BI 190 Luis Favela: The Ecological Brain

[00:00:03] Luis: When we’re thinking about, you know, mindedness and intelligent behavior, I don’t think that nature carves its joints at the brain and at the body and then at the environment. I think that it’s a flowing between them.

Yeah. It’s a coordination between low dimensional neural states, low dimensional qua synergy states of the body, and then low dimensional features of the environment. And that’s what gives rise to mindedness, intelligence.

[00:00:39] Paul: Hello, good people. Welcome to brain inspired. I’m Paul. Today, my guest is Luis Favela. Louis, as he’s sometimes called, is an associate professor at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part many things. And on this episode, we discuss his new book, the Ecological Unifying the Sciences of brain, body, and environment. In the book, Louis presents his neuroecological Nexus theory, or next for short, which, as the subtitle says, proposes a way forward to tie together our brains, our bodies, and the environment.

Namely, it has a lot to do with the complexity sciences and manifolds which we discuss. But the book doesn’t just present his next theory. Among other things, it presents a rich historical look into why ecological psychology and neuroscience haven’t been exactly friendly over the years in terms of how to explain our behaviors, the role of brains in those explanations, how to think about what minds are, and so on. And the book suggests how the two fields can get over their differences and be friends moving forward. And I’ll just say it’s written in a very accessible manner, really gently guiding the reader through many of the core concepts and science that have shaped ecological psychology and neuroscience. And for that reason alone, I highly recommend it. Okay, so we talk about a bunch of topics in the book, how Louis thinks. And Louis gives us some great background and historical lessons along the way in the show notes, I link to the book and his website, and those are at Braininspired co podcast 190. You can support brain inspired through Patreon to get full episodes and join the discord community with like minded folks, or just to show appreciation. All right, I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad Louie was here. Enjoy.

[00:02:48] Paul: Louie. I got the book.

For some reason. I’ve had, there have been a multitude of, like, just good looking covers recently, and this is a good looking cover. I mean, obviously it’s colorful, but it also illustrates the concepts that you’re aiming for in the book. Were you involved in designing the COVID I was.

[00:03:08] Luis: And often at night I tell myself I think I wrote the book just so I can have that cover.

[00:03:15] Paul: Are you an artist?

[00:03:16] Luis: I’m not an artist, but this is work by an artist I really like. And if you don’t know him, doctor Greg Dunn. D u n n. As the artist, he very kindly allowed license that piece. So Greg Dunn, I think, is very interesting because he’s a trained neuroscientist who decided he wanted to go into art.

And his favorite inspiration is the brain and the nervous system. So he’s done incredible work.

[00:03:44] Paul: Does he do all the detailed neural. Like, the neuron. Detailed pictures. Okay. I know that artist. I didn’t. I don’t think I knew the name.

[00:03:52] Luis: Yeah. And I think one of his most famous pieces, called Brainbow, like Rainbow, and it’s like a side cut of the brain showing all the pieces. But I believe. Paul, you’re in Pittsburgh now, is that right?

[00:04:05] Paul: Oh, yeah. I was gonna ask you if you. This Pittsburgh. I am in Pittsburgh, yeah.

[00:04:09] Luis: So, at Carnegie Mellon, I think they hired him. I think they had, like, some new center for neuro something or other. And he painted, like. He provided paintings for, like, their entryway and stuff like that.

[00:04:19] Paul: So I need to get over there. I’m at Carnegie Mellon, but I’m in the basement of this really old, dingy building, so there’s not a lot of stuff like that I thought that he actually did some work for. So I went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, and I thought he did a little work for them in the CNBC, which is a joint CMU program. Anyway, yeah. So maybe I’ll link to his stuff in the show notes. I assume he has a website with his website.

[00:04:46] Luis: Yeah, he does. Yeah. It’s great. So I think Doctor Dunn is awesome, and thanks again if he listens to this.

[00:04:53] Paul: So, do you miss Pittsburgh?

[00:04:56] Luis: I do. So I’ve been out there for a fellowship at the center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and I’ve been out there a number of times for conferences, and I have some collaborators out there. So, yeah, I really like Pittsburgh.

[00:05:11] Paul: Yeah. I actually work right next to the Cathedral of learning, where you were, I believe, for your kids.

[00:05:16] Luis: Yeah, exactly there. Yeah.

[00:05:18] Paul: Okay. So you wrote this book, the Ecological Brain, subtitled, unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Behavior. And in the book, the sort of penultimate thing you do is. Well, it’s all in service of describing and fleshing out your next theory, the neuroecological nexus theory, which you have abbreviated as next.

So I will very briefly say that one of the aims of the next theory is to unify ecological psychology and neuroscience, which in the past have been disparate I don’t know if that’s an understatement or at odds with each other. Why did you feel the need to develop this kind of theory?

[00:06:12] Luis: Yeah, yeah. Thanks. So one tiny, minor correction in the direction of grandiosity. So the subtitles unifying the sciences of brain, body, and environment.

[00:06:22] Paul: What did I say mine?

[00:06:24] Luis: Behavior.

[00:06:24] Paul: Oh, I said behavior.

[00:06:25] Luis: Okay, yeah, yeah, behavior just, you know, that just falls under it. I’m not bringing in the whole kitten caboodle environment.

[00:06:31] Paul: Sorry. I’m sorry. I missed.

[00:06:34] Luis: No, that’s fine.

Yeah. So, yeah, so, I mean, the main kind of driving point, motivation for the book is you’ve got these two ways of approaching, broadly speaking, intelligent behavior, how to explain these things scientifically, and you essentially got one that focuses on the scale of the body and the environment. And you have another one that, again, broadly speaking, focuses on the little stuff like neurons and stuff like that for driving intelligent behavior. Of course, neurons are part of the body, and bodies are part of environment, but where is the action really, at?

These two approaches have commitments, conceptual commitments, theoretical commitments, and methodological commitments that have put them at odds with each other.

So I can say a little bit about what I think those commitments are.

[00:07:27] Paul: Let me ask you before you do that. Yeah, let’s get into that. But I think you just said that these are both ways of understanding intelligence. I may have misheard you, but what is the target of next? Is it the mind? Is it intelligence?

So, for example, you don’t define mind, uh, in the book, obviously, but in a sense, I’m not sure if you’re trying to redefine the way that mind is, uh, now kind of usually thought of as just being a product of the brain or. Or move the goalpost or put it in its proper place, or you tell me, what is the target of. Of next?

[00:08:10] Luis: Oh, Paul, this. This is getting nothing past you. That’s right. I did not define mind, and I did that intentionally because I didn’t want people to get hooked on what their preferred definition of mind is or what the purview of a mind science would be. So I tried to be pretty broad to include things like goal directed behavior, what is referred to as cognition, generally consciousness, things like that. So when I say mind in the book and what next is trying to address, I’m referring more to really kind of like an old way of thinking about what mind is. And that’s what William James talked about in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, which is mind is mindedness. So there are entities in the world that express mindedness. To be minded is to act intelligently, to act with goals, and it’s very deeply tied to natural selection. So why do we do what we do? Well, we want, you know, we want to do the four f’s, right? So feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction.

And so that’s kind of the, you know, the core of many organisms is mindedness. And then you get more complicated organisms like humans, who start bringing in other things, like. Like art and creativity and things like that. But not to get too freudian, but in a deep way. You know, those are probably connected in some way to those basic forms of mindedness. And so when I say that next is try to give a scientific account of mind referring to this kind of mindedness, how is it that we act successfully in the world, that we survive, that we reproduce, that we can do intelligent things?

[00:09:55] Paul: Okay, and so you were about to start giving some background, I think, on ecological psychology and perhaps neuroscience, but ecological psychology is lesser known, I would say. And it’s almost as if the way that I see it, but I’m a neuroscientist, is ecological psychology is like this tiny little sub corner of one person’s formalisms and trying to redefine what a target of study is versus the rest of academia trying to study brain and behavior. Is that a totally unfair characterization?

[00:10:36] Luis: No, I think it’s a pretty common characterization, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

So, ecological psychology comes from basically the work of James Gibson in the mid 1950s ish and developed by his spouse, Eleanor Gibson.

And they thought, as you said, what is the target of investigation? Or trying to explain things like the control of action, for example. And Gibson thought putting someone in a little cubicle and asking them to press buttons based on what they see on a screen, that’s just. It’s so artificial.

[00:11:12] Paul: That’s what neuroscience has been doing for years and years.

[00:11:14] Luis: Yeah, and that’s what neuroscience has been doing for years and years. Right. But his particular, y’all say, enemy, quote, unquote, was this kind of cognitivist paradigm that was really exploding in the mid 20th century, where really, you know, you can really get to the good stuff if you reveal what’s happening in between the ears, if you reveal what’s happening in the brain and doing that, you want to isolate and control things as much as possible. Right. Which is why this kind of really contrived environment of someone, participant sitting in front of a computer, works so well because you’re controlling for everything. But he’s like. But what bird does that when they fly? What monkey does that when they’re picking fruit? What human does that when they’re walking? And so what are we explaining to? And he said, so the target of investigation must always be the organism environment system. And there’s a hyphen there, right? So it’s kind of like one thing. It’s this kind of mutually informing, dynamic interaction between the environment and the animal.

[00:12:11] Paul: But his whole focus was on perception in particular, not on what we’ll come to later, because I want to ask you about, quote unquote, cognitive issues, like cognitive, real cognition, as you say in your book.

