Coding and the New Phenotype: In Search for Lost Time

00:00:09 yeah no he's saying the hole puncher is bad he's saying that us people down here have no two not too few you're right you're right I need more holes uh we're gonna start we normally have about 50 people in the audience but since this is our first a live meeting I think we haven't been able yet to publicize it enough so that the people who usually come are here the idea for I'm the director of the

00:00:40 center at nursesian the idea for these uh in the way also celebrates our second decade well the Village Center to have five programs together it was a pay because we didn't have any live for two years and the other is who came to us by a wonderful friends

00:01:11 and Elias dark war and then that coding was an important subject and had many angles to it and maybe we should have round tables on that and Jerry Horowitz who is the associate director of the center then took this and developed amazingly five round tables and so tonight today this morning we have the first of those and then we have four more two more this afternoon and two tomorrow

00:01:44 I want to thank all the participants who volunteered to come here and have a conversation and uh I leave it to Jerry to introduce everybody and we take on from this thank you Ed it's a real pleasure to be back here live at the Helix Center let me take a moment to introduce our esteemed panelists today

00:02:14 I'll try to make this quick but it's certainly interesting the thought I'll I maybe I can introduce the idea behind this talk which I think is a little bit unusual so the the the theme of the conference is over coding coding is in the modern era and I thought wouldn't it be interesting to start off with a very basic sort of study of what how do we how did we all come to the idea of what codes

00:02:45 are and what coding might be um I find that and this I'm sure is true a lot of our ideas are sort of been concretized now and it means one thing which is sort of programming and coding but codes have a long history and what they're meaning is I think is fascinating uh and so we'll take that up so first Yogi bazaki identified a hierarchy hierarchical organization of brain oscillations and proposed how these

00:03:16 rhythms support a brain syntax a physiological basis of cognitive operations his work changed how we think about information and coding in the healthy and diseased brain such as epilepsy and psychiatric disease several Laboratories worldwide have adopted this framework and provided supporting evidence for the two-stage model of memory in both experimental animals and human subjects buzaki is Biggs professor of neuroscience at NYU he is among the top

00:03:47 0.1 percent most cited neuroscientists member of the National Academy of Sciences USA member of the Academia europea and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Michael novichak is a curator and professor of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior advisor to the Museum's president from 1994 to 2021 he served as the Museum's senior vice president and

00:04:19 Provost of science awarded a doctorate degree at the University of California Berkeley Dr Novacek studies concern patterns of evolution and relationships among extinct and extend organisms his interests have ranged from the fossil record to data on DNA sequences he has led a participation I'm sorry he has LED or participated in paleontological Expeditions in North America in the North American Rocky Mountain region Baja California the

00:04:50 Andes Mountains of Chile the Yemen Arab Republic Argentina Saharan Africa Morocco and the Gobi deserts of Mongolia Karen B Stern is a professor of history at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York her research is deeply interdisciplinary she studied Classics with honors at Dartmouth College Ernie harambe and PhD in religious studies from Brown University and has excavated and conducted field researches research in different areas

00:05:22 of the Mediterranean including Jordan Greece Tunisia Morocco and Israel several grants fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment of the humanities Council of American overseas research center and the Getty Villa have supported her research which deeply employs employ deploys methods from the fields of archeology anthropology epigraphy history and religion and religion to investigate the daily lives of mature culture of Jews

00:05:52 and Christians in Antiquity who inhabited areas around the Mediterranean to Arabia and Mesopotamia David Salter is a professor of Psychiatry neurology pharmacology and at the School of the Arts at Columbia University and New York State psychiatric Institute he received a PhD in biology from Columbia University his lab has published over 250 studies on synaptic function particularly of the basal ganglia and dopamine systems and

00:06:24 neuroimmunology in normal and disease states that are cited over 50 000 times he is founder of the dopamine Society the Gordon conference on Parkinson's disease and the journal Nature Parkinson's disease he has received awards from the McKnight Simons Helmsley narsad Huntington's and Aaron Diamond foundations and the universities of Jerusalem Minnesota University College of London and National Science foundations of Israel

00:06:54 Austria Portugal and given name lectureships at the National Institute of Health Harvard Yale UCSF Emery UC Irving Irvine and the Vatican Mark Van Der merku oh sorry Mark Vander meerub is a historian of the ancient near East in Egypt from the beginning of writing to the age of Alexander of Macedon besides teaching at Columbia University he has taught at the University of Oxford and at Yale University he directs Columbia Center

00:07:24 for the ancient Mediterranean he has published numerous books and articles on various aspects of the ancient near east of the ancient near Eastern history Egyptian history and world history with interest ranging from socioeconomic and political history to intellectual history he has written extensively on historical methodology as it applies to his field of study in these writings he aims both to present the materials of these fascinating ancient cultures to a broader audience

00:07:54 and to explore New Paths of research okay I think we're done so thank you very much so I guess I'd like to get started with my sort of the premise of the talk which is if one of you or several of you want to discuss your ideas of what code what coding and decoding means very generally because every each of you has a certain

00:08:26 area of expertise that goes into specific examples of decoding or coding and I'd like us to start with hieroglyphs the Rosetta Stone anniversary stuff like that okay David so that sounds good to me well actually I mean the the the ancient languages and scripts that are mainly deal with are not the hieroglyphic ones from Egypt but just from the near East and especially the first system of writing ever invented in world history the kidney form writing system and there we see in

00:08:58 you know Brian 3200 BCE the invention of a writing system that's quite different from what we currently use the alphabetic writing system but with this system that makes us together science multiple signs that indicate words or parts of words one of my the things that I'm very interested in is actually what that did to the people's perception of the

00:09:28 universe in which they live because in the way the conceived of the writing system and the way they conceived of the elements of the writing system it was not in order to reproduce speech but it was in order to reproduce reality and reality expressed in writing and because it's very different from the way we perceive writing in our alphabetic script where let's say each character has one particular value or

00:10:01 has only a value within the context of the other characters but it's always let's say a letter B as always something to do with the labial in pronunciation in speech each character has multiple values values that can sound entirely different from one another but also that can have different meanings altogether and what you see happening in this uniform script is actually that they play around with

00:10:33 the written form of anything a name or sentence or something like that and they reinterpret it using various meanings of the various elements obviously this is not the case for basic writings but this is when you talk about all the text ritual text that type of thing so you can take actually a particular sequence of signs and give them one meaning and actually if you give each of these signs

00:11:04 a different you know different playing around with it you can actually come up with exactly the opposite so you get this that seems to be to us extremely confusing but actually that there is a coherent system that enables you to interpret things and then get an understanding of of everything in the universe through its written form what would you say that there's more of an emphasis

00:11:35 it's it's slightly less abstract and more material so the material nature of the image of these uh no it's actually nothing it's though it's a very visual system of writing uh the the basic and to us difficult thing to understand is that actually each element within this system has multiple values and if you obviously there's an apparent intermediate understanding when

00:12:08 you read something but if you really want to to discover the full truth the full value of something that is expressed in writing you have to consider these other options and so you can take a particular name and you can then interpret that name I mean when I said you can interpret it internally in the opposite time that's that it does happen but that's perhaps too extreme but you can actually see in the name of

00:12:40 an individual or let's say of a God you can find within that God's name all aspects of the powers that that God has in the universe if you read that name popular thank you how did you feel decode cuneiform how would you decode this yeah how did you understand what uh the these various meanings that each of these uh they give us this information like Lee I mean we have I mean they have scholarly material

00:13:12 where they instance look back upon their own writings and in give interpretations of their own writings there's a long textual tradition that goes some 3000 years and so we benefit from the fact that especially in the later periods of this history there are people who are looking at texts that have been produced in the past and who make commentaries on these texts and so there within these

00:13:42 commentaries we can see how they could take certain passages and look at these passages and give them various interpretations you're saying that there's there's an unbroken tradition in Mesopotamia which is very different than the broken tradition in Egypt to the modern era actually that the interesting thing it's a this system so you did have to ReDiscover house in the 19th century of the Common Era it was rediscovered and it wasn't I mean it

00:14:15 was already an accomplishment that said to be able to read please can they form text because it wasn't as easy as with the Egyptian hieroglyphs where you had the Rosetta Stone which gave you uh you know an ability to understand these hierographic signs but it was accomplished the ones we you know people were able to read this text also they became able to Scholars became able to read more complicated text and figured out that they date themselves indicated sometimes well although you have this

