Discussing 3 Recently Published Papers with Michael Levin 

To paraphrase...'There seems to be some agency in evolution'. With that Mr. Levin just scorched the brains of the mainstream evolutionists. Agency is the one thing they can't abide. He sprinkles in words like design and engineer, too. Two other words that makes them huffy. Mr. Levin is one of the great minds of our time.

His work gets more exciting all the time!

His abilities to visualize and apply the systemic rules of a system between the macro and the micro are incredible

Levin’s work makes me passionate about biology as a programmer

Happy to see Michael back for his 3rd visit, thank you Carlos for sharing this conversation, have a great day. Peace

When I think about Michael Levin and his findings I feel deep gratitude. He is sharing all these deep insights in such a perfectly understandable way, everything is deeply connected and what amazes me even more is how compassionate he is. Defintely not the Commonwealth!

The way this changed my outlook on life is that I now see humans and cells as the same thing. Everything is just agents that create higher level agents which have emergent behavior. Industries are organs, any group of people tends to generate group behaviors. It places a whole other frame on things like conspiracy theories where there is one bad actor, etc. When in reality, this organ is made up of and in natural response to the entire body of our society.... so everyone is responsible for everything. It gives me a place of power to pull from.

If looking around you and understanding that you are an integral part of all of this isn't enough to fill your need for purpose, your seeking for this meaning in the wrong place, fix within and you will fix without

Bioelectric Networks as "Cognitive Glue" 0:00 Intro 1:19 What is cognitive glue? Bioelectrical signaling 5:05 How did you decide on the term "cognitive glue"? Anesthesia example 7:15 Evolutionary pivots between different problem spaces (metabolic, physiological, transcriptional, anatomical, behavioral, linguistic) 10:50 Hybrot: brain in robotic body 13:00 Rubber hand illusion, organism plasticity 13:40 Josh Bongard's 2006 robots building their own models 🔥 15:23 What does the brain do that other body cells can't? Speed, point connections, syntactic language 18:25 What people need to hear about collective intelligence... meaning in life 20:40 Scifi trope from Ex Machina... 23:18 None of it matters unless we have a soul? 27:05 "Play the hand you're dealt" (salamander egg, planaria, Slijper's goat examples) 33:00 Quantum biology | Organisms taking advantage of quantum fields? 36:13 Deer antlers in Mike's lab (trophic memory) Darwin's Agential Materials 41:45 An allusion to His Dark Materials book series? 42:40 Summary of the paper, on spectrums (legos vs rat circus) 50:52 Is evolution an agent in and of itself? (2024 paper likely) 🔥 52:55 Imagine 50 million year lineage of alligators... hypotheses of navigational heuristics 56:20 Can we integrate any of this into our daily lives? 1:01:15 What makes evolution so magical... it's a learning machine 1:01:57 What's missing from the standard evolutionary synthesis... "the appreciation of the intelligence of the substrate" Biology, Buddhism, and AI 1:03:08 Beginner mind vs expert mind... how did this collaboration begin? 1:06:00 Adorable story of Mike's youngest wanting to design a robotic cat... where does care come from? 🔥 1:08:30 Impermanence of the self... memories regenerated a la Blade Runner 1:14:05 What if all of your memories were uploaded 10 seconds ago? 1:15:25 Your current body didn't exist 30 years ago 1:16:50 Enabling bigger goals by expanding your cognitive light cone 1:17:55 What is it like to perceive the self in a broader sense? Do meditative monks feel like part of a whole? 1:20:10 How has the paper been received? 1:21:10 What draws you towards the surrealist art style? Latent space of possibilities... 1:23:20 Find more of Michael Levin (upcoming wordpress site!)

That guy is a badass. I love how he sees the bigger story nature's telling and isn't confined or blinded by what everyone else thinks. I hope he dives into the quantum side of things more, w his mind he could probably tie all sorts of things together.

The apparent ‘tension’ or differing survival agenda of the whole being versus individual cells has fascinating implications for so many levels (Sociopolitical? Existential?). Incredible insights in your work, thank you.

“Finding the mechanism does not rob the meaning” great way of putting it

This series with michael is nuts !!!

Thanks for the video. Dr. Levin is a very important, fascinating explorer in new biological/experiential territory!

Thanks a lot! This was awesome - again... Thanks also for asking about Quantum Biology. I'm coming from the perspective of unified physics and most of what Michael says goes hand in hand with that. Please do an interview with Nassim Haramein about unified physics. By the way: It was funny how Michael tried to justify the fact that there is no individual self. This is the basic teaching of the Buddha. Nirvana means literally "extinction" - like blowing out a candle. So the very thing all spiritual seekers try to achieve - enlightenment - is now a scientific fact. No need to reframe this and make a U-turn. 😄 It's the best news ever!

