Cambrian explosion

analogical reasoning

Cambrian is kind of a sensory 00:13:18 it's kind of a a a Renaissance of uh sensory richness and it presents the sensory World in three dimensions which introduces certain challenges to animals and in the case of invertebrates you can 00:13:34 see there was a verb veritable explosion of of invertebrates and in in particular invertebrates with different kinds of eyes

the idea of evolutionary convergence is relatively simple it's the idea that similar environmental conditions can give rise 00:09:05 to similar biological adaptations

Dr Dave David Edelman

an open problem really is and a 00:44:38 really good question is how we are defining a word and the unit the unit of analysis and so at the moment we are using our human discretion to to determine this in many cases like where 00:44:52 does a single Beluga call start and end um we're limited by our own perceptual abilities and what we can hear and and see in a spectrogram and so that does leave some room for error

ethics and safety and that is absolutely a concern and something we have a 00:38:29 responsibility to be thinking about and we want to ensure that we stakeholders conservationists Wildlife biologists field biologists are working together to Define an 00:38:42 ethical framework and inspecting these models

if you have a data set or a study system 00:31:22 or an idea that you'd like to discuss with ESP we would love to work with you here's a link to our website

using generative models to conduct interactive playbacks 00:26:19 with other species

Spanish carrion Crews

one of the projects that we've taken on within the last year is studying vocal signaling in beluga whales

we have built the first and only foundation model for Bio Acoustics masato hagiwara one of our senior researchers has named it AVS and it has been trained with 5 000 hours of sound 00:17:26 that include vocalizations from many different taxa

Beyond just audio recordings so for that reason two of our senior 00:15:02 researchers Benjamin Hoffman and Maddie cusumano have also developed a biologer benchmark data set and so a biologer is an animal born tag like the one in the image on the right here 00:15:14 and these produce very valuable data because they can inform us about animal ecophysiology and allow us to improve conservation by monitoring animal movements and behaviors with very high 00:15:27 resolution

beans and 00:13:54 this is a benchmark of animal sounds and it's a collection of audio recordings from more than 250 species and this large aggregate data set is a way to 00:14:07 test tools for classification and detection and these are outstanding problems in bioacoustics that we desperately need solutions to

this other sort of development also happened in the last couple years just clip models um and this enables us to do predictive 00:09:47 modeling across domains um what do I mean by that it means that you can understand and provide the model information in one modality and it can essentially translate it into another

this Earth shot as we call it that we're aiming for at Earth species project is for machine learning to decode non-human communication and then that new knowledge and understanding that results 00:06:42 from that would reset our relationship with the rest of Nature and you know this is a to me a really compelling as a potential unlock in addressing the biodiversity and climate crisis that 00:06:56 we're saying to help us find new ways to Coexist on the planet with other species

I’m seeking to work with potential customers, partners, and gain support from investors, and people in general, in order to secure some income to fund development and ensure long-term sustainability of development efforts.

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when building on unenclosable P2P systems like Holochain, it’s actually possible to have it both ways: clean-energy projects that have the resources for large-scale impact and are not at risk of becoming corrupt in protection of proprietary business interests.

imagine a world of unenclosable carriers in which consumers are empowered to reinvent incentive structures that encourage the existence of the nutrition they actually want

JustOne Organics Living Economy System (JOOLES)

supply-chain transparency and consumer information works best — and really only works at scale — in the case of carrier unenclosability.

garnering space at grocery chains, even at the more principled ones such as Whole Foods, often requires 6-figure slotting fees and the ability to produce at massive scale.

Independent family farming used to be much more common [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. But continued enclosures and increased centralization throughout the food markets have made it more difficult for farmers to survive without growing big. “Get big or get out,” said Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture in 1973.

In this paper, we reconsider the major events in the history of life on Earth, from the first cells to the recent technological developments of human societies. We focus primarily on which METs identified by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995) have produced MSTs, either directly or in combination with MCTs and catalysts. In reexamining these major transitions, we also highlight the importance of information for both the METs and the resulting MSTs, and speculate upon the role that Level V dark information may play in a future major transition.

We define a FET as either a MET or a MCT that is absolutely necessary, yet insufficient alone, to set into motion a cascade of events that result in a MST.

