YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Frank

lines on the record: 241
first: 2024-12-22
most recent: 2024-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Love for the way and all the beings who are suffering, everybody's suffering, everybody's suffering, you know, your worst political opponent, they're suffering, you know, and our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helping all sentient beings. That's the way they just be in here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is like, you know, the main thing is to get over. Like your job is to get over. But that's really what I found. It is actually kind of, and that's what that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it's like this. One of the things I have experienced, when I have like really, you know, there's a kind of experience I'll have in contemplative practice, which we'll carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world is just, the world gives you everything in there's a certain way, right? Just the blue sky and the breath. The world is just giving you itself completely, unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that's kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, oh, I need to be helpful because who's not having this experience, you know?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's good that we just had the last conversation because I'm going to give this answer, which is so corny. It's love. And I'm not messing around because really, actually what happens. So within Buddhism, there is the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You're here to help. You're just here to help, right? Compassion. Like that's a really essential part of this path of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, I don't care about compassion. I'm here for knowledge, right? I'm here. I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. I had, you know, the reason everybody comes to things like this. You know, life was hard. I was going through stuff. But I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion, whatever. But then I found out that you can't get that. You can't get that. You can't go to the stuff without compassion somehow in this process. You realize that it really is about”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thoughts are still happening, but you're just not there happening up there. You're not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away, you know, and there's just this presence. It's kind of like a raw presence. And that's often where the joy upwells from. But you sit with whatever. Maybe you're going to sit and you're going to have, like, you know, maybe you're going to go through like an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You know, you're just going to sit with whatever comes up. You're going to make that. That's why the sitting part. You're making the commitment. I'm going to sit here with whatever comes up. I will not be moved. And then what you come away with, it actually over time, it actually changes kind of who you are. Like I'm still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I used to have more space now for things, you know?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was pretty amazing to see, you know, because you really do see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while. I used to hate sitting. You know, I do it, but I... After a while the mind gets exhausted, like that part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter. It's just like there's nothing else to do. And then you get bored. And I now realize that's when something interesting is going to happen. Because you kind of like drop down. And now it's a very physical practice. People think you're just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually becomes a very physical process where you're really just following the breath. You're kind of riding the breath and it gets very quiet, you know. And within that quietness, there's a path, you know, because obviously there's been Buddhism is always like, you know, not about thinking, but there's a huge literature. So these guys are always about don't think. I've written all this stuff. But they're guideposts. They're like the finger pointing at the moon. And, you know, there's the idea first, you know, your mind is usually scattered, right? Like, right, you don't want to right now when I walk out, I'm going to go get the Uber and every mind's going to be all over the place. But with sitting, first you concentrate the mind so that there's no more scatter anymore.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Staring at a wall. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you're not really, I mean, you're staring, you're facing a wall. And what you're doing is you're just sitting with, you know, you can, there's different meditative practices, right? There's counting breaths. So that's usually what I do. I sit down, I start counting breaths. And for the first half hour, it's just like blah, blah, blah. think it, like I said, I'm thinking about my taxes, I'm thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen's born to run album, Track Through from the beginning to the end with the pauses back in when there were LPs.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Which is cool actually because that, you know, I'm also, you know, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well going back. And I get it, right? I mean, you know, but that's also the cool thing. I think one of the things is like, yeah, well, that is what it is. That is what it is, right? You don't have to do anything. You don't have to like manipulate it or move it around or like. Yeah, this is the experience, you know?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take years, just like anything in math, it took me years to understand Lagrangians. You kind of come to a deeper understanding with like, yeah, the words of like, it's not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. Like you feel it with like breath to breath, you know. And it really becomes sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy. And it's not connected to anything. That's what I've kind of gotten from practice. It's just like, yeah, you know, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment. That is truly the way things are and it's okay. Like not it's not okay because I have a feeling about it, okay? I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it's a pretty awesome thing.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favorite ones was stop the sound of the distant temple bell. You're like, what? Every time my teacher gives it to him, I'm like, what are you talking about? This whole zen thing over like up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So, you know, your job with these cons is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you sort of kind of, you know, you realize what the thing is trying to teach you, what aspect of experience it's trying to teach you. So there's no answer. There's no, and in fact, actually you don't give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate the first time when I sat when I did a call on and the guy was like, don't tell me the answer, show me the answer. I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, I've kind of learned the language of them. So I could never tell you. If I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You'd be like, what? You know, it's never, it's not the words. It's the, you know, so like your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With contemplated practice as it deepens over years, there really does.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I say that what I've learned from because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it, yeah. You know, um, but what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that it's not just you're not just saying, right? This is why, you know, so I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in Zen that it was established. It was a teaching method that was established.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is real is you know everything's coming and going, it's all coming and going. Well, how could I ever not come and go when the entire world is just Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising? Nothing exists, nothing has self-nature, nothing exists by itself. It's an endless, infinitely connected web.