[00:12:24] Luis: Right, right. So, yeah, so he definitely, and I think it’s really important to understand that ecological psychology was primarily just about perception and still is primarily about perception. And I’ll add to that, perception action. Perception action, kind of like these hyphenated words, is really common in the ecological speak. So I think that’s absolutely right. But as his spouse, Eleanor Gibson, showed with her, with her extensions of the approach, she’s known, I think, to maybe some of your listeners for her work in developmental psychology. So she’s known for the visual cliff illusion in infant development. And a lot of that’s based on the idea of the information.

Oh, there’s that word we’re going to have to talk about. What information?

[00:13:11] Paul: God, no. Okay.

[00:13:13] Luis: Oh, yes. But ecological information and the developmental stages at which infants can resonate with the ecological information in the world in order to guide action. So it ended up going into developmental areas. Today, people talk about things like, quote unquote mental affordances. So ideas that are afforded.

[00:13:37] Paul: Let’s come back to that, because right now let’s stick with kind of the traditional gibsonian historical account of ecological psychology that is really devoted to this perception action continuity, which is one of the tenants of ecological psychology and isn’t so much in our thoughts, in our imagination. Right?

[00:14:01] Luis: Yeah. So here’s, I think, an illustrated example historically of Gibson’s approach. So James Gibson was a research scientist in the army during world War two, and he was tasked with helping the pilots land their planes better. So the pilots were terrible at landing. They could get up into the sky, they could drop the bombs, but then they had a lot of trouble coming back and landing. And he was looking at the training manuals. And basically what he found was that the training manuals were telling the pilots to conceive of themselves in this abstract three dimensional space. So these absolute cartesian coordinates and notions of absolute distance. And so they said, you are a pilot in a plane. And the plane is so many miles or distance, whatever, from the ground and the ground. And so you picture yourself in this coordinate system. And he said, maybe that’s the problem. Let me interview the pilots and ask them what they do, what they think when they’re trying to land. And when he talked to them, they talked as if the plane was an extension of themselves. So it’s like I am going to land where it’s like I am the plane landing. And what I’m focusing on is features of the environment relative to myself. So when I speed up the plane, I see flow, speed up. When I slow down the plane, flow slows down. And by flow, I mean optic flow. So it’s that experience that people have when they’re playing like a race car game, for example. They see things pass by them. So that kind of sense of optic flow. So he found that when the pilots focused on their sense of being in the plane, the ground being something that’s relative to themselves, as opposed to both of them being part of an abstract space, that they improve their landing capabilities greatly. And this set the foundation for a lot of his further work. He said, actually, the environment is quite rich with information and seems to specify what an organism can do. The particular medium of the environment, the light, the reflecting off the ground, things like that, are things that the organism taps into to guide behavior. Now, this is very different than the cognitivist approach. So the cognitivist approach.

Your listeners are in for a history lesson today.

[00:16:29] Paul: Sorry. I appreciate you walking us through it. So.

[00:16:33] Luis: Yeah, yeah.

And it’s kind of. It helps to motivate, you know, why I think I did what I did in my book.

But the cognitive approach was thought of generally as a reaction to behaviorism. So psychological behaviorism, the idea, if we’re going to study, the aim of psychology is to study what we can observe, what a scientist can observe, and what we can observe is things like stimulus and response and reflexes and stuff like that. But people always had a problem with behaviorism and that it seemed to leave out this kind of intermediary step. It’s not just I am stimulated and then I respond, but sometimes I’m stimulated, and then I think about it, and I do internal, non observable kinds of processes that then inform my output.

And this led some people to present something called the poverty of the stimulus argument. And the poverty of the stimulus argument essentially says, what is available in the environment if that alone is supposed to account for things like language learning or the control of action, it just doesn’t seem like there’s enough information in the environment to account for what we can do. Children learn language extraordinarily fast and they can put together a seemingly infinite combination of sentences and words. And they couldn’t possibly get that from listening to their parents, even if their parents talked to them 24 hours a day. So where does that capability come from? It must be innate, it must be internal, be it genetic or some cartesian mind or something like that. That must account for those kinds of abilities. And that argument, the poverty of the stimulus originally comes from linguistics, but it went on to inform the study of vision as well. So David Maher, who I think your reader is probably familiar with, David Marr, promoted a kind of poverty to stimulus argument. And he argued for things like, you know, when I look at the corner of my room and I see these angles, how do I know that when the wall comes together and makes, you know, like a v with one line coming down, how do I know that that means that it’s like further away as opposed to closer? Well, I know this because I have these kind of perceptual rules that help me compute things. And so I know that if I see a corner that, you know, the angles are pointing down connected by a line in the middle, that’s more likely that the corner is pointing towards me and that’s not available in the stimulus. Right. I can’t get that just from a 2d retinal image alone. It must be, you know, in.

[00:19:22] Paul: David Marr does come up a lot, but I don’t think this idea has ever been mentioned.

[00:19:28] Luis: Okay. Okay.

[00:19:29] Paul: It’s always about Mars levels. So this is Mars levels. This is different.

[00:19:33] Luis: Right, right. Yeah. So, so, so Gibson says, you know, and argues an ecological psychologist from then said, you know what?

It’s not a free lunch for these cognitivists. What are these rules? Where do they come from? You know what? I can actually explain a lot if I focus on what the environment does offer, right? And so ecological psychology is this shift towards explaining things like intelligent perception, action based on what can organisms do to leverage ecological information and not rely on maybe just internal processes? How is it that the combination of the light that’s diffusing in a room along with my sense of proprioception of my body allows me to understand that I can grab this cup of coffee? Right? And then that’s a word that I slipped in a little bit ago.

And I’m glad you didn’t call me out on it because it’s an important word. But I’ll say what it is. Now, that grasping of the cup is because I perceive that it affords grasping.

[00:20:39] Paul: We’re going to, uh. Oh, let me, before you go into affordances, what would Gibson, or just an ecological psychologist or what do they think of all of the famous hippocampal cells, grid cells that do tessellate environments into euclidean maps. Right. Cognitive maps, yeah, sorry, it’s kind of a technical question, so I apologize, but.

[00:21:07] Luis: Yeah, no, no, no, it’s fine. Yeah, yeah.

So there’s one kind of like, you know, skip around, dance around the issue, right. And it’s to say, like, well, I mean, the kind of organisms we are have brains. They’re highly, you know, densely packed with things called neurons, not, not to mention the other cells that outnumber them, you know, ten to one.

There are key things that happen in the brain. Right. But what are we trying to explain to, if we’re trying to explain how is it that an orangutan can successfully reach for an apple on a tree? Is that going to be cached out with cellular activity in the hippocampus?

Or is that going to be cached out with some sort of brain body environment cycle type story? Is all the action in the neurons, is it all in how neurons are representing space or representing the body?

[00:22:05] Paul: But if I understand ecological psychology correctly, it’s saying it’s not. Well, at least classic Gibsonian, it’s saying it’s not at all.

That wouldn’t even count as a representation, as a euclidean kind of representation. It’s all in the action perception while I’m reaching for the cup. But if you’re talking mice in a burrows, right, and they have to remember which way to go, then the, the affordances, which we’ll talk about in a second, the, the continuous optic flow signals are just part of the story. They have to remember, like, the directions that they were going and stuff. Right? We’re kind of getting in the weeds, and I’m already just kind of going in on like. Because I don’t. One of the, one of the things I, and your book helped me think about this a lot is what I don’t understand why these two views are or have traditionally been seen as irreconcilable.

Because they.

Well, maybe we shouldn’t just move on to say, well, why do you think that they’ve been irreconcilable? But I’ve already interrupted you enough, so maybe you should continue on.

[00:23:15] Luis: No, I was really looking forward to this talk because listening to the podcast, if I have you know, your background, your interests. And I was like, oh, I know, I know. When you’re getting questions, you know, these, about these different issues. And, you know, when I said that, you know, the Gibsonians accused the cognitivists of, you know, no free lunch, right? You can’t just then say, well, it’s just brainstorming. Similarly, I think to be fair, we shouldn’t say the Gibsonian gets a free lunch by saying it’s not happening in the brain.

So there’s a kind of socio historical motivation for why the Gibsonians and the early ecological psychologists at least, were, like, so hardcore non brain interested.

And I think part of that is to say, like, well, everyone is just so into brain stuff, they’re already going to quickly dismiss us for not focusing on the brain. So we’re going to just, we’re going to take that. We’re going to run with it, right? We’re just going to be like saying, you know, forget it. Forget the brain. When we go to conferences, we’re going to say, oh, that doesn’t matter. We’re going to write papers and say.

[00:24:24] Paul: Whatever happens, it was a social, it was like a political cut. It was a strategy.

[00:24:32] Luis: To some degree, yes, because James Gibson himself, his most popular works. So the ecological approach to visual perception, published towards the end of his life, he talks about, you know, he starts gesturing at what the nervous system’s contribution is. And so he gestures at it. And he likes to use, he liked to use the term resonance.

Right. So the brain and the nervous system resonates with ecological information. And, you know, people are dissatisfied with that response. I myself am in the book.

[00:25:09] Paul: Yeah, this is one of the things. So one of the ways that you see that neuroscience and ecological psychology can be united is that they both have to essentially compromise. And this idea of resonance is one thing that you say ecological psychology has to give up.