Eukaryotic single-celled organisms appear in the fossil record perhaps by 1.6 BYA (Knoll et al., 2006). Yet for a “boring billion” years of evolutionary history, they remain minor components in bacterial-dominated ecosystems before explosively radiating as large, multicellular species in an Ediacaran and Cambrian MST. Eukaryotes are obviously essential for this MST, as all animals, plants and fungi are eukaryotes. However, the initial appearance of eukaryotic cells seems insufficient for a MST.

Whereas MSTs happen to ecosystems, METs and MCTs happen to species.

We define such remarkable morphological adaptations as Major Competitive Transitions (MCTs), while acknowledging the definition’s subjective nature.

We retain Szathmáry’s (2015) definition of Major Evolutionary Transitions (METs) as being Fusions and Information Leaps, and introduce the term Major System Transitions (MSTs) to describe large-scale ecosystem transformations that appear irreversible.

we: (1) Introduce a more inclusive set of terminology to improve future discourse on major transitions (Figure 1), and (2) explore how major ecosystem transitions arise within broad frameworks

there are two broad classes of adaptations that qualify as gains in “organismal complexity” and constitute METs.

We currently have a climate movement and a biodiversity movement. These are for the most part, two separate movements. As our understandings grow and spread of how important biodiversity is to climate, these two movements can merge and synergize.

Many daisy, rabbit, and fox types were first brought together by Lovelock to create a numerical model for biodiversity. In the real world, biological systems are continually being perturbed by the cycles of day and night, the turn of the seasons, changes in the climate, and innumerable other factors. When a Daisy-world in equilibrium is perturbed by the introduction of a herbivore or a sudden change in solar input, a transient burst of different daisy types appears until the system restabilizes, with new types dominant

The herbivore-daisy relationship is an example of a predator-prey relationship, and these relationships are known to oscillate in population quite a bit

In the Amazon and other regions under threat, destroying biodiversity will reduce the reservoir of apparently redundant of rare species. Among these may be those able to flourish and sustain the ecosystem when the next perturbation occurs

on the traditional empiricist account we do not have direct access to the facts of the external world 00:11:03 that is we do not experience externality directly but only immediately not immediately but immediately because between us and the external world are those what do you call them oh yes 00:11:18 sense organs and so the question is how faithfully they report what is going on out there well to raise the question how faithful is the sensory report 00:11:30 of the external world is to assume that you have some reliable non-sensory way of answering that question that's the box you can't get out of and so there is always this gap 00:11:42 between reality as it might possibly be known by some non-human creature and reality as empirically sampled by the senses whose limitations and distortions are very well 00:11:56 known but not perfectly classified or categorized or or measured

when one's reason has learned completely to understand its own power in respect of objects which can be 00:19:40 presented to it in experience it should easily be able to determine with completeness and certainty the extent and the limits of its attempted employment beyond the bounds of experience

the kandy and 00:18:29 numena are not entirely removed from the lockheed real essences

what is there now locke surely one of the fathers of modern modern day british empiricism 00:15:12 was it pains to argue that the endless metaphysical disputes about the real essence of things were idle to begin with because we lack the capacity to know the real essence of 00:15:26 anything all we have is what lock referred to as the nominal essence of things it's the way we in virtue of the way we perceive and and and cogitate 00:15:40 it's the way we come to label things people and carpets and light bulbs and computers we give things names based on general characteristics and it's 00:15:52 largely the the shared experiences of a community that settles on the meaning of a term as for the real essence of things that's beyond the reach beyond beyond the reach of our our very 00:16:05 senses now how does lock come to a conclusion like that well he is an older friend of that very clever young fellow ah 00:16:16 isaac what's his name and according to newton

what metaphysical foundation at once respects the achievements of science and provides a grounding so that science itself 00:14:18 understands the basis upon which its claims ultimately depend one might argue that that is the project of the first critique

virtually every sentence of the critique 00:04:20 presents difficulties attempts have been made to provide commentaries comprehensively illuminating uh comprehensively illuminating each individual section of the work 00:04:33 and some of these run to several volumes without getting near its end and then one commentator com noting what it's like to read the critique of pure reason says it is quote 00:04:46 a disagreeable task because the work is dry obscure opposed to all ordinary notions and long-winded as well who said that 00:04:59 kant

can't face this in his own time after the first edition which came out in 1781 it was obvious in no time that both friends and critics 00:02:50 systematically misunderstood what he was trying to convey

the human mind will ever 00:00:59 give up metaphysical research is as little to be expected as that we should prefer to give up breathing all together to avoid inhaling impure air there will therefore always be 00:01:13 metaphysics in the world nay everyone especially every man of reflection will have it and for want of a recognized standard will shape it for himself after his own 00:01:24 pattern

even as you set out to ignore metaphysics you're probably engaged in some form of manifest physical speculation