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of your own experience, so you know your ideas about what death is are equally ill formed, you know, and it's so, you know, the contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself, like spend five days at a Zen session doing contemplative practice from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m., obviously with breaks, and you'll really get a much deeper understanding of like what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention. Because, you know, attention is kind of like this thing like it's usually just like, oh, over there, oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, that, you know, what's that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes? And with the contemplate of practice, you learn how to stabilize it. And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So, but I think I've learned from that is like kind of whatever, you know, I'm not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing. And the part of me that.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, actually, it doesn't make me sad. So, okay, so, you know, full reveal. I have been doing contemplative practice in the Zen tradition for 30 years. I've been staring at a wall for 30 years. And it's taught me a lot, right? You know, I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things it's taught me is like, you know, I don't really matter that very much. This thing I call Adam Frank is really, you know, it's kind of a construct, you know. There's this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally. And that's super cool, but, you know, it's going to go. I don't know where it came from. It's going to go. I don't really need it to, you know, and then who the hell knows? I'm not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that like, you know, what I love, Zen has this idea of beyond birth and death. And they don't mean reincarnation. What they mean is, dude, you don't even really understand what life is. You know what I mean? On like this, you know, this core level.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quarterbacking it. But I think there's a lot of possibility here. It's a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, there's a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who is very much a reductionist, you know, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist. And Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, you know, where's your mind? And Salk went up here. And Bateson said, no, no, no, out here. And what he really meant was this extended idea. It's not just within your cranium to have experience. You know, experience in some sense is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do, right? You almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is from this perspective is really important. And it's very attractive to me. And, you know, seeing, again, if we're really going to do science with them, we're going to have to like have these ideas crash up against data, you know, crash up against, we can't just armchair it, you know, or, you know, or couch.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you still need to bring the body. So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't, you know, you really need to be embedded in a world. At least that's the E4 idea.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so it's possible, right? It's possible, but I think probably the view I'm advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there's something called E4. The E4 theory of cognition. Embodiment, inaction, embedding, and there's another one. Extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body, which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is essential. So that's why I think the LLMs are not going to, it's not just imitation. It's going to require, this goes to the brain and the vat thing. I did an article about the brain and the vat, which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans, where they did the brain and the vat argument, but they said, look, in the end, actually, the only way to actually get a real brain in the vat is actually to have a brain and a body. It could be a rope.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not discount that possibility. I think, you know, there's no reason I would say that it's impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests, that strange loop that we're talking about, that auto poesis, I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in silicon. I think whatever it would be very different from us, like the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us, but now it's instantiated. I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don't think what we have now, like the LLMs are really there. But yeah, I'm not going to say that it's not possible.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why information theoretic. So, the idea that we're pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture, right? Or organization, informational organization. Because, you know, right, physicalism is like everything's atoms. But, you know, Kant recognized. Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism because he recognized that life has a weird organization that was specifically different from machines. And so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization which is often I can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even is sort of it's not really quite physical, right? It's embodied in physical, you know, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of design, you know, and so not design like intelligent design, but there's a organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow. And I think, again, that's an entire”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couldn't be me without the entire community of, say, language users, right? I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems, right? That are alive, that I am a part of a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker's stuff. And then that Those ecosystems are part of the biosphere, right? We're never separable as opposed to this very atomizing the triumphalist science view wants like Boltzmann brains. You're just a brain floating in the space”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we can do it because it's also the thing, you know, what's really interesting is, I think it's not just first person, it's first and second, right? Because science, because when so like one idea is that the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third person view, that's one way of talking about objectivity. There's a whole other way is that I do the experiment, you do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity. And it acknowledges that, you know, When we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible, right? So there's a great paper, speak of Santa Fe by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it's actually pretty fluid. Like my liver cell is an individual, but really it's part of the liver. And my liver is, you know, a separate system, but really it's part of me. But I'm, so I'm an individual, yay. But actually, I'm part of a society.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resources Journal gave us a great review, so I feels like there's actually out there there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to like jump past these hurdles that we've been arguing about forever and we're not sort of stuck in a vortex.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Waiting for the fight. And then the review from Science came out, and it was like totally provision. It was very positive. We're like, oh my God, you know. And then a review came out in nature physics. And it was totally positive. And then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal because we kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized all industrial economies for that they were sort of had been touched by the blind spot. Socialism, communism doesn't matter. These extractive, you know, had sort of had that sort of view that the world is just reducible to, you know.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are organizationally closed, are causally closed, so that they don't depend anymore on the microstate. And he made that, he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it's, you know, some argue it's true, some argue it's not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete. They cannot be represented as formal systems. So, you know, in that way, they're not axioms. They're not, living systems will not be axioms. They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now, again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof is valid or not. But I'm saying I'm giving you examples of like, you know, when you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. You know, the book we thought was going to be really heretical, right? You know, obviously, you know most public facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphal. And so we were just like waiting.