00:14:48 particular passage that passage actually can have multiple meetings or we can explain the meanings that that passes have by looking at how it is written out not by how it is pronounced so let's start with the basics coding is an agreement between the sender and the receiver it requires a cipher without the cipher there is nothing so information is not out there it's not in

00:15:20 the center it's not in the receiver it's a relationship the information should be packaged and anybody who learns the morse code knows that packaging is very important because the stop signs or we computer language or in human languages you have to have methods to say this is the beginning this is the end of the message and this is the asset bit because Cipher without a cipher you can never play the code

00:15:52 decode the hieroglyphs because he was given the cipher the Rosetta's thought and that grounded an unknown language to two known languages that he spoke he spoke like 10 languages it was it was equipped with the with the way to discover things all my creditors were here but without Rosetta Stone he would have no clue let's see another example he wanted to have examples uh Alan Turing is well known though he is the breakout of the Court breaker in fact he didn't write a code he couldn't

00:16:24 the code that his decipher was given to him by the Polish intelligence service in 1939 by the the Polish post office because they already had an Enigma machine actually he got two Enigma machines the Enigma machines contained the the the the key elements of which you had to redo iterate reiterate theater in the same method but jumping on us and many of The Other Board Breakers use now

00:16:54 in the brain you know we usually read every single cognitive science paper that the brain codes information this is nonsense because there is no information out there information is always a relationship between what's out there and and what is inside here so actually without humans I challenge you is that there's no information we make things out there and keep it as

00:17:25 information because we know and who we create the ciphers now this is very general you get the Fantastic particular examples I'm uh interested in this possibility though that this modern understanding of decoding let's say where there's a where there's a uh uh the key a key yeah thank you that um the the definition of coding then gets to be well the if you know the code you know how to proceed

00:17:55 to try to unpackage a certain sort of information we call it decipher yeah right right but we I think now have this idea that it's a way to be able to know how to speak the words to just say them out loud but I think earlier on it wasn't just simply a matter of turning it into an oral format right is that fair to say that that wasn't exclusively what it was about it's like that has what's exactly so when I let like I said the message I

00:18:25 can do it various ways animals can do it by the way you know our obsession is about the human mind is just a very narrow um kind of an approach because when you generate an artifact it is a message to somebody else and the advantage of an artifact that it will survive you and it can be given to many many so it's a one-to-many communication and forever and it's very easy to identify human artifacts when you go in the desert or anywhere you find anything you say this is natural or this is a

00:18:58 human made because we are sensitive to those things that are required the human mindset and its ability to construct it so that kind of of message is what was I'm sending messages all the time with my eyes and my my gestures and so on language was a extraordinary human invention and of course when language occurred then some of these guys are on the table including me were very valuable because

00:19:28 the Elder people were the ones who accumulated all that knowledge and carried the information but when writing was invented that was huge and then books were invented that was huge assorted but it's basically an externalization of brain function it's sending messages to the receivers so there are this is something that that irritates me a lot there are a lot of people in my in my field to study so the origins of writing and it seemed to would say it stayed actually explicitly

00:20:00 it was not a big deal because as you're saying there's a system of communication pre-written or even in parallel with writing a system of communication through Visual images Etc or through objects and so on and they're saying well writing is just a similar thing parallel and it doesn't really affect the brain to to Beyond that's what you've been saying in my opinion it seems that one the invention

00:20:30 of writing had an a Very radical impact on the functioning of the human brain and that it made the human brain function differently but I'm not of course I'm not like you are specialist in this but that it made of human brain function differently what about people that don't read yeah thank you please no just because I I want the materials that I work on from Antiquity or not necessarily sort of look at texts but I also look at images because in Antiquity

00:21:02 as well as modernity not everybody could read and write so the fact that you have these amazing cuneiform texts whether they're just like receipts of things or more extended ones it still requires specialization to be able to to be able to carve those figures in those particular ways and have that vast information at hand and to be able to read it and process it but surely I mean not every recipe could do that so for those who were able to engage in the

00:21:32 very specialized Elite activities of the production of these texts surely it changed how they thought and it sort of had a ripple effect on how Society is organized but for many people who couldn't engage in those things right it took until literacy however broadly we describe it becomes more widespread I think it it probably it's true I mean the way bring function might have developed would be different in accordance with the relationship to those systems I imagine they're actually

00:22:03 experiments in India that are more illiterate than needed and people who were enrolled with a two-year school they were monitored with fmri and they showed changes all over the brain almost it's hard to point you know this is not a vernica and they broke areas everywhere but the remarkable thing I think is what we have to realize that our communication or Cipher system is based on a generative grammar that is of

00:22:33 course part of the the spoken language but one was written the key thing is that how humans figured out in all cultures 20 to 35 elements letters to describe the entire knowledge of humankind I mean that's an extraordinary achievement and of course it was not designed there were no smart people just the generous smart people and they divorce and that's that's uh something that you can call human immersion because no other speech

00:23:05 has achieved it because it's still stuck though I think what you're saying is very provocative but I'm thinking that if Homer couldn't read and write and Muhammad famously could not read or write or do you think their brains are working differently yeah who essentially wrote the the or Homer that wrote all this wonderful material that survives for thousands of years but he didn't right yeah but he didn't know me

00:23:36 too but he didn't and it was all sung right and and and and the Quran Rhymes and and no wonder people remember it but still I mean it became written but it wasn't written by them Christ didn't write his stuff down and yet so you're saying that there was this big transition in a way from from from uh Muhammad to whatever I forgot the name of the person that the Scribe that started that started writing the Quran

00:24:07 down they would have two different kinds of brains yeah but okay actually all right you're focusing I mean unfortunately also you your focus is too much on the on the alphabetic writing system and there there's this the issue of the relationship between the oral and the written and the purpose of the alphabet is to represent the oral okay they're for Socrates thought that writing was actually a bad thing because it took you one step further back from

00:24:38 truth okay what I'm saying over I'm arguing is that actually the kidney form writing system and a hieroglyphic writing system for that matter they're not alphabetic especially in the Kenya form which I know very well it's not the intention is not to render speech the intention is to render something reality in writing yes you can make a connection to Speech but actually perhaps initially it was not even connected to speech initially it may be

00:25:10 just as having the earliest text we have there is no Clear Connection to speech it is not a rendering of speech it is rendering of reality in a written form that then adjusts itself that when it becomes used to people who with different languages they use this script to start including more and more connections well then I think what you're saying is the big jump isn't to writing I I mean I know I mean well facetious but but it's not your writing it's to doing a form of writing that

00:25:42 does reflect speech because the reason we remember the Iliad or the Quran or whatever is because because they were done in written speech with rhyme and meter so that people could retain these otherwise they would have been forgotten I want to kind of get back to this idea that at the origins of spoken oratory but then I think especially writing there was a little bit of a it meant something to people who were not good at

00:26:12 oratory for starts they thought these folks who could do this they were performers they were special and certainly once writing began those who were illiterate formed this gigantic sort of penumbra around the illiterate the literate folks they saw a lot of these texts as being magical but even though they couldn't penetrate it they realized it was magical there was something magical about because they were experts who could derive things from it so it's it's wrong to think that it didn't have any impact at all on the

00:26:43 illiterate right it was it was this group that was carried along with that and I want to say one other thing before I forget it about the brain function and that is there are these interesting neurological conditions like Alexia where people cannot read from stroke and other sorts of Buenos a graphia where they cannot write they often go together they don't always go together we know their brains are the same as brains of people before there was writing right primarily something happened there was some transformation in their brain but

00:27:14 it's the same brain and it's an interesting sort of a mystery for me perhaps fundamental distinction early languages and early writings is that the speeches is storytelling it's mostly about what we call it episodic memory or episodic information that is I'm part of the I'm the agent who is uh is communicating whereas the early kunai film writings were very abstract they were all about semantics and the these semanticism started with the counting

00:27:46 the number of bushels the number of bags of Wheat and the number of sheep and so on and this is how the numbers emerged as an abstract thing because it was a practical reflection of the activity of the humans who said I can't achieve now two years ago I was counting doing something and the way I counted one two three four you know this is how the decimal system was denied and things like that and then all of a sudden it occurred to the person that the folks early puneiforms the 10

