Introduction and Challenging Assumptions

• Neurons and their functions are not unique to brains; similar capacities exist in non-brainy organisms. Ion channels, electrical synapses (gap junctions), and neurotransmitters, all predate multicellularity.
• Biological Systems navigate not only 3d spaces, but all problems spaces: physiological, metabolic, gene expression and anatomical spaces.
• The “self” should be understood in relation to others, not in isolation. The second-person perspective (interaction) is crucial for understanding the first-person perspective (individual self).
• Current concepts in philosophy of mind and cognitive science are often static and adult-centric. This approach is like the outdated “epicycle” model of the solar system, requiring overly complex explanations. A shift to seeing dynamic interconnectedness as fundamental.
• The “hard problem” of consciousness (linking physical states to subjective experience) may be approached by understanding the interconnectedness between levels (physics, chemistry, biology) rather than reducing one to the other.
• Disciplines have created artificial boundaries and unshakable assumptions not portable across fields. Cross-disciplinary tool application leads to novel discoveries.

Development, Continuity, and Persuadability

• Embryogenesis (development) demonstrates the continuity between physical systems and minds. There’s no “magic moment” of transition. The null hypothesis should be continuity.
• Cognitive terms are “interaction protocols,” describing how we relate to a system, not objective facts about the system itself.
• A “spectrum of persuadability” ranges from systems requiring physical rewiring (clock) to those responsive to goals (thermostat), behavioral cues (dog), or arguments (human).
• The spectrum suggests what sort to tools or interaction is required to achieve certain outcome:
  • For a mechanical clock, rewire hardware.
  • For thermostat: rewriting internal goals is possible, with limited interaction.
  • For dog: using behavioral tools for desired behavioral goals with medium level of interatcion.
  • For Human: only a mere argument could allow for the goal-setting behavior and interactions for high level complex changes, where low levels get managed on its own with minimal need for interaction.
• Applying tools from different disciplines outside their standard domains (e.g., behavioral neuroscience tools to cells) can reveal unexpected capacities.
• This highlights the nature of relationship of interaction is critical in any attempt at gaining utility from interaction.

Goals, Aging, and Open-Endedness

• Living systems have an intrinsic goal: to stay alive. This foundational goal underlies higher-level, explicit goals.
• Depersonalization/derealization may result from detachment from the body’s intrinsic goal, leading to a sense of unreality.
• Flexibility and adaptation to a constantly changing environment are more important than precise information processing. Being “stuck” can indicate a lack of this flexibility.
• There are muliple approaches of goal understanding
• Programmatic: Evolution wants older organism to stop existing and get rid of to free resources for younge.
• Damage approach: accumulated hardware (dna/tissue) error build up over time will degrade the system.
• Intrinsic Approach: morphogenic system requires to maintain goal states, or order becomes degraded. Loss of “goals” cause degradation of systems.
• Aging may be related to a loss of goal-directedness in morphogenetic systems, *not* solely due to damage or programmed obsolescence. After achieving a goal, a system needs a new challenge, or it degrades.
• Life is intrinsically open-ended, requiring both beginnings and endings (birth and death). The concept of “eternal life” is oxymoronic, the concept doesn’t make sense in terms of Life.

Perspective, Interconnectedness, and the Self

• Humans investigate the world from their perspective, but this perspective shapes the investigation. Clocks and thermostats are human constructs, not natural kinds.
• We tend to put whatever is of highest concern (us/earth/god/etc.) at the center of things, thus need to stay open.
• The “self” can be seen as an attractor state: a stable pattern within constant change that a system strives to maintain. This attractor is not chosen but is part of a larger, interconnected process.
• Self is part of an ever larger scale of “goal directed system”, and the system interacts on many scales and “scales” of interconnected system that are dynamic.