The field of sensory ecology is based on studying the sensory systems of animals in order to understand what they perceive in their environments and how that is going to affect their interactions with that environment (Dangles et al. 2009).

VARIABILITY IN SENSORY ECOLOGY: EXPANDING THE BRIDGEBETWEEN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY

in the Middle Ages, and still in the usual meanings of words in English, transcendent and transcendental are almost synonymous. It means beyond, beyond what? Beyond appearances. Beyond experience. Something that explains experience, but it's not directly experienced. But Kant distinguished between the two meanings. 00:08:30 He said, as soon as we posit with the unconditioned, outside of all possible experience, the ideas become transcendent. So this is the usual meaning of transcendent. Kant uses transcendental in a completely different sense. It's not what is beyond appearances. But what is below appearances. And becomes the condition of possibility 00:08:58 of these appearances. It's from where appearances appear. That is the new sense of transcendental by Kant.

a transcendental is something that is, or not a thing, of course, but it's very well known and it has been well known for a very long time.

So whatever problem you have in your knowledge, and suddenly you think, oh, that doesn't fit, there is a problem, and so on, what do you do? You stop projecting your attention onto the set of theoretical object you have, and you come back where you are. Where are you? In the laboratory observing dots on the screen. 00:24:54 And then you think, is my picture adequate to the dots I'm seeing now in the screen? That's what occurs at each scientific revolution. Suddenly, if things, scientists say, poof, finished, all this theory, I have to think everything again from what is given to me.

Electrons, protons, quarks, and so on, what they turn out to be is just inferences that we do from marks on the screens of our apparatuses in the laboratory essentially.

the missing element in science is precisely the realization that all these objects are seen from somewhere. So, from somewhere in a very elusive sense, namely, from this famous aware spot, but also, in a very concrete sense, 00:22:19 all these things are seen from our everyday world, the life world.

The epoche is always performed and we don't know it. We don't realize it. 00:19:42 This was said, for instance, by Michel Henry. But maybe even more strikingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, The Transcendence Of The Ego

In fact, it's very easy to perform the epoche

when you have lost 00:17:54 the world by the epoche, you can conquer it anew in a universal self-examination. What does it mean? It just means that when you analyze what is left after the epoche, you see all the processes by which we tend to reconstruct our belief in and extend in the world

according to Husserl, the epoche is dramatic. It's something that changes suddenly your state of consciousness. It's not something cheap. He says, phenomenology implies a complete 00:17:02 self-transformation which can be compared to a religious conversion. You see things completely differently when you have performed an epoche. This epoche is radical. It's immediate and so on.

Buddhism has no transcendent god, but it explores the transcendental field of consciousness. How do you do that? How do you lend into this field that is to be explored? To do that, you have to perform the epoche.

He concealed the origin of this knowledge 00:23:38 by trying to show how you can derive the life of the nowhere out of the nowhere's intellectual byproduct.

according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.

Husserl discovered Buddhism about, at about 1924. So he was given the book. A translation of the Sutta Pitaka in German. And the author of the translation asked him to give a command, a preface. 00:13:52 And in his preface, Husserl wrote the following sentence. Buddhism looks purely inward, in vision and deed. It is not transcendent but transcendental.

The case of experience is more tricky because there is no way to get a third person view of experience. 00:06:39 And therefore, you only have experience seen from the first person standpoint. Yet, there are features that are typical of this experience. For instance, the analog of a vanishing point is called by philosophers such as Heidegger, situatedness.

what about the visual field itself? Can it reveal anything about its being seen by an eye? Yes. Why, because there is a structure of a vanishing point and vanishing lights, 00:06:14 converging towards the vanishing point. The vanishing point is the expression in the visual field of it being seen from somewhere. Namely, from an eye.

several varieties of blind spots.

