The Song of Life with Richard Watson
Music, Love, and the Dance of Life. On the spaciousness of realization. Richard and Andrea. Recorded in November 2023, Heidelberg:“There’s no such thing as just an analogy.”
Part one here: • Exploring Love and Embodied Evolution...
Richard and Andrea meet again to delve into a new theory intertwining the realms of music theory, biology, cognition, and love through the lens of resonance and harmonic relationships. The discussion covers a wide range of topics, including the role of top-down causation, agency in evolution, nested oscillations across different scales, and the dynamic, reciprocal nature of living systems. It also explores the philosophical and metaphorical implications of viewing life and cognition through the framework of musical harmony, suggesting that living organisms, their development, and interactions can be understood as complex, resonating systems. The theory posits that love, characterized as deeply vulnerable mutual knowing based on resonance, plays a central role in the relationships and dynamics between organisms, highlighting the interconnectedness and continuous change of life.
watch Richard introduce Song of Life: https://youtu.be/zdmY6q2ZWm8?si=a6c-1yAYG5ItRHtB
#song #lifesong #cognition #richardwatson #andreahiott #waymaking 00:00
Opening Greetings and Introduction to the New Theory 01:03 Exploring the Mysteries of Evolution and Biological Phenomena 02:40 Introducing a New Theory: Living Things as Nested Oscillations 05:26 Dynamics of Oscillations: From Music Theory to Biological Systems 07:34 The Interplay of Genotype and Phenotype in Evolution 16:05 Musical Metaphors for Understanding Genetic and Organismic Complexity 18:15 The Role of Metaphor and Analogy in Scientific Understanding 21:57 Challenging Reductionism: The Complexity of Organisms and Systems 26:43 Musical Analogies for Genetic and Organismic Interactions 34:33 Morphology and Vibrations: A New Perspective on Organism Development 37:10 Exploring the Depths of Musical Analogies 38:15 The Intricacies of Music and Brain Dynamics 38:52 Resonance: Bridging Music, Movement, and Mind 40:09 Feedback Loops and Spirals in Music and Life 40:25 Redefining Cognition Through Musical Metaphors 41:24 The Holistic Harmony of Life and Music 42:23 Questioning Life's Objective: Beyond Survival and Reproduction 44:01 Challenging the Optimization Paradigm with Musical Harmony 44:54 The Creative Process: Music as a Metaphor for Life 54:07 Love, Resonance, and Vulnerability: A Musical Perspective 58:08 Cognition Beyond the Brain: A Musical Understanding 01:07:20 The Endless Dance of Organizational Harmony “Love is deeply vulnerable mutual knowing.” “Getting cognition out of the head.” Denis Nobel: • Why Dawkins is wrong | Denis Noble in... Metaphors we Live By Lakoff and Johnson: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/... Video discussion of Metaphors we Live By: • Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff a...
Transcript
Theory of Song
Richard Watson: [00:00:00] It's not just that living things can do cognition with other substrates.
It's that living things must do cognition, that if a living thing is not doing information integration and collective action, to use Mike's words, it isn't a thing. It isn't a living thing if it's not doing
that
so that's the sense in which I'm talking about a cognition first story. It's a story that includes the the vibration in the geometry of the string as a whole from the beginning. Hey Richard, good to see you. So it's [00:01:00] another kind of research conversation, this one framed a bit by this new theory that you're working out, which is very exciting. I don't know how much you're actually ready to share with everyone yet, but it's actually thinking about, well, I'll let you explain it a little bit.
Andrea: The music theory.
Richard Watson: Yeah. Um, yeah, it is difficult to know where to start.
Andrea: Maybe you could even say how you, where you came upon it. Are you musical? Do you play music?
Richard Watson: No.
Andrea: Yeah, I don't either. So it's mysterious to me.
Richard Watson: No, uh, I, there's a lot that we, uh, pretend that we understand about how evolution works. And, um, uh, I'm interested in understanding it better than that pretense.
The The pretend story is that we know how it all works. [00:02:00] It's all by random variation and selection on the genes, and that phenotypes and organisms and the behavior of organisms are all controlled by the genes. But there's a bunch of biological, um, phenomena which aren't very well accommodated in that view of things.
And there are some grander, more sort of philosophical puzzles about evolution writ large that can't be answered that way. Um, and I've been very much inspired by Mike Levin's, um, work and conversations with him about the role of development in agency and the role of development in evolution. Um, and seeing if there is a way of developing [00:03:00] a theory of living things that is, that has room for top down causation, has room for agency, and better explains the things which are anomalous.
And the, let's see if I can do a quick version of the whole narrative arc in one go, um, the The theory that I'm developing, uh, describes living things as nested cycles or oscillations, um, that operate at different physical scales and different temporal scales. And that, um, you know, the slow oscillations control the large macro scale physical organizations and the fast oscillations control the small.[00:04:00]
And the top down and bottom up causal connections between the large and the small and the fast and the slow operates through resonance, through harmonic relationships of those frequencies. So, an oscillation with frequency 2f fits inside an oscillation with frequency f as an octave relation. And those harmonic relations give a way for Small scales to interact with large scales and large scales to interact with small scales in a way which is symmetric, that you have a resonance or a phase locking between different physical scales.
Um, which would suggest that the causal flow is neither exclusively from small to large, a bottom up way of seeing things, nor exclusively from top to bottom. top down way, um, sort of anti reductionist way of thinking about things, but [00:05:00] uh, in fact a sort of swinging back and forth between the two. Um, and that living things are physical dynamical systems with dynamics at multiple physical scales and multiple temporal scales that swing back and forth between top down and bottom up causes and, um, a way speed to formally link, a way to make that all formal instead of it just being a sort of a, well, it is quite hand wavy, but a way, a way to move from, uh, uh, what currently a hand wavy way of describing things to a more formal way of describing things is, is through that, sort of, uh, logic of musical resonance of what frequencies resonate with one another and connected with one another and what frequencies aren't.
So that's the sort of territory I've been thinking about.
Andrea: Okay. [00:06:00] So you say swing back and forth. This is something I wanted to dig in a little bit and ask you about, because these are some issues that I've also been trying to understand how to articulate. When you say swing back and forth, it sounds like something stops and starts and stops and starts, but you also kind of mean it's ongoing.
It's not one or the other. It's not this binary, it's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. Yeah. Is it how we're measuring the music, even though the music is doing a lot of things all the time?