Memory, Pregnancy, and Agency

• Infantile “amnesia” may not be a lack of memory but a different *kind* of memory storage at the body level. Explicit recollection may be absent, but the body “remembers.”
• Pregnancy is a universal state of shared embodiment. Two immune systems negotiate within one body, illustrating the fundamental interconnectedness of selves. The first ‘interaction’ a human has in negotiating resource sharing, a key survival.
• Immune system needs to have “me-vs-not-me” early on.
• Inflammtory to settle (build), then stasis (growth), then finally reject (separation of baby and birth).
• First trimester of the pregnancy is when most failures happens, because negotiation/agreement happens here.
• A “self” can be defined as a process with interlocked features: goal pursuit, a self/non-self boundary, and the ongoing interpretation of one’s own memories to create a coherent narrative.
• We are not in complete control of our memories; they are constantly being reconstructed. Free will exists in the long-term, time-extended sense: consistent effort can shape future selves.
• Memories may have agency of their own. Patterns themselves, not just the physical systems they inhabit, may possess goal-directedness. The line between “agent” and “data” is blurry.
• Thought Patterns (especially repeated) may change/create their “host environment”, altering “substrate” and thus itself (memory, or hardware-like system) can be more expressed (through a postive feedback look). This, in effect, allows them to take on attributes of an agent.
• Caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis illustrates that memories persist even through radical physical transformation. However, the *meaning* of the memories must be reinterpreted, not just preserved.
• This dynamic also applies in embryonic systems. There isn’t “literal reading” of instructions. Embryonic systems also “creatively find a new solution”.
• We are always reinterpreting the past and constructing a story, both in our minds and in development. Biology uses its substrate as “affordances,” not fixed instructions. Life is fundamentally a “sense-making process.”
• We use tools in ways our ancestors used, and these tools (patterns of interactions with environment) can be seen in 2 ways.
• The self can be thought of as a carrot cake, with layers overlapping.
• How can we analyze such overlapping objects? “Self” may need something like fractals/etc. that handle these type of systems.
• The “self” might be understood like the concept of ‘attractors’: constant reshaping from dynamic of interconnected goals.
• Self-as-system does not “choose” to come to existence; it exists as part of a longer continuous ‘chain’ from the other, which must first be.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Final Thoughts

• Cross-disciplinary connections are incredibly valuable. The era of strict disciplinary boundaries is becoming less relevant.
• Language shapes our understanding of reality. Embodied ways of understanding may not require the same conceptualization as language-based thinking.
• We should recognize the intelligence of cells and the body, not just the “mind.” The body is not just a vehicle for the mind; they collaborate.
• We should see how other “systems” are connected with “us” through time/systems, and then will give better insight of understanding to that which is not obvious/overlooked, giving insight of our understanding.

“

介绍与对传统假设的挑战

• 神经元及其功能并非大脑独有；在缺乏“大脑”的生物中也可见到类似能力。离子通道、电突触（缝隙连接）以及神经递质，早在多细胞生物出现之前就已存在。
• 生物系统不仅在三维空间中导航，也在各种问题空间中（生理、代谢、基因表达和解剖空间）进行导航。
• “自我”应在与他者的关系中理解，而非孤立地存在。要真正理解第一人称视角（个体自我），就必须重视第二人称视角（互动）。
• 当前心灵哲学和认知科学的一些概念通常是静态、基于成人状态的，这类似于旧式天文学中用“本轮—本轮”的模型来解释太阳系，需要用非常复杂的解释来弥补不合之处。真正需要的是承认动态互联性为根本。
• 意识的“难题”（将物理状态与主观体验联系起来）也许可以通过理解层级之间的互联来切入（物理、化学、生物），而不是简单将其中一个层面简化为另一个。
• 各学科人为地设定了边界，并形成了难以撼动的假设，导致跨学科难以直接通用。但当我们在不同领域交叉运用工具时，往往会获得新发现。

发育、连续性与可说服性

• 胚胎发育（发育过程）证明物理系统与心智之间存在连续性，并无某个“神奇时刻”突然发生转换。最自然的假设应当是连续性。
• “认知术语”可以视作一种“交互协议”，它并非对系统本身的客观描述，而是我们与系统打交道时所用的语言。
• “可说服性”谱系从需要物理改造硬件的系统（时钟）到能对目标做出回应的系统（恒温器）、再到能接受行为引导的系统（狗）、乃至能基于论证就做出改变的人（人类）。
• 这个谱系暗示了实现特定目标所需的工具或交互方式：
  • 对机械时钟：必须重新布线硬件。
  • 对恒温器：可改写其内部目标，交互程度有限。
  • 对狗：通过行为训练工具来达成所需行为，中等程度交互。
  • 对人：只需通过论点或对话就能影响其目标设定；下层维持相对自动运作。
• 将原本在特定领域使用的工具（如行为神经科学的方法）移用到其他对象上（如细胞）可能揭示出意想不到的能力。
• 这强调了交互关系本身的重要性：任何想要利用交互所带来的效用，都需要关注系统与我们如何建立互动。