The creator, he said, 00:01:17 wanted to look away from himself. That's why he created the world. You could just revert to the proposition and say, okay, since we are so absolved into the world, we tend to look away from ourselves. And it's exactly what we want to revert now. How can we become of this blind spot? 00:01:40 How can we become aware of the blind spot of science? That's my question

From the very beginning, his work has been guided by what Edmund Husserl called the mothers of knowledge. Namely, the dynamics of lived embodied experience,

what can you say about the transcendental? Can you speak of it? Can you use words to describe it? Can you characterize the condition of possibility of it? 00:09:24 And Kant says no. This, namely, the transcendental, cannot be further analyzed or answered because it is of such condition that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects. So, the transcendental itself cannot be an objective thought. It is a condition for any objective thought.

the way you say hello in humpback whale is oh

given this motion for an animal what sound might it 00:35:42 make an example two whales coming together what sound do they make that might mean hello if a whale Dives what sound would the 00:35:54 other whales have to make to make that whale dive and that would mean maybe it means dive maybe it means there is danger up here maybe it means there's food now there but has something to do with diving

AI used to have separate fields this is great when I get to reuse slides um speech recognition computer vision robotics music generation were all different fields that changed also in 00:30:21 2017 when they became one thing language

this is just a hypothesis there's a thing called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics like why is it the case that you go off and you invent complex numbers and quaternions and do abstract algebra and somehow that has something 00:33:26 to say about the physical world still a mystery but there's an unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning there is no a priori reason why DNA and images and video and speech synthesis and fmri 00:33:40 should share a kind of universal shape but they do and I think that's telling us something very deep about the structure of the universe

this is AVS the very first Foundation model for animal communication

in 2018 you know it was around four percent of papers were based on Foundation models in 2020 90 were and 00:27:13 that number has continued to shoot up into 2023 and at the same time in the non-human domain it's essentially been zero and actually it went up in 2022 because we've 00:27:25 published the first one and the goal here is hey if we can make these kinds of large-scale models for the rest of nature then we should expect a kind of broad scale 00:27:38 acceleration

this is like 00:24:33 where this like cusp of a moment as we move this from able to work with lab-like data to real life data that we're about to have access sort of like to the new telescope to look out at 00:24:45 the universe and then to discover all the things that were invisible to us before

science progresses generally not because of a thing that we see but because we increase our ability to perceive

these guys are lemurs 00:19:09 taking hits off of centipedes so they bite centipedes literally get high and they go into these trance-like states I'm sure this is not at all familiar to anyone here 00:19:24 um they get super cuddly uh and then later wake up and go their way but they are seeking a kind of transcendent State of Consciousness Apes will spin they will hang on Vines and spin to get dizzy 00:19:37 and then Dolphins will intentionally inflate puffer fish to get high pass them around in the ultimate puff puff pass right many mammals seek a Transcendent 00:19:57 altered state of being and if they communicate they may well communicate about it

this is a pilot whale 00:20:12 carrying her dead Young this is week three so grief is an experience that's shared

whales and dolphins have had culture passed down vocally for 34 million years humans have only been speaking vocally impacted on culture for like 200 000 years tops 00:17:16 like and that which is oldest correlates with that which is wisest

can we build one of these kinds of shapes for animal communication

pretty much every human language that's been tried ends up fitting in a kind of universal human meaning shape 00:15:40 which I think is just so profound especially in this time of such deep division that there is a universal hidden structure underlying us all

AI turns semantic relationships into geometric relationships

the shape which is say Spanish can't possibly be the same shape as English right if you talk to anthropologists they would say different cultures different cosmologies 00:14:45 different ways of viewing the world different ways of gendering verbs obviously going to be different shapes but you know the AI researchers were like whatever let's just try and they took the shape which is Spanish 00:14:59 and the shape which is English and they literally rotated them on top of each other and the point which his dog ended up in the same spot in both

esearchers in 2019 did this at University of Tel Aviv and they took a primrose flower and they would play different sounds 00:06:03 to the flower and they would play you know like traffic noises low noises bat noises High noises and then the sounds of approaching pollinator and only when they approached or played the sounds of an approaching pollinator 00:06:15 did the flowers respond and they respond by producing more and sweeter nectar within just a couple of seconds right so the flowers hear the B through its petals 00:06:26 and get excited okay so plants can here

another incredible study that the same university did right after where they're like okay but can they speak and so they 00:06:42 actually stressed out tobacco plants um they would either like cut them or dehydrate them sort of plant torture um and when they did the more dehydrated that the plants got the more they would emit sound 00:06:55 um these and not quietly it's at the sound of human hearing um just up at 50 or 60 kilohertz