Richard Watson: So you can see a pendulum as swinging back and forth that appears to sort of momentarily stop at either extreme and then reverse and go back again.
But you can also see a pendulum as an ongoing cyclic exchange between kinetic and potential energy that it's, it's just in a cycle in phase space. It's just going round and round. It's a nice smooth orbit. There's no. There's no corners to its trajectory, right? In, in that two dimensional space, [00:07:00] it only looks like there's corners in it because you sort of collapse it into a one dimensional projection where you just look at its position in space.
Um, so there you have a, a swinging back and forth left to right, but you also have a swinging back and forth between potential, all the energies in the potential, all the energies in the kinetic, all the energies in the potential, right? You have that swinging back and forth. Um, and, uh, There's swinging back and forth.
There's another kind of swinging back and forth between the, um, small, fast time scales and the long, slow time scales. Um, that I think is characteristic of organic systems. Uh, that there's a, there's a slow time scale that's organizing the fast time scale. But the fast [00:08:00] time scale is. creating the material substrate that enables the swinging of the slow time scale, and that sort of going back and forth.
In biology, it's the going back and forth between genotype and phenotype. It's the going back and forth between the genotype, which has the potential to be an organism but isn't, and the organism which has the, which is the information in action, but not, not in a form that you can copy it, has to go back to the copyable state where it's sort of inert, the genotype.
Uh, so there's a swinging back and forth between the information is distributed in the collection of cells of the adult phenotype and the information is concentrated into the one cell of the germ line. There's that swinging back and forth. Um, and the swinging back and forth between the, uh, active and passive.
It's sort of the genotype is [00:09:00] just an inert thing that you can treat like data and just copy it with DNA polymerase, or it's an active thing. It's in the middle of a dynamical process of creating proteins, which create all of the details of the organism. Um, so, you know, there's, um, you know, basically I'm just reaching for it.
Everything is a cycle, everything is a swinging back and forth, and everything that looks like it has corners on it is really just an orbit in a higher dimensional space.
Andrea: And how does that matter for the position which is assessing it? So, I guess what I'm trying to get at is, you talk a lot about nestedness in scale, and this is very interesting.
When we think of it musically, how, I mean, it opens up a way to understand it. Um, mathematically you do this right in, in the, in the videos, but I'm trying, you know, it's different, right? This one swinging back and forth and the swinging back and forth itself [00:10:00] is different according to where we're assessing it, right?
Or is it, I don't know, is that part of this nestedness and scaling that you, that you see or.
Richard Watson: Yeah.
So if I, um. I don't know whether, whether it's the right time to go into the, into the sort of the physical details of the resonance and how it works and stuff. But I guess that's where I'm at in understanding it. So that's, that's, that might not be the best way to that's where I'm at at the moment. So if you have something that's oscillating, uh, how can it influence anything else?
The, the way in which one oscillation influences something else is that something else needs to be the same natural frequency as the thing that's oscillating. If it's the same natural frequency, then each time the source oscillates, it gives a little bit of energy to the receiver and the [00:11:00] receiver starts to swing as well.
It transfers energy from the source to the receiver. But that is also a swing which overshoots. And then over time, you have all of the energy in the receiver, and not in the source. And they're like, oh, wait a minute, so now what's going to happen? Now the energy is going to go back from the thing that was previously the receiver becomes the source, and the energy goes back to the other pendulum.
So if you have two pendulums on a shared string and you swing one of them and the other one is stationary, the energy moves from the swinging one to the stationary one, and the originally swinging one becomes still. And then, well, then you've got the mirror image of the situation that you started with, and it swings back again.
So there's a, instead of transferring, instead of the oscillation from left to right, or the oscillation from kinetic to potential, you have a, an oscillation from pendulum one to pendulum two, [00:12:00] that's, that's going back and forth as well. Uh, so there's a fundamental symmetry between the observer and the observed.
That the observer can only observe something by being the same natural frequency as it, so that it can be influenced by it. Uh, but by, by being influenced by it, it takes energy out of the thing that it's observing and then becomes the thing that can be observed, right? It's like the energy is transferred into the observer and the observer becomes the agent rather than the passive observer.
Now, that can be, you can get the separation to be, um, asymmetric, but still a swing if the observer isn't the same natural frequency as the original oscillation, but something harmonic to it, [00:13:00] for example, being twice the frequency. So if the natural frequency of the observer was half the frequency of the observed, then they will also resonate.
But there'll be two swings of this one for every one swing of that one. And that will also transfer energy, but it transfers, um, in a way that for any particular duration of time, it looks like there's more of it going this way than that way. Don't, um,
those, you know, changes in frequency, when you think of them as being physically connected with changes in physical scale. That the, you know, large things produce low notes. They have low natural frequencies and small things have high notes, high natural frequencies. Um, then this, the swinging back and forth, instead of just swinging back and forth between [00:14:00] pendulum one and pendulum two, it's swinging back and forth between top down control and bottom up control.
Um, and it needs to be a swinging back and forth of that kind in order for It to be an ongoing process in order for not to just be something that happens once and then is over because there needs to be some sort of conservation. You know, instead of there's no, we started with a conservation of, of translation that if you go to the left, you have to go to the right.
And then there was a conservation of, uh, uh, energy that if you go up in potential energy, then you have to go down in potential energy and vice versa with the kinetic energy. And then there was a conservation in the, whether it's in pendulum one or in pendulum two, it has to be somewhere, but it goes back and forth.
It's not just a one way flow. And then it's over because it's a cycle. It goes back and forth between the [00:15:00] observer and the observed. And when it goes back and forth between small scales and large scales, both organizational scales and temporal scales, that's when you have something that looks like, um, Oh, it's an agent that can do stuff.
Versus it's a machine that was constructed by its parts. So, so the parts were the agents and that going back and forth between top down and bottom up, that's what we recognize as, you know, there's a living thing, right? There's a, there's an agent, there's a, uh, an agential autonomous system. It's still, it's still just a, a conservation of.
causal flow or something between one scale and another. Uh, and it, because it's conservative means it can be ongoing, but we see it as a, as a pulsing of agency, as it were, a pulsing of [00:16:00] top down controlness, which has to be compensated by a pulsing of bottom up controlness. Um, but you know, as observers from the top scale, the top scale is the one that looks interesting.
My, my agency to your agency.
Andrea: Yeah, gosh, there's so much. I mean, even this agency, I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking of the pendulum kind of, if I could try to think of it musically, it reminded me of when I'm a kid and my, at my grandmother's computer computer, my grandmother's keyboard piano, like a real piano.
