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Platonic Space is the core concept of a hypothesis put forward by Michael Levin in which physical systems are interfaces that enable “patterns” of varying complexity, which exist in a non-physical, ordered space, to manifest in the physical world.
I would rather start with the presumption that these kinds of patterns form an ordered space, with a metric that enables systematic, rational investigation – a research program that facilitates discovery. We need to understand the contents and structure of that space, and the ways in which the objects we build can pull down desired (and undesired) patterns from that space.
A way of thinking about it is that physical systems – machines, computers, embryos, biobots, etc. are pointers to patterns in that Platonic space. They are interfaces through which these patterns ingress into the physical world. Thus, the long-term research program is to understand and exploit the mapping between the pointers we make and the patterns of form and behavior that appear.
Therefore, I hypothesize that: (1) instances of embodied cognition likewise ingress from a Platonic space, which contains not only low-agency patterns like facts about triangles and prime numbers, but also higher agency ones such as kinds of minds; (2) we take seriously for developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics; (3) what evolution (and bioengineering, and possibly AI) produces are pointers into that Platonic space – physical interfaces that enable the ingression of specific patterns of body and mind.
Understanding the mapping between the architecture of physical embodiments and the patterns to which they point has massive implications for evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, AI, and the ethics of synthbiosis with the forthcoming immense diversity of morally important beings.- Copied from thoughtforms.life
These specific forms are encoded in very short formulas in complex numbers, and can be revealed by a simple algorithm. The fact that this highly complex pattern is indicated by a very compact description provides an un-ending richness from a small seed. I propose that it’s better to think of it not as a kind of infinite compression, but rather as the function serving as an index or a pointer into a morphospace of possible shapes.
What sets the nature of this shape – where does it come from? There is no history of selection, no prior events in our universe that determine it.
Perhaps patterns can span across the spectrum of persuadability: they can be static, active (as in Grim’s logic patterns), or possibly agential. How to conceptualize agential patterns? By remembering that we, ourselves, are patterns – temporary self-organizing patterns that hold together for a time within metabolic and other media, and manage to exert cognition, agency, and consciousness. Why couldn’t Platonic space contain patterns that are intelligent and active to some degree, like the specific kinds of network structures that have been shown to have the simple goal-directedness of attractors and self-assembly capabilities or even capacity for Pavlovian conditioning? What if some of the Platonic patterns that matter for biology are, themselves, intelligent to a degree?
The relationship between mind and matter (of the brain for example) is proposed to be the same as the relationship between Platonic patterns and the physical objects they inform (or more accurately, in-form).
Every analogy has limitations and no doubt the pointer metaphor will fail at some point, but the aspects of the pointer analogy I wish to emphasize are: 1) as with pointers into a rich informational medium, you get more out than you put in, 2) the mapping between the interface you make and what comes through it is not linear or simple and must be investigated, and 3) in order to learn to call up the patterns we want, we will have to look beyond the pointer toward the structure of the space into which it points.
On my view, mind precedes and is a superset of life, but we call “living” those thing which are very good at scaling up the lowly competencies of their parts into aligned collective intelligences with bigger cognitive light cones that project into new spaces to which the parts have no access, thus bringing down new patterns and increasingly more sophisticated cognitive agents all of which coexist in one material embodiment.
There has been no convincing explanation of why the meandering trial-and-error of mutations and selection would have a monopoly on making new minds, but it is a common opinion that life is a discrete natural kind and that machines do not have the magic.
Machines driven by algorithms do the thing the algorithm makes them do; that part is not what we mean by mind, agency, or consciousness, and organicists are correct in rejecting the computationalist perspective in which mind arises because of the steps of an explicit algorithms. But they are wrong in thinking this is the end of the story: machines (whether meaty or silicon-based) also do other things that are not in the algorithm, and these things are not just unpredictable complexity, it is emergent intelligence. It is those behaviors – allowed by the algorithm but not directly prescribed by it – that correspond to the freedom (physically non-determined) or secret sauce that we seek when trying to understand how free minds can supervene on chemically-determined substrates in the case of living beings.
On this view, algorithmic machines and biochemical life are on exactly the same spectrum, having in common the ability to go beyond the facts of physical or algorithmic implementation because both are just pointers/interfaces to patterns that ingress in a way that results in getting more out than we put in.
This part of the framework (proposal that the Platonic space contains high-agency patterns, not just low-agency ones) is even more radical than the core idea of diverse intelligence (minds all the way down into pre-biotic living material) because it posits agency in the non-physical patterns themselves – it’s not physical living agents that have a mind partly because they draw on computations in a non-physical space (as if that weren’t weird enough), it’s that the patterns themselves are the agent, with the physical body being an (important but not primary) scratchpad that allows them to project effort and experience (consciousness) into a physical world.
This view implies that we don’t “make” intelligence; but with natural and engineering activities, we invite it to temporarily inhabit various embodiments.