Addiction, distraction, disinformation, polarisation and radicalisation; all these "hurricanes", Mr Raskin and Mr Harris argue, have one common cause. They come from the fact that we now spend large portions of our lives inside artificial social systems, which are run by private companies for profit.

"Unless you've felt it, unless you've cried over the fact that we really thought we were making the world a better place with the internet..." He pauses. "We 100 per cent believed that." Humanity, he says, is living through "two super old stories. One: be careful what you wish for, because you'll get it... And two: creators losing control of their creations."  He should know, because he is one of those Dr Frankensteins. As the son of Silicon Valley royalty (or at least nobility), he spent years merrily building technology that he believed was changing the world. It did, but not in the way that he hoped.

we we are made of of a kind of nesting doll architecture not just structurally I mean that part's obvious that each thing is made of smaller things but in fact 00:01:58 that each of these layers has their own problem-solving capacity uh in many cases various kinds of ability to learn from experience and and uh the the 00:02:10 competencies of various kinds and this turns out to be very important

It is a major mistake in the current climate action debates, when big actors with interests in the oil, gas, and coal industry, use investments in nature based solutions or technologies for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), as “offsets” for the inability to phase out fossil-fuels. This will not work. Science is clear on this point – we need to phase out fossil-fuels AND restore nature to secure carbon sinks in soils and forests, AND to invest in CDR technologies. Additionality is the word of the day, not substitution.

The remaining global carbon budget for a 50% chance of holding the 1.5°C line is down to crumbs, adding up to a meagre 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 6-7 years of global emissions at the current pace. This gives us no choice, but to have all countries, businesses, citizens across the entire world working collectively and unified to solve the planetary crisis.

We cannot continue with double standards on fossil-fuels and renewable energy, or as a majority of countries are doing today – continue to sit on the fence, with green rhetoric but grey actions, which adds to the perception of widespread greenwashing.

What we need here, with a Schumacher Action Lab, is not a traditional organization, but rather a brave organization that can help convene, host, and galvanize a larger movement.

. The subterranean Republic of Commoners needs to step into the light of day.

The problem is that this pluriverse of system-change players remains largely disorganized. They are marginalized and eclipsed by the raw power of the market/state system.

In a sense, there is already a parallel polis in many countries, including The Netherlands. It’s just that the people living in this parallel culture haven’t yet discovered each other.

A parallel polis is not an escapist fantasy of retreating to communes and gated communities. It’s about building horizontal, convivial relationships with one another, which over time can give rise to a prefigurative new order. In a parallel polis, people can start where they are – with their local circumstances and personal talents and shared needs – and begin do what needs to be done.

I draw inspiration and guidance from Václav Havel, the Czech playwright.  When he and other cultural dissidents in the 1970s faced a totalizing, repressive system impervious to change – in his case, the totalitarian Czech government – Havel had a counter-intuitive response.  He called for the development of a "parallel polis." A parallel polis is a community-created safe space in which people can mutually support each other, directly produce what they need, and build a kind of shadow society – outside of the machinery of the dominant political system.

Open Source Models

Emergence is how lifecreates radical change and takesthings to scale

A major evolutionary transition in individuality is defined by two conditions

How are the potentially selfish interests of individuals overcome to form mutually dependent cooperative groups? We can then ask whether there are any similarities across transitions in the answers to this problem.

i find it very hard to imagine if we if somebody claimed to have a a good theory of consciousness and i 00:29:43 were to ask them okay well what is the prediction of your theory in this particular case i don't know what the format of the answer looks like because numbers and the typical things we get don't do the trick they you know they're sort of third person descriptions

as andy clark puts it quite succinctly is why do we spend so much time puzzling about why we are aware

what do you think about the so-called hard problem is there in fact a hard problem

Dark sides of REP

renewable energy prosumerism (REP)