Yeah. The real, a real old piano keyboard and pressing like one note and then another just back and forth. You know, like there's, it's almost like a pendulum kind of oscillation in terms of. Like this one sounded good with this one going over back and forth or something like this. And, and, and with the pendulum, right?
The there's, I'm the agent, I'm putting something into the system and then it's kind of [00:17:00] doing something with what I've put into it in a way. Um, I find it hard to, get out of that kind of me in the middle or, or the agent giving the system, giving the pendulum, the energy, and then watching it, or me doing something, uh, with the notes or, or something.
It's, it's hard because, you know, maybe you could tell me even like, um, how you see this. idea of the song and music. Is it metaphorical for you? Is it literal? Because how does it fit with something like if, uh, Dennis Noble's idea of music of life, where instead of the previous idea of genetics, we think of genes almost like a music script.
I don't know if I'm doing him justice, but, and so you could read the script many ways. The script is just a script unless you have the instruments and someone playing it. It's, it's a great way to start to think about genes as not the primary actors in a sense, you know. So I wonder if you're, you're introducing music into this [00:18:00] notion of agency and, and cognition, which we're going to talk about in a second, because that's really the key here in a way for me.
Um, are you doing it metaphorically or are you really trying to create a mathematical way of really thinking of this as like, um, Yeah, music that we can, we can notice the patterns, the pattern and the behavior is the same. And if we can notice the pattern in a, in a musical framework, then we're actually going to learn something, you know, deeper or different.
How do you see all that? Maybe it'll help me.
Richard Watson: So there's a lot of different metaphorical levels to play with. And I think that my sort of overall position is there's no such thing as just an analogy. When you, when you notice the similarity between things. That can be a shallow similarity or a deep similarity, but it's still a true similarity, right?
Andrea: That's interesting.
Richard Watson: There's still, you know, there's, um, the, the question is, what's the extent to which the [00:19:00] analogy holds? Is it deep? And, you know, when you say, when you recognize that, wow, this goes really deep, when you look at it really deep, it's actually, it is the same mechanism. It's not just an analogy, but all you're really doing when you say that is, this mechanism is isomorphic to that mechanism.
You know, it's, it's still, you know, you know, even when you say, you know, this number six is equal to that number six, you're, well, they're not, right? Because you held them apart for a moment so that you could measure this one, and then you measured that one, and they weren't literally the same. Right. But, um, I'm gonna have to move rooms a second.
No problem. There was something about the pattern
Andrea: that was similar, I guess.
Richard Watson: Sorry about that. I just need to change rooms.
Andrea: No problem.
Richard Watson: Um, the, uh,[00:20:00]
Andrea: Oh, good. I like this room. The love room.
That's my favorite.
Richard Watson: Um, So, I lost my train of thought. Sorry.
Andrea: Um, so I guess what we're trying to talk about is metaphor and analogy and how that's, that's not just a dismissal actually. You were saying it it's an expression of something that's isomorphic that we're not connecting directly.
You were saying like two different kinds of patterns or two, two different numbers. They're not the same thing, but of course. you know, we can, we can think of them, uh, as part of the same package.
Richard Watson: You, if you measure the, the width of the table and the length of the table, and it turns out that they were both six, it's like, oh, they're the same.
It's like, well, they're not the same because one of them's the length of the table and one of them's the width of the table. So yeah, but they're the same in the terms of the number of centimeters across or the number of feet across. It's like, [00:21:00] yeah, but that's only a particular aspect of them that's the same then, you know, their measurement is the same.
So you're recognizing the, what's similar about them at the same time as holding what's different about them. It's a, it's maybe a bit too philosophical, uh, I think it's
Andrea: helpful because metaphors is used so much, but also dismissed so much. So
Richard Watson: yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, there are, there are philosophers and cognitive scientists who, you know, take that all very seriously.
You know, the. Um, what is it, how does it go? Metaphors to, metaphors we think with, right? That everything.
Andrea: Yes.
Richard Watson: Every thought we have.
Andrea: Make up.
Richard Watson: Is a, is an analogy or a metaphor that makes a connection with something else we've thought that isn't literally the same, but by recognising the similarity, it enables us to, to think Draw connections and drawing connections is exactly what the job of thinking is.
Andrea: Mm hmm Which to me connects nestedness that you express via something like music or scale.
Richard Watson: Yeah [00:22:00] so so the Let's let's try it from Dennis's point of view and where where I agree and diverge from that. Okay, I'm very much inspired by Dennis Noble's writing on this so and he is in part responding in contrast to a Dawkins esque way of viewing things, you know, the genes are in control Everything is reduced to the benefits of individual genes, and we're just the lumbering robots
and Dennis in contrast suggests No, the organisms are orchestrating the activity of the genes And Dawkins says, well, no, that's just wrong. The genes are orchestrating the behavior of the organism. And Dennis says, no, no, no, that's not right. Because whether a gene is active, being expressed or not, [00:23:00] is determined by the context in which it's in.
The gene doesn't control that. The context of the gene controls whether the gene is active or not. Yeah, but the context of the gene is other genes, right? Yeah, it is. In a complicated way, right? There are, I don't really like the word, but emergent collective consequences of the, all of the components of the organism, which create the context that orchestrate whether a particular gene is active or not.
Andrea: I don't want to interrupt you, but is that the same as top, top down and bottom up in the way that you were talking about it earlier?
Richard Watson: Well, that's, so that's the thing that's so uncomfortable about it, right? So Dennis's suggestion sounds like he's advocating for top down causation as though There's a higher level agent of some kind that's deciding which genes to turn on.
Andrea: Like me doing the thing on the piano, or playing the music, or putting the pendulum into action.
Richard Watson: Yeah. Instead of [00:24:00] saying, you know, my neurons made me do it, or, um, the chemical transmitters in the synapses of my neurons made me do it, or the molecules in the chemical transmitters made me do it, you know, as though they were the things that did it.
No, I did it, and I made my neurons fire in order to make that happen, and then that made my, the cyanide, the chemical transmitters transmit in order to do it. It's like, no, the prime mover was me, not the prime mover was the molecules, right? So that's generally not very well received in, um, like all science, right?
So the, you know, reductionist science is the business of taking things apart. Uh, so that you can look at the component parts and, you know, to be fair, the relationships between the parts and that by, by so doing, you will understand the whole. Except every single time we do that, [00:25:00] we totally don't understand the whole at all.
