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!
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.
It is amazing to see the works of biology, phyisics, psychology, sociology, etc. come to the inevitable conclusion that there's some grand design to all of this, some sort of intelligence greater than our understanding that ultimately put us here... I'm clearly not saying that the world was made in 7 days, or that women were made from a rib, but it's undeniable that this beautiful Universe we were put in was a great work made by the most talented of artists
@@adrianchevalley9805 he quite directly and literally said that that is not what he was getting at. Evolution happens to active, not passive, matter - so the "subjects" of evolution are not mere pieces, but agents. His take is precisely a huge blow against the whole "blind watchmaker" and "hurricane on the scrapyard" oppositions to evolution, by discussing a sense in which evolution is more like training a dog than building a clock.
@@monky_dust Trust is a dangerous emotion. You can trust in Donald, because he will never let you down. Unlike many other politicians, I've never been disappointed by Trump. He always does exactly what I expect. I wish he didn't, but he does. Or, you can evaluate the book not the cover, the facts not the messenger. A good primer would be the works of Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. These figures are all from the 17th century, when Western European culture first figured out how to rise up out of the trust business.
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.
@@S.G.Wallner As a musician, I’ve observed that musical stasis implies change, so as a conscious participator, I add notes, but the most interesting notes create tension (musically speaking, this is usually dissonance), which then seems to imply resolution of some kind - and what kind of resolution? That’s the mystery, and why the music keeps evolving, hinting - it seems - at some higher order or harmony. But I also always have the feeling that the musical ‘higher order’ already exists, and I’m just exploring it.
@@danielross7899 beautiful thought. I think life is more like music than we give it credit for. There are probably hierarchies of tension that pervade reality.
@@S.G.Wallner Yes I agree, and I try to stay in tune with that idea as it’s comforting right? But when we’re immersed in a particularly ’dissonant’ part of the cosmological symphony (or jazz improvisation!), it’s challenging to align to the idea of a higher implicit harmony, or resolution. What I love about Michael Levin’s insights is that they allow me to conceptualize a higher gestalt by considering lower layers/systems of organization. There’s something about it that just clicks and makes deep sense, and for me it’s logical, but somehow intuitive as well. Lots to study, that’s for sure.
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!)
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.
You might want to look into anarchist theory, I think it does a good job at attacking this notion (although from another angle right, none of this was even know when anarchism was getting started), and also integrating this with a strong conception of the individual. I'd recommend Zoe Baker's channel if you're interested : ) Paraphrasing, Emma Goldman and others have stated that the goal of anarchism is to surpass the apparent/imposed contradictions between individual and collective, and do so in a way which affirms both by recognizing their deep relations. This is closely tied to the anarchist position on the unity of means and ends, too, which can definitely be seen in the light of emergent behavior. To be clear, I don't think you should ever mechanically transpose ideas from biology to the political - even if we are collectives of cells, there are effective, noticeable differences between these levels of organizations. That being said, I do think a lot of the underlying logic in this view on biology goes deeper than biology, so the analogy is interesting.
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.
it's not so simple immediate example being relation between human and technology, how new technology becomes master of the process on own terms reshaping meaning question is when it applies and when not it assumes new mechanism obeys meaning because was found to fit into it and serve it's nature, conditions from root and that replacing mechanism still obeys the same definition and requirements except one cell operational meaning is different than multicellular emergent collective hierarchical meaning, with qualitative jump it shares the same sum of low level mechanisms, tools, transformations, resources but utilises it on completely different level of abstraction, and it's meaning can enforce selection of colony pieces for own desired effect and needs to navigate new type of cells emerging, with new qualities with tolerance to integrate them in the system (like new bacteria in gut, exchange of DNA with viruses, symbiosis with other systems) there seem to be multi levels of messaging between parts with tolerance to variability and higher entropy the more basic level we look at and less tolerance at top with a library of tested and predefined structures, predefined exactly because they need to be complete defining that functional thing they build
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
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!
Carlos, thanks so much for this. Many of the interviews he grants are clicky bait banality only using him for traffic. YOU ask intelligent questions where he has the opportunity to be broader in teaching more than his usual factory lecture he uses for so many casts. Thanks much
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 : ua-cam.com/video/jPhvic-eqbc/v-deo.html
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.
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.
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.
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?"