目标、衰老与开放性

• 所有生命系统都具备维持生存的内在目标——这是更高层、显式目标的基础。
• 去人格化/去现实感也许源于与身体内在目标的脱节，从而让人感到现实不真实。
• 与其追求完美的信息处理，不如关注在不断变化的环境中保持灵活与适应。“卡住”往往意味着缺乏这种灵活性。
• 关于衰老的几种观点：
  • 程序观：进化“希望”年长个体退出以为年轻个体腾出资源。
  • 损伤观：硬件（DNA/组织）损伤随着时间积累，从而削弱系统。
  • 内在观：形态发生系统若无法持续维持目标状态，秩序会退化。目标的丧失会导致系统衰退。
• 衰老或许与形态发生系统的目标导向减弱有关，而不仅是损伤或被进化“设计”为舍弃。系统若在达成既定目标后缺乏新挑战，便会开始退化。
• 生命本质上是开放式的，需要开始（出生）与结束（死亡）。用“永生”来定义生命本身是一种自相矛盾。

视角、互联与自我

• 人类始终从自身视角出发去探究世界，而这一视角也塑造了我们的探究方式。时钟与恒温器实际上是人类建构的概念，而非自然之“类”。
• 我们倾向于将自己或最重要的事物（人/地球/上帝等）放在中心，因此保持开放心态尤为重要。
• “自我”可以被视为系统中的一个吸引子状态：在持续变化中仍然相对稳定，系统会试图保持或回到这一模式。这个吸引子既不是系统自愿选择的，也受到更大互联过程的影响。
• 自我也是一个更大规模“目标导向系统”的一部分；系统在多重层次、在不断变化的互联网络中运作。

记忆、妊娠与能动性

• 幼年失忆症（infantile amnesia）或许并非“没有记忆”，而是以身体层面存储了另一种类型的记忆。虽然没有明确的情景回忆，但身体依旧“记得”。
• 妊娠是一种共用身体的普遍状态。母体与胎儿的免疫系统需要在同一个身体里“谈判”，也彰显了自我之间的根本互联性。这是人第一次在生理层面学会“资源分配谈判”。
• 免疫系统要在早期就分清“自我/非自我”。妊娠会经历初期发炎（嵌合/着床），随后平衡生长，最终分娩时再次分离。
• 妊娠失败多发生在早期，因为那正是双方“谈判”或“达成一致”的关键阶段。
• 一个“自我”可视为同时具备以下特征的过程：具有目标追求、可区分自我/非自我的边界，以及不断诠释自身记忆形成连贯叙事的能力。
• 我们并不能完全控制自己的记忆；它们时时被重构。自由意志在长时程里才更显著：持续努力可塑造未来的自我。
• 记忆本身也可能具备某种能动性。存在的并非只有物理系统，而是包含了可带有目标导向的“模式”。在此，“代理”和“数据”的界线变得模糊。
• 思维模式（尤其在频繁重复时）可改变所处“宿主环境”，因此形成正反馈循环，使它们更易被表达，从而拥有某种“代理”属性。
• 毛毛虫到蝴蝶的转变表明，即使在彻底物理形态改变过程中，记忆依然得以延续，但其意义必须被重新解释，而不只是简单地被“保存”。
• 类似动态在胚胎系统中也存在：并没有所谓对基因“指令”的字面读取，胚胎也在“创造性地”寻求新方案。
• 我们不断地重新诠释过去、构建故事，这在思维和发育过程中皆然。生物利用其所处环境提供的“机会”（affordances）来实现意义，而非执行固定指令。生命本质上是一种“建构意义”的过程。
• 我们的工具和用法，很多都沿袭自祖先，但这些工具（与环境交互的模式）也可以有两种视角来解释。
• “自我”也可类比胡萝卜蛋糕（层层交叠），分析这些重叠对象或许需要像分形等能处理多尺度结构的概念。
• “自我”可被理解为“吸引子”：在多个互通目标的动态中持续重塑。
• 自我作为系统并非“选择”存在；它是更长链条的一部分，由其他先行条件所必需。

跨学科合作与总结

• 跨学科的连接非常宝贵。严格的学科壁垒在当今逐渐失去意义。
• 语言塑造了我们对现实的理解；身体化（embodied）的理解方式未必依赖同样的语言概念来思考。
• 要承认细胞和身体自身也具有智慧，而不仅是“心智”在起作用。身体并非只是心智的“运输工具”，两者相互协作。
• 我们应当关注各种“系统”与“我们”在时间/结构上的关联，这将带来对表面下隐藏内容的更深认知。