Open Q&A with Michael Levin and Bernardo Kastrup

An open Q&A with Michael Levin & Bernardo Kastrup, raising money for the Ormylia Foundation, supporting homeless children who have been abused, orphaned or fleeing war zones, as well as preventive medical care, research and child protection to remote communities in Greece.

When you register to attend you can make a donation and submit a question. Questions received get listed below, in order of the highest contribution,

We will select questions based on donation amount, asking them in order of the highest donation.  

You can ‘crowd source’ towards your question by asking others to sponsor your question, so it appears higher in the list of questions!

We will likely have time to discuss the top 6 to 10 questions.

If you want to crowd source to get more people sponsoring your question, just share this link and tell them to enter your question when they register. 

Please submit just one question per donation, but you can donate again to ask a new question, or increase the sponsorship of your existing one. 

Any donation amount is accepted and will support the Foundation. Here is a short guide of what your contribution will mean:

• €2 provides a meal for 1 homeless child
• €10 provides a meal for 5 homeless children
• €21 provides medical care for 1 homeless child
• €210 provides medical care for 10 homeless children
• €630 provides medical care for 30 homeless children

The foundation also supports underprivileged women, with €26 providing a mammogram for 1 woman.
 

Money raised so far:£1146

Questions so far:

£220:

Imagine you take a brain and magnify it to a scale of galactic proportions: you make it as big as a galaxy: the neurons are like stars in a galaxy, separated by vast distances. They nevertheless behave just as before, sending signals from one to another - it's just that it takes a lot of time, even at the speed of light, for these signals to arrive at their targeted neuron/neurons. How can we then talk about integrating this collection of neurons into a single experience if from one neuron's perspective a message has been sent but from another no message has been sent (since it takes a lot of time for it to arrive, from the receiving neuron's perspective there's no message sent). Also, how does such a structure "stay together", in other words, how does that brain know which neurons are "his" and which other neurons aren't? How would such a structure be "limited" to a particular number of neurons, how would it know which neurons comprise it? I think this shows an insurmountable problem for materialism, where it's supposed that the neuron's physical activity "cause" the subjective experience.

£210:

“I am a fitness coach. And a huge fan of Kastrup and Levines work. This is extremely exciting for me to ask - even though both of them probably might find it weird :) Q. Research and experience shows that exercise (strength training and aerobic - excuse the dualism) seem to allow people to live higher quality lives. Why? (from YOUR perspectives) What is going on here? Meaning, why does the body respond so positively to exercise or why do you think the body evolved this capability/capacity at all? And what is the first thing that comes to your mind in terms of what it means, what can be extrapolated, and how we should/could leverage it? I understand the hormetic aspect - but do you think this seeking of stress and strain against which to adapt is a sort of telos? Do you both exercise? And what kind of approach do you take if youd like to speak about it. Maybe you both have a perspective no one in fitness science has. Thank you!” 

£150:

"Main q: "How does science progress? How does to think about methodology?"

My interest is specifically in psychology and social systems, I think science has been really underpowered to meet the complexity here, so my inclination is, oh start with the bottom of the stack.

Emotions are funny because, no one physiological signal correlates with anger for instance.

And so maybe something more basic is interception and sensation, and there are therapeutic modalities that focus on the felt sense.

Prof. Levin, I saw you say elsewhere that you don't think that chi maps one to one with bio-electricity. Yet it seems like the coarse grain you were talking to Nick Land about, of metabolic status in membrane potential, resonates with subjective felt sense.

There are many unusual body energetic phenomena, I don't know if you are familiar with Kundalini awakening and Kriyas? Meditative states as well, but I wanted to point to the embodied ones.

How can methodology evolve to ground our understandings here?"

£100 + £21 +£5= £126

"If thought and consciousness precede matter, is electromagnetic energy the basic nature of thought and consciousness?"

£10 + £20 + £21 = £51

“How to transform one’s perceptions in accordance with the understanding of the primacy of consciousness”

£50:

"Bernardo Kastrup described Michael Levin as "the most important person on the planet". Without context this can only appear as hyperbole. However, upon further scrutiny, it seems that Michael Levin is not only the most important person on the planet, but also, in potential, the most powerful, hence the most dangerous (the anatomical compiler being first and foremost the ultimate political weapon of subjugation and/or liberation—where eugenics failed, eulectrics will succeed, for horrors and wonders), more trivially, the richest person on the planet (a quick estimation: at 60 million amputees worldwide currently—how much would one value a renewed leg, a new arm? $1 million? more?—being able to regrow a limb using a ‘simple’ bioreactor with 5-6 electroceuticals would be an easy $60 trillion), and perhaps the wisest (being the only researcher that stopped themselves speaking, at least publicly, of artificial consciousness upon the realization that wielding such a power, awakening cogs and gears into agentiality, would be tantamount to killing trillions).

The question is: how much money/power does Michael Levin want? And why doesn’t he want it all? Vannevar Bush, arguably the most important person on the planet in the 20th century, whose Chair Michael Levin holds, already had this decision to make and he decided to withdraw after the World War, arguably for the worst."

£35:

“How can you have Mathematics (as an archetypal Truth of the Universe, not the human symbolic language) come from an instinctive mind? Mathematics is an symbol of order , what are the chances that the inherent disposition of Consciousness is order and not chaos?”