I think in another talk he said he was interested in developing the tools to prod these sorts of questions, but that they should be approached empirically. So yeah, not sure what his gut feeling is, but I think "as a scientist" he'd say he doesn't know.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I think he talks about some thinks being useful concepts and that being their nature. At another talk he says that someone might say "But I don't feel like a collective of smaller selves" and that one might reply "Yes you do; what you feel is what that feels like". If any "substance" could give these concepts "intrinsic meaning", than why can't any other substance which brings them about? It's arbitrary, as he puts it. And if none can, than nothing is being lost. So if it could make sense before and nothing is being lost, there's still this way in which it retains it's meaning, if not before all kinds of theories and ideologies, at least in practice - which is we ever could really count on. Concepts are tools, and moral responsibility is still a useful, sensible and well-adapted tool. That's not to mention the relational layer of all of this.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Material has topological agency. Agency has a topology of materials. Cells care about creating topologies, as does material. The optimization vectors just happen to be in a higher-dimensional space than 3D space, because each variable is its own vector space. It just so happens that we see what it is doing in 3D space with 1 dimension of time, but it is working in 6D space with 4 dimensions of time, where both space and time are non-Euclidean, thus escaping our Aristotelian logic. This is why electricity has a high effect on the body and the body exhibits electric signals. This is why magnetism has a high effect on the brain and the brain exhibits magnetic signals. These are just higher spatial dimensions at play in our lower-dimensional representation (3D collapsing eyeballs). The mind has the capability to build these topologies independent of materials through a recursive embedding of agency. It is our ability to be aware of our own awareness that gives us the ability to construct these topologies with the mind's eye.
There are meta-engrams that the individual engrams point to. This is the folding point of our next larger cognitive light cone. DNA and epigenetics, LSD, psylosybin, and DMT research all show us that there are deeper layers, where memories are stored relationally through epigenetics, where insight can be achieved without content. This is meta-cognition, or the locked-in awareness of awareness moment-to-moment. It is a meta-experience that transcends the experience of mind and body. This is completely analogous to the cares of cells, which are about creating topologies to explore. Our minds, when working optimally, are doing the same thing.
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.
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.
@@Carlos.Explains :) I must say, on listening to his discussions with McGilchrist (very much a Bergsonian) and his interest in McG's thoughts, my comment is now pretty much an "obvious."
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
@@Carlos.Explains pretty self explanatory - Richard Dawkins is a NeoDarwinian who believes that evolution is all about the genes without agency or compositional or behavioural influences.
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.
Do you still believe that we reconstruct our past from traces ‘in the brain’? Is there no field in which events leave traces that like reverberating waves effect the brain?
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.
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.
@SigmaCarlos it' sure is a brilliant city . I have helped over 2000 famlies with Autism. My son was Serverly Autistic until 2019 Age 9 half a Danger to himself and others. Over 500 famlies all one to one help...all same Results as my son. I am an Advocate for Autism How do people all over the world get same results as my son. Howdy .....excellent interview Is there a Reason you where in Belfast?
@@margueriteoreilly2168 that’s amazing to hear, thank you. Incredible work. And I was in Belfast on vacation! Spent about 10 days traveling around the country with friends. =)
@SigmaCarlos If you ever come back Look me up......I am starting podcast myself soon 4 years ....lol ...I am dyslexic and I was a Beauty therapist before changing career This Is how I understand Cellular Biology As I do Microneedling to repair skin to reduce fine lines ... Combination of Cellular Biology Course Havardx Nd all the Famlies I have helped From all backgrounds From Princes 🤴 to your typical Irish person I have helped them all And They all get the same Results I am Lucky , I am Irish And Came to Science late in Life There is No way , I would believe I could be so Intelligent We are the New Punks of Science Do you know.....every one wants in the Club Thank you for creating a lovely space ✨️
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
someone should tell Michael that (at least outsidethe university) people are in fact consuming and (waste-producing) automata, operating strictly in cliché space
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.
