 Okay, okay, we're back now. An online talk from Victor Rovot. Oh, I forgot. Victor, the last time you were here, how to pronounce your name. I'm very sorry about that. We're thinking material agency, bioelectricity as a model of causation for the life science. You have the floor, Victor. Yes, thank you very much. I hope that I can talk a little bit with this viewer up here. So, yeah, I just wanted to thank you, Axon, for making it possible for me to present this wonderful workshop without you. Even though I wasn't able to actually come to Leverman as it is now. So I'm really excited to talk to you about this. And this is, so, I wanted to invite a little bit of context about this work, because it's a joint work, very much in progress, that we began to think about back in 2021 after the diversity intelligence summary institute and the project that we started there through beyond the summer school, and we just continued with that. And the overall aim of that project is actually to start reviewing materials as it is appearing in philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, but also philosophy of biology. And the point that we're trying to make in this project is that there are insights nowadays from empirical sciences, such as condensed and active matter physics, basal condition, and software bodies, which very much reshape how matter is understood in the sciences, that philosophy supposedly draws a work where we're talking about materialism. And in fact, we think that the notion of matter and the notions of materialism in philosophy have been lacking behind those changes in the empirical sciences. So there's a couple of points. The biggest point that we see are the following three. So first of all, condensed and active matter physics has provided a bunch of studies which indicate that there is an inherent activity, or perhaps even called directedness, in simple non-biological material systems. And here I think both, for example, the studies that Martin Hansen did with oil droplets that he had that were able to solve meses. So he actually got oil droplets navigating meses. And another example, it comes from the basal conditions of the research on very basic forms of cognitive-like behaviors in organisms that are in a single cell form, and also very simple multicellular organisms where we actually observe complex activities which we wouldn't turn cognitive if they were exhibited by more standard organisms. And here, for example, it comes from the word that is being done on the slime mold. I can't remember the, I forgot to change the name, but it's a large slime mold, also known as the blob. It's, for example, in Paris too. And one of the most famous experiments that I've shown what kind of cognitive-like abilities this kind of system has had the slime mold to solve the TokyoMap problem where the slime mold was able to create optimal connections between different food sources, finding the optimal solution to the TokyoMap problem. Finally, soft robotics, especially in the domain of morphological communication has been showing how non-standard substrates can be increasingly used in an engineering way for information processing. And we believe this kind of also shifts the way we should be thinking about information processing in biological and cognitive-like systems or cognitive systems in the system. So, yes, this is the overall plan for my talk today. I want to begin, especially after the previous talk because I will touch upon some similar topics as I kind of presented this, but I would preface this with saying that I didn't have very metaphysical views. What I want to achieve with this talk is to show how research in biological research in biology shows that biological processing is a very messy, very weird process and that our political notions have to get up with this kind of empirical evidence that comes through. So to kind of throw a benzyme on those political notions that can be a little bit strong, I think, but I hope not too much. I'm going to introduce the just basic view of reductive materialism, the standard reductive materialism as a basis for our approach. Then I will move forward to the main example that I will be throwing up on in the remainder of the talk, maybe the example of bioelectricity in developmental and region-regional morphogenesis. And then I will point out those two weird issues that appear in this kind of system. So first, downward organization, most specifically circular organizations of the interplay, mid-downward and bottom-up organization. Then I will say a little bit about the long log of causes and I will explain more of what I mean by that. And then I will try to throw this together in this emerging picture that comes from this kind of research. So to begin with, this kind of basic view that we think is still kind of, it's still very much present in philosophy, especially in philosophy of mind-watering about reduction. It's kind of just a basic view and it's embedded in the standard capacity of mechanisms as Jessica recently argued in her great book, The Restless Fall, where she showed that there are kind of multiple notions of mechanisms, our current views are embedded in this passive view where entities in the physical world are seeing us as a passive perspective and not able to perform any action on their own. They have to make things reasonable. And this reactive materialism can be stated in this form. So the statement is that all biology could be in principle whether we are limited, whether our human limited cognitive resources allow us that part of this is a different issue. But in principle, biology could be explained in terms of particle physics. So the fundamental particles, whatever they are and their interactions and that there's nothing else that is actually there in physics. And this is something, something