[00:25:26] Luis: Yeah. I just think, contrary to some of my closest colleagues that I collaborate with, who are defenders of resonance, I just don’t know what work it’s actually doing. I understand why Gibson used a term like that. It was very metaphorical, even referred to it as a metaphor in certain writings. It was something just to kind of say, like, hey, I’m not saying that, you know, my skull is filled with foam rubber. Right? Like, it’s filled with something very wondrous and interesting and it’s doing something. I don’t know what it’s doing. The best way I could think about it is that it’s resonating. Right.

And that’s about it. And maybe future sciences might augment ecological psychology and include something like that, but we shouldn’t just jump right into the brain to try and explain everything that we think is kind of interesting about being an organism in the world.

So it actually makes me think about Freud. And you’re like, what?

So Freud, you know, he was wrong about stuff.

[00:26:37] Paul: But he’s making a comeback. From what I understand, a lot of his ideas are kind of making a.

[00:26:42] Luis: Comeback, so they are in certain corners. But what I learned relatively recently, and I wanted to kind of dig in a little bit more and learn history of psychology, is that Freud started out as a proto neuroscientist. Yeah, actually neurobiologists. So he had these great sketches of, you know, the nervous system of various organisms and things like that. Some people have speculated that if Ramon Ikahal didn’t get the Nobel Prize for the neuron doctrine, that Freud would have gotten it.

But Freud, he said he was interested in, quote unquote, higher cognition, consciousness, mind, in that way.

[00:27:20] Paul: Yeah.

[00:27:20] Luis: And he said, we are just like, the science is just too impoverished, too inferior right now to make those connections. He originally thought we would explain those things reductively. There would be a neural story for what’s happening in the mind, that bottom up strategy, he said, science is just not there. He’s going to take a top down strategy, and that’s why he ended up developing psychoanalysis, talk therapy. It doesn’t get any more top down than that.

[00:27:47] Paul: So that was really.

Do you think this is a historically correct interpretation that, like, he. I don’t know if he actually directly related this right, or wrote about it, that he simply thought that the technology and the science wasn’t there enough for him to progress far enough that way. So I’m going to invent a lot of psychological terms and go that way. Okay.

[00:28:12] Luis: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I can send you some books, recommendations for some books, if you’re curious about that.

But you know, what he did after he made that move? That’s a whole other story.

[00:28:25] Paul: Sure. Okay. Yeah, but your point was that he started off with an interest in the neuroscience, and at that time, maybe what you’re about to say is now that we’re under the deluge of data and computational power and techniques that have come along, that now we’re at least the neurosciences are in a better place to be able to begin to explain, help explain mind with the aid of ecological psychology. I don’t know if that’s where you.

[00:28:54] Luis: Were going, and vice versa.

[00:28:57] Paul: Yeah. Right.

I want to pause for a second because I think ecological psychology gets a lot of pushback. Right.

Because people are kind of neuro or brain chauvinists. Right. Neuroscientists are. And there’s so many more neuroscientists than there are. I. Ecological psychologists, I don’t know. I keep tripping over the phrase ecological psychology, but part of that isn’t part of it that. So when I think of ecological psychology, I think of Gibson, and it’s strange that there’s like one godhead of this whole field, right. And that he made these rules, direct perception, affordances, resonances, and they’re very staunch rules. And you adhere to many of these rules, like direct perception. And I’d love for you to actually explain to me what direct perception actually means, because I don’t understand. You know, information is. Meaning is contained in the information at the neck, at the, you know, brain, body, environment, locale. And that’s where meaning comes from. And, you know, neuroscientists say meaning somehow magically appears in the head. But they’re just all these kind of staunchest rules in ecological psychology made by one person.

And it’s strange to me that it hasn’t sort of developed or morphed more. Whereas in the history of neuroscience is hundreds and thousands of people working on these things. Yes. Under the umbrella assumptions that the brain is the underpinning of the mind and is the major factor of the mind and the environment is out there to model inside the brain.

However, it seems like conceptually, there have been more developments and offshoots and changes, perhaps, in neuroscience, and I don’t know if I’m miss seeing that. Whereas even today, even in your book, you still take on some of the early defined tenants of ecological psychology. I’m sorry, that that was kind of a rant.

[00:31:03] Luis: No, no, it wasn’t a rant. If I thought anything you said was wrong, I would have jumped in.

[00:31:07] Paul: Please do. By the way, very fair.

[00:31:09] Luis: Very fair assessment. So a couple things to say right off the bat. So one is. So, yes, Gibson. It kind of goes to this one main person, one of my dissertation chair. He said that after I left, grad school students, they started having a reading group, and they started referring to him, to James Gibson as St. Jimmy, because, like, they just like, you know, it’s like they treat it like. Like worshiping this, like dogmatic.

[00:31:39] Paul: It’s weird.

[00:31:40] Paul: That’s what. That’s the sense I get of it. So it makes me uncomfortable, you know? Yeah.

[00:31:44] Luis: And one should be right to just accept things in that way.

[00:31:47] Paul: But on the other hand, I know that, like, if, for example, let’s say, let’s give a stupid example, if a tweet becomes really popular, that tweet is bound to be stupid or wrong. Right. Or if a figurehead becomes super, super popular, they’re going to be wrong almost 100%. So it’s not to say that just because it’s focused on these very first principle tenants, or defined tenants, that it’s wrong. It’s just a curious thing to me that so many people adhere to it and it hasn’t developed as much.

[00:32:25] Luis: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I agree with some of that. And I’ll say where I think you can modify what you said a little bit. So why has the. Why have the basic tenets stayed basically the same? Well, they’re pretty core to defining what ecological psychology is. So if you take away direct perception, for example, you’re not doing Gibsonian ecological psychology anymore. So, for example, this is a wonderful neuropsychologist. I actually don’t know if you’ve had him on your show, Paul Chiskic or Syisec.

[00:33:04] Paul: Yeah, he’s been on a couple times. Yeah.

He uses affordances in a way that isn’t conducive to the original definition in ecological.

[00:33:13] Luis: Exactly.

[00:33:14] Paul: Which you write about in the book. Yeah.

[00:33:17] Luis: So he’s not an ecological psychologist. Right. He’s using the term affordance as an opportunity for action, but he cashes it out neuro computationally, neuro representationally. And that’s just not going to fly with the ecological psychologist. Right. So, yeah, you can certainly take what you want and add what you want to whatever theories. Right. But then is it still the original kind of position?

[00:33:41] Paul: But does it need to be. Can’t things change?

[00:33:44] Luis: Can’t things change? Right. So the question is, do the basic tenants need to be revised or do they need to be supplemented and augmented?

[00:33:54] Paul: Okay.

[00:33:55] Luis: And what I try to do in the book is say, let’s maintain the tenants, but now let’s supplement it with the neuro story, the kind of neuro story that Gibson, I think should be okay with, but wasn’t able to do back, you know, back in the mid 20th century. So that’s kind of like main kind of response there. The other thing is.

So Gibson, yes. He is St. Jimmy to a lot of people, but he didn’t birth these ideas out of nowhere. Right.

He is explicitly influenced by William James James functionalism, by darwinian natural selection.

He had a lot of historical precedents, and he was also highly influenced by what I’ll loosely call continental philosophy. So continental philosophy just vaguely refers to philosophy done in Europe in certain parts of Europe at certain times. Right. Specifically, Merlot Ponty. Maurice Merleau Ponty, a phenomenologist. So he taught, actually, Gibson is said to have taught graduate seminars on Merlot Pontis phenomenology. And so why are people still following these basic tenets? Well, one could be because they’re blindly adhering to a godhead. The other one could be because these tenets are the culmination of over a century of scientific and phenomenological work.

A lot of work has already been done to get to these tenets. And now what do we do with that work? Well, now we try and do more science, more sophisticated science, this and that. So those are two of my kind of responses to the points you raise that I do not think are wrong. And, like, in the sense that people don’t regularly think this and that they don’t think this with good reason. But I think we do have response as ecological psychologists. I think we have good responses.

[00:35:52] Paul: So, yeah, I don’t want to spend the whole time, me questioning particulars about ecological psychology either.

And a lot of these things will, I’m sure, return to as we kind of go through, because I want to get to your solution and why you think there needs to be a solution. So why do we need to marry these things?

[00:36:12] Luis: Yeah, so I think. So here’s the very, like, mundane response. Because I just like brains, right?

[00:36:23] Paul: Okay.

[00:36:23] Luis: I like brains, and I’m in. I think they’re, you know, I’ve always liked neuroscience, and I’ve always been curious, like, how do we connect?

[00:36:31] Paul: But I happen to know about you that you kind of, at least the way you tell it, is that you started off as a cognitivist. Right? As a. Brains. Do minds. Loosely, let’s say. And then as you learned more, then you kind of shifted your thinking over to at least toward ecological psychology, in that the target of study shouldn’t just be the brain. It’s sort of a continuous cycle between brain and body and environment. And so, correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve come to the conclusion that that is correct, that our target of explanation for a phenomenon of mind, of intelligence, is not brain. It’s the whole system across scales.

[00:37:17] Luis: So you’re saying that what I’m defending and promoting is this idea of the brain, the body, the environment, is a continuous kind of system, and that should be the target investigation. And that’s right.

So I started, as you said, pretty hardcore, like, brain focused cognitivist. I thought neural computations and representations were where it’s at. Then in grad school, I got exposed to these ecological psychologists. I got exposed to dynamicists, to embodied cognition people.

And at first I was like, what is going on here? This just can’t be right.

[00:37:57] Paul: I thought these people had it all figured out. Why am I now questioning these things?

[00:38:01] Luis: Why am I. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, and so, you know, my pendulum swung from being just hardcore neuro to being like, hardcore non neuro, I guess I’ll put it.