Firstly in biology/evolution people don’t talk in terms of fitness, that’s a misquote of Darwin’s work, the correct term is more like ‘survival of the most adaptable’. Secondly, whilst you eluded to it, I don’t think you’ve quite understood the power and drive behind sexual selection or selection in general. Mates don’t just select for traits like strength and intelligence, there are also important traits like fairness/justness, compassion, wisdom, levelheadedness etc (there is a reason ‘care’ is at the centre of the ven diagram at the end). A female chimp with a choice between two equally strong males will chose the one that doesn’t just assert dominance over everyone/thing, but the one who asserts dominance to threats and compassion to those within the family. Also when you reduce life to its mere ability to manipulate the external (hoard wealth/knowledge, increase intelligence, build size/muscle etc) you miss out on exactly what makes life what it is, which is one’s internal experience. Whilst the ability to manipulate the external is an attractive trait, without the ability to control one’s internal experience/emotions, it will never be the most attractive. No one can fully control the external/run the universe, you can have all the money, power and intelligence in the world and you still can’t protect yourself or your loved one’s/children from disease, death, natural disaster, or the greed and ill will of others and what really separates the attractive from the less attractive is the ability to deal with those inevitable truths of reality, not by being devoid of emotion but, through mastery of the emotions. There have been plenty of male dictators for example that had great wealth, strength and intelligence, that called for the genocide of large groups of the population, and barring a few exceptions most women do not see these men as the most attractive/desirable partners. Furthermore it is clear that reality/evolution, even in asexual populations without the same sexual selection, selects for fairness over dishonesty/cheating/selfishness (look at tic tac toe, prisoner dilemma, game theory etc and how they effect the evolution of behaviour). As no organism is an island cooperation becomes synonymous with adaptability, which is synonymous with survivability. In short life doesn’t select for selfishness or short term gain but rather for cooperation and ecology (longer term sustainability/survivability). Whilst I agree that the lines between genders will increasingly dissolve, sexual reproduction will always have a place/reason to be there in an evolutionary sense (namely it’s ability to create genetic variation/‘adapt’ quicker thus potentially increasing survivability). To posit that the ‘fittest’ ‘life form’ would be a supercomputer that can exponential increase intelligence and replicate itself seems to disregard that very ‘life forms’ relationship to all other things, which is where it’s key to survival, and perhaps even its reason for survival, lies. Peace
"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.
Only a scientist could literally prove souls are real and that they hold memories and awareness from their findings and then conclude the exact opposite ^_^
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!
His work gets more exciting all the time!
Same. Same. SAME!
Levin’s work makes me passionate about biology as a programmer
Ditto
Same
only as a programmer ? (only as a tech bro?)
I can't wait to make my own xenobots to explore morphological space!
His abilities to visualize and apply the systemic rules of a system between the macro and the micro are incredible
Every interview is 3 credits to a BS.
Happy to see Michael back for his 3rd visit, thank you Carlos for sharing this conversation, have a great day. Peace
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.
It is amazing to see the works of biology, phyisics, psychology, sociology, etc. come to the inevitable conclusion that there's some grand design to all of this, some sort of intelligence greater than our understanding that ultimately put us here... I'm clearly not saying that the world was made in 7 days, or that women were made from a rib, but it's undeniable that this beautiful Universe we were put in was a great work made by the most talented of artists
@@adrianchevalley9805 he quite directly and literally said that that is not what he was getting at.
Evolution happens to active, not passive, matter - so the "subjects" of evolution are not mere pieces, but agents. His take is precisely a huge blow against the whole "blind watchmaker" and "hurricane on the scrapyard" oppositions to evolution, by discussing a sense in which evolution is more like training a dog than building a clock.
Is he? Or is he a gatekeeper?
Don't trust him at all.
@@monky_dust Trust is a dangerous emotion. You can trust in Donald, because he will never let you down. Unlike many other politicians, I've never been disappointed by Trump. He always does exactly what I expect. I wish he didn't, but he does.
Or, you can evaluate the book not the cover, the facts not the messenger. A good primer would be the works of Bacon, Pascal, Hobbes, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
These figures are all from the 17th century, when Western European culture first figured out how to rise up out of the trust business.
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.
I've definitely entertained the ideas that tension is fundamental. Thoughts?
@@S.G.Wallner As a musician, I’ve observed that musical stasis implies change, so as a conscious participator, I add notes, but the most interesting notes create tension (musically speaking, this is usually dissonance), which then seems to imply resolution of some kind - and what kind of resolution? That’s the mystery, and why the music keeps evolving, hinting - it seems - at some higher order or harmony. But I also always have the feeling that the musical ‘higher order’ already exists, and I’m just exploring it.
@@danielross7899 beautiful thought. I think life is more like music than we give it credit for. There are probably hierarchies of tension that pervade reality.