We just understand the parts, and we list the relationships between them. And the thing that we really wanted to understand isn't there anymore. We say, so, you know, we do this with, we do this with, um, you know, we want to understand the nature of the universe, and why it's there, and what it's for, and what its meaning is.
And we turn down at, well, you know, they're just masses and gravity and things orbiting around one another. There isn't anything to see here. And we do this same thing with, you know, what's an organism? Well, an organism is just cells and the cells are just full of molecules and the molecules are just bumping into each other.
And the, it's just, it's just biology. There isn't anything to see here, right? There's no such thing as life. There's no such thing as spirit. And the same thing with mind. It's like, oh, how does that work? Oh, well, there's neurons and there's axons and there's connections between them and there's electricity.
There isn't anything to see here. There's no such thing as mind. [00:26:00] And the thing that we wanted to explain in all of those cases falls between, through our fingers, right? We didn't explain the thing that we really wanted to explain. It's the reductionist science just says, it just isn't there. There's nothing there to talk about, right?
Andrea: The tricky thing is that in so doing, we also do make some kind of innovations, technological or otherwise, because just by looking at it in this way, we've started to understand it a little bit. So then it seems like, oh, it must be right. That it's, as you just said, because we've, you know, created these kind of new ways of, of interacting with the world, but we still haven't actually done, as you're saying, what we set out to do, but somehow it doesn't matter anymore because we've somehow understood the process a little bit, or what you might say, the song or the pattern.
We've kind of understood it a bit, but, uh, in, in a very mechanical way, it's not a bad thing. You're also saying. So the,
Richard Watson: so what's the. So the music and analogy of the [00:27:00] same problem is that you take a piece of music and you ask the question, what's the meaning of this piece of music? What is it? And you say, well, you know, it's this note followed by that note.
And you say, well, what's that note? Well, it's, you know, it's just an oscillation that moves, vibrates the airwaves. Or what's this note? Oh, that's just an oscillation that moves the airwaves. And why did that note follow that note? It's well, no particular reason, but I can tell you what the interval is if you like, you know, as though, you know, you're just describing the parts and their relations.
Andrea: Yeah,
Richard Watson: yeah, exactly. That's great.
Andrea: That helps you understand the music and even maybe make new music or become a musician. But the whole point is the music, right? That isn't explainable. I mean, otherwise, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's this kind of, it's, um, The most important thing is, is the thing that we're not explaining, in fact we're perpetuating, even maybe evolving you might say, by our ability, our, our trying to explain it.
Richard Watson: So the, the [00:28:00] music metaphor in terms of the genes and the organism, an in between position is something like, well what if the genes were to specify the instruments? But not the music, right? So somehow the music, I don't know where that is, some sort of ethereal thing, that's orchestrating which instruments get played at which time and which notes they play.
And the genes are necessary in order to code for the hardware. Mike Levin might say that, uh, you know, you can't use this protein if you don't have that protein. Uh, but whether you're going to use it and how you're going to use it and when you're going to use it, that's orchestrated by the activity of the whole cell or potentially the whole organism.
But then the next worry is, okay, but who's doing the orchestrating then, right? You know, this has to be, it has to be, The parts themselves that are somehow orchestrating themselves, doesn't it? Because where else could it be, right? You know, wherever this [00:29:00] orchestration comes from, it must be made of stuff.
It must have parts. Let's list those as well.
Andrea: So that's the darkened gene, selfish gene.
Richard Watson: Yeah, it's like, you know, it's just, just from that, it has to be somewhere and the only place it can be is the genes. So that must be in the genes too.
It can't be the case that the musical score is sort of written down somewhere else and that there's a conductor that comes out of nowhere and tells the genes what to play and when to play it, right? Um, and, um,
so how do we, how do we sort of get out of that? sort of, um, trap of wanting to have a materialist explanation, a materialist understanding of the stuff that we're looking at, but also wanting to understand it holistically. So, you know, some [00:30:00] attempts have been things like, well, you know, it's self organization or it's emergent or something like that, uh, which is fine.
So long as it goes, there's definitely self organized principles in physical, in physical complex systems and properties can definitely emerge at the system level that. don't belong to any of the parts individually or their sum, but somehow it's, it's missing the feeling of
cause from above. It's missing the feeling of, um, the whole telling the parts what to do.
Andrea: Yeah.
Richard Watson: The
Andrea: change of behavior at a different scale, or
Richard Watson: Yeah. So there's a, there's a, there's an analogy here, or is it? Uh, with, um, you know, how do you explain the reason, uh, that a guitar string plays a [00:31:00] particular note?
And if you look, if you look closely at what's going on, well you need to know, um, you need to know that, uh, Uh, the, the molecules of steel in the string are being physically pulled to a particular position by the molecules of steel either side, right? You know, if these two are going up, then the one in the middle has to go up, right?
They are, there are physical forces between the particles in the string that cause them to move the way that they do. That's why the molecules move the way they do. That's why the string is moving the way that it is. Yeah, okay. But, um, how come they're going up and down at that particular frequency and not some other frequency?
It's like, well, that's because, um, you know, all the ones next to it are going up at that time, and all the ones next to them are going up at that time, and so, and then they, you know, they reach their limit of their [00:32:00] tensile, uh, potential energy, and then they push back again and they go in the other direction.
Yeah, but why that frequency? Well, Yeah, that's also to do with the length of the string, all right? It's not just the, the tiny molecules of steel which are controlling what's happening in this system. The length of the string, the geometry of the string, is also involved. How is it involved? Well, when one molecule pushes another molecule, pushes another molecule, and pushes another molecule, and we have a wave of energy traveling along this string, it gets to the end of the string and reflects back, and it meets itself, as it were, Traveling in the opposite direction.
And in so doing that creates a kink in the string that strings don't like. And that causes the kink causes the, uh, waves to move in the third dimension, to change their phase around one another in order to. resolve. And the resolution of those collisions [00:33:00] between waves and themselves reflecting back and forth in the geometry of the string is controlled by at least two things.
The speed of the wave in the string and the length of the string. The relationship between those two things controls whether the wave meets itself in phase or out of phase. If it's in phase, it just builds up. If it's out of phase, it cancels out or causes a kink that needs it to. Uh, resolve. So the macro scale geometry of the physical system is involved as well as the micro scale particulate nature of one thing bumping next to another.
Andrea: What's that sort of multi scale?