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk about downward causation, right? So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms, right? That's it. If you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you're done. Of course, in principle, you need God's computer, but fine. In principle, it can be done. Colossal closure, and there's, I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this. There's ways in which using epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates. Now the macro state fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws. Whether that paper is true or not, it's an example of heading down that road. There's also Robert Rosen's work. He was a theoretical biologist who he was, you know, he talked about closure to efficient cause, that living system.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the self membrane creates itself. So there's this strange, it's always with life. There's always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that's ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure, accounting for how the”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, but I think we can do it. I think there's aspects of it. I mean, as long as you're never trying to like, this is what experience is. Like, I think that's kind of the where, you know, you're never going to have a causal account of experience because it's just given. But you can do lots about, and that's what the good work is, is to, how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that's rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so, for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about this is what we're counting with our semantic information too. causal closure love this idea right the idea that so we talked about autopoiesis a while back right the idea that living systems are um they are self-creating and self-maintaining so the the membrane cell membrane is a great example of this right the cell membrane you can't have a cell without a cell membrane the cell membrane lets stuff through keeps other stuff out right but the cell membrane is part of the processes and”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They started always with they wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on I've got this experience. I can't get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there's like a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from, you know, not like slavishly. We don't all have to become Buddhists to do it, but there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn't.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nagarjuna and Vasuban doing, and they're like the Plato and the Aristotle of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience. In the West, I think maybe because we had the Judeo-Christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame. The traditions that came from the classical philosophies of Indian Asia.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then that has not been part of this discussion about you'll never, good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, you know, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it's a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization, right? So there's the Western core out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia, and they developed their own, they were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions. And they, for reasons, because they had contemplative practice, they were very focused on direct, trying to directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did. Phenomenology kind of started it, but there's philosophers like.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. And that's why, you know, fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part, is following a religious impulse. It's wanting the gods' eye view. And you know what's really interesting, and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, you know, there's a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in. And it is actually a pretty, it's only one version of philosophy, right? So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition, right? But there's even in Europe or in the Western tradition, in what we'll call Western philosophy, there's phenomenology. There's a Hersherl and Heidegger and Merlu Ponty, which took an entirely different track. They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle that is experience, right? You experience you're not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it. It's given.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An illusion looking from where, like, right? Because that already requires to take that stance is you've already pushed yourself into that third person view, right? And so what we're saying is that third person view, which now you're going to say like, oh, I've got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities, meaning, you know, things that I think exist in God's living room in spite, you know, that are independent of me and the community of living things I'm part of.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the idea, you know, the reason why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they're more real than experience. And the equations are a paler, they don't corral experience. They are a thinner representation, as we like to say, don't confuse the map for the terrain. What's happening between us right now in this, you know, all the weirdness of it, that's the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations. And then in the workshop do experiments on super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say is that free will is a given. And that's the thing about experience, right? So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote, is says it's not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It's the job to account for the abstract. The concrete, what's happening between us right now is just given. It's presented to us every day. It's presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn't add anything to it, right? So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent, right? To be an agent, agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, you know, they're equivalent. And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of its arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in. Like you literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions, neglecting experience because that's the only way to do science. And then you think somehow, oh, I'm going to put, I'm going to jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difficult, right? And so that, but that's the good work of the science ahead of us, right? So, what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So, you know, we start with experience, which is irreducible. There's no atoms of experience, right? It's a whole. And we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There's a philosopher Robert Creese who talks about the workshop that's starting in like the 1700s, 1600s. We developed this communal space to work in. Sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory, where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated, and we went to the next step. So this idea of pulling out from experience these thinner abstract structural invariants, the things that we could actually do science with. And it's kind of like we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction, right? So the problem with the way we do things now is we take that abstractions, which came from experience.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration. Like we humans were duration for us is full. It's sort of, it's stretched out. It's got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present. Music is the best example, right? You're hearing music, you're both already anticipating what's going to happen, and you're remembering what's going on. There's a kind of phenomenon.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we've taken, this is what when Herserl talks about the surreptitious substitution, we've taken Einstein's beautiful, powerful formal system for viewing time. And we substituted that for the actual experience of time, right? So the block universe, where like next Tuesday is already written down, in the block universe, the four-dimensional universe, all events are already there, which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the sort of the scientific framework. But it is not lived time. And this was pointed out to Einstein, and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Berkson, who was the most famous philosopher of like the 20, early 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity. And Berkson, whose whole thing was about time and was about duration.