@@S.G.Wallner Yes I agree, and I try to stay in tune with that idea as it’s comforting right? But when we’re immersed in a particularly ’dissonant’ part of the cosmological symphony (or jazz improvisation!), it’s challenging to align to the idea of a higher implicit harmony, or resolution. What I love about Michael Levin’s insights is that they allow me to conceptualize a higher gestalt by considering lower layers/systems of organization. There’s something about it that just clicks and makes deep sense, and for me it’s logical, but somehow intuitive as well. Lots to study, that’s for sure.
It reminds me of a fractal pattern as a relationship between geometry and frequency.
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!)
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.
You're deep diving. Reeling too much of one side of the same coin. Agents are still independent, though not orthogonally independent.
You might want to look into anarchist theory, I think it does a good job at attacking this notion (although from another angle right, none of this was even know when anarchism was getting started), and also integrating this with a strong conception of the individual. I'd recommend Zoe Baker's channel if you're interested : )
Paraphrasing, Emma Goldman and others have stated that the goal of anarchism is to surpass the apparent/imposed contradictions between individual and collective, and do so in a way which affirms both by recognizing their deep relations. This is closely tied to the anarchist position on the unity of means and ends, too, which can definitely be seen in the light of emergent behavior.
To be clear, I don't think you should ever mechanically transpose ideas from biology to the political - even if we are collectives of cells, there are effective, noticeable differences between these levels of organizations. That being said, I do think a lot of the underlying logic in this view on biology goes deeper than biology, so the analogy is interesting.
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.
Definitely follow his recommendation of Chris Fields. There are some great conversations on Michael's channel that touch on the quantum aspect more
@@KalebPeters99great thanks
I think he knows more about quantum than he is letting on
“Finding the mechanism does not rob the meaning” great way of putting it
it's not so simple
immediate example being relation between human and technology, how new technology
becomes master of the process on own terms reshaping meaning
question is when it applies and when not
it assumes new mechanism obeys meaning because was found to fit into it and serve it's
nature, conditions from root
and that replacing mechanism still obeys the same definition and requirements
except one cell operational meaning is different than multicellular emergent
collective hierarchical meaning, with qualitative jump
it shares the same sum of low level mechanisms, tools, transformations,
resources but utilises it on completely
different level of abstraction,
and it's meaning can enforce selection of colony pieces for own desired effect and
needs to navigate new type of cells emerging, with new qualities with
tolerance to integrate them in the system
(like new bacteria in gut, exchange of DNA with viruses, symbiosis with other systems)
there seem to be multi levels of messaging between parts
with tolerance to variability and higher entropy the more basic level we look at
and less tolerance at top
with a library of tested and predefined structures, predefined exactly because they
need to be complete defining that functional
thing they build
@@szymonbaranowski8184 dude im just glad im still a “real boy” and not a bio-pinocchio. Thanks for the deep comment. Still tryin to figure it out!
This series with michael is nuts !!!
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
Thanks for the video. Dr. Levin is a very important, fascinating explorer in new biological/experiential territory!
wow amazing conversation thank you for all 3
2:27 The cognitive glue or omnipresent energy that coexists and is beyond space time is something that as a proposal needs evaluation.
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!
Top notch stuff here, I appreciate both of your work. Re-laying this foundation will be truly invaluable for our own agency moving forward
Thanks!
Doug, thank you so much! Very kind of you! 😀
Carlos, thanks so much for this. Many of the interviews he grants are clicky bait banality only using him for traffic. YOU ask intelligent questions where he has the opportunity to be broader in teaching more than his usual factory lecture he uses for so many casts. Thanks much
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 : ua-cam.com/video/jPhvic-eqbc/v-deo.html
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.
Wonderful! Love listening to him. Thank you for posting
what are the best readings on bio electricity?
You should look at Stephanie Romer's (formerly Steven Eric Romer) work. Especially about the learning machine part.
thank you! 🙏
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.
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.
Thank you very much. I agree, we are taking too much from mother earth.
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?"
I think in another talk he said he was interested in developing the tools to prod these sorts of questions, but that they should be approached empirically. So yeah, not sure what his gut feeling is, but I think "as a scientist" he'd say he doesn't know.
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
The secret here is how the memories are initially encoded. The same reconstructing process takes place but with much higher accuracy.
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.