Richard Watson: Yeah, so it isn't, it isn't sufficient to just say, you know, the molecules made the string play a G.
Andrea: Right.
Richard Watson: The macro scale geometry of the string made the molecules play a G. Right? Is, is equally valid.
Andrea: So that, is that like saying, we can't just [00:34:00] say the genes made an eye, that it was also where it was placed in the system or how, how I'm thinking of like planarians or, you know, your discussions with Mike or, you know, where,
Richard Watson: for a minute, I wasn't sure whether you meant an eye or an RI, but
Andrea: I guess it could be either in a weird way, if we think about a
Richard Watson: leg or a self, um, well, so, you know, if you, if you put an undifferentiated cell into the Tissue of a developing organ.
It will become a cell that's appropriate for the context in which you put it in.
Andrea: Mm hmm.
Richard Watson: Despite the genes it has, right? It's genes don't determine whether it changes into a liver cell or a skin cell or a part of an eye. Exactly. It's the context. So that's
Andrea: why we're thinking that's maybe the length of the string and all these things you were thinking about has changed.
Richard Watson: So I think of the morphology of an organism is like A complex vibration. Some of those vibrations will be resonating in relatively short [00:35:00] scales, organizing tissues like You know, the hair follicles on your skin of little repetitions of hair follicles all the way along and other oscillations will be whole body oscillations like the head to tail oscillation that makes the head end of an organism different from the tail end of an organism or the extremities of a limb different from the shoulder of a limb.
And then there are other scales like making the. Inside of your arm different from the outside of your arm, right? The outside has the skin on it and the inside has the bone in it and those those organizational scales Are different physical scales that have that are controlled by vibrations in different kinds of substrates.
So those might be gene expression vibrations. They might be morphogen, um, uh, wave excitations in tissues. They might be electrical connections between individual cells that are neighboring or between cells that are far apart if they have a neural connection or indeed. [00:36:00] Physical vibrations if we know when in the.
Bones, perhaps. And those different scales of vibration are controlling, the different frequencies of vibration are controlling different physical scales, organizing different physical scales, um, and also all connected with each other, right? We can't have, we can't have the higher physical scales being disconnected from the lower physical scales.
They're all connected. No, but you could have the same notes
Andrea: or the same notes with completely different Harmonies. Yeah.
Richard Watson: Yeah. So you can. The different kinds of communication that we are familiar with in music, right? Uh, so, first of all, there's the simple connection between, you know, this thing has the same natural frequency as that thing, meaning those two notes are the same.
They sound nice together, but a bit boring. Then there's, you know, these two notes are [00:37:00] different from each other. They're not the same frequency, but they sort of sound like they're sort of similar. How did that happen? Oh, they're an octave apart. One of them is twice the frequency of the other. Uh,
Andrea: Right.
Richard Watson: And then there's the other intervals, which are, you know, the sort of the nice, neat ratios of things. And then there's this thing of like, but now I can play this tune. In an octave higher. So all of the relationships between the notes are the same, but all of the frequencies were different. So is it the same or is it different?
It's like, there's none of the notes are the same, but the ratios of the notes are the same. The, the changes in the intervals between them are the same.
Andrea: Yep.
Richard Watson: Uh, and then there's the, you know, the changing of. that, you know, Bach makes a little phrase go up and then go down and then a little bit later he makes it go down and then go up.
Andrea: And he, you know, turns all
Richard Watson: of these symmetries inside out. Um, uh, that are, you know, the, the, oh, it's, it's different, but it's also sort of the same, right? It's this [00:38:00] conservation of the going, the swinging back and forth between the sameness of things and the differentness of things at all of these different scales.
That makes
Andrea: me think of Philip Glass. It's a good pendulum, pendulum music.
Richard Watson: So the, so the, the musical analogy, let's call it that for now, is deep, I think. At the very least, if it's an, if it's an analogy, it's a deep one.
Andrea: Yeah.
Richard Watson: So it might not be music in the sense that you can listen to it with your ears, but it's music in the sense that, uh, it connects together similarities and differences.
Uh, at different scales and different intervals, it's music in the sense that it moves you, uh, not just emotionally, but physically, right? The way that you move is through the resonance of the dynamics that are happening in your brain with the dynamics that are happening in your [00:39:00] muscle cells, right? Those are resonance connections, I think.
Uh, and it's music in the sense that. It's about, you know, sort of call and response between a subject and the object and the swinging back and forth between that, that I was talking about as well. Those are real physical forces, not just metaphors, right? Resonance actually moves things. Um, and that resonance can move from one substrate to another, right?
Like you can, like, like you can move a tune from an air column vibration to a string vibration or to a metal bar vibration as you move from one instrument to the other. You can move a song from a thought space from the electrical dynamics in your head to a physical space to a behavior that you're doing with your fingers on the keys.
And there's a Going back and forth between that, right? That, [00:40:00] why am I thinking about playing those two notes over and over again? Because I'm hearing those two notes. Why am I hearing those two notes? Because my fingers were pressing the keys. Why was I pressing those keys? Because my brain made me do it.
And you sort of, there's a, it's a cycle back and forth between the. Desire or intention to keep playing them and the hearing of them from, from your own actions. So you're creating a cycle at that causal level.
Andrea: Yeah, you're getting all these feedback loops, which aren't really loops. They're more like spirals because every, every time it's going to be a little different.
I think we, yeah, but that's another conversation. But that's exciting because I think. Um, this is messy again, I'll just talk, but a lot of things were coming to mind, right? The same when I was watching your videos, it, it helps to think about, we can, you said you, you know, you have the thought and then your hands are also doing it, but you're also kind of saying that's a continuous process in the sense that you and Levin and I have all been talking about in different ways of thinking about cognition first, in the sense that the, the [00:41:00] navigation or the way making or the movement is already cognitive.
Um, it's almost like redefining that as cognitive. It's not that we're saying mind, that's mind. It's more like from the beginning, before you call it cognitive, the movement is already doing what you think of as mind on a different level. Um, so as you're explaining all that, it's, it's, it's, it's. Music can be really helpful to, like, think about tracing the, the path of how different things have, um, navigated or made their way, uh, in terms of these kind of notes or harmonies or, and how the different patterns connect and overlap.
It made me think of, uh, Jakob von Oaxacal. Have you read his stuff at all? He also has this kind of musical theory of meaning, which I haven't thought about in a long time. Um, He's the one that a lot of people attribute niche construction and stuff like that to way back, you know, more, I'll send you some stuff.