[00:38:12] Paul: Okay.

[00:38:15] Luis: And I wanted to see how far can these people get with their explanations of their accounts, right? How philosophically and theoretically compelling are these stories? And can they guide research? Right. Empirical research.

And so that ended up. I ended up kind of swinging back a little bit, right? So I still put myself more in that kind of systems approach, more in that embodied camp. And I still wear. I still carry my ecological psychologist membership card with me, but for my own interests, I want to see where can the brain come in to? You know, do we have the tools to do that in a non hand, wavy kind of way? Resonance is not going to cut it for me. Right. I want to know what’s going on at the neural scale when an organism is perceiving an affordance, when there’s an affordance event, can we do that while not giving up our core tenets? Right. Of ecological psychology. That’s the main kind of aim, right? It’s trying to maintain the tenants. Because again, if I give up any of the tenants, I’m not an ecological psychologist anymore. Not hardcore, which I want to be. I want to be hardcore.

[00:39:27] Paul: Okay. Yeah, you are, my friend. You are hardcore, let me tell you.

Actually, you are hardcore. And we’ll come back to that. Come back to that later in a very particular way that I’m a little.

[00:39:38] Luis: Envious of, if it’s okay, you’ve asked me about direct perception, and you brought it up a few times, and in some ways, direct perception seems absolutely incorrect.

Okay, how is it that I can look at this cup and you’re telling me I am directly perceiving?

[00:40:01] Paul: What does it mean? What does direct perception mean? Sometimes I think I get it. And then I think, oh, no, I don’t get it, because I’m not exactly sure what perception means. And direct can mean different things as well.

[00:40:15] Luis: Yeah. So one way to start thinking about it is the opposite. So indirect perception. So indirect perception says, I’m not literally perceiving the things of the world. When I have a visual perception, when I have a visual experience, it’s a reconstruction in my mind that has attempted to interpret something in the world. So whatever you’re going Marian 2d sketch and all this kinds of stuff, and you’re reconstructing images in the mind, that would be indirect perception, often known as a representational theory of mind. You’re representing the world. And this is hardcore, very popular right now. So there’s a lot of popular approaches to vision, broadly speaking, bayesian predictive coding, predictive processing, active inference, all these kind of words that all kind of come together. And a lot of them are fundamentally about the construction of mental representations as predictions of the world. And then if the world doesn’t happen to work in that way, then it’s supposed to update for the next time and get more and more accurate.

[00:41:25] Paul: A beautiful idea, by the way. Right?

[00:41:28] Luis: Powerful idea, and a very popular one. I wish I was more on board with it. I’d get more grant funding.

But. But indirect or direct perception is sometimes called flatteringly naive perception, which is to say that when you are saying you’re seeing something in the world, that you are seeing as it is in the world, right? And so there is minimal interpretation going on, if any interpretation at all.

For a ecological psychologist, how I understand direct perception is to say you are tapping into the energies of the environment in a regular way. And energies is not something like, and no offense, it’s not something like crystal healing or power animals. I know, I know the metaphysics section at Barnes and nobles.

It is not energies in that way. It’s literally like the stuff that physics studies, photons in the environment, light refraction off surfaces. And if an organism is selected to perceive a certain wavelength, it’ll perceive certain wavelengths in a regular way. And if those guide action in a regular way, that’s an instance of direct perception. Or ecological psychologist.

There are other kinds of intermediary views that some will say, and I don’t know why I’m breaking disjunctivism. Okay, so disjunctivism, generally speaking, is the idea that there is a disjunct. There’s a difference between when I’m perceiving this cup right now in front of me and when I close my eyes and generate a mental image of that cup. They are different kinds.

So when the mind brain is perceiving things in the world in real time, that’s a very different phenomenon than when I’m dreaming about a cup or a ball. And these are. And they should be treated as different phenomena, as opposed to the idea that there’s something deeply the same about. When I’m looking at this cup right now, and when I close my eyes, it create a mental image in my mind. A lot of work, as I understand it, would take this indirect perception approach in some way, says, okay, now we need to figure out where’s that slight little difference between the real world and the world in my mind. And maybe it’s not actually such a different view. Maybe it’s very much similar, because all perception really boils down to is what’s happening in my mind to begin with. And the disjunctivist is saying, no, no, they’re different kinds.

And the direct realist says, you know, you’re just. We’re just focusing on, you know, what we are connecting with. Perceiving in the real world, in real time, that tends to be what happens. Is that helpful?

[00:44:37] Paul: Yeah. So, but I think this is the case, and as I get older. So what’s supposed to happen when you learn more about stuff is you’re supposed to become more and more entrenched. But there are these ideas that I think over and over, I see more and more ideas that are supposed to be irreconcilable, and they’re both right. There’s value in both of them. So, for example, I don’t think maybe this is not a good example. I see your mug, right. And I can’t reach through the computer, but. Right. And I quickly close my eyes and reach for it. Right. Where would that. So was that direct perception? Was that. How did I do that, for example?

[00:45:21] Luis: Yeah.

So what is being relied on physiologically when you’re doing that? And I think the story that a gibsonian theological psychologist would tell and that I would tell is these are just habitual actions that we have.

[00:45:40] Paul: Yeah, I told you it wasn’t a good example. I knew you were going to weasel your way out of that.

[00:45:45] Luis: No, no, you gave me low hanging fruit. I appreciate that. It’s a good example for your guests, so thank you. But why not think that a lot of the things that we do that apparently need this mental representation are actually just done out of habit? We used to use this term like muscle memory.

That’s not a real thing. At least I don’t think it is. Who people now think it is, I don’t know. Yeah, but loosely, colloquially speaking, muscle memory for reaching, that doesn’t really need to represent.

It’s just an action that works for me.

[00:46:22] Paul: Okay, well, what if I close my eyes and 3 seconds later, I reach for it. So there has to be some maintenance or you can say, maybe that’s muscle memory, but what is your title? Are you a philosopher? Are you a cognitive scientist?

What do you consider yourself?

[00:46:38] Luis: I mean, my formal title is associate professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences.

[00:46:46] Paul: Okay. I was just looking on the back of the book to see. That’s what it says.

[00:46:49] Luis: Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it’s a really tough, because, I mean, what is it? Is it my PhD? Is it my graduate degree? Is it what pays my bills? Is it what I publish it?

[00:47:02] Paul: I don’t like being, I don’t like having a title like that either.

[00:47:05] Luis: Yeah, yeah. And so if that’s. If it’s all those things, and I’m many different things, but I’m just interested in minds.

[00:47:13] Paul: Yeah. That’s why, that’s why I have you on here, to answer your question.

There you go.

[00:47:19] Luis: Because I’m interested in minds. Yeah, yeah.

[00:47:21] Paul: I mean, there’s lots of different ways to be interested in minds, and I. And neuroscience, quote, unquote, neuroscience, whatever that is, gets criticized a ton because there’s so much money being spent for so long, and we still don’t understand how brains work. Right. And that’s like, a major criticism. So next is an alternative that will potentially push these things forward. And one of the interesting things is that you are taking on tools that have become quite popular in my area of neuroscience in the past decade, or a little bit more now, I guess. Tools from complexity science, specifically, like dynamical systems theory, has become quite popular. And manifolds, everybody talks about manifolds these days in my world, and that’s only my world, my little corner of neuroscience. And so you’re all in on manifolds.

I’m not sure if I interrupted you, and I’m moving us forward too fast, but okay, so let’s just do it. Let’s jump through the six hypotheses, and I think we can kind of go through fast, but given this background material, we can go through a few of them rather fast because I don’t want to keep you all day, and so go ahead.

[00:48:39] Luis: Yeah, yeah. So.

[00:48:40] Paul: Oh, I’ll read the hypotheses off. Right. And then, so I’m not going to make you do it. So I’ll read the hypotheses off, and then I’ll say what I think, sort of what you alluded to in the book, and then we can discuss any issues that maybe we haven’t talked about before, or I can ask you more questions to be a jerk or anything like that.

[00:49:02] Luis: Oh, can’t wait. Bring it.

[00:49:04] Paul: All right, so this is the theory. This is the theory. Thing is that you’ve developed these hypotheses, right? Why? It’s more than a framework and you’ve won me over partially to that side. So hypothesis one, the organism environment system is the privileged spatiotemporal scale of description to understand mind. And so we’ve already talked a lot about this, and this has to do with the viewpoint from ecological psychology that the target of investigation shouldn’t be the brain. It should be some relational dynamics between brain, body and environment. And I’m not sure if you want to say anything more about that or correct me.

[00:49:45] Luis: Yeah, so that’s right.

So when we’re thinking about mindedness and intelligent behavior, I don’t think that nature carves its joints at the brain and at the body and then at the environment. I think that it’s a flowing between them, right. And, or among them, actually between seems to put a barrier there. But this way of talking and the way of doing science requires that we draw boundaries. And I think that that’s fine. I think it’s interesting to say, like, this will be the organ at this scale and the body at this scale and the environment, and we’ll constrain it because we have to do our science in a manageable, interpretable way. But in the end, we cannot forget that the brain is always in a body.

I was really happy to have Pusaki endorse my book.

[00:50:43] Paul: You got a blurb from Yurizaki?

[00:50:45] Luis: Yeah, yeah, he’s awesome. And it was funny because he’s like, he’s like, I don’t know why this mundane truth is so hard for people to swallow that brains are not like a great separate thing. Like, they’re always in an environment. They’re always in a body, and the body’s always in an environment.