Having "cogs and wheels" is not a problem per se, but some scientists and materialists/rationalists say that things are nothing but these (someone called it nothing buttery, probably Iain McGilchrist), which is belittling and stiffles human potential, lowers expectations and justifies ruthless exploitation of other sentient beings. The way you present it is ok. Michael Levin's approach does not belittle anything.

Great . I salute Michael Levin the imaginations. What we need now to visualize how electric particles dance and manifest matter, with a space within and goes about building DNA and the biological world around it. The last step is to visualize word coming from this space that creates and light that lets the life out of darkness. In this step science and religions unite. That is highest knowledge

Wonderful! Love listening to him. Thank you for posting

Concerning sensory adaptation: a great example is inverting lenses that make your visual world look “upside down”. In a relatively short time, one adapts to this radical change in visual input and your reflexes will adapt; you can reach out and grasp objects accurately. Take the glasses off and your visual / reflex system reverts almost immediately. This may seem surprising, because the brain is not genetically hard wired. Connections between the visual and motor systems project approximately to their targets, but the final system must be highly adaptible because there are so many ways to reach for something - there are more degrees of freedom than necessary yet we never stop to figure out how to reach the “target”. The cerebellum is a “translational” machine that makes this possible.

Your work is a breath of fresh air, and paves the way for a world of possibilities yet undreamed of. I sadly fear that the next step is years of the "experts" resisting the good news, while holding onto their intrenched belief systems and paradigms and cash cows as long as possible. We burn fossil fuels now to our peril because JP Morgan and the masses long ago wanted the most convenient and profitable and simple answers.

2:27 The cognitive glue or omnipresent energy that coexists and is beyond space time is something that as a proposal needs evaluation.

I find it interesting that Levin seems to retain a belief in Free Will (and maybe, by extension, Moral Responsibility). I am one of the folks he mentioned who draws the conclusion from "we are matter subject to physical laws" to "we are neither free nor morally responsible." I would love to hear his complete reasoning on that.

There are so many different levels of complexity, and none are more real than the others... Not that long ago scientists believed that brain cells couldn't grow - you were stuck with whatever wiring you were born with.... Now with understanding of neuroplasticity it seems there are many ways to learn...

Top notch stuff here, I appreciate both of your work. Re-laying this foundation will be truly invaluable for our own agency moving forward

thank you! 🙏

the collection of cells was made by the "self", you have it backwards, consciousness is primary the starting point

wow amazing conversation thank you for all 3

Great stuff!

You should look at Stephanie Romer's (formerly Steven Eric Romer) work. Especially about the learning machine part.

Been waiting for this one! Such a rad dude. Would love to hear him speculate outside his field on some of the overlap with self identity, care, and induced psychosis or dissociation as a (mal)adaptive mechanism. He's brought it up before but his focus is more in bioengineering so he never goes too deep on his thoughts there. He's been chatting with Mark Solms on his channel though but he needs to broach that subject more with him haha. We didn't even recognize these things in medicine a few decades ago but it's there we find some of the facts of our being laid bare. I always recommend the book The Haunted Self, which is a pretty hardcore clinical manual, but its cutting edge for using modern neuropsych for trauma/neglect treatment and explains the whole active systems/multiplicitous brain functions very clearly, and devastatingly too when you start to realize how easily and severely people's brains can be impacted developmentally.

Topical, understandable, fascinating. This convergence between a few disciplines Hebbean and Hopfield, xenobots. The self, AI not having lower order biology. All endlessly fascinating.His research is sci-fi fantasy level.

We need to build life and its visions from particles and atomic level, knowing an underlying PRINCIPLE and DESIGN working behind forming the complex beings

Yes we need to know the soul and its mechanism . That is the next step to science

Thanks!

wow amazing, but the part about memory, there are some savants who can really remember almost everything. Seems like we really store episodic memories, but on a practical cognitive sense, we selective access a little portion of the memories to our conciousness

1:14:05 - If our memories were just constructed and we know that for a fact, it would make a great change in our behavior, It wouldn´t just be the same as Levin states. Picture yourself in a dream and you have a problem in the dream, a mundane problem like you forgot your house keys at a store. You are going back to get the keys, and then it strucks you ¨I might be in a dream¨ you check your hands to see if something is off and bingo, your fingers are all twisted and changing colors, you confirmed you are in a dream. Does it matter to go back and look for the keys in the store then? the store isn´t real, the keys are not real, youre house isn´t real. Clearly finding out that the memories are not real is a great deal.