I'll have to think about it. But, uh, yeah, I think his [00:42:00] idea was, is kind of harmony. Like the whole world is kind of a harmony. Um, it's very holistic in a way, but also that, and it gets to what you were saying, what I'm trying to say from each perspective within that harmony, There's going to be a different kind of music, even though there's like kind of one ongoing large music.
So I don't know how, have you thought about that kind of, I know you think a lot about part and whole and, and so on, but does, does that, yes. One of
Richard Watson: the things that, one of the things that interests me most is, um,
what does this all mean for what's the prime mover, right? What does this all mean for, what am I supposed to do with my life?
Andrea: Yeah. What does it mean?
Richard Watson: What's the point of it all,
Andrea: right?
Richard Watson: And the, you know, the point of it all from a natural selection point of view is to survive and reproduce. You know, you could do that if you like.
We're, [00:43:00] to a certain extent, we're compelled to do it. You almost can't
Andrea: help but do it. Reproduction is, you know, in so many forms. We think of it sexually, but we're always reproducing. You know, when you write a text, you're reproducing.
Richard Watson: Uh huh. But the But what's, but what's the point in that, right? You know, there's, you know, that, that, that might explain the, the biological, um, necessities and impulses, but it still doesn't explain what the point of it was.
And there's this assumption that there's a, a striving for improvement, a striving for, um, uh, adaptive increase, which would do what, which would make things reproduce faster, which would make things survive better.
Andrea: Yeah.
Richard Watson: Um, and it's like, and where, where do you think that's going to lead? Right? It's like, it's like, it's not, that's not going anywhere.
It's only, it's only That's this
Andrea: whole linear thing too, that there's some place it gets to, and [00:44:00] that way of thinking about meaning is painful.
Richard Watson: So that, that whole thing of, of, you know, life is some sort of optimization against an objective function that you're trying to maximize. Music has a, like all the arts, has a suggestion that Uh, I don't think that's it, right?
Like, I don't think we're trying to, uh, optimize against some objective function here.
Andrea: Mm.
Richard Watson: And when you think about, uh, harmonies and the ways in which notes interact, um, the idea that you're trying to optimize it, Becomes immediately ludicrous. It's like, okay, let's, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to make the best note.
It's like, that doesn't make any sense. I'm trying to make the best harmony. What does that mean? Well, the two notes that harmonize the best, well, well, there's the octave that harmonizes pretty well. It's a strong resonance, but you know what? Unison is better. Why don't we just do [00:45:00] that? Right. And we just all play the same note.
That's the perfect harmony, isn't it? Oh, I think we've missed the point somehow. You know, so. This notion that when you, when there aren't, when there's nothing, when there are no notes at all, sort of anything is possible, but also there's a sort of, there's sort of every potentiality is there, but nothing is actually there.
And then you lay down the first note and it's like, well now something is actually there, but the space of potentialities has actually been reduced. The, the number of notes that go with the, the number of second notes that go with that first note is. less than the number of all possible notes. But as you lay down the second note, then now that makes suggestions about what the third note is calling to way making.
Andrea: Yeah. Yeah. I'm getting it. Thanks for calling that out by the way. I didn't say thank you a long time ago.
Richard Watson: You're welcome. [00:46:00] It's, yeah, it's, it, it fits well with my thinking. Then that's, it's a, each step is creating, uh, inviting a particular distribution of the next step.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Richard Watson: And. The, um, what's the point of that?
It's like, what did there, you know, there isn't right. It's just, it's just a dance. It's just a piece of music. It's just a creative process, which is, uh, creating spaces, which invite reactions and reactions, which create spaces, and it's a going back and forth between those things, which isn't going anywhere and isn't it beautiful.
Not I won't tell me which way to go and I'll go there the most right, you know That's that's not what life is about
Andrea: or it's making way, but it's not going somewhere. It's not there's not I think even the question itself of what the point is a linear question that you [00:47:00] just You know, we need to ask a different question in a way.
And when you were talking about it reminds me of like, okay, why do we even create music in the first place? It's not to optimize anything. Although it gets stuck in these, uh, algorithms of social media or of just our language, the algorithm of our language, exactly asking questions like, what's the point where you start to kind of optimize your life somehow with your creation.
And then we get confused and I think we get quite unhappy, but, um, I think what you're doing is trying to open it up again. So that it's like, actually, if you have to say, there's a point when you really write a piece of music, the point is that you're having an experience that you want to, uh, make way through.
And somehow you want to connect it with the ones around you or the world around you, because you need a way to deal with that emotion, right? I mean, it comes down to those very intimate. intense, important kind of things that you don't need to ask what the point is.
Richard Watson: [00:48:00] Yeah. I'm just compelled to do it. Yeah.
Andrea: Yeah. So maybe that's more what music is really. I don't know. What do you,
Richard Watson: so that, that whole artistic, um, non objective, uh, implication of the, of the using the metaphor of music is also important to me. I, I, I don't want to turn a better theory that explains biological evolution into a more effective optimization algorithm.
It's like, oh, there was a, there was a dumb optimization algorithm, variation and selection. And now I've got a better optimization algorithm. Yeah. But it's, you know, it's not, it's, it's just, um, You know, processes which create the space for their own existence, uh, but also in so doing create their own demise and then [00:49:00] go round again.
And that, that dance of, um, creating spaces, moving into the space, moving into the space creates the reflection of the space back again and moving back. That dance, um, is a, is a dynamic which creates something from nothing. And that's. That's what's interesting about living systems, not how well they optimize their The exploitation of their current niche, right?
It's the, it's the construction of the niche into which they step and in so doing change the niche into which they are creating a niche. That's the reflection of the one that they just left that, that dance of stepping in and stepping out the swinging back and forth is the thing that's creative about life.
If you, if you were to sort of. When you take that sort of optimization stance, it's as though you're saying, well, all other things being equal, this is the best way to go, right? And [00:50:00] the arrogance is to assume that. in your going that way, everything else will stay equal. Of course it won't. I mean, you know, every, every thing that you do has,
Andrea: has a,
Richard Watson: yeah, the thing, the thing that you, the way that you perceived everything to be right now wasn't stationary anyway.
It's like it was always in flux. It was always in motion. It was only there because of its, Reflection to you and you were only there because of your mirroring it and in any movement that you do necessarily has a Consequence in in changing what it is you're moving into and I my hope is that in understanding that That that's what it is, that the fallacy of, um, you know, the greed in control that has got [00:51:00] the western world in its grips.