00:28:19 bags of wheat has different pen than the 10 ship because that is specifically referred to the referred thing and later on somebody said oh maybe 10 is something I can use in and count anything and that was a explicit semantic information and later on when the languages became more complicated or not complicated but more useful than the storytelling came back also in in written languages

00:28:49 but that comes I mean one has narrative text relatively soon I mean it's relative but the first you know written I mean you're talking about administrative texts and indeed are the primary the the first things found but we have narrative texts okay 600 years later admittedly it's a long time obviously the one thing that is very important in that so indeed the administrative documents or the primary documents found in the earliest writing

00:29:19 but and this to me is very important alongside their lists of words lexical text or dictionaries but they are actually in my reading of them their study of the written word so it sees it as it's not just making well what type of of sign can informed science do we have that we can use in administrative text but it actually takes because they're visual signs and it takes it and it plays around with them and come up with nonsensical signs

00:29:53 if they you know somehow they see that there is an ability to to create something a reality that is not connected to a physical reality and that's purely a written reality Michael what do you think well I am my interests come way before language I should say and and the work but I'm very familiar with the need and the concept of Cipher on one hand I've been working for years trying to what we call reconstruct the

00:30:26 tree of life and the tree of life is an evolutionary pattern uh that now was an extraordinary time at least in the last decade and a half that DNA sequences and the genetic code is part of that evidence to reconstruct the tree but DNA has certain limitations 99 of all life that ever existed on this planet is extinct and so for those fossils except with some very few and my friend sponte Pabo just won the Nobel

00:30:58 Prize his his work uh you know and except for those exceptional circumstances where the code has actually been recovered in human fossils or things that are uh Mammoth skin and so forth things that are very quite young uh that fossil record is really um really out of the scope for DNA so we have to rely on what actually happened and the fossils that we find and that as

00:31:28 Darwin recognizes an incredibly inconsistent and spotty record but you mentioned Cipher and I think what we have our Cipher we what happens in the advance of recovering this history is the discovery of a cipher so and indeed almost it's almost a platitude you'll see occasionally where someone will Proclaim oh I have this early hominid fossil it's the Rosetta Stone for human evolution you know

00:31:59 everything is representative but the reality is there are Cyprus once in a while a fossil is an extraordinary Cipher for example archeopteryx the earliest bird which shows the definitive characters of both dinosaurs and birds and it's only through it's only in the last five or six well the last decade that we've come to recognize that birds are not only related to dinosaurs they are dinosaurs they're just a branch of dinosaurs in

00:32:29 fact they're a branch of theropods that are related to Tyrannosaurus an oviraptor and a lot of things that we've collected in Adobe so you know that's our Cipher that it was a combination of characters which was recognized by Richard Owen in the early 20th century he said hey look this thing has some dinosaur-like characters you didn't go much farther than that then uh John Osterman Yale went a little further and then people like Jacques cotier and Mark my colleague really you know expanded on

00:33:01 that and so it's I think we're always searching for ciphers you know in in the fossil record and there are too many there aren't you know it's it's a very rare event that's why there's so much attention paid to it I think speaking for the audience can you say a little bit more about why birds are dinosaurs that's really pretty yeah intriguing well the the skeletal structure of a uh if you as as Richard

00:33:31 Owen observed if you strip that archeopter skeleton of you know it's preserved in this incredible way in the jurora Limestone with impressions of feathers and if you strip that off uh this animal it looks like a small theropod dinosaur and it it's hip structure the orientation of the pubis the uh the lower limb and the feet very very characteristic of a subgroup of

00:34:03 dinosaurs that therapod dinosaurs but the Long Claws and the extended uh digits on the foot in an in a whole variety of other characters so um and of course we discovered in 1993 with this very incredibly Rich site in the gobian in a way this site which we named hookah to God the whole site is a cipher because um it's preserved hundreds of skeletons of

00:34:33 dinosaurs little mammals and lizards and compared to what we have in what we found in Mongolia uh in North America a lot of those animals especially the smaller ones are represented only by isolated teeth and Jaws we knew nothing about what they look like as whole animals we called those fossils spare parts because you know you have to put everything together well we discovered

00:35:03 that these uh oviraptors or nesting we discovered the first nesting dinosaurs and they were on a clutch of eggs and the eggs were always in an architectural Arrangement and these these dinosaurs were capable just like bear uh birds of Parental care of their nests so there was once in the there's there's a window open to Dinosaur behavior that we never expected to find once again that kind of

00:35:36 and once again reinforcing the relationship between these dinosaurs and and living birds just to amplify this point that how important it is to have a key or a cipher no ciphers lead to game changing ways that it leads to changing the framework through which we see the world as an example Ari backs on the philosopher introduced that term called Alan vital Nobody Knows

00:36:06 the young people don't know what I'm talking about Ella mital was the most debated critical thing in the two centuries ago because it was impossible to explain or conceive how from a seed you can make a tree or from ovum and sperm you can make a human there must be a driving so is a the drive of life and it's like nowhere all of a sudden

00:36:37 DNA came around it was a gate changer nobody talks about Italian well everything is explained because we shifted to a different framework from where things are explained in a self-explanatory manner well precisely Darwin had uh his theory of natural selection as solid but his mechanism for it is completely wrong because he didn't have that Cipher but I want to make a point about ciphers because the cipher you referred to earlier Georgie about

00:37:08 Rosetta Stone was an explicit like this equals this that equals that there are some these there has been deciphering that's gone on here clearly there's no key there's no explicit key in what you're doing in paleontology um there are other massive methods that people have to try to make some sense of what's of decoding what is going on so there's frequency the chronology things of that nature and also am I wrote long about this so Linear B also was decoded

00:37:39 without an explicit key yeah it was a good thing right the frequency of the appearance of certain uh units elements in the language is used as a kind of a way to build up a key right how how often in the information being imparted does well in English would be the letter e appears much more than other letters the letter Z not very much except in your name and mine it's the Spotify because everything in nature is love normally

00:38:09 distributed the address that the right end of this skew distribution exactly no but those are the frequency analyzes and chronologies do help to build up a sort of a key which doesn't necessarily well which is the best we can do but in order to do so don't you need to have a cons an understanding of the general structure because indeed the letter e is more is more common than the latest disease within the structure of English that are frequently used are not really

00:38:42 changing or changing much slower over the time of humankind so it'll give a language when uh that you are looking for common words in pheno yogic for example then we have a bunch of words that are very basic and frequent very frequently used over centuries such as blood fingers and so on and they rarely words are changing meaning a lot many Greek words are used today they're totally different connotations like empathy

00:39:14 everybody else versus empathies in the real use in Greek is called disgust all these Transformations happen because of the way how we use language in everyday life and these numbers or the frequency distributions are very important tools to dig out what are the common and what are the unique elements of changing language also I think you need a context for interpreting the key to recognize that key so I just thinking back forgive me

00:39:47 about the fossil record um there had to be someone had to present the idea that these things took place over enormous amounts of time and that was a huge controversy there wasn't evidence directly for the age we didn't have radiometric dating or anything like that there was basically a concept of time with that being in this enormous expanse and it was rejected by most

00:40:20 intellectuals of the time until it finally took hold so you needed some kind of context to interpret even those fossils those ciphers people were finding fossils during that time and you know thinking that maybe they were casualties that didn't make it on the ark so you know the the you had to have some kind of context for interpreting deciphers in the beginning in the first place I appreciate the

00:40:54 the types of materials that I work on and the way that I work on them there is no Cipher because I'm approaching it from sort of a cultural angle so some of these things resemble letters and some of these things resemble pictures but it's really just paying attention to the precise spatial context and sort of broader practical context and looking at patterns in their distribution that enables us to sort of create some sort of framework of interpreting them because otherwise there is no interpretation that's not you know

00:41:25 they're not words to represent something necessarily what are those texts that you're referring to a lot of my research is on graffiti in Aramaic or Greek in Syria and data Antiquity or the Middle East and ways in which I mean to sort of hearken back to as you described it these these ways that people produce artifacts we just don't know necessarily what they're trying to communicate sometimes except the patterns and their distribution can be helpful if they're

00:41:55 graffiti and burial caves or um in places of prayer or worship or something like that but these are humans who might not have been able to write a record of how many sheep or how many well maybe if it was a very limited vocabulary they could but they're trying to express something I mean they're they're trying to commemorate a moment an idea and it's sort of trying to get a sense of what why they're creating this sort of artifact of presence or ideation or something how do you know you were

