Michael Levin and John Vervaeke on Free Will, Character, Attention and Causal Relevance

A meeting of two great minds moving from considerations of choice and agency to free will and wisdom. Books and authors mentioned follow timestamps. If you prefer audio only, check out Spotify or Apple podcast of The Meaning Code.
Michael Levin and John Vervaeke, Part 2 - Free Will, Constraints and Causal Relevance

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:30 Decision making and competent behavior do not imply high level cognition
05:20 The value of higher levels is context-dependent
06:30 Be careful not to all into patterns that lead to collectivism
07:07 Composite agents harness their parts toward an action they wouldn't normally be doing on their own. The scaling of cognition.
09:30 A. Juarrero's notion of constraint. Causes are events, happenings. Constraints are conditions and orderings of probability.
Bottom up causation, top down constraints.
Aristotle's impact on Juarrero: participating the tree structure.
Hierarchies presume a single ontological relation.
We have to get beyond simple models mapping onto each other.
Two kinds of constraints: Selective (reduce probabilities) and Enabling (increase probabilities) counterbalance each other.
14:03 Emergence without emanation is epiphenomenalism: an ontological oxymoron, a monster.
We are crypto privileging the level at which we do science.
16:22 We need to acknowledge the importance of the higher levels, but there is not a simple mapping.
18:00 A symphony of choices over time. Constraints as a way to generate creativity.
Selection is a way to ignore stuff in order to prevent combinatorial explosion.
21:00 Acknowledging continuity - the problem with extending agency all th way down.
Deep identities hypothesis
23:45 Self-constraints are related to behavior shaping
24:30 Choice, agency, decision making as a continuum.
What is a decision?
It is a decision to the extent that you need to consider a radius of events in space and time to figure out what just happened.
31:45 Not just explained by local forces. Distiinction between causation and causal relevance.
What caused the sinking of the Titanic?
33:00 If we allow choice to map onto the causal event....
We need a sensitivity to causal relevance
34:52 the idea of will goes alll the way down to primitive agents
37:02 I am an agent that does things, using the same coarse graining on myself.
The need to tell stories, to build internal models.
38:25 The basic physics of being an object.
Active inference is also for cells and molecular networks.
The critical thing is the difference that makes a difference.
40:05 What does attention look like in the molecular pathway in a cell?
41:20 Will, active inferencing, free energy all bound up together.
45:13 When you zoom in to any event, there are only 2 choices.
Determinism or true quantum randomness.
If you zoom in... no big shocker! If you zoom in, all you see is physics.
Free action (free will) is stretched over long periods of time.
47:30 Free will is exercised over years in small increments
50:00 Free will only applies to extended beings.

From here, they go into a discussion of wisdom.

New paper by Michael Levin, et Al:

https://mindrxiv.org/wemr6


Books mentioned by John:
Shaun Gallagher: Enactivist Intervention
Brian Cantwell Smith: On the Origin of Objects
Alice Juarrero: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26272... (paper on constraints)