DemistifySci Podcast interview with Andrés Gómez Emilsson

Part II: 

My comment:

When I was a kid I designed an 8-bit computer whose state transitions were a function of its global operation. It was very simple. All I did was use memory-mapped I/O registers to control address-decoding logic. At the simplest level this was just a memory management unit where logical addresses mapped to physical memory addresses via whatever the address-decoding logic determined. But then I realised that the memory addresses at which the address-decoding logic registers appeared could themselves be controlled by the address-decoding logic. I didn't build it because the immediately obvious problem was how you could reliably program it. If there were any error in writing the registers then the machine state would have departed from the small subset of states which had deterministic behaviour. But in principle systems like this would have the property that Andrés talks about: their microstate is determined in part by their macrostate. I had never thought of this in those terms before. Thank you!! 

54:30 Michael Levin's ideas are horrifying to me. He has an hypothesis about how biological morphogenesis can be controlled and on this basis he thinks human beings can insert themselves into the root of the tree of life and hitch it to their oxcart, to borrow the earlier metaphor. 

59:18 On evolutionary goals and artificial goals: The anthropologist Gregory Bateson used to talk about evolution as a self-healing tautology. On its own, the idea of natural selection is a tautology: that which survives longest survives longer than that which does not survive so long. He quite explicitly used ideas from the philosophy of mathematics, in particular Russell and Whitehead's theory of types that appears in Principia Mathematica. His book Mind and Nature is a good place to start. 

1:10:52 There is a nascent discipline of psycho-social-physics appearing here. See Psychophysics.

1:14:23 DMT and vascular resonance! See Serotonergic Modulation of Neurovascular Transmission: A Focus on Prejunctional 5-HT Receptors/Mechanisms by Abimael González-Hernández, Bruno A. Marichal-Cancino, Antoinette Maassen VanDenBrink and Carlos M. Villalón and Calcitonin gene-related peptide.

See Switch Angel - Vibe Coding Without AI.

Subscribe to The DemistifySci Podcast. 

See https://clusterfree.org/. 


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