quite posthumously ideal, I would say, and it has been actually when we crystallized that that's why I say this is perhaps a little bit too many but I hope not too much. And I will say a little bit about those criticisms in a second. But also, it is still very much present that here I won't quote Samuel Ocasio on the sentiment that there is perhaps a sense in which the developmental explanation is more because of the fundamental or it is an explanation from the bottom up and the developmental explanation where he's discussing the earlier sovereign distinction between developmental and selectional explanations and the causality of the problems with those types of explanations. And he's precisely saying that it's kind of like both of us simpler things to explain more complex things and causing more complex things. So when we explain the processes that are more complex, we have to actually explain the causality of the slower, simpler level that makes this higher level up and he claims that there is something more fundamental about this kind of relationships. So I think even though there has been criticism this sentiment is still present in different forms. And as I said if those criticisms come from two main points I would say and Green and Butterman here have developed a framework by showing that this ideal is not in fact applied in any physics so in biology we usually think that this is the site especially in space biology because that's how physics works but Green and Butterman have condensed the matter of physics specifically how we've done in physics maybe not impossible in physics but in many other areas of physics this ideal is not meant we have multi-scale modelling where both bottom up and top down relationships come into play. It's also visible in the right active modelling system so what they put this picture into the claim that there is something like an eternity of scales and this claim says that there is a difference in how physics operates at different sites and temporal scales so when we when we are thinking about causation specifically but in general physical processes operating on the medium scale that we are most accustomed to where our conscious lives happen so to say the kind of physical relationships that we have served here are going to be distinct from the physical relationships that are that we can observe on much lower scale level and this lower scale level is already there at the certain lower level the process is happening with itself are already on the smaller level where this kind of our middle scale physics doesn't actually apply that well or it doesn't transfer easily the right thing from those different scales. So to kind of substitute this point a little bit I want to quote a liking but I want to put this a little bit a liking quote from Guthrie Smith because I think it captures this idea on quite a different scale as quite that word is talking about the settlement of cells and the behavior of the physical operations happening on the level of cells in that context and at that scale matter it takes different key from how it behaves elsewhere. In a phrase the YouTube popcorn would remind is a molecular storm there is an anything spontaneous motion that does not need to be powered by anything external larger molecules rearrange them and everything is bombarded by larger molecules. Electrical charge also plays an immediate role through ions dissolved in the water and charged regions of larger molecules. The word is by mycing tendencies in this thought matching quantum walks in useful direction. So towards the end I want to quote here where the reverse is kind of like different thinking and multiplication that we have to have in mind when we are looking at the cellular scale I want to talk a little bit about the earlier part of the description especially for example on this being bombarded by larger molecules so our standard experience of water is that when we move through water perhaps it is a little bit more difficult than moving through the air we feel that the water is more viscous and air so obviously it's going to mean putting out more resistance when we move through it but it's okay we can still do that. However when you're looking at the level of molecules that are within cells what we have to realize is that water molecules are quite large on that scale so they have smaller molecules, quantum proteins and other molecules that are crucial crucial for the operation of cells just by being immersed in this kind of water environment it's actually they experience, so to say, so they are met with completely different forces than we usually ask to see with water so this kind of environment is very different from our middle scale experience, what we usually think about this is on the middle scale we're trying to say that okay so moving on we want to say a little bit about bioelectricity because one of the things that the administration points out in his description is the role of electrical charge at the level of cells and this has to be the testing and all the controversies surrounding the research of bioelectricity that dates back to the 19th century in the world of Calvary that I have included in the title slide and people having it in some parts very that's been accurately a little bit hard to say that to be a little bit conscious of the risks that come with this work and in result we had this kind of like dominance of biochemistry throughout the 20th century and this dominance have been I think that one of the reasons that this dominance of biochemistry of genetics has been in part because of this reductive ideal of explanation because it translates very well to this reductive ideal so we've been very much trying to say never been in terms of genetics throughout the 20th century however this bioelectric research has continued and in