[00:51:05] Paul: I know why.

[00:51:05] Luis: I’m like, I know, I know, I know why.

[00:51:07] Paul: I mean, there is legitimacy to the idea of wanting to study the brain for what it does. Of course it’s connected to the body. But if your target of interest is understanding the brain, then you’re gonna understand the brain. I mean, my target of interest is understanding the mind. And now, you know, because you have repositioned where the mind is. And in my head now, I think, well, I don’t. I don’t, you know, what do I need to think about the relation to understand what a person is like? Where is the individual? Is there an individual?

[00:51:43] Luis: It’s funny, I was watching you and judging you right now. So you said because I was doing.

[00:51:50] Paul: This and moving and.

[00:51:51] Luis: Yes, yes. You were talking about minded brain mind stuff, like, in a way that was just like really localized between the ears, yet you were doing it embody.

[00:52:00] Paul: Of course, I’m all in. But, but it’s. But it’s. Yeah, but where is the individual then? Right? So I love the relational aspect of the. Of it. And, you know, I had Masrita Chirmuta on a few episodes ago, and she wrote about this a long time ago, and this is not by any means a new concept, but she wrote about it in terms of color perception, but you think of it in terms of minds, right? That were relational being.

Minds are relational processes, I guess. And that’s one reason why the target of investigation needs to be between and among these things we call brains and bodies in the environment.

[00:52:44] Luis: Yeah, yeah. Just two comments. One quick thing. I highly recommend Masvida’s work. So I know she was on the show, and I think she does great work. So I further endorse her books and articles.

The second thing is, you know, one of my early influences were the. The Churchlands. Paul and Patricia ChuRchLaND, primarily philosophers associated with the neuro philosophy movement of the late, you know, mid, late eighties, right? And, you know, one thing, you know, that they would say in some of their papers or some of their talks, you know, to people who would say, well, I mean, the things you’re saying are so contrary to intuitions or, you know, or just the obvious truths of this or that. And, you know, especially, you know, Pat Churchland would say things like, well, then the worst for our intuitions, right? Like, tough, right? Why does the world have to conform to our intuition? Like, I’m, you know, this is my own wording, but I tell my students I’m a mostly hairless chimp, right? Like, why should I think that my intuition dictate how the world is or structured?

[00:53:53] Paul: But she might not understand. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding the logical fallacy in what she said, because she said, then the worse for she said, our intuitions. But my intuition, as if there’s an I to have an intuition. But if the eye is like, where’s the eye? There? I’m sorry, I interrupted you again, but, yeah, no, no.

[00:54:15] Luis: So that’s a kind of separate point. So hers is more about giving way to the sciences, right? And so she’s heavily influenced by another philosopher, Willard van Ornam. Quine pushed, you know, naturalism in philosophy, and he said a lot of things that people thought were contrary to our most obvious intuitions. But in terms of the specific kind of intuition about, like, I have an eye.

Well, you know, I don’t want to get in the minutia of it, but whose intuitions? Right. Yours. Collective United States. Right. What about, you know, you know, maybe a buddhist or a human or, you know, whatever that doesn’t have the strong sense of I. And so, you know, a lot of these claims, you know, will end up being, you know, if we’re going to take the science and the evidence, empirical evidence, seriously, it’s going to push back against these. So, you know, by, say, the organism environment system is a privileged scale for understanding, you know, mindedness and things like that. What about, you know, where do we draw the line on a person in our humanity? Exactly. Where do we draw the line on a person or a human? Right.

[00:55:21] Paul: It’s been a philosophical problem for a long. For a long time, so I thought you’re going to solve it for me. I guess not. Not today.

[00:55:28] Luis: Yeah, not today. Not today. Yeah. Maybe over a few six packs or something.

[00:55:34] Paul: Yeah, we should do that. All right. Is there anything else to say about just the target of explanation investigation being this relation between brain, body and environment?

[00:55:45] Luis: No, no, I think that’s such a hypothesis.

[00:55:49] Paul: Two is that neural population dynamics generate relevant states, and this is where we get into the neuroscience side of it. And this is what I was saying. You advocate for what has become popular in my little world in neuroscience, which is the dynamical systems view, looking at more than. So the history of neuroscience. You study, you record a single neuron while an animal is looking at an image of a crocodile on the screen. And if that neuron fires more for the crocodile than it does when the animal looks at a sunflower, then that neuron encodes crocodiles, then that was kind of like the story for years and decades in neuroscience. So one version of the neuron doctrine, and we’ve shifted now, partially because the technology has improved, that we can record lots more neurons at a given time. And what we found is that you can actually, when you’re looking at all those neurons, you can transform the recorded activity into a lower dimensional representation of that neural activity.

Yeah, that was good for your audience.

[00:57:09] Luis: When Paul said that, my jaw dropped and I put my hands on my cheeks in disbelief.

[00:57:14] Paul: I don’t remember the name of that famous painting, but you were close.

[00:57:19] Luis: Edward Munch’s scream.

[00:57:20] Paul: There you go. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. So you say that populations of neuron are the right spatial scale. Spatial temporal scale to bring the neuroscience part of this in the. Toward ecological psychology.

And that, in fact, you go into what you advocate is what Gerald Edelman’s neural dharmatism. And I don’t. We. I fear that we could spend a lot of time talking about that because that’s like a whole. So I don’t know if you want to succinctly discuss that and tell me what I got wrong with the description with hypothesis two as well.

[00:57:58] Luis: Yeah, yeah. So when you started talking about hypothesis two, kind of started to overlap a little bit with hypothesis three, but hypothesis two, definitely. That’s okay. So hypothesis two definitely about, like, saying that I’m going to hedge my bets, and I think it’s going to be neural populations, and that’s already kind of slippery. Right.

[00:58:18] Paul: Right. What is the population? It’s more than one, more than a single area, and less than a. Sorry. More than a single neuron and less than a. Yeah. An entire brain region, let’s say.

[00:58:28] Luis: Exactly. Right. So what is that? Right. It’s also saying mesoscale. Right. What is that? Right. So it will probably end up being relative. Right. To the task or to the, you know, the target of investigation. But I do think there’s something about. I think it’s unlikely that sophisticated information like faces, are encoded in single neurons.

I think that’s unlikely. The brain regions, for various reasons, probably bigger than we need to account for this phenomenon, there’s much more localization than that.

But Gerald Edelman, I think, is a overlooked pioneer. I think people maybe might group him with Francis Crick and Christoph Koch as helping push the idea that the study of consciousness could be scientifically reputable in the late eighties and early nineties. But he offered, you know, a very sophisticated account of how minds emerge in organisms that starts with the developmental scale. So Edelman won the Nobel Prize for applying darwinian principles of selectionism to antibodies and how they deal with pathogens and things like that. And he said, why not apply it to more things? Right. And so, you know, his attempt was to say, like, okay, well, you know, start at the zygote. We build up. There’s selection pressures happening.

He didn’t put it this way, but it’s key to what he talks about. It’s always environed. That’s the word I’m using right now. But the zygote is always in an environment. The temperature, gravity, all these things are pulling on the expression of cells, of the genetics and things like that. Then he tells the story going all the way up to, well, now we’ve got organisms with more fleshed out brainstor. And how do we know which networks, which connections are the ones to be selected for? Well, it goes back to the four f’s, the thing that facilitate things like fighting and fleeing stuff. And try giving this account of strengthening and weakening of connections. It’s very Hebbian and all this stuff. So he gives a very sophisticated account.

And towards the end of his life, and I think this might connect, Paul, to the second half of your podcast, aim of being neuroscience and AI stuff.

[01:00:52] Paul: We got it. We have to talk about AI. We can’t finish this thing because I have questions about AI. Yeah, maybe we’ll get into it now. Who knows? So, yeah, yeah.

[01:01:00] Luis: Hey, I’m ready to roll.

So, Edelman, towards the end of his life, started trying to take the Feynmanian Richard Feynman approach that what I cannot build, I don’t understand kind of saying, and put these principles in.

He didn’t call them artificial intelligence. He didn’t call them computers, and he didn’t call them robots. He called them, like, brain based devices, because he didn’t want people immediately thinking like these run on syntax, rules, representations, all these kinds of stuff. He tried to have software that mimicked these kind of neurodarwinian principles of selectionism.

Again, towards the end of his life, late nineties, early aughts, he would test these robots. So there was one case where they had a group of robots. They were gonna play a soccer match, right? And one team had robots that were based on, like, symbolic architectures. And then his team were all based on this brain based approaches. And so, like, the first few rounds, uh, the Edelman team was just getting crushed.

[01:02:13] Paul: Yeah.

[01:02:14] Luis: Right. Because the symbolic people already had the rules. They were ready to go, but the others were learning. Right. But then it didn’t take long, and then there was a big shift, and then the, you know, edelmanian brain based robot started crushing the symbolic architecture because they started developing more contextual based rules and, you know, things like that. So, long story. That’s Edelman in a nutshell, and I think there’s a lot to be said, and he gives a very compelling story why the population is the scale for mindedness and things like that. Yeah, I could follow up on whatever you.

[01:02:49] Paul: No, yeah, that’s okay. Well, let’s move on to hypothesis three. Yeah, let’s move on to hypothesis no. Let’s talk about AI for just a second, because I want to make sure that we get it. And if we need to, we can just go late. I don’t know what your timing is like today.

