First, two talks on issues related to unconventional topics for emerging biomedicine from 2023:
Here’s one on minds and a bit on consciousness:
Here’s are two on goals (teleology) and diverse intelligence:
Dr. Michael Levin
A few recent talks given:
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13 responses to “A few recent talks given:”
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I don’t know if it’s an intentional didactic strategy or just economizing on slides, but I appreciate the fact that your talks iterate on the same examples and arguments. It helps with comprehension. The first time I watched one of your talks, I had no idea what was going on. By the tenth time, I was nodding along.
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Yeah I try to keep to consistent, flagship examples of specific concepts. I am working on a 8 or 9 part series where I go very slowly through a lot more data and results. We have tons more stuff than what I normally get to talk about in a 1-hour talk. If I ever get the time to finish, it will be a comprehensive seminar type of thing.
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You’ve commented recently that growth/development is just chasing a moving target. A process of error minimization wrt to a constantly changing goal. Why do you think it stops?
– Is there anything physiologically that stops it, or does the pattern side just run out of ideas
– Could you imagine “growing” forever is you kept the patterns coming?In other words; is it the body that stops being able to change, or the “mind” that runs out of ideas?
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It’s a great question. We don’t know; we’re working on this now, as part of our aging research program.
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Most economies showed basically no growth for thousands of years, then in the last few centuries they started growing rapidly and now look set to grow up to the limits of resources in our light cone. Might be something analogous to explore there—the ability to grow was a hidden competency in systems that had shown very little growth for millennia.
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Seems like the system gets stuck at some local optima, until the fitness landscape changes or a move to another part of the landscape is accidentally discovered. For economies, there is a slow buildup of knowledge that eventually unlocks new affordances and thus reshapes the fitness landscape.
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If this is the same Benjamin that did the talk Prices as Cognitive Glue, I just wanted to say I really liked it. It actually helped clarify some ideas about what cells are doing, for me.
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Oh c’mon, speculate! 😉 … Asked better, what’s your null hypothesis?
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Great talks, Michael. Curious what happens to xenobots when using cells from different frogs (heterogeneous dna). Do the cells prefer genetic matches, don’t care at all, or something in between? What happens if you mix the human and frog cells in the same environment?
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Great question. Here’s our discussion of chimeras: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266729012100098X?via%3Dihub
Can’t mix frog cells and human as mammalian cells won’t live in pond water and room temperature, and frog cells won’t live in the high temp that mammalian cells need. But in general, it’s often possible to mix and match.
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Hi Michael,
I was wondering if you had ever studied siphonophores in your pursuit of understanding scaled consciousness. Organisms such as Portuguese Man O’ Wars are composed of identical cells yet form purposed organs. I wonder if investigating them from your perspective could shine any light on the issue. I’ve always thought of them and things like coral as a sort of stepping stone between things like slime molds and what we think of as fully integrated/embodied systems such as animals and plants. Due to them seeming to represent a transitional stage of development it seems to me that they would have a more primitive and perhaps more readily understood mechanism of demarcation. Hope this makes at least some sense and I’d love to hear your thoughts-
Yep, I agree, definitely an interesting system for the reason you mentioned. We’ve haven’t studied them yet.
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Hey Michael! I just wanted to drop a comment of pure gratitude. I run a pet service in Fort Erie, ON and your work has helped me personally on the search for truth and through darkness. Look forward to more discoveries!
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