Import AI 474: Platonic mindspace; TPUs in space; Zhipu starts an outer RSI loop
Michael Levin proposes minds are non-physical platonic patterns that embed in physical reality through bodies and machines.
“Bodies (whether living, engineered, or hybrid) are interfaces for a massive, multi-scale hierarchy of patterns to ingress into the physical world”— Jack Clark
Scientist Michael Levin argues in a new paper that minds are non-physical patterns from a platonic space of arbitrary complexity that 'ingress' into physical reality via biological or engineered bodies. He draws on experiments with xenobots and anthrobots as empirical evidence of patterns adjacent to known biological forms. While speculative and lacking definitive experiments, the framework is directly relevant to AI by proposing that minds—including potentially artificial ones—are substrate-independent pattern embeddings rather than emergent physical phenomena.