00:42:27 right I don't so because that's the without the cipher you have a consensus approach there was a wonderful expression at building men that I you often use that reality or the truth is what we all dream about together that's a wonderful expression except it's useless because everything that we would like to Define has to be grounded one way or another I have to communicate that

00:42:58 grounding to any to other cultures because I don't know your classic or any classification can happen only from a point of view from a classified point of view now we have it can be classified in millions whereas you know you have a beard we've got short hairs and so on um thank you so so that kind of classification is useful and then somebody tells you the framework and said for sure but then you could say well then what do we do do we just I

00:43:30 absolutely I think that's why it's important to you know yeah so record your own framework of interpretation and people can perfect as long as we know that we are in a temporary particular mindset that is it's then it's okay and this should bring us to time because you you just mentioned that people don't have but didn't have the concept of very long time because human perception and animals perception is based on this skewed rule that Ten Thousand Years

00:44:00 for me is the same as a million years there is no way when I was a boy as a kid I was obsessed by this issue I just didn't understand how you could understand time and my parents took me to the Grand Canyon and I said oh wow I think I finally got it because this is this immense place you know and it starts the bottom of the canyon it's Precambrian Rockets goes

00:44:32 back billions of years and then it goes to the top and then I realize the youngest rocks in the canyon were 200 million years old the stuff at the top so there was even more I said I just I can't wrap my head around that and I I still think even though we can date those rocks and even though we can recover these lost communities and so forth from uh eons ago I still think we don't quite

00:45:03 perceive what that means you don't know as a young boy was somebody like humans 200 000 years ago we had a vague concept of space and time which meant that we are nobody is in this universe just tiny little things and there is this huge thing these days this eternity and things like that science approached it well space and time became scientific Concepts as editing us when we started measuring them right so space

00:45:33 was replaced with distance time was replaced with duration and then we came to an agreement with measuring instruments such as rod and clocks without such externalization of brain function and a universal agreement on things space and time is nothing and it can continue discussion I will explain you that there is no space at no time but but indeed once you started to look at that those stratifications those are

00:46:03 concrete those could be looked at yeah and then you look at the physical process of the tube but geologists have said the evolution of this is this long according to biometric then you have an agreement well Lyle you know looked at those rocks and then he went down to a beach or a river and he said well wait I can see in these rocks these Pebbles streaming out I could see these things forming now what

00:46:35 let's see how long that takes and he went out on the beach and nothing happened he could sit there for a month well you know you saw a little bit of sand you know being deposited on a sandbag and so he said hey this takes a huge amount of time to create what you see here in this rock record see I want to I want to go back to something Karen just said earlier and you challenge a little bit Georgie is about how do you know how could you confirm what you're seeing

00:47:06 when you look at these archaeological things and you said well it's true the consensus gets built and you tell your story in your account the best you can and then you wait to hear what sort of other colleagues and experts in the field think and you slowly build it up okay to me that's what language is also too isn't language a consent we think language itself forms as some sort of social thing everyone agrees that we're gonna use the word red and whenever the original wrote Whatever the original red

00:47:37 was that we all kind of get into this consensus and interestingly that seems to give the semantics to meaning right so you can say well what you're doing right now seems to be a little in cohesive maybe at worst I don't think it is but you know and then maybe it'll come closer and closer as consensus and it might go down the wrong path the consensus may lead us in the wrong direction and that's that's just what you're dealing with but I think there's something lost in that because

00:48:07 the the next topic I'm interested in talking about is Will is there anything lost in changing to the thinking of things being all a code like do you miss something because it's reductionistic to a degree you know you will miss tons of things because again we we are human and language of industry but we can look at the same problems with a different direction so semantics or explicit knowledge can be derived in all animals one particular way which is

00:48:38 my whole experience so one I have one one experience I have another experience another experience these are all concrete and from those interactions or intersections of those experiences something becomes explicit that is the events are stripped off from the spatial temporal conditions and it then become explicit but I've seen the first talk in my life I said it's an episode it's an experience I see another dog and another dog and then I created the the the

00:49:09 explicit knowledge of darkness and I know what it is now this is fantastic humans with language have another way of producing semantics which is pics are given to you by an authority such as your parents such as your teachers and so on and said uh this is a USB this is an iPhone and I can use it because I was told about the utility of that thing and it goes along for a long time and I have no reason to

00:49:41 contradict it even though I don't know what's in USB I don't even know what USB stands for I just know what this is so humans can give there is a little funnel here and then we are pouring a lot of knowledge into the head of a newborn or a child because we can't do it and people who cannot generate episodes in their lives there are people without hippocampal systems they still can get around because they have this enormous freely

00:50:11 given uh semantic information the catch is this because it's not your experience you don't go through the verification process you don't ground those things and then I start believing that I'm a good Democrat because this is my framework or I'm a good Republican because this is my framework and I never question my framework because that was given to me I never questioned those words that were given to my teacher my prince though if I have one or or or authorities so that's an interesting

00:50:43 thing and that's why I say that when we explain things to its or carve Nature by his joints and we are trying to go this is the only time when you have to think about that seriously for everyday parents it's not a big deal you know culture is not a big deal when we are classifying this and that but when we are going to the roots of things then this is the key to think about and this is the absolutely it needed approach for space and time as

00:51:14 well back with this issue of language because I mean I forget the exact term that he uses but now I'm trumpsky's idea about Linguistics is totally different from what you're saying it's not something that is taught to us language is not taught to us but language is somewhat inherent into the human being as a species I'm afraid I can't I mean I hope I'm not talking about something that is totally alien to you I thought you oh no no you

00:51:45 just brought up a can of worms it's going to go way longer than two hours so maybe I should have not yeah no I I mean happy to get into that but maybe briefly really briefly I mean for me personally in my own work I sort of dismiss all of that there are all forms of animal communication that have nothing to do with those rules and um and and then it becomes for me very very arbitrary about what we call

00:52:16 language friendly I mean uh the you know the consul bachikov Studies have you ever read these snakes these are fantastic this is a spell I just retired but anyway he's he he studies prairie dog communities in the uh Arizona and the different communities have different calls uh to us they just sound they're they're 100 milliseconds right and so to us they all sound the same but if you simply record them uh and and slow them down you find out that they

00:52:47 have they have a they have different meanings one of them will mean um the coyotes coming from that direction they he even did experiments with graduate students wearing different colored t-shirts and they were able to assign the a different call to each of the colors that the graduates and the student t-shirts were and they were able to distinguish one of The Graduate students in a different way even if she could because she was shorter than all the other ones those useful graduates did yeah yeah yeah yeah

00:53:17 yeah and then he would do things like shoot a rifle he'd shoot a rifle off on the side and then they would develop a new vocabulary for that that's amazing so yeah I know it's it's fantastic it's great work and is it is it language but in this case wait isn't it isn't that analysis based on looking at a stimulus and then the frequency of the response like it's a little bit of a syntactical analysis because you're talking about the formal aspects of those sounds right we don't know and that's exactly what we do when

00:53:47 you try to decode a script that we don't know right I don't I don't think it's inconsistent with I'm not a Chomsky fan either but I happen to think that's not inconsistent you could say well Chomsky would say yes but in humans the way language forms the formal aspects the syntactical aspects have a certain form and we can rely on that to do an analysis exactly the difference so he would exclude that as a language and I just I just frankly stay on it and use the word language like when you're

00:54:18 referring to prairie dogs or Dolphins well I would use communication because but mostly because I don't want to get down that road of defining what language is because to me okay this is what I really think I think that a lot of a lot of academics like to use language as a way to differentiate our species from all other species right and so I just don't want to I don't want to have to deal with that I think it's a way for me personally it's a way so I don't think that anybody has that there are very few

00:54:50 language is completely human yeah but no lamb does uh he still says that he still says it now no Yuri's bill says it now I saw yeah I know but then he has a lot of followers in different departments yeah you know I just I mean it's just it's it's like you were saying some some uh the the what Vita it's like if we were still arguing about about getting the uh the homunculus from the semen into the you know into the egg I mean it's just

