Weird World

There are several things that give me goosebumps. Or make me think how little we comprehend / understand about the weird world we live in.

Physics - the way we have it now - is completely bent. Totally far from being intuitive and understandable. Take the John Wheeler's double-slit experiment. A source of light and a screen with two thin, vertical slits. You shine the light through the slits, the light acts like a wave., interferes with itself, resulting in a ripple-like pattern on the wall. Turn the light down to only a single photon. The photon acts like a particle: hits the wall in one specific spot. But after enough photons arrive, the same interference pattern emerges. The single photon interferes with itself. Now add a detector to the slits, to figure out which slit the photon actually passed through. When you do this, you never get an interference pattern on the far wall. The OBSERVATION (not any interaction with) of the photons affected their behavior.

Then there is Michael Levin and his Platonic Space Thesis, a radical departure from the standard biological paradigm. It argues that the complex shapes and behaviors of living things are not merely "emergent" properties of genetics and physics. Instead, he proposes that biological systems act as interfaces or pointers that access a pre-existing, non-physical "Platonic Space" of forms. In this view, the potential for a specific body plan (like a hand with five fingers) or a cognitive structure exists mathematically in a latent space before evolution ever "finds" it - much like how prime numbers exist mathematically before a human discovers them. Levin uses the "Cognitive Light Cone" term to describe the horizon of an agent's concerns. A single cell cares about metabolic sugar levels (small light cone). When cells join via gap junctions to form a tissue, their electrical signals merge. They now share a "collective intelligence" with a larger light cone, capable of pursuing massive goals—like building a limb—that no single cell can comprehend. This thesis attempts to solve the "software-hardware" gap in biology. We know the hardware (proteins, genes), but we don't understand the software (how a specific shape is remembered and repaired). Levin suggests the software isn't fully "in" the body at all—the body is just the receiver for a universal set of mathematical laws that govern shape and mind. Or - to more IT-oriented readers - event the brain is just a "thin client" interface that accesses patterns from the Platonic space. Minds, consciousness, and cognitive behaviors are not created by the brain but are patterns that ingress through this interface. A truly wild concept but does explain the gap between physics and biology.