recent years it's started to bring about more evidence that perhaps not every biological process can be spread through genetics and not that genes are not all there is to explain biological process and after 40 years this research has been the lead of Calvary University led by Michael Levin and I want to refer to the particular experiment very I think because it's very well and it features this kind of relationship that bioelectricity allows us to cut so they have conducted a set of experiments on planaria, little worlds that are a couple of millimeters long and planaria are a very interesting system because they have astounding regimental capabilities so basically you can slice them to very thin slices, many thin slices and each slice will regenerate a full war after some time so I think this is actually the main way that referees I think they have some ability to sexually reproduce but mostly they reproduce just by being injured so whenever the world is injured it's split towards regenerate and towards continued living so they have this very weird lifestyle because of that but it also makes them a training system to study the blood network and regenerative morphogenesis so the processes of organisms that organisms use to achieve a particular shape and one of the study that has conducted was to slice those worlds into three parts and they kept the middle parts to just the front without the head and the tail because normally they had the head and the tail and that's as simple as we can see on this picture I don't know if you can see my mouse but here perhaps it makes a point here now so here you have the head here you have the tail and they had this little slice and the free is just the middle part of the trunk and they then embedded in a bunch of chemicals for a short period of time that have influenced the expression of ion channels in this house and by that they modified the bio-electrical pattern so the pattern of communication between cells they removed them from chemicals and placed them in the normal environment so just in water because they live in water and what happened proved this editing they were able to induce non-standard morphology of these raw organisms without any genetic or any other surgical changes they were able to grow two-handed work and in other experiments they were able to grow four-headed work so it's kind of like cross-shaped like work which have also on the sides of the trunk additional heads so very weird morphologies which are not usually observed in nature perhaps even not at all observed in nature but this is only a part of it because it would happen so once you have these two-headed work you can actually slice it again in the three parts keep just the middle part just in trunk and place them again in plain water without any further manipulation so you do manipulate the bio-electrical pattern at the first step but you don't change the genetic makeup you don't change anything else and then at the second division it actually regenerates two-headed again and this continues this kind of process continues over multiple same generations of this kind of surgical procedure where you just cut them and make the trauma regenerate and without further intervention it is able to regenerate the heads so what it shows is that there is this kind of bio-electrical pattern it has a great role that it plays in in morphogenesis morphogenesis in this case and as I try to underscore this happens about any kind of genetic modification in development so I hope that this is more or less clear I will now move on to them what kind of consequences I think are drawn from this for the future of bio-electrical compensation so the first consequence is that this is the complex interplay between top-down and bottom-up causality that is a play in morphogenesis perhaps in biology or general because in terms of top-down we have this pattern, the bio-electrical pattern that determines the actions of the individual cells and this pattern as it's shown here I can draw again we had intervention on the level of that pattern so we have this kind of higher level of intervention and we had also particular results so if we abide this kind of intervention we still should conclude from that that we actually have this kind of higher level of organization influencing what happens at the lower level influences how the cells divide and how the cells choose particular type of the cell that they will be like of this organization because of the difference between the head and the tail so yes, we had this kind of top-down process but at the same time we have also that bottom-up process because this bio-electrical pattern depends on the bio-electrical activity of the individual cells obviously it depends on what kind of signals, what kind of ions they send out and this in turn depends on this kind of what kind of ion channels they have so I would take this to mean that there is not just bottom-up and not just top-down but rather there is this kind of like mutually codependent relationship between the lower level and the higher level of organization in this case and I want to repair also here in this moment by Dennis Noble from his 2012 paper where he's been claiming that in part this kind of the directional result is from the above biological systems and he shows up with this diagram where in the middle we have this standard view of bottom-up causation from genes from products cells all the way out of all of this and this standard view but at the same time he recognizes that there are top-down influences which skip level will go from level to another level and influence the behavior of the lower levels and that can cause the efficacy efficacious so he claims that this kind of top-down and bottom-up interface more present throughout biological systems and as he has also mentioned at the end