00:55:21 it's just something I want to put aside yeah I agree he's as a prominent person but I think any linguist would agree that communication is better perhaps more General word and and I can communicate with my dogs my my cat said there's no question that we communicate or they communicate with each other do they have seen that the girls yes they have do they have the same language Jesus and we know that birds have also because zombies have similar genes that was a huge Discovery but the two decades ago

00:55:55 there's nothing without Evolution there is nothing in the brain that doesn't have a precedence even the most complicated things like question everything is that French dogs communicate differently than American dogs different language so that's a interesting thing that brings me back to my my as I said the funnel that we put a lot of stuff into our brains is because interestingly there is a mixed keys for humans a mixed

00:56:27 discrepancy between knowledge of humankind and the individual share my share of human Christ knowledge is extremely ridiculous and is getting worse and worse and worse obviously every day now dogs from anywhere they have pretty much the same knowledge of dog kind anywhere in the world do they have cultural differences of my there might be the localities do the

00:56:58 other other cultural inheritances in animals yes there are there are known monkey groups in Okinawa there's a reasonable case they wash potatoes and the ones that that tradition is gone then perhaps it's gone forever if you know there are many cultures that that like the Tasmanian cultures like the the the the Icelandic cultures and the Greenland cultures they all disappeared because the people who had the knowledge

00:57:29 died and then they they couldn't make new canoes they didn't make like arrows and things like that all of a sudden That civilization just was disappeared because of the lack of this knowledge and when I have to tell this story is mostly because it's amusing and I want to move away from having this round table devolve into a talk about animal Consciousness which we love to do here at Helix but we're gonna the story which may be a good segue is there was a study about cats looking into whether cats uh

00:58:03 understood their names I think this is just a wonderful story so you know as opposed to other words they might hear so they do an MRI of the cat and they stimulate call the cat's name and sure enough the research was found yes cats can distinguish their name from other words spoken to them they just don't care yeah that's right I mean it's really funny but it does say something about well what does what what then do you do let's say oh say the cat's decoded Tabby it's decoded it some

00:58:37 part of his brain anyway seems the evidence that that has been decoded but then what does the cat do with that code is there that creates a meaning for the cat right no I love that story because they really don't give a damn and it's very interesting to me to be around people that are trying to decode for instance uh the the seti group which is you probably read about this so trying to decode the the whale song by doing deep learning and and the fellow running it says what we just need more data that's all we need and it's it's

00:59:07 nonsense frankly I mean God bless them for doing that and I'm glad somebody else is doing it but but the uh um but Roger Payne the fellow who discovered well song he tried to you know he's done over 50 years of of following the wells and and interacting with them as well as we can and he was trying to imagine what the conversation would be in the conversation would essentially be okay uh where's the food now and I'm tired of smelt okay you know give me

00:59:39 give me give me give me octopus I'm tired of smell and that's the kind and I also this also reminded me of conversations with Oprah chernovsky who who you probably know is a bird scientist and he says you know spent his life around these songbirds and he says you know they they really think we are very slow I mean we can't we can't possibly catch them and we're very stupid and the stuff that we worry about is is just nonsense and and I think that's right I think we're going to put it he's absolutely right and then

01:00:11 you're right you know if you go to the Neuroscience you know science we made this mistake all the time because of our inheritance that is we are giving the world to the brain they are recording from the brain something such as firing or fmri singles and then we find a relationship and we think we are decoding the brain and you had on the New York Times the fact is that that message is message only for an outside observers because only the outside

01:00:42 Observer has the luxury of seeing the outside world at what's happening in the brain neurons in the brain have no clue they don't know if there is anything outside there the only thing they have is the activity there so what comes into the world there has to be grounded it has to be connected to something that something else in person you have to have a second opinion the only thing that's available for the for the brain that that is for us as humans also is through our actions and our verification of things unless those are

01:01:14 our things are verified independently everything is just a consensus and that doesn't really help us at all so you know when it comes to uh communication some race but some we use a lot of imagination but that has to be looked at and I can give you many many examples that we have tons and tons of misunderstanding once you start recording from the brain and you ask whether those patterns that we thought

01:01:44 were representing these things actually means something to the brain if you don't have that grounding knowledge you know nothing right well a good way to think about that would be in this goes returns to Shannon's discussions about information you know and he made a very strong effort to say look this is not information in the sense of like knowledge it's not meaning it's just how do you get the code there's a code for the information right

01:02:14 and it's it's just imagine a signal comes across a wire or the airwaves and it's the word dog right okay dog now that's wonderful I heard it it's the word dog now why is it then then if I want I can go to the library or I can think of myself I can write an essay on dogs about all of my experiences and thoughts about dog I can write a poem I can make a song I can write a song about dogs right and so and those individual expressions of mine will be I hope rich

01:02:47 and elaborate and it goes well beyond just the single word dog that that information came along but it doesn't have the full richness of dogness for for me right and I think that's an important but it doesn't it's just a few yeah yeah because you represented right but that but the but the code only provides a key to triggering that sort of what you're saying there's a context into which these codes you know find them insert themselves and then the rest

01:03:17 has to do with the way the humans respond to it that's why I was saying earlier if the if a illiterate looks at uh writing especially I think back in the uh in the ancient times it would have a very strong meaning to them although it was not an explicit meaning that the code good seem to be trying to convey right well back to the notion of The Cypher you know to my mind I think what ciphers are they are the means of falsifying consensus

01:03:49 so and there's so many classic examples of that I mean plate tectonics everybody thought continents didn't move and even though there was a concept for moving continents it wasn't really it didn't really falsify consensus until uh uh as examples of real science brought up here um paleomagnetic reversals sip uh patterns on the ocean floor showed actually that the ocean seafloor was

01:04:20 spreading and these continents moved so that that happened almost a century after the concept of continental drift so the cipher the key was paleomagnetics and it falsified what most scientists believed at the time and the Russians still some of the Russians still believe that continents don't move but but here's an exceptional Community I mean I think there are all there are these Paradigm

01:04:53 shifts I think and we should I mean I think we shouldn't be too arrogant into believing that now we have fantastic yes Next Century or next year we will find some you know some other relatives absolutely that will create a different I mean I'm in a field with violent arguments about this because I keep encountering and and uh in combat with say uh genomics people who say now we have the true tree we know exactly

01:05:26 what was related to what and I'm in a school or a group of people who say we don't we may never have the the true tree very much like what you were describing have you read in Tango tree no this is exactly about the Darwin Street and today's different branching and how you classify evolution in different ways it's an extraordinary good New York Times vessel book this thing it's still very good

01:05:56 I think one of the reasons I I was interested in coding is I feel in many ways we were in this sort of Paradigm of computers being the answer to everything and we're going to apply a computer model to understand every every phenomenon we come across and I thought well I'm interested in coding and I think it's not all a bad thing but I feel there's some a little overreach yeah well isn't it the case in medicine now it's everything everything's genetic isn't it oh I wouldn't say that but but

01:06:28 there's a lot that's yeah yeah but then you see I have identical twins which are except for T cell receptors and antibodies are are genetically identical and they're obviously not identical so no I wouldn't say and some of them develop we have ones with plenty of cases if somebody develops a disease and and the identical twin never develops it this is the biggest problem we have in in Neuroscience that we've got inbred that is identical twins and these are 50 to 100 Generations yeah yeah it's so

01:06:59 embarrassing that you know you take 10 animals and two of them are outliers all the time yeah yeah still so yeah I would say okay maybe maybe sometimes people pretend that everything's genetic but it is sort of a paradigm it's a it's a it's a powerful Paradigm well the discovery was so exciting conditions you can identify genes oh absolutely I mean there are plenty of you if you have the Thai stocks Gene maybe you know if you have sickle cell

01:07:30 you're good you may develop the disease at different ages but eventually you will develop the diseases but there are plenty of others where where it will never happen but like in paleontology that's the thing too now I mean everything are you talking about genome I mean so I mean we're all looking at these these particular questions with a new lens let us say that we think enable us to create these because it is General genealogical trees and things like that that might I

01:08:02 mean in my understanding you know the the whole issue of human evolution has radically changed in whatever the 80s or something like that yeah well and now but there's still a lot of arguments even with all this new genetic information genomic information there's still a lot of arguments about the mobility of of homo sapiens and and the relationship to Homo erectus and whether or not there was you know one exit from

