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Warm Greetings to All,

Join Plato's Cave philosophers and Orlando Stoics on Zoom this Sunday morning, Sept 20 at 9:00. (Informal chat at 9:00, forum at 9:15)

NOTE: New Applications for Plato's Cave membership are currently closed. The Plato's Cave forum will soon be discontinued on this meetup platform for reasons stated in my message to members.
Links and program information may be accessed through our partner organization, the Orlando Stoics meetup, at https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

Active Plato's Cave members can temporarily reserve a place, receive zoom login information on this site, and receive e-mail confirmation, until September 2026.

Every Sunday, a new forum. Our meeting starts at 9:00 AM with friendly wakeup chat; then our select topic panel briefly introduces the subject at 9:15, followed by member discussion and Q&A.
Volunteer introduction panelists will meet following each forum to develop the next program;.

This Sunday - The Agent

What are we actually building? Every intelligence we know of comes inside something that keeps itself alive. This week moves from a principle to an application to a measurement, so we end with a number rather than an opinion. We begin with Philip W. Anderson, a Bell Labs physicist who in 1972 published a four-page essay in Science called "More Is Different." Five years later he would share the Nobel Prize. Everyone agrees, he said, that a cell obeys chemistry and chemistry obeys the laws of particles. But it does not follow that you can start from particles and build your way up. Knowing the rules of one level does not let you predict the next. At each step, genuinely new rules appear, and finding them is as fundamental as anything in physics. Taking a thing apart and building it up are not the same job. So if we want to know what an agent is, we cannot just study its parts.

Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, tells us where to look instead. A living thing, he argues, is not an object. It is a pattern that maintains itself. Your atoms get replaced; you don't. A cell builds its own membrane, and the membrane is what makes the cell possible. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela called this autopoiesis: self-making. Frank adds the decisive move. You can describe a star in terms of information, but the star never uses any. Life is the only thing in the universe that uses information for its own purposes instead of having purposes installed by someone else. See his 13.8 columns at Big Think and The Blind Spot (2024), written with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson.

Finally, Damian Sowinski and colleagues, Frank among them, measured it. Building on a 2018 theory by Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert, they modeled a forager hunting for food and fed noise into its senses. Cut its connection to the environment a little and it copes fine. Cut past a certain point and survival collapses. They call that edge the semantic threshold: the part of what a creature knows about its world that it actually needs to stay alive. The paper appeared in PRX Life in 2023. Move a bird a thousand miles and it's finished. Move a rock and nothing has changed, because the rock was never using the information. Now ask it of a machine: scramble its world, and is anything lost for it?

Links

Philip W. Anderson

Adam Frank

Damian Sowinski and colleagues

Hosted by:
Plato's Cave and Orlando Stoics
https://www.meetup.com/platoscave/
https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

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Related topics

Atheist
Free Thinker
Skeptics
Philosophy
Spirituality

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