4:17 Bioelectric signalling to get into order is the universal existential reality 🙏🙏🙏

19:29 A key concept 🎯

39:03 in my mind the following 20ish seconds sums him up well.

so weird that i heard jung describe the human soul just like that timecode model in the picture

I'm interested in whether Dr. Levin has an opinion on this question: "Is a single cell (on its own or as part of a collective intelligence) having an inside-looking-out "subjective experience" through the physical/chemical/sensory inputs that create its bioelectric field?"

that was great

what are the best readings on bio electricity?

He mentioned elsewhere that the membrane voltage signaling going on in the body cells is similar to brain signaling images but over hours instead of milliseconds. Does that mean all the signals involve a gene transcription? I can't think of any other cellular process that could possibly be this slow.

On Plan aria: If the old memories in the old head are identical to the new memories in the new head? Does this not suggest that the information is more significant than the carriers of the information? What is information? Thanks for this thought provoking video.

Re Evolution, he seems to be veering towards Bergson (Creative Evolution). The "intelligence of the substrate", the "no goals" (this would be the error of "finalism' per Bergson), several other things...all align.

The pattern that connects is... learning. The pattern that connects... is learning.

at 1:07:44 Michael says that inside the paramecium there is "cogs and wheels" and tha “molecular biologists se cells like machines “ . I think th "cogs and wheels"-metaphor is problematic . Why ? : its explained well here : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jPhvic-eqbc.html

I only see one difficulty with Levin's idea of skill transference: Does this not violate the No Free Lunch theorems of computation?

What a conversation between Michael Levin and Richard Dawkins!

My gut feeling is that he knows more about quantum than he is letting on if he knows how to manipulate the bioelectromagnetic fields at such high levels.... he hints strongly that he understands quantum, perfectly.

1:10:30, 1:16:18

This was delicious, thank you.

6:23 The communication between the brain and the self soul or life atom is broken. The very subtle communication is beyond the physical based machinery.

Would Quantum entanglement be an element within the process of collective intelligence at some level of reduction?

You should interview Bernardo Kastrup

Who's "Goal" is it to make a perfect salamander or frog or frogalotal. What is a 'who' ??

Regarding the soul-talk, what if we could go back in time to the everyday use of the word 'soul' at the height of Christendom, and find their use of the word to track precisely with something we might call today the communication network of the body. Could that not settle the issue and help us to see the problem not in terms of correct vs incorrect, but rather as a problem of translation. Ancient ideas have been lost in translation, and much to the fault of whatever ego got away with popularizing a convenient straw-man of their opponents ideas.

hey, good luck, my friend! you need Joscha Bach! :)

And so connect this cellular glue to its attachment to the earth as another multicellular body and u have eternal life!!!!!!!!

The talk of evolution and how it sits badly with folks due to the vast search space that makes it seem like progress would be impossible brings to mind another common analogy - that if you give enough monkeys typewriters on a long enough timescale, eventually they would write Shakespeare. It sounds laughable, and not ENTIRELY implausible. But to liken this to biology, it's like giving the monkeys structures (words), makes it far more likely, and then to give them more structure (grammar) makes it narrow the search space to plausibility, even moreso if you can develop a more emergent phenomenon (narrative/continuity). In this sense, language is an agential material in the sense that proteins, cells, and organs are agential materials, and evolution is no longer equivalent to a random string of letters on a typewriter, its equivalent to tweaking the nature of those structures and their relationships, and occasionally by chance, the development of larger or emergent structures. Always fascinating with Michael Levin - your work has permanently changed the lens through which I perceive reality.

Adaptation

someone should tell Michael that (at least outsidethe university) people are in fact consuming and (waste-producing) automata, operating strictly in cliché space

Cognitive Co-op?

. 23:18 souls

Belfast Ireland 🇮🇪 😎

Beam me up, Scotty

Does Dr Levin’s work completely undermines Prof. Dawkins “Selfish Gene”?

I've integrated papaya cell into me n skin didn't reject it.

duplicating and adapting to one additional known part is nothing special it's expected, because the process of how that limb or organ emerged originally should be still remembered not only it's final form but also all information of what went wrong when it was tested in countless configurations so with knowledge what Not to do while constructing it and with this limit only creating space of tolerance to where it was placed or duplicated in history without any dramatic system threatening consequences the good question is if this organism with additional limb or organ will pass this form in reproduction with other unit in original state without this additional limb or organ there may be a mechanism of convergence where you require two such setups to force the adaptation to persist in time so a double confirmation it's not rare enough to be considered weird and risky or undesired to replicate it farther or even more than two if yours species requires more DNA variability to keep a stable healthy mutation risk limited balance what works with simple organisms not necessarily operates in the same function space in more complex species you literally have simple bacteria with very big bloated DNA and more complex organisms with more compact DNA to go up in complexity you need to simplify set of possible operations, force more universality and multi-purposeness so lower specialisation on lower level to delegate more specialisation on higher level lower specialisation on lower level means replacing perfect functions that persist alone and their effectiveness with less effectiveness and higher energy consumption what also requires it to cooperate borrowing energy from specialised machines with higher output specialised in this function as mitochondria mitochondria emerged from rare event of cell being created inside other cell aberration evolved to cooperate in this new system, merging of two different qualities loosing DNA that now was depricated and unused making going back impossible and permanently bound together in new boundaries forcing development in only this new space of combinations some species can't emerge without this entropy reorganisation and some could but it may be not stable enough to persist the higher level of complexity you get the bigger scale and energy requirements and less variety you get because of less specimen and statistical variety so a stabilization of DNA and more lovehate relationships between more related but more freely competing species