Okay, good, because it’s interesting. So, okay, so let’s say Edelman developed these brain based devices, and as you know, today, we have deep learning, machine learning based AI, which is just killing it. Language. And a lot of people say brain modeling it is killing it. It’s not. You know, it makes mistakes. Right. But we can always play that game. But it’s really, really impressive in many ways. Right? And image recognition and all that stuff.

And, yes, yes. It’s not perfect, and it is based on really old ideas about what a neuron does and from. So it’s sort of birthed from, let’s say, neuroscience.

My question. And, in fact, you know, like, recently, I just moderated this panel at a conference, and it’s the question that originally, sort of this whole podcast was based on, what is this relationship between AI and neuroscience? Like, how do they inform each other? How should they inform each other? How can they inform each other?

I don’t think there’s ever been a panel of ecological psychology and AI. Has ecological psychology informed Aihdenhe at all?

I mean, have there been? Do you know? And I guess not vice versa, but is there a relationship?

[01:04:31] Luis: So, short answer is yes.

[01:04:35] Paul: Okay.

[01:04:37] Luis: But the little bit more fleshed out answer is probably not, like, directly and obviously so, you know, Gibsonian, ecological psychology had an enormous influence on embodied cognition and activism and these other kind of four e approaches.

Those also had a big influence on.

[01:05:02] Paul: Work in robotics, like cybernetics as well, probably, right. Oh, and robotics in the eighties, because I was thinking in the eighties. Okay, yeah, good.

[01:05:10] Luis: So, people like Rodney Brooks, I can’t remember if you mentioned him on your podcast before, but he has this.

He has this quote about the world is its own best model. And so quick background on that. So, he was faced with the problem that robots were just terrible at the time at identifying shapes and getting around in the world, and the computational power wasn’t really there. They’re facing this problem, like, how can we keep increasing computational power so that the robot can better and better represent, you know, indirectly represent the world? And I guess, you know, he has this epiphany. Why don’t we just offload that onto the environment that’s already there? Why don’t we just have the robot directly perceive the environment?

He will more specifically say that that was connected to the embodied literature. But I think that’s definitely something. I don’t think it’s a leap to say that’s a Gibsonian lesson right there.

[01:06:10] Paul: Okay.

[01:06:11] Luis: Right.

So, in that way. I think this idea of trying to offload onto the world, that the world is actually quite informative. It doesn’t have to be treated as impoverished. I think those. Any approach like that is likely to have a connection to Gibsonians. There’s a lot of work in robotics on affordances. I think those tend to be more loosely gibsonian.

[01:06:33] Paul: I’m sure you’d say that they’re not using affordances in the correct way, right?

[01:06:39] Luis: Damn right.

[01:06:41] Paul: See, I know you. I know the way you think because I read your book. Yeah.

[01:06:45] Luis: And I’m simple and lazy.

[01:06:49] Paul: We found out.

[01:06:50] Luis: And lazy and lazy. Yeah, definitely. Guilty as charged.

But did the Gibsonians, does the embodied cognition stuff have an influence on these current trends in AI?

I don’t think as much.

[01:07:06] Paul: Okay.

[01:07:06] Luis: Yeah, I don’t really see it as much. So back to focusing on between the ear type stuff.

[01:07:11] Paul: Well, kinda, but they don’t pay attention to neuroscience much these days either. Right. And not that they should.

It depends on what their goal is. Right.

[01:07:21] Luis: You’re right. I was being sloppy. I meant more like kind of like localized, like not really caring about the body as much.

[01:07:26] Paul: It’s an information processing approach. Right. It’s a cognitivism approach, you might say 100%. So what I really wanted to ask you was how you think. Let’s say you’re successful with next. I don’t know what successful is, but let’s say you come to a place where there’s work being done. That’s a value that is explanatorily satisfying. What I wanted to ask you is, what do you think that this could do for artificial intelligence? Or do you see them as different kinds?

And I’m not sure if I should ask you that now, because you might start talking about things in your hypotheses, which is totally fine. Maybe I should just ask you that now.

[01:08:10] Luis: No, I think this is as good a point as any.

So I would be okay if it never influences AI research.

I wonder if the lessons making are not lessons.

Some of the lessons that I’m adhering to and promoting are not in some form already out there. And if AI people wanted them, they would have already taken that. So I think that there are people who care about embodiment, but I don’t see that with, like, you know, OpenAI or, you know, things like, I just think they don’t really care.

You know, they’re maybe doing something different, admittedly. Or they just. That’s where they’re putting their bets, the real action.

[01:08:57] Paul: So do you kind of all right, here’s my thought. It’s like, you think about some deep learning network or like a transformer, and you’re just like, oh, it’s just so cognitivist.

Is that kind of the way that you react?

[01:09:18] Luis: I have a lot of reactions to it, so. Oh, my gosh, I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, so let me go back to one step. So, you know, I did say I don’t necessarily think that my, the next approach is going to have an impact on AI, because I think some of the lessons of next are things that are already out there that AI research is not doing.

But I do think it does lay out a plan that could be loosely followed. So the idea of maybe having more brain based robot type thing, kind of like Edelman spirit, I think, and leveraging environmental information and embodiment, proprioception, and then how the structure of the internal workings and the idea that all of these kind of collapse into low dimensional processes, I would say that maybe that could be a helpful lesson for AI.

Having some way to develop collapsing into synergies and low dimensional processes could be helpful for doing that.

And I’m sorry. And then so I jumped back and we had a question.

[01:10:33] Paul: The question.

Oh, yeah. I was just imagining you being judgmental about the way AI is done.

[01:10:39] Luis: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Again, guilty.

I’m lazy. I’m judgmental.

[01:10:46] Paul: These are all things that I. It’s like staring into a mirror in many ways. In many ways. Like haircut.

[01:10:54] Luis: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. The piercing eyes.

[01:10:58] Paul: Wow. Oh, my. I wasn’t expecting.

[01:11:01] Luis: I was talking about myself.

[01:11:02] Paul: I see.

[01:11:04] Luis: So, yeah, but I mean, you know, what?

So what are these people doing? Right? What are these people who are developing, quote, and I have to keep saying, quote, unquote, AI because I have a problem with it being referred to as artificial intelligence. But me too.

[01:11:24] Paul: I don’t like the term. Yeah, this will be fun. And I’m talking to Kim Stackenfeld in a couple days, and she works for DeepMind. So whatever you’re saying now, I’ll pass this along to her. I’ll say, what do you do?

[01:11:34] Luis: What do you do? What are you doing? Like, what are we trying to explain or what are we trying to build?

[01:11:42] Paul: Right. The latter is all anyone cares about in AI.

[01:11:45] Luis: I think that as an outsider, that’s my perspective as well. Right. And so can you build a system that you can put natural language prompts and get natural language responses?

Yeah, we’re seeing it. And it’s cool and it’s awesome.

But is that telling us anything about how we work?

Right. Is that explaining how we work? Is it also saying, you know, and if it’s allegedly based on how, you know, neural networks, biological neural networks work, is that really the best way that they should be doing it? Right. There’s various kinds of approaches to it as well. You know, Gary Marcus is a big symbolic architecture guy. So you’ve been pushing that.

He’s pushing old ideas from Jerry Fodor.

[01:12:35] Paul: And he’s also on board with us having a symbolic mind brain. So it’s not like, yep. It’s not. In his view, we don’t have a connectionist only brain. We have no 100%.

[01:12:46] Luis: Yeah. I mean, yeah, exactly. My point is that the loosely speaking, connectionist approach that’s very popular, giving us such amazing products like chat, DPT, and stuff, there are people right now who think that that’s wrong headed. No pun intended, but. So that’s one thing I’m, like, asking, what are they trying to explain and what are they trying to build? And those are separate questions. One’s explaining the type of thing you and I are, and the other one’s building really cool tools.

When they’re tools, they’re not artificial. They are just the tool. And it works or nothing. Right.

[01:13:24] Paul: Well, it is an artifice.

[01:13:27] Luis: Okay? It’s an artifact.

[01:13:29] Paul: Artifact built by humans. Artifact. Sorry? I said artifice.

[01:13:32] Luis: Right?

[01:13:32] Paul: Yeah.

[01:13:33] Luis: Yeah. Isn’t that like a. Like a wizard or something?

[01:13:35] Paul: It’s like. Yeah, it’s.

[01:13:36] Luis: Oh, fake. Okay.

I’m thinking about dungeons and dragons, I guess. So there’s, you know, there’s that. And then if there’s trying. If people are trying to make the claim that these things are these machines, these neural networks are intelligent like we are, I just. I just. I can’t see it. For one main reason, they don’t have a world.

[01:14:06] Paul: Yeah, but if you build a robot, all of a sudden they do, right?

[01:14:11] Luis: I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, if it’s more. I’m more. I’m friendlier to the kind of edelmanian brain based robot. So put these processes in, it will a symbolic architecture or the kind of networks that, you know, these, you know, open eyes have used, if those were embodied in a robot, would that be. Would that give rise to the kind of intelligence that we have? I don’t know.

[01:14:35] Paul: Yeah.

[01:14:36] Luis: You know, I’m phenomenological, classical phenomenology, so Martin Heidegger, Lucerle, Merlot, Ponty. I think they were right about something basic about the human condition, is that we are in a world that we care about.

[01:14:50] Paul: Yep, that’s a big one.

[01:14:53] Luis: And that’s a big one. And I think that drives everything. The four f’s, I think, without a sense of self and other and stuff like that, that drives organisms and the kinds of intelligences we have. And I see no sign of that as being either an interest or a feature of contemporary hot AI stuff.

