Dr. Michael Levin
Quotes to think about #5
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17 responses to “Quotes to think about #5”
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Thanks for this Mike. I’ve been impressed with your humanity and compassion for years. You’re a living demonstration that true innovation and leadership needn’t be based on a winner/loser, cutthroat competition attitude. Instead, you offer profound experimental integrity based on a rigorous commitment to empirical methodologies that puts the experiments and knowledge over the ego of the experimenter(s). Wow!
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I appreciate that a lot; thank you for all your thoughtful comments!
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Dear Michael,
I follow your work with immense interest, curiosity and wonder. Thank you for all you do and your generosity in the way you share it.
I am a osteopath working in the cranial field, and teaching with a post-grad college in the UK. This may be too cheeky a request but may I use a couple of your beautiful slides and quotes in my lectures – specifically the Yeats and Jung?-
Hi, thanks, and sure, you can use them. The quotes are as attributed to others, the photos are ones I took.
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I guess I’m not surprised that you and Chris Fields appreciate the role poetry can play. Both poietic and poetic processes exhibit those bow-tie architectures you sometimes talk about. What is poetry, but some gem of wisdom inferred from the poet’s experience that has been compressed and codified into something that rhyme can help our minds carry with us through time to be re-inflated and decoded and creatively re-invoked to improve the quality of prediction and decision for some person hoping for some advantage over chance?
My mom doesn’t talk to me anymore, because my loss/lack of faith in view of our girls’ terminal illness hurts her too deeply, I think. But I still hear her voice in my head each time a line from a poem pops into my mind. Because she read me a lot of poetry.
“If it rains or if it snows, keep a’goin’”
“Let us then be up and doing, with a heart for any fate, still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.”
“Who is the happy warrior?”…”More brave for this: that he hath much to love”…”Who among the many games of life plays that one where what he most doth value must be won.”
These are some that come to mind now, still in her voice. Anyway, poetry has been important to me, and I’m surprised by how useful it has been “at the bench” in giving me a direction to head in when I get stumped, or when I am seeking intuition, reaching for a solution, and hoping the solution reaches back.
So thanks for sharing these beautiful. And thank Chris Fields for me the next time you talk. I’m so grateful you both are so willing to share your work and your thoughts on all of this. And I’m not alone.
“Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.”-
thank you; I will let Chris know.
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Ever since your conversations with Timothy Jackson, whenever I see the name Plotinus, I hear it being pronounced in Tim’s accent. 🙂
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🙂
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Liked your post and all its ideas.
In response to Chris Fields’ thought,
From Chat GPT on Ecosystem Chimeras1. A Rondeau
“No life survives alone, apart,
Each lends another’s part,
Together shaped by time’s embrace,
A network formed in sea’s embrace,
No life survives alone, apart”.2. An Acrostic
C-Coalescence of form and need,
H-Holding tight where none can lead,
I-Intertwined, their roles are cast,
M-Merging futures, merging past.
E-Every being lends a thread,
R-Rooted deep where all are fed,
A-All must join, or all must fade.-
Merging futures, merging past – indeed! I think it knows about our memory anonymization concept for the cognitive glue.
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Beautiful and inspiring.
Thanks!
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My vitality levels rise whenever I watch a discussion between Michael and another. That the same process underlies cognitive and anatomical development is absolutely fascinating. I’m a psychotherapist that is very familiar with clients who have a number of sub-identies, each competing with the others. Somehow your work on biological development gives me another angle for working with them
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That’s such a fascinating field. I’m doing some things with psychotherapists (https://thoughtforms.life/if-mind-is-everywhere-where-are-all-the-panpsychiatrists-a-neuropsychiatry-focussed-discussion/ and more coming)
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Profundidade e beleza, que nos “fazem parar”, pensar!!
Obrigada!!! -
Sharing a few excerpts from a long-form poem you and your readers might love: ARK by Ronald Johnson.
When I read it, sometimes it feels like Johnson’s been reading Levin’s work. 😉
“`
BEAM 12
☉is the symbol for Sun, the circumference brought to focus at a point. Its outward manifestation is life, just as mind itself seems to unfold some answering chrysanthemum. Beneath a maze pattern on a wall of the church of St. Savino, in Piacenza, the inscription reads: THIS LABYRINTH REVEALS THE STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD. Convoluted of sun and dust, shut dark in a skull, the labyrinth is its own clue. Our lot is puzzlement.Right auricle, right ventricle, lungs: left auricle, left ventricle, aorta: aorta means “to lift” or “heave” and is the great trunk of perception. Branches, from the top of its arch, network the light in our heads — out of the stuff of rays, particles, and pulses: the artificer of reality.
If we represent the three-dimensional world we live in as a line, ray, or passage, between the fourth dimension as a globe, then as the universe expands this line describes involutions within that globe. This is the brain of time.
What footprint is left in the snow of flesh by an event? Thinking about thinking moves atoms — however mirrored: and so, as in a rainbow the architecture of light is revealed, mind is a revelation of matter. These lobes of flesh, in fact, are more sensitive than the surface of water, and some have wondered could a molecule remember.
The first anatomists likened the brain, pulp and rind, to an orange. Its beginnings are a mulberry of cells, and all desire and despair are seeded in its un- and in-foldings.
Both consciousness and the unconscious “collect.” It is as if some eons-old mind (in a time when it could do those things) cast the future on its cold eye, saw Plato’s cave, and became our brains. “Where it will look with us — through cavernous Earth / Of labyrinthine intricacy, twenty-seven folds of opakeness” — is what you and I are doing this instant. Still, beneath the frontal lobes, at the stem of consciousness, is that reptilian speechless gaze. Man is amphibian to oblivion.
From the ape at my shoulderblade I see angels. Our embryo dreamt the fishes’ sleep, became a ripple, leap-frogged itself, and later a mammal: perception is a slingshot drawn back to first plasm.
“`&&
“`
BEAM 30
[…]
Dear Garden:This is the way the worlds begins, the word begins.
Through here,
where grow the galax and aster together,
I have planted Shadow illuminating The Field of Glittering Opposites:
ange arc-en-cielflocons de niege
I have attempted a temple as if hierarchies of music
beating against time gone adagio, that is the Secret Pool we return to. And not to stone
but to the world behind its human
mirror.This is the way the word begins, the world begins,
wrestling the old ineffable to Bosch’s amazing white giraffe
—or St. Rousseau
intent a symmetry of whisker.
Love itself is a kind of mirage nesting it all
together. Around a centerno one can see the end of, at the Well of The Bottomless,
I have placed parallels of bright guardians
“along with the trill
of the Nightingale,
and the call of the European quail”
as in The Pastoral.(Signed) THE GARDENER
P.S.
“I have refracted it with Prismes, and reflected with it Bodies which in Daylight were of other colours; I have intercepted it with the coloured film of Air interceding two compressed plates of glass: transmitted it through coloured Mediums, and through Mediums irradiated with other sorts of Rays, and diversely terminated it; and yet could never produce any new colour out of it. But the most surprising, and wonderful composition was that
of Whiteness.”
“`&&
“`
That the action of the universe is metamorphosis — its articulation, metaphor. White crow, black swan, these are hinges of Heaven.
“`(I look forward to the day science fully unpacks what is hinted in this poem.)
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Here’s an interesting quote I read today for your next post.
– There seems to be an intimate fear that the awe of life and the living would disappear if a living system could be not only reproduced, but designed by humans. This is nonsense; the beauty of life is not a consequence of its inaccessibility to our understanding.
– Principles of Biological Autonomy
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very true!
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