Horizontal Information Transfer in Embryos

• Research on “hyper embryos” shows that large groups of embryos resist teratogens (development-disrupting agents) better than small groups or individuals.
• Embryos communicate with each other using ATP and calcium signaling, and share information, enabling a group-level response to stress, going beyond individual genomes.
• The only individuals who improve resilience, are those also subject to stressor exposure.
• This has implications for toxicity studies: The toxicity/benefit result is a factor of both group response and intrinsic risk/benefit, meaning the data collected by such studies do not nececarilly represent ground truth about those studies alone.
• Suggests a “hyper embryo” exists as a higher-level entity with its own dynamics and gene expression. Implies development isn’t solely vertical (from parent) but also horizontal (between peers) and cooperative.

Emergent Behavior in Simple Algorithms

• Studied simple sorting algorithms to find minimal conditions for surprising emergent behavior, addressing reductionism vs emergent complexity.
• Injected individual element awareness such that rather than 1 algorithm for whole array, each element ran 1 simple algorithm locally, just seeing neighbours.
• Created self-sorting arrays where each number “wants” to be in the correct position relative to its neighbors.
• Found that even with broken/immobile elements, the algorithms exhibit “delay of gratification” – temporarily getting less sorted to ultimately achieve sorting, without explicit coding for this.
• Created “chimeric” arrays where different elements follow different sorting rules; these show unexpected clustering behavior (“algotypes”) even when not advantageous, and persist longer in cases where sorting tolerance increased, representing ‘free will’ in the model, the cost of ‘physics pulling them apart’, decreased.
• Emergence can exist, surprisingly, in highly-reduced conditions and environments, suggesting that we should not assume human/animal/biological properties only exist when “obvious” based on the typical components known for those organisms (nervous systems).

Discussion on “What Algorithms Want” (Epistemic vs. Ontic)

• Debate on whether emergent properties (like “delay of gratification” in algorithms) are real (ontic) or just projections of our cognitive modes (epistemic).
• Levin argues multiple perspectives exist, and the perspective of goal-directedness can be useful for scientific discovery, even if not “fundamental” in the lowest-level reductionist sense.
• Kastrup contends complexity science often shows that apparent complexity results from simple underlying rules, cautioning against over-attributing cognitive properties, suggesting a lot of observed agency is misatrributed and that what we refer to is purely an epistemic and convenient simplification, instead of ontic truths about reality.

The Problem of “Thingness” and Points of View

• Is there an objectively definable “thing”, or is this purely observer dependent based on current capabilities and understanding of that observer?
• If all “things” (even tables) are assigned their own cognitive agent perspective from observer: observer faces information and combinatoric explosion.
• Analytic idealism frames point of view as arising from dissociation; a living zygote *is* a point of view (distinct from the world), undergoing internal complexification.
• Levin does not accept binary of view/no-view but accepts that living zygote represents a “view”, a “thing”. He thinks it does not only extend to biology: “thingness” a function of degree, that many levels (degrees) of “thingness” may coexist inside bigger “things”.
• Abiogenesis (life from non-life) presents a greater challenge, creating a point of view from non-view entities, unlike fertilization.

Continuum of Perspectives and Sense-Making

• Levin emphasizes a continuum of perspectives, rather than a binary “has it/doesn’t have it” view of consciousness or agency. The size/signifiance of cognitive perspectives can and will differ greatly.
• Rejects idea of *objective* criteria for defining an agent/thing; criteria are relative to an observer’s perspective, and their primary goal, driven internally by self-preservation, is: sense-making.
• “What it’s like to be” questions are about a relationship between two systems; truly becoming another system means losing the original perspective, but instead represent an offset comparison or merge, but the target is retained.
• An explanation helps improve sense-making of the observer to aid effective actions on future, therefore all “useful” and functional descriptions have a quality of *future prediction*, which should not be mistaken as *just* past/present descriptions.
• Levin: the world a giant set of perspectives, growing and shifting, making estimations/assumptions about “other”s in environment.

Implications for Biology and Evolution

• Levin discusses memory remapping, exemplified by caterpillar-butterfly metamorphosis: information is compressed and reinterpreted for a new life context.
• Evolution likely selects for mechanisms of perspective that extract salience from experience, not rigid replication, allowing flexibility/interoperability, hence resilience and ease-of-combination of cells.
• Anthrobots (made from adult human tracheal cells) demonstrate emergent behaviors like self-motility and neural wound healing, despite no evolutionary pressure for this.
• Suggesting capabilities or potentials latent in structure space; exploration through “periscopes” created using perturbational experiments of system.

Speculation on a Platonic Realm

• Suggests a latent “Platonic” space where capabilities exist as forms, instantiated when physical structures align; evolution “searches” for pointers into this space.
• Levin imagines space as interaction/dynamics between entities (similar to how philosophical concepts have shapes).
• These forms are not static, but potentially dynamic, influenced by interacting systems; the “frame rate” of interaction depends on the observer’s capacity.
• Discusses philosophical concepts including L. E. J. Brouwer and intuitionist logic.

Metacognition, Active Inference, and the Physics of First Persons

• Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is consistent with multiple complexes within a living being; subsystems are subsumed, not eliminated.
• Levin suggests active inference (surprise minimization) and Markov blankets may lead to a more refined definition of “life”, potentially including things not currently considered alive, not by explicit components, but by organizational rules and properties of *interactions*.
• “Physics of first-person perspective”: Rewriting physics in terms of predicting one’s own next experience, and connection to actions that can influence that, which aligns with Carl Friston, and Chris Fields’ work, “Active Inference”.