[01:15:13] Paul: But you can’t imagine a scenario where you would call a robot with a more or less continuous action perception loop that’s interacting with the world. You wouldn’t describe it as mindedness.

Does it have to care to be mindedness?

To have mindedness, I mean, yes, I.

[01:15:35] Luis: Think it does have to care.

And that what you just described, is that a way to test principles? Yeah. Is that a way to develop better autonomous cars or whatever? Probably.

But is that going to then generate a mind like us? I’m skeptical.

What would it take? You know, so is my position a priori that there are no such things as artificial mines? I don’t want to go that far, but I think there is something to be said about our evolutionary lineage and the things that we have been selected for over billions of years and the kind of care that arises from that. And again, I’m using care loosely. I’m not saying the kind of care that one has for their child. I care about my hunger. I care about where my arm is. I care about being in the world, as phenomenologists say. I don’t think that these machines have worlds.

[01:16:34] Paul: What if they use. What if they use manifolds? So hypothesis three is that mind is based on low dimensional neural dynamics. And as you alluded to, I started talking about the dynamics in hypothesis two, which I should. Which I bled them into each other. But this is all about manifolds. And you describe manifolds a lot, and a lot of the work that’s being done using manifolds. And so you’re all in on manifolds?

[01:16:59] Luis: Yep, I think manifolds.

I’m starting to think that there’s a sort of kind of cool geometry about the brain’s structure and about the way we do things. And I use that quite loosely. I think topography is a great way. I’ve been knee deep in fractal analysis concepts and stuff for a long time now.

And so what is it that’s kind of common and appealing to me about these things? Well, it’s because these are ways of finding what is really important in the clouds of data.

I don’t think that more and more accumulation of data, more and more recording. I don’t think principles of organization or explanations for various intelligent actions are going to just fall out of that. I think we need to have principles to, dare I say, decode the data. I’m always very careful to use computational speaker. That’s just my background. But from that perspective, clearly, I mean, the whole brain is always active all the time.

I would hope that people are long past the idea that we use 10%.

[01:18:11] Paul: Of our brain, you and I do, but that’s okay. Yeah.

[01:18:15] Luis: I’m mostly a brain stem, just basic dysfunction all the time.

But during these talks, I sometimes blow the dust off the cortex.

But I think we want to find the principle structure. We want to find a way to understand, make comprehensible, these large amounts of data. We need principles to do that, and we need particular methods. And I think framing what’s happening in the brain in terms of these topological, geometrical kinds of principles, I think it’s very appealing.

[01:18:50] Paul: Let me just back up so what a manifold is in neuroscience, typically, now that we’re recording thousands or hundreds of neurons at a time, you get these quote, unquote, high dimensional data, because every single neuron that you’re recording is one dimension. So if you have 100 neurons, it’s 100 dimensions. No one can look at all that neural activity. Make sense of it. One way that dynamical systems has come, dynamical systems theory has come into neuroscience is to take all that data and reduce it to a lower dimensional representation that highlights what seems to be important about the data, whether that’s, like, the highest amount of variance in the data or other aspects of the data that, as a population, seem to be important. And what you can do with these, one thing you can do is plot the trajectories in some state space in that lower dimension. And when you do that, those trajectories often can map out into the simplest way to say it is a surface structure that they’ll all align on. And we call that structure a manifold. One thing you do in your book, and I highlighted a bunch of these references, because I deal with manifolds now, is you talk about manifold theory and the manifold hypotheses, and there are lots and lots of different types of manifolds beyond what you think of as, like, a smooth, nice euclidean kind of surface.

And you talk a lot about topology and how those tools from topology and complexity science are some of the tools that you talk about as being used in service of understanding this high dimensional data in a way to reduce the dimension so that we can grasp it better. Is that where. Are you on board with what I just said?

[01:20:42] Luis: Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, there’s this cool paper, and I’ll think of it later. Maybe you can put it in show notes or something. But they were reviewing the various kinds of topological structures. So. Not just so. The one I use in the book is the most simplest torus manifold. Looks like a doughnut.

But there are a lot of other different kinds more sophisticated or, you know, whatever. But they were going over, classifying the different kinds and showing different kinds of neural recordings that could map onto those.

So epistemically, in terms of knowledge, I think it helps to have limited categories of how things can be organized. Right. There’s the ontological issue, which is, is that actually what brains or minds are doing? And I think that’s an open question. The example I use in my book is supposed to be a very fundamental ground level example, which is, you know, recording for hypothalamus, applying these dimensionality reduction techniques, then projecting it onto a torus manifold. But what I thought fascinating about this is that there’s a real time movement on the manifold in the state space, in the neural activity and the organisms movement in the world.

That is mind boggling to me.

[01:22:05] Paul: It’s worked out really well.

[01:22:06] Luis: Yeah, that has worked out really well. It could be a one shot, right? It could be mostly that. That was just a key example.

[01:22:13] Paul: There’s also a lot of processing that goes on with all those steps, which is a caveat, but it’s awesome. It’s beautiful. Yeah.

[01:22:21] Luis: Yeah. It’s really cool. And as you know, I’m into, like, what is possible, in principle, constrained by scientific practice. Again, philosopher of science hat. There you go. Proof of principle, right? And now I’ve given this nice story from the neural population scale all the way up to the environmental, in this case, a mouse approaching an aperture or an opening scale. What more would a Gibsonian want? I haven’t given way on any of the principles, and the neuroscientist should be happy because I haven’t hand waved at the neural scale. I’ve said, this is what’s happening right now at that neural scale.

[01:22:59] Paul: But the ecological psychologist, wouldn’t they have a little trouble with manifolds in the brain?

Wouldn’t that be too representational or.

[01:23:09] Luis: Yeah, see, you used representation earlier that you said you were saying something about the Taurus representing, and then I kind of cringed a little bit. Broke out in hives. I said that.

[01:23:19] Paul: I know. Yeah. It’s just rejected it is, yeah.

[01:23:23] Luis: 100%. Right. And that’s why this interdisciplinary kind of work is hard.

[01:23:28] Paul: But I’m okay with the term representation. I just know that it’s meant in so many different ways. Right. So. And so that what I was saying is an ecological psychologist does not like the term. Definitely. So wouldn’t they not like the idea of that being a brain process and somehow connecting that to the world?

[01:23:50] Luis: So if it was a representation in the sense of being semantic, of giving meaning to the action, that would be.

[01:24:05] Paul: A no, no, it’s just a. If it’s just a redescription of brain activity, that’s fine.

[01:24:10] Luis: Yep.

[01:24:11] Paul: Okay.

[01:24:11] Luis: Yeah.

[01:24:12] Paul: Okay.

[01:24:12] Luis: And connect it in a causal way. Right. To the affordance.

So the affordance is meaningful at the scale of the organism environment interaction. The affordance is not meaningful because there’s a part of the brain that has a list of things that are meaningful and has transformed this raw stimulus and then said, that’s a meaningful opening in the wall. That’s a meaningful cup. Right. And that’s one of the big problems that gibsonian ecological psychologists, some of the more radical embodied people have with cognitivism is this idea that really intelligence, really meaningfulness and semantics and so really just comes from the brain. And ecological psychologists have been pushing back and using a phrase from Daniel Dennett, he used this phrase called loans of intelligence.

And ecological psychologists have been critical of cognitive scientists and computer scientists and neuroscientists who don’t ever give us a cash out on that loan of intelligence. That’s their perspective. I’m not saying, like, everyone thinks that, although I do as well, but. Right. When are we going to cash this out? So how does. Okay, the representation is meaningful. How does the representation get meaning? Right. Where does that come from? And the ecological psychologist just wants to say, the meaning is in the act, and the act happens at the scale of the organism environment system. If it wasn’t meaningful, I wouldn’t be able to successfully drink coffee out of my mug. That’s the meaning. I don’t need a syntax of a chomp skin syntax tree with meaningful semantic spot to give that cup meaning. It’s in the action.

[01:25:58] Paul: So later, when I’m thinking about this, as I’m laying in my bed, later thinking about you, Louie.

[01:26:05] Luis: Thank you.

[01:26:05] Paul: Not just reviewing, reviewing, because, you know, it’s a terrible thing that I, you know, every time I do one of these interviews, I just think, oh, I should have said this. Why did I say that? You know, that sort of thing. And I might think oh, you know, Louie and I got along pretty well. He’s wrong about a lot, but, you know, but it was a friendly conversation. Just, it’s a friendly conversation. And I think that we could be friends and that’s meaningful to me. So then what does meaning in that sense mean? Or a different example? I love my children. Right?

Do I get that? From where does that mean?

Are these different things that we’re talking about or can you have meaning? Can you have it both ways? Can you have meaning that is developed internally and also at the, at the Gibsonian nexus of things?

[01:27:01] Luis: Yeah. So, I mean, the cheap response is, well, it depends what you mean by meaning. Different ways. And open up the Webster dictionary. And the Gibsonian means that the scale of the organism is different than, well, yeah, okay. Let me just, let me push back and ask you, you know, when you say, let’s think children off the table, let’s just, you love, you’re drinking some beverage right now. Does it have a flavor?

[01:27:31] Paul: If I’m drinking, drinking it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lemony.

I didn’t realize you were asking me. I thought you were asking me to imagine something. Yeah, okay.

[01:27:40] Luis: I love lemony flavored drinks. They’re meaningful to me.