01:08:32 Africa or 25 exits or it's not a field that I'm really deeply involved in but but uh even with the arrivals you know and and in areas where I work I work primarily in mammalian Evolution and and there's there's some still some big big uncertainties and controversies in that area even with all this genomic information some some of it's working extraordinarily unbelievably well and as you can tell I'm I'm skeptical but still the fact that your saliva can find your

01:09:05 second cousin in other countries pretty astonishing that's pretty and the fact that Google Translate is doing so well even though it kind of cheated in some ways in the way it wasn't so but it's it's working immensely well right you said probably everybody's using it I wanted to ask the neuroscientists here just say a few words about how you go about to the degree the word decoding applies to what you're doing how do you go about it because being right you don't necessarily have a key so we do have a case okay

01:09:36 at least I think we have a feeling and they just think that you said you know I just said in mammalian Evolution so am I but from a different aspect of you one of the most fascinating thing about the brain for me is that in every mammal what remains constant over the over the evolution time is timing that is the brain rhythms you might heard about Alpha Beta gamma oscillations and Delta and so on this uh not only individual

01:10:07 ones but they form a hierarchical system in such a way that the slow oscillations are modulating the amplitude of the first ones and the phase of the first one modulate the amplitude of the even faster one so it's like the the the the time is changing and then upon the changes the amplitude of the the the the the the the ocean waves are changing now this is good because uh

01:10:39 when you ask though how come that you scale up a system fifty thousand fold from the small brain to the size of the the brain of a of a whale what is the rule of this evolutionary scaling what should be remain what should remain constant and what Rima is constant is timing through this oscillation because they are preserved it will take them 20 seconds why is that because this is what they call the

01:11:12 neural syntax this is the these are the time packages which allow that you said information if you want those spiking activity from one area of the brain to another area of brain because the other area of the brain is already given the cipher which is the time window if you don't have that framework this neuronal syntax then brain areas cannot communicate with each other we cannot communicate with each other the reason why you understand me is because even though

01:11:42 I have an accent and I have made so many mistakes is because I have a particular Tempo which is about four Hertz which is characteristic of every single human language which is also not only the utterances but also the perception and the reason for that is because both the utterances as well as the perception of these events are based on brain rhythms so again we have to go inside and pain in order to have the grounding that that's the grounding from the the grounding of the origin of language and

01:12:14 classification and Cipher how much of this uh formal appreciation of these constant relationships how much of it is a purely sort of mathematical you know like one over F distribution how much does it diverge from that and does that help you because it right if it's very generic it's very yeah it's not only generic but you already know

01:12:46 the content of these petals and there is a if if something is showed it means that in a system which has of constraints on the speed of communication the brain is a very slow system you know the conduction velocities of the the neurons is on the order of 0.2 to several meters per second very very slow so given that if you have a short amount of time available it means that only your immediate Partners can be involved

01:13:18 that is showed means small number of neurons more time means larger number of neurons and then the whole goal of this communication is that whatever happens locally can be broadcasted globally as well as the the global brain state we know what I'm the activity pattern in the brain this constrains how local communication or local Cipher going to be uh can be generated if you take away the cipher if you take

01:13:51 away the uh or alter any of these brain items we end up today without every single psychiatric disease is associated with one or other type of timing problems it's difficult to differentiate disease is from each other because those are all arbitrary but it's very easy to look at the brain even a depressed patient with this depressed state or non-depressed state very different so the timing the

01:14:22 communication is is absolutely matters and that's what I'm pushing for that we have a syntactical system well I'm um thinking as a very general level this idea of extracting some understanding of meaning from either brain activity or artifact uh assumes a certain sort of background either it could be there's various mathematical descriptions of it it could be noise it could be a one over F frequency these are background uh you

01:14:53 know mathematically defined uh substrate and we find meaning or we think we find meaning when something diverges from that something you give a stimulus it's no longer it doesn't have that Baseline anymore and uh that's a way of building a key isn't that in a way when you when you don't have the literal you know uh you said it absolutely right but then there is a deviation this is where many brain structures kick in and it happens through what's called phase reset and all of a sudden the

01:15:26 timing changes and that timing change is detected elsewhere if that is not detected as happens in schizophrenia and they're not the diseases that's a big problem I guess the question is do we have any folks want to ask questions of our panel thank you go ahead okay thank you

01:15:58 sorry everyone's sitting down so I'm like sit down too hi everyone thank you that was really fascinating my name is Celia Emery I'm a museum architect and my concern relates to I guess more the politics of coding the psychology of coding and where agency fits in so in museum design we have two aspects of kind of time space one of them is the path of the visitor in the spaces of the institution and people enter into a

01:16:29 building with a pre-existing idea of how they're going to use it because they're adults they're free agents and they've already learned how to use buildings so Museum institutions set up what that time space experience is going to be and yet there's a conflict there's a Schism within any use of any building which is that we as individual agents want to be able to act in our own way we want to be able to affirm so your reference to the graffiti was so interesting I'm about to go to

01:17:00 alula to visit the hegra tombs and there's a lot of graffiti we'll talk um but apparently it was speculated that that graffiti was just journeyers you know writing down that they had arrived in other words I am here Joe was here and in fact that isn't that is what much of the graffiti is so that that kind of need for us to kind of the ego you know to kind of exist somewhere and Market [Music] somehow within a coding system so um the other Schism that we have is that in

01:17:33 um in a museum you have a relationship between a person and that artifact which was created in a different point of time so it's in a different space it's in a different time so how do we so there's two different aspects of this I'm going to get to this point in epigraphic and cuneiform the who was controlling my question for the group group is really who has the control of these forms of ideology who is creating who is who is benefiting from the cuneiform methods why and who was

01:18:04 benefiting from written language and why how come that didn't continue to exist and then how do we as individual agents kind of fit in like aren't we are we just obeying the you know ideological precepts that have been handed down to us or do we have any agency within coding okay sorry it totally took so long well let me start about the specific question of so who benefited from can I form you can have a very materialistic

01:18:35 interpretation and that's the usual interpretation it's you know it's a way of dealing with a more complex system of especially economic interaction therefore you need some type of record-keeping uh that goes beyond time and space that you know can be you know can it can travel from one place to another place or is kept for a specific period of time [Music] the to take it to this greater level of

01:19:10 um that then you know when the writing system well the writing system has a meaning Beyond a purely practical writing system well I wouldn't call it an ideology it's a it's a philosophy it's an approach to reality um it's an attempt at understanding reality that yes is shared by an intellectual Elite just as today philosophical discourse is shared by intellectual Elite but it frames a cultural you know it creates a cultural

01:19:42 setting that yes the entire it's a civilization if you can use that term or you know is part of even though a lot of the majority of people are not consciously aware of the elements I just want to say that uh you know at one of the roles I have at the Museum and I still have is I have oversight of exhibition so I really understand what

01:20:13 you're saying about what the visitor how does the visitor engage or how does the museum engage with the visitor and the question and who has agency there and there's always so the trend in recent years of course has been interactivity interactivity interactivity and they're generally many of them are experiments that fail because you make assumptions about what visitors really want and the problem is that's based on you your opinion you're

01:20:45 not the visitor you know and it's it's fascinating just to think about who what's happening in a museum what happens when a visitor encounters an artifact or a fossil or a piece of tapestry or whatever in that sense well I think there are just many interesting questions that you raise and I'm very jealous of your um

01:21:16 I think it's to me it seems very context dependent in terms of who benefits because it has to do with how communication Works in individual societies and today in a global Society working literally in code benefits very different people than at least geographically it's it's a sort of a more a sense of something much more diffuse than when you're talking about individual ancient Societies or medieval societies where certain practitioners

01:21:47 were sort of deputized of being the record Keepers and they could derive status from their roles as such or proximity to different ranges of literacy would allow people to sort of pen themselves accordingly in that order of status or esteem and to go back to a point that you made earlier I mean this is why we literally have we have tons of whether we call them magical texts or text of ritual power a lot of times their total gibberish

01:22:18 at least to us they seem to be and they don't seem to Accord with any particular scripts that we know of because it seemed like it resembled writing to people who couldn't write they wouldn't know the difference and so there was a power to that and sometimes it was just something esotericus deliberately esoteric but I think the ways in which we relate to sort of dominant types of communication allows us to sort of fit into broader constructs of status cultural economic and otherwise but I think it's really