Yeah. Or is it the other way around? Would be alleviated a little bit.
Andrea: Both, I guess, as you show, back and forth. Yeah. Yeah, your hope is to shift that a bit then, or help people see past it, beyond the dichotomy.
Richard Watson: Yeah. And if, as soon as you ask the question, um,
uh, what's, what's a person supposed to do? What's a, what's a self supposed to do? What's the, what's the objective of a self? It's like, well, once you've defined a self and you ask, what are its interests? It's, the answer has to be, well, whatever it is that maximizes those interests.
Andrea: Yeah.
Richard Watson: By making the cut between the self and the non self, uh, you've already set up a situation where the only answer can be self interest.
If instead you think about [00:52:00] it as, well, the, the self is not separate from the non self. The self is a mirror image of the non self. They are a reflection of each other. Um, like then, uh, the self trying to get control of, dominate, hold on to. Grasping, risk and aversion, that, that notion is like, but that, but so doing would, um, imbalance the, um, the reflection between the self and the non self in such a way that the self would cease to exist.
Your, it's the, it's the resonant relationship between the self and the non self that's the thing. You can't separate the self from the non
Andrea: self. No, and you don't only have one self. I mean, it's like you don't only have one song, even if you have the whole universe as a harmony [00:53:00] in some kind of sense.
There's always, you, I guess that's what gets back to what I was trying to say at the beginning, depending where you're going to kind of look, as you just said, too, once you've decided on a self, what you've done is set the trajectory, or you've taken that first note in the way you explained before, so that now.
within that song or trajectory, which is only one possibility of many ongoing other ones, then yeah, you've set some parameters in terms of what the next step can be and so on. But there could, you know, overlapping using that same note or millions of other possible songs and trajectories. So there's something about that limiting linear thing where we think, oh, that's the self, that's the song, that's the trajectory we have to Get to the right end.
Um, yeah, that's like very, very limited. And I guess you're opening up that space, which is really a space kind of like this word on the, on the wall back there and some of the work you've done, you know, relative to that there's something. about just the [00:54:00] spaciousness of realization of that there's more harmonies than the one you're working on at the moment or more songs than the one you're working on at the moment.
Um, does that relate? Yeah.
Richard Watson: Shall I say more about how I think this word connects with
Andrea: Induction.
Richard Watson: Music, resonance and harmony.
Andrea: Yeah, please.
Richard Watson: So my working definition of love is deeply vulnerable mutual knowing and say what I mean by that. So in order for one thing to know another thing to be affected by it, it has to resonate with it.
Um, If two things are completely different frequencies, they just can't see each other, right? So they're
Andrea: oscillating with a similar behavior or pattern, is that kind of fair to say?
Richard Watson: Yeah, so if I have the same natural frequency as you, then your movements will affect me, and vice versa. If we have frequencies which are [00:55:00] different, then you can move as much as you like.
And I just don't resonate to that. I just, I'm just not affected by it. You might
Andrea: not even sense it at all, or you might, you might just go in the other direction to, to avoid that.
Richard Watson: Yeah. It's just, you, you just, we just don't connect. There's no, it's just invisible. Now, um, that, uh, that relationship, if we are the same frequency, we are the same natural frequency has to be reciprocal.
It has to be mutual. That in. knowing you in being able to be sensitive to you by being tuned into your frequency, that enables me to read you, but it also enables me to be read. It also enables me to change you and you to change me. And so knowing another deeply is the same as being vulnerable. It's the same as in order in, if I really knew, if I really know you deeply, I'm making myself available to be changed [00:56:00] by you in the same way as, you're making yourself potentially vulnerable to be changed by me.
Andrea: Yeah.
Richard Watson: So obviously you want that, if that, um, similarity is superficial, like there's a, you know, there's a resonance, but it's a weak one. Um, you know, then that's, that's not deep, but if there's, if there's a richness to the combination of natural frequencies in your song with the combination of natural frequencies in my song, and I am able to tune those in, that's a deep resonance.
It's vulnerable in the sense that it, um, makes me available to be transformed by that relationship. Uh, and it's mutual in the sense that it's bi directional. Yeah. So I mean it. I mean,
Andrea: I
Richard Watson: mean, to make quite direct connections between oscillations, natural frequencies, harmony, music, and love.
Andrea: That's [00:57:00] beautiful.
And it makes a lot of sense to me. And, um, even on a like dynamical systems, systems integration level where You're changing, I mean, everything is sort of influencing and changing everything else depending on, of course, the proximity of the oscillation or the path, you know, you could think of it in different ways trajectory.
And it's true too about the kind of books we read. And I mean, I think about in terms of way making right like you're, it's not only the physical body but it's also can be. Through symbolic things like books or, or films where people have expressed themselves in these way ways that you then kind of oscillate with those and they change you, you go here lecture and it changes you forever, whether you like it or not in a way.
So there's this vulnerability that's so at the heart of. almost like all of our actions, in a way. Um, I think we both have to go, but I wondered, like, as you were talking, how do you connect that back to these discussions we were all having about cognition? You [00:58:00] know, this thing I'm talking about beyond dichotomy, through love and philosophy, and this, these can be really hard, right, to think about.
This space that we just opened, which I think has a lot of truth in it. And then trying to understand some, what does that relate with the first order? Like starting with cognition or movement or what are your thoughts?
Richard Watson: Uh, so I'm a, I'm a big fan of getting cognition out of the head. So the basal cognition way of viewing living things is that cognition is a thing that can happen in, in biological substrates that are not just neurons.
Right. You don't need a brain to be doing cognition.
Andrea: No, you just need to be.
Richard Watson: What do you need exactly? Well, you need to be able to do some kind of information integration and some kind of information distribution, something like that. But there are all sorts of different substrates that potentially could do that, right?
So [00:59:00] instead of having neurons sending electrical connections to one another, you could have non neural cells sending chemical connections to one another or genes sending protein transcription factors to one another. They're all capable in principle of doing the same kind of information integration. Um.
So, first of all, let's get cognition out of the head.
Andrea: So it's some kind of a body in an encounter.
It's physically instantiated
I have trouble with processing information because
Richard Watson: Yeah.
Andrea: It sounds already in the head.
Richard Watson: yeah, so the information versus physical causes That sort of split of, well, it's only information. If you have somebody to read the information, like you made a split between agent and information program and data, I think that you can, you can do that okay with resonance, right? So if I resonate to a particular piece of music, [01:00:00] because, uh, but.
