Transclude of The-scaling-of-goals-from-cellular-to-anatomical-homeostasis---An-evolutionary-simulation,-experiment-and-analysis#^32a7c8
The collective behaviour of cells is not just an emergent property of simple mechanic rules (like with CA)
For example if you try to deviate them their goal, they are very good at finding new ways to get there.
least action principles are the lowest form of what we mean by goal-directed effort and activity (which is strongly involved in affect and feeling and so on). A universe without least action laws is one where nothing ever happens. → “At least in our world, I don’t think there is a zero (for consciousness / goal-directedness).” - michael levin
There are incredibly minimal kinds of things, only smart enough to follow a gradient (no delayed gratification, no memory), but not no zero:
The question to ask is: What can you depend on? If you build a roller coaster, you can depend on the fact that it will go down the hill / take the path of least action. Incredibly minimal, but already on the spectrum.But there’s more to it:
Why an object (now deserving the name agent) needs to register how well or badly it’s doing is so that it can change its mind. - Mark Solms
You are then not obliged to continue the path you were pursuing.
→ There is a degree of uncertainty being introduced. The system cannot be 100% confident of what it’s doing. Pure local interaction is not enough. It needs to know the context in which it is acting, it’s history of actions… and that can’t be infinite! → This is the size of the cognitive light cone – that you need to consider in order to interact with a system – in levin’s framework.
The bottom-level of this – of free will is random quantum indeterminism, what happens after that is a scaling: Multiple (hierarchical) scales that help you tame that underlying noise and randomness into something that does begin to be causally linked to what was good or bad last time.
→ A higher level system guides a lower level system with some degree of freedom.Mike thinks that some of this might arise without any indeterminism (see his recent research on sorting algos).