Thanks Joshua. Added The Haunted Self to my reading list. :)
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.
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
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.
I think he talks about some thinks being useful concepts and that being their nature. At another talk he says that someone might say "But I don't feel like a collective of smaller selves" and that one might reply "Yes you do; what you feel is what that feels like".
If any "substance" could give these concepts "intrinsic meaning", than why can't any other substance which brings them about? It's arbitrary, as he puts it. And if none can, than nothing is being lost. So if it could make sense before and nothing is being lost, there's still this way in which it retains it's meaning, if not before all kinds of theories and ideologies, at least in practice - which is we ever could really count on. Concepts are tools, and moral responsibility is still a useful, sensible and well-adapted tool.
That's not to mention the relational layer of all of this.
39:03 in my mind the following 20ish seconds sums him up well.
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...
the collection of cells was made by the "self", you have it backwards, consciousness is primary the starting point
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.
19:29 A key concept 🎯
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 stuff!
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.
Material has topological agency. Agency has a topology of materials. Cells care about creating topologies, as does material. The optimization vectors just happen to be in a higher-dimensional space than 3D space, because each variable is its own vector space. It just so happens that we see what it is doing in 3D space with 1 dimension of time, but it is working in 6D space with 4 dimensions of time, where both space and time are non-Euclidean, thus escaping our Aristotelian logic. This is why electricity has a high effect on the body and the body exhibits electric signals. This is why magnetism has a high effect on the brain and the brain exhibits magnetic signals. These are just higher spatial dimensions at play in our lower-dimensional representation (3D collapsing eyeballs). The mind has the capability to build these topologies independent of materials through a recursive embedding of agency. It is our ability to be aware of our own awareness that gives us the ability to construct these topologies with the mind's eye.
There are meta-engrams that the individual engrams point to. This is the folding point of our next larger cognitive light cone. DNA and epigenetics, LSD, psylosybin, and DMT research all show us that there are deeper layers, where memories are stored relationally through epigenetics, where insight can be achieved without content. This is meta-cognition, or the locked-in awareness of awareness moment-to-moment. It is a meta-experience that transcends the experience of mind and body. This is completely analogous to the cares of cells, which are about creating topologies to explore. Our minds, when working optimally, are doing the same thing.
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?
Possibly... may be stretching the definition of intelligence.
4:17 Bioelectric signalling to get into order is the universal existential reality 🙏🙏🙏
I only see one difficulty with Levin's idea of skill transference: Does this not violate the No Free Lunch theorems of computation?
1:10:30, 1:16:18
Yes we need to know the soul and its mechanism . That is the next step to science
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.
Thanks Stephen! Keep the flame of Bergson burning. ❤🔥
@@Carlos.Explains :) I must say, on listening to his discussions with McGilchrist (very much a Bergsonian) and his interest in McG's thoughts, my comment is now pretty much an "obvious."
The pattern that connects is... learning.
The pattern that connects... is learning.
so weird that i heard jung describe the human soul just like that timecode model in the picture
That's interesting. I haven't heard that take from Jung. Care to share more? Or point me to where you heard it if you can. How would you explain it?
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
What a conversation between Michael Levin and Richard Dawkins!
Curious comment... not sure I follow.
@@Carlos.Explains pretty self explanatory - Richard Dawkins is a NeoDarwinian who believes that evolution is all about the genes without agency or compositional or behavioural influences.
@@Carlos.Explains maybe he meant to write "want"?
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.
that was great
Do you still believe that we reconstruct our past from traces ‘in the brain’? Is there no field in which events leave traces that like reverberating waves effect the brain?
hey, good luck, my friend! you need Joscha Bach! :)
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.
You should interview Bernardo Kastrup
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.
This was delicious, thank you.
.
23:18 souls
Cognitive Co-op?
Belfast Ireland 🇮🇪 😎
Wonderful spot, visited in 2008!
@SigmaCarlos it' sure is a brilliant city . I have helped over 2000 famlies with Autism.
My son was Serverly Autistic until 2019
Age 9 half a Danger to himself and others.
Over 500 famlies all one to one help...all same Results as my son.
I am an Advocate for Autism
How do people all over the world get same results as my son.
Howdy .....excellent interview
Is there a Reason you where in Belfast?
@@margueriteoreilly2168 that’s amazing to hear, thank you. Incredible work.