The music that was on the piano was vibrations that were in the strings that moved to vibrations that were in the air that moved to electrical vibrations that were in the nerves coming from my ear that moved to, you know, now it's in that sort of common currency that the brain deals with of electrical, uh, movements can resonate with all sorts of other ideas and other feelings, which then connect with other things which are in the body.
And the, the. In holding the resonant oscillation in a different substrate for a while, it's both information and it's a cause. Like, it's information because right now, it's holding onto the energy rather than giving it to something else. Uh, but it's also a cause in so much as, well, if there is a something else that resonates with it, the [01:01:00] energy can be transferred back again.
So you can, you can turn it from, from, you know, doing macro scale work in the world to doing,
Andrea: little teeny tiny
Richard Watson: vibrations, which are not really doing anything right now, but they're just sort of spinning around and then you can get that energy back out to do macro scale work in the world again. And that's the sort of
Andrea: person who's assessing this thing.
It's information, but it doesn't necessarily have to be for the process as it's happening.
Richard Watson: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, um, I mean, it can
Andrea: be more immediate. It doesn't.
Richard Watson: Yeah. So, uh, right. So we've got cognition out of the head and into the body. Then we want to connect. It's not just that living things can do cognition with other substrates.
It's that living things must do cognition, that if a [01:02:00] living thing is not doing information integration and collective action, to use Mike's words, it isn't a thing. It isn't a living thing if it's not doing
that.
Andrea: Exactly, that connects to Griffin's faults too. Like development of biology is cognition in a way.
Richard Watson: Yeah, so if you have a pond of an ecological community of single celled bacteria, That isn't doing information integration and collective action. It isn't an organism. It's just a. Pond full of single celled bacteria in an ecology and to the extent that they do do information integration and collective action It is an organism that being able to do Cognitive work is the same thing as being more than the sum of the parts You're not a thing unless you're doing cognitive work having being a living thing That is that is greater [01:03:00] than the sum of the living things at which you are composed means that You were doing cognition.
They're the, they're the same thing.
Andrea: That's an important point. Yeah.
Richard Watson: And then the, when you think about that, which, which came first, the part or the holes, which came first, the molecules on the guitar string or the length of the guitar string. Now you have that, that back and forth between what, well, what came first then was, was this a collection of cells and organism because the cognition made it so, or was.
The cognition happening because the cells made it so right. That's just the same back and forth again, that the, the information integration and collective action was the thing to organize the cells into an organism. And the organism was the thing that was doing the information integration and collective action.
That's a, they are co supporting, co creating, swinging back and forth between looking at the parts and looking at the whole. Um, [01:04:00] so the. In that, that's the sense in which I'm talking about a cognition first story. It's a story that includes the, um, the vibration in the geometry of the string as a whole from the beginning.
It's like that, the geometry of the string is not just something which, which, um, organized the vibrations of the molecules, but it's almost as though it made the molecules, right? And if you get, you don't want to get. Too metaphysical too quickly, but that the the reason that the molecules have the springiness that they do and the connection that they do is because they were organized by the geometry of the whole.
Andrea: Yeah, and you don't even have to get metaphysical if you just understand that what we're talking about is a kind of assessment. of this ongoing process from a particular scale or nested point of view. So you could also just like, you could hear many [01:05:00] different songs that have the same note on it, you know, but you can only hear probably one at a time, depending on where you're going to listen from.
It's similar with this process that you've just described, that there's always going to be many different ways of looking at that process and assessing it, just, Um, depending on what you're trying to, trying to assess, it's going to kind of align or harmonize or whatever in a different way. But when you describe all that, it makes me think, okay, well, love is like entropy or the vulnerability of that, that there isn't actually a closed loop.
Even though we talk about loops, that it's always a kind of spiral. There's always this moment of, you know, you're never going to come back exactly to where you started the first time. Even though. coming back, you've, you've grown or you've evolved. Um, so I don't know, is love like the entropy, the vulnerability in that, like that whole system, plus.
Richard Watson: Yeah, I mean, I think that if you could hold everything else constant, then it would just be a [01:06:00] loop. It would eventually just go around again and you'd get back to exactly the same place and nothing would have changed.
Andrea: Yeah, but we can't do that.
Richard Watson: Because it isn't closed. Because, because there is a connection between the self and the non self.
By the time you've gone around that loop, the non self has changed. And the, you know, the interaction between one Uh, song and another right when one, when one song meets another, when one living organism meets another, whether they're the same species or not, uh, is, um, throws up different intervals between them.
It's like, you know, it's, it's almost as though if you imagine, if you imagine two messages on the same carrier wave, then if I know that carrier wave, I can see the message. That's it. If there isn't really any difference between the carrier wave and the message, they're all part of the same thing. [01:07:00] And what I see of you is the difference between our two songs.
And what you see of me is the difference between our two songs, but from the other side. And if you look at the two of us from outside, well, whatever is outside, Is, is not that, by definition, and what, what the outside sees is the difference between it and those two songs, right? Yeah
The next, the next level of organization is a, is a, um,
If that, if that level of organization on the outside nudges one of those songs, it will nudge the other. Uh, but, And that creates a sort of a reaction between the two of them so that they're not, um, that they're momentarily, uh, out of equilibrium, as it were. Um, but that, that disequilibrium is going to flow through the system and either come back to the same point, or it's going to have spread some influence a little bit [01:08:00] further and we recurse outwards again to another level of organization.
Um,
Andrea: So it's that integration, as you were saying, that you change each other, uh, can't avoid it. Yeah, I, I have to go to class, but, um, thank you for, uh, Yeah, I feel very inspired. Oh, you're very welcome. Again, more to talk, think about, and, um, yeah, once I, maybe we, we can talk more about the actual theory that you've laid out when you're ready, because I know you're, I don't think I'm allowed to share your videos yet, but if I am, let me know.
Richard Watson: Yeah, I think I'm going to do some more work on them and do another version before I make them public, but it's, it was a sort of a useful stage of, I've been trying to get my thoughts down on paper for such a long time, and it was so hard that I decided to do it in. As a recording, which seemed to work better, but it's still a work in progress.
Andrea: Well, it's interesting and [01:09:00] you're onto something there, illuminating.
Richard Watson: Thank you. It's been a very stimulating conversation. Thank you.
Andrea: Yeah, for me too. And, um, I guess we won't talk before the holidays. So, uh, I'll stop.