References: Richard Watson, Josh Bongard, michael levin
rewatch from min 56 and take notes!!
Agency / free will: Instead of being a consequence of action that happen to you, you want to take actions because of their consequences that haven’t happened yet.
effect→cause, instead ofcause→effect
If there is something that is happening at a regular interval, and there is a consequence of that which happens with a little delay, then if the delay happens to be just a little bit less than the period, it ends up looking like cause and effect are the other way round (cartwheel turning backwards due to stroboscopic effect).
→ If you are the right amount of late, it looks like you are a reaction coming before things instead of afterwards.
→ If the world really is a rotation, then B isn’t just appearing to happen before A, but it is happening before A.
→ With a linear notion of cause, agency / free will is always going to be mysterious. With a circular notion of cause, it is possible to let go of a notion of time going in a particular direction, and just accept that these are all part of a cycle and have the same causal power over every other part of the cycle (all points on the cycle have the same info about all the other points on that cylce).
harmonics come naturally in a circular system:
Units in linear systems are arbitrary, whereas with a circle, the fundamental unit simply is a cycle, and all others are multiples of it..
In enginerring, we keep things separate until you are ready to piece them all together, that’s because else we cannot handle the complexity.
You see this in ML too: Learn a world model, learna vision encoder, learn a language model, … all separate modules and then somehow pieced together.
Biologiy is exactly not that, because every frame of reference that’s involved is co-created with the processes that were happening with in that frame of reference.