of this talk the top-down causation is that it's weird that people have been trying to avoid accepting its existence however they're having a chance to provide a way to naturalize this kind of top-down causation and one, and I think very much well applicable in this case when doing that comes from through the notion of constraint that had been, I think, originally advanced in this context by Paul Imagine his culture is famous to have paper but I also want to draw on Terebin Decum's arguments in that regard so constraints are for example we can think of constraints as the initial conditions but also the boundary conditions of a particular system by a particular process and they have two functions so first of all they restrict state space trajectories so they make the system they reduce how many trajectories in the state space the system can take because they make some of them unlikely or impossible at all but at the same time they have this innovative productive function because by restricting state space they enable particular trajectories which otherwise could have been unlikely and make the system bias the system towards and here we can know the relation physical or e-controls and he's example comes from from question so we can think of an engine so what happens in an engine is that we have basically either gasoline or other people explode and this explosion happens in an unrestricted space it could just explode at this way however when it happens in a restricted space of an engine this explosion is able to empower it just because there are constraints on how the energy is being released and this can transfer the energy in this form and again this goes back to the description that from Guthrie Smith where we see again that this thinking about constraints seems to be because of this how constraints can bias the system towards particular state-based trajectories that it seems to be well suited for this level of other cells and we can draw more complexity what we think about is the directional causality in terms of constraining relations and this shows that scales temporal and size scales are not causally consuming the activities that one scale can and do in other scales but we don't determine so there is this very complex interplay of how much causality comes from which level and this thinking about mutually constraining relations allows us to capture them and from that we can throw out this strong imagine but I'm not an expert enough I'm not sure how much I agree to speak out so we'll pull a treatment you will have to wait for his doctoral thesis actually where he's putting a full treatment of this in relation to emergence and I want to use the remainder of my time to turn to slightly different to the second weird thing that comes out of the picture of causality in the biological system and I have turned to normal causes because I don't want to argue for any kind of a physical action out of distance so I don't think it starts from however I think there is this kind of level of interplay between negation and direct impact of particular events which are which are disconnected in terms of space and perhaps even from scale or temporarily disconnected biological systems that makes us forces us to consider this kind of normal quality in a weaker sense and one thing is is that and this can be seen in this kind of bi-electrical example that I think I'm showing you for there is the difficulty of tracking relationships we don't know what impacts what and one example is in the case of doubtful organization there is the average of relation to doubtful organization however even on a single scale there is still the difficulty of tracking which cell influence is weak because we have this kind of like very complex picture where everything seems to be influencing everything else and in this kind of like very strongly connected network of this it's difficult to track individual events and see how they how they are how they are constantly efficacious and one of the things that I think it makes it visible is this kind of stop problem what I call the stop problem so one of the biggest difficulties for any view of normal genesis is the question of how does how does the process know when to stop so how individual what is the source of information for individual cells for them to know that the target shape of the organism has been achieved and this happens both in the rigid grid case that I've been discussing here but also in more standard than in all of our standard regenerative cases where we have this kind of like target anatomy that the organism is trying to achieve but how does it know that it has actually achieved that because no individual cell can have access to that type of information so this is a very difficult problem for biology and so not well understood how that happens but in lots of pro terms it could be said that there is this kind of again metaphysically and I'm saying this word without putting too much emphasis on them but just pointing out the difficulties that appear perhaps there is some kind of a cause of power of absence that is visible here or perhaps even are still doing their final causes until the moment it comes into play at this level or what we call alternatization and so yeah but it's very difficult to see what causes this process of stopping so this is why I'm saying for example of this difficult relationship and this kind of complex connected process is actually crucial for biology as some people might like that and that has biological individuality Victor could you conclude out of time okay so I just want to I have two minutes more so maybe I just yeah coordination is a prerequisite of individuality so this kind of interaction is what enables the audience to transfer from this level individual styles into it the level of the multicellular audience are