胚胎中的横向信息传递

• 对“超级胚胎”的研究表明，大群胚胎比小群或单个胚胎更能抵抗致畸剂（发育破坏剂）。
• 胚胎使用ATP和钙信号相互沟通，并共享信息，从而实现群体层面的应激反应，超越个体基因组。
• 唯一能提高恢复能力的个体，也是那些受到压力源暴露的个体。
• 这对毒性研究有影响：毒性/益处结果是群体反应和内在风险/益处的综合因素，这意味着此类研究收集的数据不一定代表这些研究本身的真实情况。
• 表明“超级胚胎”作为一个更高层次的实体存在，具有自身的动力学和基因表达。这意味着发育不仅仅是垂直的（来自父母），也是水平的（同伴之间）和合作的。

简单算法中的涌现行为

• 研究了简单的排序算法，以找到令人惊讶的涌现行为的最小条件，解决还原论与涌现复杂性之间的关系。
• 引入了单个元素的感知，这样每个元素不用一个整体阵列的算法，就在本地运行一个简单的算法，只看到邻居。
• 创建了自排序数组，其中每个数字都“希望”相对于其邻居处于正确的位置。
• 发现即使有损坏/不动的元素，算法也表现出“延迟满足”——暂时变得更无序，最终实现排序，而没有为此进行显式编码。
• 创建了“嵌合”数组，其中不同的元素遵循不同的排序规则； 这些数组显示出意想不到的聚集行为（“算法类型”），即使没有优势，并且在排序容忍度增加的情况下持续时间更长，代表模型中的“自由意志”，“物理学将它们分开”的成本降低。
• 令人惊讶的是，涌现可以存在于高度简化的条件和环境中，这表明我们不应该假设人类/动物/生物特性只有在基于这些生物已知的典型组成部分（神经系统）而“显而易见”时才存在。

关于“算法想要什么”（认知与本体）的讨论

• 关于涌现属性（如算法中的“延迟满足”）是真实的（本体）还是仅仅是我们认知模式的投射（认知）的争论。
• 莱文认为存在多种视角，目标导向的视角可以用于科学发现，即使在最低层次的还原论意义上不是“基本的”。
• 卡斯特鲁普认为，复杂性科学经常表明，明显的复杂性是由简单的基本规则产生的，告诫不要过度归因认知属性，表明许多观察到的自主性是错误归因的，我们所指的是纯粹的认知和方便的简化，而不是关于现实的本体真相。

“事物性”和观点的问题

• 是否存在一个客观可定义的“事物”，还是这纯粹是观察者依赖的，基于观察者当前的能力和理解？
• 如果所有“事物”（甚至桌子）都被观察者赋予自己的认知主体视角：观察者面临信息和组合爆炸。
• 分析唯心主义将观点框定为分离的产物；一个活的受精卵*是*一个观点（与世界不同），经历内部复杂化。
• 莱文不接受观点/无观点的二元对立，但接受活的受精卵代表一个“观点”，一个“事物”。他认为它不仅仅扩展到生物学：“事物性”是程度的函数，许多级别（程度）的“事物性”可能存在于更大的“事物”内部。
• 无生源论（生命来自非生命）提出了更大的挑战，从非观点实体创造一个观点，不同于受精。

视角和意义建构的连续体

• 莱文强调视角的连续体，而不是意识或自主性的二元“有/没有”观点。 认知视角的大小/重要性可能并且将会大不相同。
• 拒绝*客观*标准来定义主体/事物；标准是相对于观察者的视角，而他们的主要目标，由自我保护内部驱动，是：意义建构。
• “成为…是什么感觉”的问题是关于两个系统之间的关系；真正成为另一个系统意味着失去原始视角，而是代表一个偏移比较或合并，但目标被保留。
• 解释有助于改善观察者的意义建构，以帮助对未来采取有效行动，因此所有“有用”和功能性描述都具有*未来预测*的性质，不应被误认为*仅仅*是过去/现在的描述。
• 莱文：世界是一组巨大的视角，不断增长和变化，对环境中的“其他”做出估计/假设。

对生物学和进化的影响

• 莱文讨论了记忆重映射，以毛毛虫-蝴蝶变态为例：信息被压缩并重新解释以适应新的生活环境。
• 进化可能选择从经验中提取显著性的视角机制，而不是僵化的复制，允许灵活性/互操作性，从而实现细胞的弹性和易于组合。
• 人造机器人（由成人气管细胞制成）表现出涌现行为，如自我运动和神经伤口愈合，尽管没有这方面的进化压力。
• 表明能力或潜力潜藏在结构空间中；通过使用系统的扰动实验创建的“潜望镜”进行探索。

关于柏拉图领域的推测

• 暗示一个潜在的“柏拉图”空间，其中能力以形式存在，当物理结构对齐时实例化；进化“搜索”指向这个空间的指针。
• 莱文将空间想象为实体之间的互动/动态（类似于哲学概念如何具有形状）。
• 这些形式不是静态的，而是潜在的动态的，受相互作用系统的影响；交互的“帧率”取决于观察者的能力。
• 讨论了包括 L. E. J. Brouwer 和直觉主义逻辑在内的哲学概念。

元认知、主动推理和第一人称的物理学

• 整合信息理论 (IIT) 与生物体内的多个复合体一致；子系统被包含，而不是被消除。
• 莱文认为，主动推理（惊喜最小化）和马尔可夫毯可能会导致对“生命”的更精确定义，可能包括目前不被认为是活的东西，不是通过显式组件，而是通过组织规则和*互动*的属性。
• “第一人称视角的物理学”：根据预测自己下一次的经验，以及与可以影响这种经验的行动的联系来重写物理学，这与 Carl Friston 和 Chris Fields 的工作“主动推理”一致。