And I was in Belfast on vacation! Spent about 10 days traveling around the country with friends. =)
@SigmaCarlos
If you ever come back
Look me up......I am starting podcast myself soon 4 years ....lol ...I am dyslexic and I was a Beauty therapist before changing career
This Is how I understand
Cellular Biology
As
I do Microneedling to repair skin to reduce fine lines ...
Combination of Cellular Biology Course
Havardx
Nd all the Famlies I have helped
From all backgrounds
From Princes 🤴 to your typical Irish person
I have helped them all
And
They all get the same Results
I am Lucky , I am Irish
And
Came to Science late in Life
There is No way ,
I would believe I could be so Intelligent
We are the New Punks of Science
Do you know.....every one wants in the Club
Thank you for creating a lovely space ✨️
Microbiome Research Northern Ireland.......we are hopeful linked in to Queens uni to anysle our Data
We have so much going on here .....
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
100 yapping not recommended💯🗣️
someone should tell Michael that (at least outsidethe university) people are in fact consuming and (waste-producing) automata, operating strictly in cliché space
sorry, but that's so cliché : p
Some people don't care....they're called politicians
Does Dr Levin’s work completely undermines Prof. Dawkins “Selfish Gene”?
Adaptation
Polyploid plants have bigger berries.
Clark Eric Davis Robert Taylor Anthony
🙏✨🫧🦋⛲️🪷💎🌈🎨🧠
it's ok to be nihilistic once in a while. to get out of the depression your brain overclocks to search for better meaning.
If these guys don’t reference Dan Winter, then they’re just inventing their own language instead of simply using Physics.
Beam me up, Scotty
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.
Firstly in biology/evolution people don’t talk in terms of fitness, that’s a misquote of Darwin’s work, the correct term is more like ‘survival of the most adaptable’. Secondly, whilst you eluded to it, I don’t think you’ve quite understood the power and drive behind sexual selection or selection in general. Mates don’t just select for traits like strength and intelligence, there are also important traits like fairness/justness, compassion, wisdom, levelheadedness etc (there is a reason ‘care’ is at the centre of the ven diagram at the end). A female chimp with a choice between two equally strong males will chose the one that doesn’t just assert dominance over everyone/thing, but the one who asserts dominance to threats and compassion to those within the family.
Also when you reduce life to its mere ability to manipulate the external (hoard wealth/knowledge, increase intelligence, build size/muscle etc) you miss out on exactly what makes life what it is, which is one’s internal experience. Whilst the ability to manipulate the external is an attractive trait, without the ability to control one’s internal experience/emotions, it will never be the most attractive. No one can fully control the external/run the universe, you can have all the money, power and intelligence in the world and you still can’t protect yourself or your loved one’s/children from disease, death, natural disaster, or the greed and ill will of others and what really separates the attractive from the less attractive is the ability to deal with those inevitable truths of reality, not by being devoid of emotion but, through mastery of the emotions.
There have been plenty of male dictators for example that had great wealth, strength and intelligence, that called for the genocide of large groups of the population, and barring a few exceptions most women do not see these men as the most attractive/desirable partners.
Furthermore it is clear that reality/evolution, even in asexual populations without the same sexual selection, selects for fairness over dishonesty/cheating/selfishness (look at tic tac toe, prisoner dilemma, game theory etc and how they effect the evolution of behaviour). As no organism is an island cooperation becomes synonymous with adaptability, which is synonymous with survivability. In short life doesn’t select for selfishness or short term gain but rather for cooperation and ecology (longer term sustainability/survivability).
Whilst I agree that the lines between genders will increasingly dissolve, sexual reproduction will always have a place/reason to be there in an evolutionary sense (namely it’s ability to create genetic variation/‘adapt’ quicker thus potentially increasing survivability).
To posit that the ‘fittest’ ‘life form’ would be a supercomputer that can exponential increase intelligence and replicate itself seems to disregard that very ‘life forms’ relationship to all other things, which is where it’s key to survival, and perhaps even its reason for survival, lies.
Peace
Perez Kimberly Smith Frank Young Sandra
Evolution works in real-time.
Micheal Levin , I would appreciate whether you believe in God - just a quiry
"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.
Cognitive glue. You mean God?
(And I'm not religious at all.)
YAAY!
Only a scientist could literally prove souls are real and that they hold memories and awareness from their findings and then conclude the exact opposite ^_^