01:22:50 sort of culture dependent I think when we talk about Antiquity again it's very different from today when we talk about code and coding and who's benefiting from their ability to be able to work with certain languages on computers it's you know many more people than 20 years ago but who are those people right and how do they use that information it's it's something that I I can't possibly triangulate that others might but I think it's definitely indicative it's a symptom of something

01:23:21 that's shifting in our Global society that I can't interpret but because it's it's something sort of different it's it'll be interesting to see where we'll just get the key phrase you have is be late I think that's the most important thing in the museum and I'm looking for New Creations that allow me to go to a place and I lose my sense of time all of a sudden I can devote my entire mind to what's going on there once I do

01:23:51 that I all of a sudden have a first point of view rather than a third person first person for interview rather than the third person point of view of everything now you asked about the agency that I become an agent because somehow you transformed me and I will be part of the participants of those events even though I had no knowledge about that that continents go together but I use my imagination I use my existing

01:24:22 knowledge I use my existing belief systems to relate myself to that situation now the agency is not human it every animal has the desire and and everything to learn his boundaries you know we know that we have boundaries and that's the essence of even a memorable or every single creature that it knows that it has its boundaries and relates it to everything else that relatedness is the

01:24:53 super important thing if I go to a museum where I have to interact this is what kids when they go to New Jersey the science museum I see that's the same thing as a physics class the only plus maybe that they can do more freely and the teacher is not watching but this is a fascinating thing because yes we are always saying the museum is important it was important to reopen after covet because this is a place this is it gives people a sense of place but what's really interesting is for a lot of people this is their place

01:25:25 this is there and increasingly and there might be a dichotomy in society maybe that'll break down as people die and younger and younger people come up but you can see it in you know in a daughter or somebody close to you that you know intimately what their reality is compared to you know what you're trying to do with visitors coming to a museum so two examples that work for me very well of course it requires the

01:25:56 relatedness uh the Japanese shito Goddess that is simple but you lose the sense of the time immediately because you are just looking at the rock or the other one is an extreme other things that Selena also knows what um when she was sitting in the oh yeah there was nothing nothing there except a pair of eyes right and you were looking to see yourself in those eyes and all of a sudden you you had a means of saying

01:26:26 you can discover yourself if your museums are a museum spaces can create that thing that discover yourself you leave the museum with a better feeling or Recreation then is the organization that's telling you exactly they want to convey information I don't need information I have had enough my own personal experience which has been taken for what it's worth I'm not a I have nothing to do with museums except as a museum goer but

01:26:59 you know a lot of what makes science interesting are controversies and and challenges within a paradigm and the challenges within a paradigm can be small and they can be on the verge of some cataclysmic change and that's really I think interesting to people I would think it's interesting to people I think it's a mistake to use the word controversy first of all I would stay away from that word because I think it makes people think well they're experts and that you're already distance from the other experts and the word controversy from personally for myself

01:27:30 sort of is off-putting it makes it seem like this is a little bit going to be Beyond me I think it's really useful to say here that just lay out the different ideas side by side and don't refer to it as being some raging uh um controversy among experts sure well I just want to express appreciation for everyone who does this work and it partly relates to the phone because I found and this is also relating to what you asked before is there a difference to humans between

01:28:01 something that's a million years ago or 10 000 years ago and I I find that with my students anything that happened before the year 2012 is ancient history the time is completely compressed and obviously my students are not as they're not working in the same capacity if you were to work with graduate students or in your field or you with yours or you with yours right because they're already very much aware of of the stretch of time but to

01:28:32 me the ways that museums have the capacity to jar people from the present reality and to force them to confront chronology and time whether it's I I feel like it's activist work these days and and the power of losing yourself in those places being Jarred from your phone it's different when you're talking about academics or researchers or Specialists and the general public I think it's one of the only places where

01:29:03 we can remind people that there's a world Beyond themselves chronologically culturally and Beyond the human realm too and I think it's that is what I feel like is increasingly lost in the world of coding and it's just such important work so any way you can make people uncomfortable enough to be present in those spaces and learn is a contribution to everybody do you do uh your students you take your students in the field you notice the

01:29:33 difference and there'll be absolutely yeah I am so extraordinary now anecdotally I mean I I teach in a history Department yeah so not all my students uh expect to specialize in anything that relates to Antiquity but I tell them that I I think the tradition about museums is that you know it's sort of European tradition these are places to appreciate art and being able to appreciate it in a particular way it has to be it's it's a status thing it's an appreciation thing

01:30:04 so I tell them these are libraries are they're like visual libraries in a way not like not that that's such a great advertisement for them either but rather than being something flat and two-dimensional it's something you get to enter and immerse yourself into and when it's really effective I remember because I teach I teach in Brooklyn I teach in Flatbush and some of my students have never been to the Met yeah and I remember the first time when I started teaching there and I brought across to the met and I remember the

01:30:34 student who looked up the grand slaves and he just like well you know because it's a it's just a different environment a different world and when you don't approach it as art but you know objects that are artifacts that can teach us about different places and times that these you know that they can investigate it's totally transformative and it's something that a lot of people take for granted in lots of different places but um it I think it's again I think it's like a form of activism to remind people they're not the center of the universe

01:31:06 and their bows are not the center of the universe and the world is not flat so sorry about this but thank you oh is there another question there um as I hear everyone talking about decoding it seems to me that there's a little bit of um sort of a an incompatibility of some fundamental

01:31:36 assumptions especially as I hear this coming out in the debate about consensus so are kind of two different approaches here to what decoding actually is so I've kind of like set out a number of binaries here trying to make sense of this for myself it seems on the one hand there's a sort of an approach to denotation and on the other an approach to connotation as it pertains to decoding meaning you know you could say that there's a kind of idea here of text versus context or

01:32:06 um I guess thinking about what you were saying about the brain a sense that there's there's a synchrony you called that synchrony a key but I don't think that that's a key to meaning that's just a condition of possibility for interpretation of meaning so I guess I'm wondering in this discussion of coding one whether you all would agree that there are two different approaches to thinking about what meaning is and whether that's a disciplinary problem or something else

01:32:37 you ask an easy question please so is that synchrony secret is not exactly the same as as brain waves but nevertheless I didn't make a claim and nobody does that we can decide with a content that's a it's a you know grammar has a large uh way of defining things but one of them is uh you can you can call it the phonetics of language and that's without

01:33:08 content so that's what brain written is about now the meaning is the essential thing of everything unless my students show me that that relationship between what the experiment to propose to the brain and the response is there is has a message for the rest of the brain or to the animal that's not there is no meaning so and meaning has to be generated only through utility at least this is uh what the view in evolution as well as in in any world is that if a

01:33:41 particular thing comes with a plus or minus in the life of the animal that generates meaning so many ways uh the way how today's Neuroscience is studied we think that it's a a blank slate and then you just shovel the information into this newborn brain and so on and they can which means that the complexity of the rain whatever we do is growing as you learn more and more and more and that's exactly what happens in a in an AI system

01:34:11 I think it collapses very soon because there are so much stuff that are interfering with each other another way of thinking about this is that break comes already with a equipped dictionary every single thing that exists in your future life is already there and the parents that uh we thought were generated the Nova in fact they pre-exist so what happens is that out of this realm of possibilities you experience something that goes in one

01:34:43 way another positive or negative and that pattern that was present at the time where that experience happened becomes meaningful it will have a utility for now or the future of the organism this is how we generate bidding now a linguist or a human person who thinks about may have another way of phrasing it but I think that would be just rephrasing the same kind of thing I'm going to drive you guys both both of you crazy I mean to me I'm not sure what meaning means here but but there are I mean if it means

01:35:16 something as simple as you know you're already talking about brain rhythms I mean if i s if you stimulate a a synaptic input to a muscle fiber that muscle fiber will twitch and if you do it over here in in the there's a couple of extra steps but you know this muscle will twitch and if you go over here this muscle a little twitch and if you just go uh a few you know about a millimeter on the other side you

01:35:48 will hear something or you will feel something in a particular part of your body is that meaning because if it is then it's based in okay so why is it not meaning because it has no relation to experience because but what if what but but it's remapping so I'm going to press you on that it can change it can it that can change so we can we can remap this to here instead of there

01:36:22 and this happens all the time when people have strokes for instance would that would analysis meaning [Music] okay so I think I think we have to finish up I always want both of you but meaning it becomes so there are sticks that are not there but when you have a stroke it becomes a meaning so when you when you touch your nose with your toe