£25:

Hi Bernardo. Do you believe there is a correspondence between our internal states—such as our thoughts, emotions, and the degree to which we are experientially in contact with our true nature—and the external events or circumstances that occur in our lives? Specifically, do you think this correspondence can occur unmediated by our behavior?

£10+ £15 = £25

I’ve heard Michael refer to the Platonic realm and its potential role in morphogenesis. I’d like us to discuss this further, even if ‘speculative’. Bernardo: how do you think about the Platonic realm within Analytic Idealism?

£20 + £2:

“Hi Michael. When regenerating legs on frogs, do they grow young legs or are the regenerated legs the same age as the existing legs? Why if our liver regenerates does it still age? Please convince me that planarian like regeneration can work in humans. It seems to work even in the sexual planarians so we shouldn’t need to be asexual which is good to know.”

£21:

I’m assuming agency requires consciousness. Cells act with agency, which might imply they have some level of consciousness. We’re a “bagful of cells”; might our consciousness rely on cellular consciousness in some way? And if so, what is it about cells that gives them some degree of agency or consciousness? Can consciousness exist without electromagnetic activity?

£10 + £10 = £20:

What accounts for the new openness of some scientists--for eg, Mike Levin, or Christoff Koch-- to idealist metaphysics? Is there a crisis in physicalism?

£20:

“I would like to ask both of them the following - what is their opinion on experience during deep sleep or anesthesia? Is it just the lack of memory of having an experience due to certain parts of the brain being shut down? This is a topic that really bugs me. When we are small children, we don’t have memories of our life. We don’t have detailed memories of a random hour from a random day say 2 years ago. Yet we still had experiences. Thanks!”

£20:

“Bernardo, how has your metaphysical view changed since encountering Michael's hypotheses and results?”

£20

“I have now been following both of your works for a couple of years now and I am now on your side of the intellectual fence. I follow Philip Goff, Lee Cronin, Rupert Sheldrake among others. Now that I think I understand your intellectual frameworks, an old question came back up for me: that of the Fermi paradox of why have we not been visited yet by advanced alien civilizations. I would really appreciate your perspective from your intellectual framework as to why, seemingly, complex life seems so rare in such a gigantic universe?”

£20:

“Is there evidence for collective emotions, in the same way as collective consciousness impacts us. Do we just 'feel responsible' like we can just 'know something' even when it's clear we weren't responsible, or we didn't have the education that led to that knowing?”

£20:

“I work with survivors of traumatic brain injury…how do you view the impact these injuries have on people’s cognitive, emotional and motor abilities including their sense of self, in a non-physicalist frame?”

€20 

Rebuilding Neurons can be done Intellucal child age 9 half 2019 my son and neurons stayed repaired through feeding the Microbiome Daliy. Do you think that one day we can really help others gain this Knowledge. All I see is young Autistic children every where struggling.... from the foods water and air we take in that's all it takes ....my own mind Body and Soul gained all this knowledge and have hit many walls trying to work it all out ...any advice or help Question to both as it needs all the Sciences

£10

What is your perception about Varela's position of enaction? 

£5:

About the nature of time

£5:

Will we be able to apply regenerative processes similar to the ones seen in planarians to humans?

£5:

My question revolves around cancer and past generations. I remember Bernardo has talked about the seeming randomness of cancer in several of his videos. I wonder if Bernardo and Michael could talk about the role of epigenetics, and whether considering the epigenome could help us make sense of the seemingly inexplicable cancers in very young kids, as well as adults who have "healthy" lifestyles?

£2:

I would like to hear what they say about the downsides of their work. It will continue to impact reality long after they are gone in a way they are not intend to. Explained by Daniel Schmachtenberger. https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/

£2: 

It seems like one of Bernardo and Michael's most interesting areas of difference is in the criteria they use to distinguish authentic, ontological wholes from mere perceptual wholes. I'd love to hear them discuss this difference. More pointedly: Michael, if you consider the fundamental building blocks of nature to be 'perspectives' - and if there is something it is like to be a perspective - do you find yourself facing the combination problem?

£0:

“Are you knowledgeable about Nobel Laureates Gerald Edelmans theory of Neural Darwinism and do you see it as relevant to your work”

About Michael Levin
 

Michael Levin, a Distinguished Professor in the Biology department at Tufts (https://drmichaellevin.org/), holds the Vannevar Bush endowed Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts (https://allencenter.tufts.edu/). He is also an associate member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard (https://wyss.harvard.edu/team/associate-faculty/michael-levin-ph-d/). 

His group works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, they use a wide range of natural animal models and also create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. 

Their goal is to develop conceptual frameworks and practical tools that help detect, understand, predict, and communicate with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots, and software-based AIs.  His mission is to develop fundamental understanding of how minds of all kinds arise, scale, persist, and change, and to use that knowledge to benefit the embodied experience of sentient beings, through biomedicine and beyond.

About Bernardo Kastrup

Photo by Pedro Henrique Casarin

Bernardo Kastrup's work has been leading the modern renaissance of the philosophical position, ‘metaphysical idealism’ that reality is essentially mental, an appearance in ‘mind.’  Bernardo has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. Bernardo's most recent book is The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.

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