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used that's been the headline on Scientific American stories. So there clearly another direction has to be found. And maybe it has nothing to do with this. But I suspect that Because so many times the agent or having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency, like when it comes to time, thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time, you know, clocks don't tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even like the fundamental nature of time can't be viewed from the outside, that there's a new physics theory that is going to come from that comes from this agential informational computational view. I don't know, but that's kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, listen, that would be kind of my dream. I'm not going to be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it. But Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while with string theory. I've spent my whole life listening to talks about string theory real soon, you know. And it's gotten ever more disconnected from data observations. There were people talking for a while that it's post-empirical. And I want to always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like physicists have been smoking their own stash, right? There's this way we've gotten used to like, you know, you have to outweird the other person like, my theory has 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it's got, you know, psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there's been a problem. There's a problem. I don't need to tell you there's a crisis in physics or there's a crisis in cosmology. Other people...”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into just an epiphenomena that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent's not the most important part of the story.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's what we're looking for. I think that is really the exciting part. And it's a move. You know, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you know, you understand why people love this. Like, I have these equations and these equations represent, you know, there's this platonic ideal that they are, you know, they exist eternally on their own. It's kind of quasi-religious, right? It's sort of like somehow look, these equations are reading the mind of God. But this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you're saying is there's us and the world. They're inseparable, right? It's always us and the world. And what we're now finding about is this kind of co-creation, this interaction, you know, between the agent and the world, such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account. Like in no way am I saying these laws aren't important. These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, you know, that turns the experience, turns the agent.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The agent, or life the agent, interacting with the world and drawing it both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in living systems like cells. So, you know, we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you, you know, basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focuses on, and in a very simple way, just like what much of the information that the agent, you know, the critter is getting from the world actually has helps it survive, right? That's the most basic idea of meaning, right? We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food kind of has the same feel, the same architecture as what's going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it. How do we bring this sort of recognition that there's always us the...”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. That's exactly it. So, you know, one of the things that's really interesting to me, so I have a project, I'm part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Spenier on Cubism. So I've been part of that. And what I've been amazed by is the language they use. So what's cool about cubism is it comes from quantum information theory. It's a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics. And it's always about do you have an agent who makes an action on the world and then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that's the action of the world, updates their priors, updates their Bayesian. That's why it's called cubism, quantum Bayesianism, updates how the information they've gotten from the world. Now this turns out to be kind of the same language that we're using in a project that's about the physics of life where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right? So when you're asking how will we do this, quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it. So there's been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there, go to enormous lengths like the many worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like cubism, which is I'm going to advocate for, is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the Born rule at the center, right? Instead of focusing on the Schr ⁇ dinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrodinger's cat and all that other stuff, it says, no, no, actually the real mystery is the born rule. Let's think about the born rule. And like you said, that puts the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamical equation, the Schr ⁇ dinger equation, which you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions, and now you've got a differential equation, and you crank out the differential equation, and it makes predictions for the future, right? Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it's like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you. You know, that's the Born, what we call the born rule.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that that's what we have to figure out, right? And so, actually, you know, a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, right? Because one of the things we're arguing is, look in the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who's a wonderful philosopher and Marcelo Gleiser, who's a theoretical physicist. When I was writing the chapter on the origin of the blind spot, like, you know, sort of what how this emerged out of history, the subheader was like, well, it made sense at the time because it did. You know, it really, there was a reason why people adopted this third person god's eye deterministic view, this view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe, yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you like, and no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right? Quantum mechanics slams you with the idea that the measurement problem, you know, and most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamic.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one of the things that Whitehead said was we have to avoid the bifurcation of nature. And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into sort of scientific concepts, wavelength. Think about like the seeing a sunset. You can say like, oh, look, it's just wavelengths, you know, and scattering particles. And your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness and all the other things. It's not just red. There's no qualia. There's no pure redness. Everything that's happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomena. It's just, you know, brain states, whatever. He said, you can't do that. They're both real. They're both accounts. They both need to be integrated. And so that required, I think, a really a different conception of what we mean by nature.”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you're always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being inexperience. So whatever account we want to give is of the world is going to have to take that as experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, like we don't have an answer. Like that's when people are like, well, what are you suggesting as the alternative? It's like, look, that's the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this. But what we would argue with is, and we're thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature, right? That doesn't sort of jump right to that third person, that fictional third person view, and somehow figures out how to do science, recognizing that it always starts from experience. It always starts from this field of experience in phenomenology the word is the life world that you're embedded in. You can't unembed yourself from it. So how do you do?”
2024-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source