You say, well, then isn’t that love? And that feeling, isn’t that kind of meaning just in me? And I think I would want to push back and say, you know, well, show me. Prove it. Like, how is it that you, that it is meaningful to you? And it’s like, well, I drink it.

Right? How is it that, I know I said leave kids off the table, but, you know, how is it that your kids are meaningful? You care for them, you provide food and shelter, ideally, you know, like, but.

[01:28:13] Paul: I have to plan to plan to purchase those electrolytes to taste that later in, you know, when I run out. Right. I have to plan to go buy some and all that seems to be fairly internal.

[01:28:25] Luis: Okay, okay, so now you’re pushing it back even more. Well, firstly was a question was, is that going to be meaningful? I try to get some conceptual clarification. I try to address it well, but what about. And you push it back, and I think that’s fair, right? And I think that’s what’s happening to ecological psychologists. And I think that’s what’s happening to radical embodied cognition people, right? I think they can give good stories like what we just had happen will happen over papers, right? Like, I’ll just say, this is my theory. And then you’ll come in, you know, philosopher, cognitive scientists and be like, it doesn’t account for this. And then I write a response that says, well, I do, and you say, yeah, but what about this aspect of it? And then we get to a point where I think then maybe, yeah, I don’t want to get into higher cognition type stuff yet, but got to soon.

[01:29:13] Paul: Because I actually have to go parent pretty soon.

[01:29:16] Luis: Yeah, yeah, because you care for your kids. They’re meaningful.

[01:29:19] Paul: Yeah, only when I see them.

[01:29:21] Luis: Only when you see them, right. Yeah. Or you hear them yelling.

[01:29:24] Paul: That’s what Gibson would say. You’re here. Yeah, maybe.

[01:29:30] Luis: But, yeah, I mean, I think we need to, you know, get semi lost my train of thought. But I think, you know, we have to be clear in our questions. We have to find some conceptual agreement, and then we can argue. Right. So, you know, it was informative, I think, what just happened between us, because we were getting kind of clearer. Right.

[01:29:53] Paul: Yeah. I think the most informative thing is what you said is that what depends on what you mean by meaning. And that’s a very philosophical philosopher thing to say. But it’s true because you have to operationalize definitions. And what I think happens a lot. And I think what ecological psychology does is just redefine meaning. And the cognitivist might. It’s not saying meaning is in the head, but that’s what we. That’s just how we understand meaning by, like, what we’re thinking or something. I’m trying to play devil’s kind of advocate both ways and clearly failing, but.

[01:30:23] Luis: No, no, no.

I agree with that. Not the failing, but reconstruction, you know, this. I mean, again, this cognitivist approach that seems so, you know, fundamental to the relevant sciences and the philosophy of mind, like, that’s not always been the case. Right. Even in philosophy of mind, there’s been a debate between internalism and externalism of meaning. Right. And I think a lot of philosophers, I might dare say, are leaning towards externalism and grounding meaning. Right. Of course there’s internal things that happen, but essentially, you know, why does the word water mean what it means? Because it links up to h two o, which links up to how the world is. Right. It’s not. I don’t give it meaning internally. It’s something that’s strongly constrained by the way the world is.

But yet somehow we skip over that. We go, no, but the real stuff that we want to explain is all just being internal.

[01:31:18] Paul: Or can it be both?

[01:31:20] Luis: Okay, why not both?

[01:31:22] Paul: Why not both?

We got to get through these other concepts real quick. So, hypothesis four is that the body like, the neural activity, like the mind organizes into low dimensional synergies to generate relevant states. So a synergy, I’m going to give it a quick and dirty definition. And by the way, I mean, I can only go for another eight minutes or so, but we’re not going to get through everything. And I don’t want to. I mean, I don’t want to get through the whole book anyway, but. So I will refer, you know, the listeners to go and get the book because, I mean, we haven’t even covered, like, there’s so many concepts, even in complexity science, that we haven’t covered. So I want to make sure we get through at least a little bit more of that. Okay? So I read the word synergies, and I thought, oh, man, here we go. We got to talk about synergies. So maybe you can just describe that essentially. Go ahead.

[01:32:15] Luis: Oh, just the easiest way to think about synergies is just functional units.

So when various components self organize into a functional unit, and it’s functional when it carries out a task. So the body will organize, right? It’ll collapse its degrees of freedom into a low dimensional state to carry out a task, right? All the different ways my arm can move, don’t matter what. I just need to reach for my cup. So my cup reaching my ball, catching my walking through apertures. I was walking like a bat, I guess, walking through apertures, right? These are all collapsing of the very countless degrees of freedom into a low dimensional functional unit of synergy.

And that is connected with low dimensional, at least my hypothesis, manifolds neurally.

And that connects to how I’ve interpreted Gibsonian information, ecological information, as a collapsing of that into a low dimensional set of information. So it’s this coordination.

Yeah, it’s a coordination between low dimensional neural states, low dimensional quas energy states of the body, and then low dimensional features of the environment. And that’s what gives rise to mindedness, intelligence.

[01:33:35] Paul: I was going to see if I could really quickly find the figure in the book, because you have basically three sets of manifolds that are then connected. And so you have a description of activity at the brain level that’s a manifold, a description of the activity, the body level, that’s manifolds, and a description of the environment as manifolds and connections, systematic relations between them. And it’s all of it together is sort of what next is aiming to explain.

[01:34:07] Luis: Yep, that’s right.

[01:34:08] Paul: What an easy project, right? That figure in particular, I’m like, oh, my God, there’s so much to be done.

[01:34:16] Luis: There’s a lot to be done. Yeah. And I think interdisciplinary communication is key. Right. Like, you know, I remember one of my advisors back in grad school saying, you know, she went to the. She was a philosopher by training, but she went to the Society for Neuroscience, and she said, you know, just like thousands of, you know, posters and hundreds of talks, and they’re all different subjects. They’re loosely organized into group, but nobody’s talking to each other about how they relate. How does this row of findings, of poster findings relate to that row of poster findings?

[01:34:55] Paul: I think nobody. Nobody is selling it a little bit short. But largely, I agree that it’s very few, very, very small percentage.

[01:35:02] Luis: Yeah, I mean, I’d be curious to hear you say more.

[01:35:07] Paul: Well, I mean, every connect offline, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:35:12] Luis: But the point is that even within one field, yeah, it’s really hard for people to make this connect. And then there’s computational neuroscientists, genetic, you know, people working at the molecular level, you know, things like that, let alone psychology, cognitive science, philosophy. And so, you know, having these talks and making these connections makes that work of piecing together those three state spaces that I presented even tougher to do. And what I suggest to revive an earlier point is that maybe we just need a shared language. Complexity science might be that kind of substrate free or not free, substrate neutral kind of wording and methodology.

[01:35:53] Paul: Okay, so hypothesis five, and I’m going to just read it and skip over, is that mind is fundamentally emerges at low dimensional scales of the organism, which is the brain and body slash environment activity. And you go into emergence in the book, and it’s one of the characteristics of complexity of complex systems.

Okay, so. And I’ll leave that to the reader to explore more. So, finally, hypothesis six is that next, the neuroecological nexus theory explains the architecture of the mind by means of a finite set of universal principles. And it’s. It’s these universal principles that you think the concepts and complexity science that you can apply to different systems at different scales, in scale free ways, across temporal scales and spatial scales.

There’s a set, a finite set of units, and you don’t know exactly what that set is, but you lay out lots of examples that seem to fit this bill, fit this bill, and have been applied in different domains. And so is next, is it sort of the search for those principles and where to apply them and how to systematically connect the different.

The different brain, body, environment systems?

[01:37:21] Luis: Yeah, I mean, ideally, you know, next would be able to leverage work in other areas to find you know, those principles. So, you know, fractal scaling or scale invariance is common feature of temporal aspects and spatial organization of organisms. And that’s a kind of universal kind of basic principle, right? Why, why genetically encode exactly where every bronchial tube is? Why not just encode split every now and then? You know, it’s split, split, split, split, split. And then you get, you know, a rich, you know, strong, resilient kind of system based on this one simple kind of rule. And we find that in various other kinds of systems as well. So the hope, the conjecture and the hypothesis is we’ll be able to account for much of the physiology and much of, you know, of an organism and the way they act in the world by these finite set of principles as opposed to kind of one off explanations.

Problem is that that hypothesis six just might totally undermine some of my other hypotheses. Because, for example, if that low dimensional kind of torus manifold turned out to be a one shot deal for head movement or body movement in space, then that wouldn’t be quite universal. The idea would be that it would apply more generally to other actions.

[01:38:47] Paul: And, well, it’s not a one shot deal. There’s a lot of manifold structures that have been shown and a lot of different tasks that are being used.

Okay, Louia, so there’s lots more that we could have gotten to. I really loved the book. I really enjoyed the conversation. And so we didn’t talk a lot about a lot of the concepts that you go into a lot more detail in the complexity science world. And so I think it’s just a great resource, actually, for people who don’t know much about complexity science to learn a lot because you describe a lot, but then you also refer to everything that you’re describing.

So if people want to learn more about those things, they can, they can use your book as a reference for that. So thank you for writing the book. Thanks for having a conversation with me. I appreciate the time.

[01:39:39] Luis: No, thanks for having me and suffering through this odd, odd set of ideas.

But thank you very much, and I hope your listeners enjoy it.

[01:39:50] Paul: All right, take care.

[01:39:52] Luis: Thank you. You too.

[01:40:08] Paul: I alone produce brain inspired.

[01:40:10] Paul: If you value this podcast, consider supporting.

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