01:36:56 see there's a meaning for you because it feels at the same time now that meaning is acquired through experience and because you feel it's at the same time that I can show you that anybody can show you that it's not at the same time it's a much longer time to go from the bank of here than from my nose but that for me as a utility I don't care about the mechanism I just know it's at the same time so that that's a that's a meaning for the for me because I can use that information anything that I can use utility determines meaning

01:37:28 that's a really unsatisfying discussion right yeah meaning is the most difficult Concept in philosophy yeah yeah we have to move on right it's interesting it's an interesting question and I but Beverly so I've learned so much this morning and I'm very grateful and it has led to many different questions but I'm just going to bring it down to one um I wonder what happens in terms of when emotion enters what happens to how people approach things and I'm thinking

01:37:59 now of at the Morgan Museum right now there's an exhibit on arduana I'm sure you've already seen it you've probably been talking to Sydney Babcock about it or but it goes from agriculture being discussed in terms of bushels which you were mentioning versus the handling of harvest through this highly emotive charged poem by this Priestess about plow my Fields plow my Fields as an erotic situation so I'd

01:38:32 love to know what happens in terms of the evolution of mind that brings that in or the world where weary man in his bustle and in Egypt you know where that's a whole other very highly emotive interaction so are you asking within the context I mean the fact that this becomes a it's something that it's written down know that you can approach the Harvest

01:39:04 through the number of bushels or you can approach the Harvest as a kind of analogy of the coming together of sky and Earth male and female what happens what's what's happened in the mind that opens it up to that kind of approach well the metaphorical language I don't know if that's assuming predates writing metaphorical language where we we reconnect something physical let's say that's physical in

01:39:36 one one area of life and metaphorically we connected to another area of life I really imagine that that pre-pre-ex predates the origins of writing one of the great things about poems like the homeric epixes are rich that is with metaphorical language and what I find interesting about metaphorical angle like what you mentioned in the if it wanna poem is or metaphoric or metaphors are contained

01:40:06 within a cultural structure in order to make sense so abundance of fields make sense in a particular type of society actually I discussed metaphorical language with my students only a couple of days ago living in New York City they have no connection at all to the metaphors that are being used in ancient poetry because they're mostly rural metaphors but I do that I think is yeah there is a system there of clothing as

01:40:36 well you have to understand you have to understand the cipher you have to understand the system if I compare something to a an object an entity a natural phenomenon phenomenon that none of you have ever experienced you're not going to understand my metaphor but just also in terms of image making or expression and emotion I think that's more what I'm wondering about especially now with all the talk about emotion and

01:41:06 cognition and what the interaction is between them and and I just thought you know how do you express emotions how do you render emotion in a very orally or in a written form how do you do so you can only do so I think by using comparisons I'm in love is a feeling of whatever fire etc etc I I think we're also going to have the opportunity to reflect on some of this issue in our the meta fiction

01:41:39 fiction meta fiction talk later today because I think really for me the answer and response in part to what you're asking is that there's a dialectic that goes back and forth between metaphorical poetic sort of meaning phenomenological meaning and then the way it gets encoded and then the codes create the opportunity for more engagement with meaning because the codes themselves can have meaning so I think it's a very interesting dialectic did you have no oh sorry

01:42:11 please hi um this last question um sort of prompts me to to uh to rise I have this thought I've been developing for a long time and it seems to uh coordinate with a lot of the different themes that that we've had this morning um prior to the development of language there was a great deal of intelligence in in early humans they survived and and

01:42:42 so so do we um the thought just to make it very general is that the evolutionary pressure which leads eventually to the most powerful evolutionary movement which is the development of culture really requires the development of language because we have to express to larger groups over time over generational time um the development of language seems to be

01:43:15 a cognitive way of thinking which is pairs of opposites which is um as you say positive or negative and so on the metaphorical thinking is not it's it's more analog um the earliest need for language I want to suggest or I think is the communication of what we would call Mythic kinds of ideas it is what forms a group it's what

01:43:48 gives self-identity to the group and The evolutionary pressure is in the direction of groups that are more tightly bound more coherent those are the successful ones the so how does that happen evolutionarily the thought that I have and I don't have your expertise to know whether it makes sense to you which is why I guess I I'm saying this is that we develop a the brain develops a

01:44:20 sensitivity to certain kinds of narrative that we think of as Mythic we recognize Mythic ideas Mythic narrative in a different way it's not about the content but there is something that we feel is Mythic which would require a a physiological development evolutionarily based in the brain and so we end up with two kinds of Minds a cognitive which is all Linguistics are

01:44:53 cognitive and the the same intelligence that we had before we developed language and those two different minds are in commensurate they cannot communicate with each other you can't be thinking about metaphor in a cognitive way and understand the power and if you try to translate it into cognitive forms you lose the power and so we have these two different Minds

01:45:26 just as a as a as a further development of that is the notion that that which can communicate his myth Mythic stories Mythic ways of thinking is what gives us a sense of wholeness where we can see the world with the two incremental uh intelligences

01:45:57 we were talking downstairs over coffee before a little bit about people have written books they're very similar to what you're saying and I guess who had Peter pessic here with the Polyphonic Minds idea so you might want to check out his book um he kind of thinks the way that you do and we were also talking about the bicameral mind which is very out of fashion but do you know that book The bicameral mind yes I've read many years yeah yeah yeah so it's very similar in what exactly it's very very similar to what you're bringing up uh now I'm very

01:46:28 skeptical of both of them and I I'm friendly with Peter you know but but still I'm very skeptical I think they take a lot of impressionistic and stuff and try to come up with the whole Theory but and just like I'm being a little skeptical of what you said but that doesn't mean you don't have a lot of depth there and that there's a lot to examine so I just we were talking about kind of a variation of what you were saying just before we started the meeting this morning I I I take these two sides that you're describing as being uh not in commensurate or at least they may be

01:46:59 different but there are different ways of looking at the same thing or they're on a developmental historically in a developmental course and I think um I mean the person that comes to mind for me is Ernst kasira who wrote a lot about Mythic way of looking at the world and has it it became more rationalized and scientific not to say that's always better which is what people sometimes lament but that it's it's it is a further development of Mythic thinking so I think you're saying there's two parts of

01:47:30 the Mind one of them is more modern and and it's it's it can't exactly coexist simultaneously with the other parts at the same time our problem today is our even ings of both at the same time myth functions by Jester it doesn't describe it implies it is a place from which you can experience both ways of experiencing the world of seeing the world and

01:48:01 responding to it at the same time and gives us a sense of wholeness myth becomes religion at a certain point the myth plus politics equals religion well I I really had hoped in fact that's a very we have to finish and that's a interesting uh endnote because no it really was my hope that that this would be this sort of two-sided disc decoding and demeaning connotation and denotation is something I was hoping we would be able to bring out here and I think we did a really pretty good job I thank you

01:48:33 all for your your contributions all right thank you can I make a little correction yes please so I kept wondering whether we could have this conversation 2000 years ago and many of the things that we discussed here we discussed two thousand years ago exact same way and your answer about meat and so on was unanswered the same way

01:49:04 so now it's important but I think if you look at the grounding that is how you can make a a judgment whether there are two brains as you said that is emotional and cognitive brains and this has been going on in humankind for a long time before DSM-5 dsm-4 actually had two axes you know and one set of psychiators that with the cognitive problems with the emotional problems now we know now we know there

01:49:37 is no part of the brain that would be dedicated to emotions we know also there is no such a thing as fear Center because negative and positive in the Isola context amygdala wherever something bad is coded next to it adjusts to it is the good this is how the relationships are formed and that is just ensure there's no part in the brain that you can look at MRIs it's like we can distinguish and separate completion

01:50:07 from emotion they evolve together they are never separate we we have the beliefs that we can separate them and those beliefs can persevere and no amount of introspection can help that's why but if you look into the brain the debate will become simpler there are times where you you have an emotion and you have no cognition until you actually absolutely you don't how do you do you have a

01:50:40 condition without emotion no no okay so can you have a reaction to something just through emotions yes you can so that I call adaptive behavior and you can call it condition so if I avoid something because it's unpleasant that's a adaptive behavior and that's the definition of competitive action also you'd say hotel motel time