precedes and is a superset of life, but we call “living” those things which are very good at scaling up the lowly competencies of their parts into aligned collective intelligences with bigger cognitive light cones that project into new spaces to which the parts have no access, thus bringing down new patterns and increasingly more sophisticated cognitive agents all of which coexist in one material embodiment.

On the one hand, it is a very fruitful intuition but then, alas, everything else shows how our own cognitive process remains cemented and unquestioned. Everything about investigating these other ideal patterns boils down to building intellectual models and testing them against physical experiments. In other words, one is eager to know these other minds, to interact with them, but only through the interface of biological or technological embodiment. Even though it is readily admitted that we are collective intelligences, somehow this is taken to apply to everything except our cognitive process. We accept that our cells and organs embody ideal patterns that are independent of us, yet our intellectual sphere remains self-enclosed with its mental images. It is not suspected that we can begin discovering the interference of intelligences right within our cognitive space.

Also pains me how he continues to profess the algotypes experiment as pointing to these Platonic ideas, clearly failing to see how it actually undermines the idea of embodying novel patterns (since the behavior of the algotypes is completely determined by the basic rules and thus there's no room for anything in addition to influence the system).

It would be interesting to see the reaction if he received the first paragraph here as comment to his blog.