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#159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down

#159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down

Giants Shoulder vor 1 Monat

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John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the
University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science
programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He
helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath
your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a
single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has
argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and
his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive
processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to
presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it.
So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been
alive, long before there was a brain to think with.

Expect to learn:

- Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in
front of you and still land on what matters

- Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same
thing your mind is, only smaller

- The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares,
and what that rules out

- Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models
collapse on open-ended problems and always will

- Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside
your head but in the coupling with your world

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis,
Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing
Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!:
https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA

Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you
think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!:
https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E

Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We
Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY

Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6
Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that
Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!:
https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS

University of Toronto Faculty Profile:
https://www.psych.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/john-vervaeke

Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/

X: https://x.com/vervaeke_john

YouTube (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis):
https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke

Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (book):
https://johnvervaeke.com/books/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/

LISTEN ON

YouTube - https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:54 The Meaning Crisis, Explained by a Cognitive Scientist

0:04:16 The Patterns in This Room Outnumber the Particles in the
Universe

0:06:45 How Your Mind Ignores Almost Everything

0:09:09 "Dad, It's Relevance Realisation All The Way Down"

0:10:24 Noise Is Just Information Nobody Needs

0:15:33 Comparing a Human Mind to a Single Cell

0:18:01 Michael Levin's Cognitive Light Cone

0:19:49 The Cone of Caring

0:23:20 How Far Down Does Mind Actually Go?

0:24:15 Why a Tornado Isn't Alive

0:25:34 Pressing Michael Levin to Admit He's a Platonist

0:34:01 The Water Bottle Experiment

0:40:34 Where Levin Leaps From Patterns to Minds

0:48:12 The Problem With Symmetry Theories of Consciousness

0:55:03 Why LLMs Fall Apart on Open-Ended Problems

1:00:16 Obviousness Is Not a Physical Property

1:05:11 The Shark That Dies in the Sahara

1:10:49 What Consciousness Is Actually Doing

1:15:12 Are Neural Correlates a Dead End?

1:22:07 "We Should Stop Funding It"