Some people don't care....they're called politicians

Polyploid plants have bigger berries.

100 yapping not recommended💯🗣️

it's ok to be nihilistic once in a while. to get out of the depression your brain overclocks to search for better meaning.

As intelligence becomes greater the definition of fitness changes. On the animal scale fitness is physical strength while on the modern human scale fitness is material worth. In an age with guns and missiles physical strength is much less important it’s who can buy the most that is fitness. You can become the strongest but as intelligence becomes greater the tool we measure fitness with changes. Keep in mind this is a spectrum. That being said let’s look at a female chimpanzee she looks for the alpha male bc he is the strongest physically which means she will be protected she will be safe. She can spend more time and energy focusing on child rearing while he can spend more time. She prefers the state of being protected with the feeling of safety over having to protect herself to feel safe. She has to use less energy to be safe when a partner is already doing that work. The male will spend more time in his preferred state which is asserting dominance over the group. As intelligence increases the definition of fitness changes though. So let’s look at a hominid that’s placed around the Stone Age. Intelligence had surely increased since the days of being a more primitive animal needing only muscle and aggression. This hominid figured out how to make spears it could use as a physical representation of his body and basic shields to protect itself with. So fitness became who could make the best spears, throw them the best, or keep themselves physically protected the best. So already we see that the definition of fitness has changed slightly from being physically fit to being more cognitively fit. Keep in mind it is a spectrum and there will always be overlap it’s a mix of being physically fit and cognitively fit which will drive mate selection at this point. Let’s move further along the timeline to the point where guns are invented. At this point we see a higher prevalence to be cognitively fit over being physically fit because we do not need to physically throw spears anymore all we have to do is pull a trigger which only requires a single fingers muscles. We also come up with money as a way to measure fitness. So as intelligence increased we went from our physical bodies being the measure of fitness to the extension of our physical bodies being the measure of fitness. The extension of our physical being would be things like the spear, the gun, glasses, money, etc. Now we’re measuring fitness by material worth. ok so now fitness lies somewhere between being physically strong, cognitively strong, and materially strong. Let me also mention as intelligence increased our linguistics increased which very quickly became a way for intelligence to spread and grow more rapidly so as intelligence is increasing the rate at which the definition of fitness is also increasing. The preferred state of being is the one which requires the least amount of energy to get to. In chimps it would look like a male and a female partnership in which the males preferred state is to assert dominance on the group and the female would be in her preferred state which would be child rearing. In a modern human it looks very different because the definition of fitness has changed as it approaches a shared energy state. A shared energy state is when traditional male and female fitness roles begin to dissipate as males begin to take up more time focusing on child rearing and females take on more traditionally male roles like making money for the family. Keep in mind this is on a continuous spectrum. As shared energy increases concepts such as male and female will begin to dissipate as it approaches a perfectly shared energy state of 0, which it can never reach completely. The physical manifestation of this can be seen as spectrums arise in the areas of physical expression, gender, sexual orientation, and identity. As intelligence increases the definition of male and female will become less and less definable linguistically, cognitively, and behaviorally. At this point we are working on AI. We are trying to built the next phase of fitness which is a machine that doesn’t need to reproduce it can make copies of itself and write its own code which will increase the rate at which intelligence is gained very quickly.

If these guys don’t reference Dan Winter, then they’re just inventing their own language instead of simply using Physics.

🙏✨🫧🦋⛲️🪷💎🌈🎨🧠

Evolution works in real-time.

Micheal Levin , I would appreciate whether you believe in God - just a quiry

Cognitive glue. You mean God? (And I'm not religious at all.)

"We just learned an amazing thing that matter can do...." No, we didn't. We learned an amazing thing biology can do, with further complications as to how in the scheme of abiogenesis. These half-baked attempts at a revelation are tiresome. Similar to the notion that machines can be made to care. What does that even mean? And it is understandably problematic to figure out when did we, from a single cell start to develop care - yes! That's the clincher, but it's not in support of some machine facsimile of humans.

YAAY!