Lifeboat Foundation

We don’t come across papers that attempt to redefine reality very often.

Vitaly Vanchurin, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, makes the particularly startling claim that we are living inside a vast neural network that controls everything around us in a paper that was recently uploaded to arXiv.

Michael Levin discusses his 2022 paper “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds” and his 2023 paper with Joshua Bongard, “There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-scale Machines.” Links to papers flagged 🚩below.

Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. He works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.

Continue reading “Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond” »

AI specialist Jürgen Schmidhuber on Kurt Gödel, meta learning and fundamental limitations of computability.

Read the full text on our website: http://serious-science.org/godel-machine-10426

Continue reading “Gödel Machine — Jürgen Schmidhuber / Serious Science” »

Isaac Newton described his theory of gravity as a force that acts instantaneously across space: a planet immediately senses the effects of another astronomical object, regardless of the separation between them. This aspect inspired Einstein to create the renowned theory of general relativity, where gravity becomes a local deformation of spacetime.

The principle of locality states that an object is directly influenced only by its surrounding environment: distant objects cannot communicate instantaneously, only what is here right now matters. However, in the past century, with the birth and development of quantum mechanics, physicists discovered that non-local phenomena not only exist but are fundamental to understanding the nature of reality.

Now, a new study from SISSA – Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Do we all look forward to what lies ahead?

67 years after its theoretical prediction by David Pines, the elusive “demon” particle, a massless and neutral entity in solids, has been detected in strontium ruthenate, underscoring the value of innovative research approaches.

In 1956, theoretical physicist David Pines predicted that electrons in a solid can do something strange. Although electrons typically have a mass and an electric charge, Pines asserted that they could combine to create a composite particle that is massless, neutral, and doesn’t interact with light. He named this theoretical particle a “demon.” Since then, it has been theorized to play an important role in the behaviors of a wide variety of metals. Unfortunately, the same properties that make it interesting have allowed it to elude detection since its prediction.

Fast forward 67 years, and a research team led by Peter Abbamonte, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has finally found Pines’ elusive demon. As the researchers report in the journal Nature, they used a nonstandard experimental technique that directly excites a material’s electronic modes, allowing them to see the demon’s signature in the metal strontium ruthenate.

Dr. Mark Hyman recommended Costco items including nuts, canned seafood, and fermented goods.

Michael Levin talk for the Mind, Technology, and Society (MTS) talk series at UC Merced on January 23, 2023. Abstract: Each of us makes the remarkable journey from the physics and chemistry of a quiescentunfertilized egg to that of a complex human being. How can we understand the continuousprocesses that scale up minds from the tiny physiological competencies of single cells to the large-scale metacognitive capacities of large brains? Here, I will describe a framework known as TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere — which enables identifying, understanding, andrelating to unconventional cognitive agents. I will use the example of the collective intelligence ofcells during morphogenesis to illustrate how we can begin to widen the lessons of multiscale neuroscience well beyond neurons. This will be essential as we head into a future that will bepopulated by a wide range of evolved, designed, and hybrid beings with novel bodies and novelminds. I will conclude with a case study of our new synthetic biorobot (Xenobots) and a discussionof the implications of these ideas for evolution, biomedicine, and ethics.

Consciousness is usually ascribed to a specific set of mechanisms and functional capabilities of the complex brain. Importantly, those mechanisms (ion channels, electrical networks, neurotransmitter machinery) long pre-date the evolutionary innovation of nervous systems. Moreover, the algorithms and competencies such as memory, decision-making, and information integration likewise have an ancient evolutionary origin: before they controlled moving the body through 3D space, electrical networks moved body configurations through anatomical morphospace. In this talk, I will describe how we view the morphogenesis during embryonic development and regeneration as the behavior of a collective intelligence, which has many problem-solving capacities. I will describe the tools we have developed, paralleling neuroscientists’ attempts to read and write mental content by control of electrophysiology, to decode and re-write the pattern memories of the body. This has significant implications not only for biomedicine and evolutionary biology, but also for questions about consciousness and the scaling of coherent Selves from agential materials. I will conclude with some conjectures about what this new field offers the science of consciousness, in the form of new embodied living creatures that are outside the natural evolutionary stream of Earth, and the quest for theories of consciousness.-https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ Participate in our online research survey-Survey on Diverse intelligence-https://tufts.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eE51vKE34q3hexo (takes 9 minutes). Thank you.

Edited by Emilio Manzotti.
https://github.com/emilim/