acting as a biological individual and there is a bunch of problems that are related to this and I will skip to conclude perhaps because it's also very as I said it's a full working process so I'm more interested in pointing out difficulties now I don't have too many solutions at this point and I want to thank my viewers Questions, comments thank you are you able to hear me the microphone the microphone is stuck to the wall so if you go a bit closer to the wall that's the issue yeah I'm in the front of the room can you hear me if I stand here okay thank you very much for your talk so we've been talking obviously in this workshop we're talking a lot about causation and so I'm interested to know if I can to say more about inter-level causation especially thinking about the noble diagram and you raised the really interesting example of this mutual constraining relationship and how that's one suggestion for how to make inter-level causation go through but I'm wondering if there is an issue there where we all to separate relationships of constraint or explanations by constraint from explanations by causation so for instance the kinds of modal constraints that might be applied by the available state spaces are those causal explanations or should we think of those in the way that say like Mark Lang would call them sort of right modal or mathematical sort of constraints that aren't causally efficacious and so when you've got this sort of synchronic dependence between these two levels and one level is impacting the other level by constraining the trajectory, the possible trajectories in the state space are we oriented in thinking of that as a causal relationship that's my question for the noble diagram Thank you Thank you very much for this question I want to say that it is causally efficacious and now I'll try to explain I think behind it it's not a full argument yet but so drawing on the kind of interventionist view of this I would say that exactly this case of bioelectricity shows us and the specific experiments that I'm drawing on shows us that when we impact the level, the higher level because again we emerge the whole organism or part of the organism not individual cells so we cannot modify the bioelectric combination of the level of individual cells we modify the bioelectric part of us at all we don't have the tools yet to impact individual cells in this procedure so I think this war is saying that there is this kind of causal relationship from this higher level of the pattern of activity towards the activities at the lower level specifically how the individual cells divide how they choose the particular kind of that they develop into in the course of the process so I think there is this kind of link there obviously obviously you could argue that it is just this mathematical constraint or this kind of structural constraint because it is a little bit of that as to how this bioelectric project offers the kind of topological maybe or structural recipe of cells for the organism so you could try to argue that this is rather done and try to avoid the sign of any kind of causal I think it is without but I think that there is a lot more purchase just in terms of empirical progress that can be made with this stronger view Any other questions? I have one of course but that was just Victor I like your point that this reduction does not work in physics and the literature in philosophy of physics and in physics showing that it is obvious that there is no reduction in physics is gigantic just there is surely something to there is surely a problem of communication between physics and the other fields for the other fields to believe that something could be reducible to physics and I have to say that I appreciate the fact that you discussed it at the beginning but you could have filled your slides of reference all saying physics itself does not reduce to physics on the other hand I have as a comment it is probably the fact that philosophy of physics write really poorly and most of the time refuse to discuss with any philosophy of science outside physics that it is not known there is a the hot subjects in physics now it is effective theory which is by definition modellization that cannot be reducible so I think that another trajectory in this problem is that we have been inheriting a lot of things about this through philosophy of mind and it has been embedded in the business of physics or philosophy of physics from the 70s perhaps even from before philosophy of biology has been kind of like too much connected to this kind of thinking to be able to step aside and look at the broader field I actually have to say that it is difficult it is not like I can read the physical literature I can read some of the basic literature and some of the people there are smart enough to read physics and so I have still been kind of disconnected to yeah yeah this is perhaps on Simon's kind of comment there is also one of the historical literature on this and I would be careful about using that book by Jessica Riskin to make these kinds of things you are making because it falls from the mic so there is a lot of historical literature on this especially on the material reductions in question and I would caution you against using Jessica Riskin as you are looking at one of the classics which is called The Architecture of Matter which presents the nuanced picture of history of this despite the fact that it was like published in 68 and I am going to do the thing where I log a paper that I wrote in which you could read me as saying possibly that there are cases where physics reduces the biology but you will have to make your own choice actually I have been with Riskin on this but as I said it is a very well written book I am very convinced of you when you read it so we are out of time thank you very much Victor