Open Q&A with Michael Levin

An open Q&A with Michael Levin, raising money for the American Humane to support their work saving animal lives and ensuring their safety, welfare and well-being. 

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. 

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Money raised so far: £263

Questions so far:

Raised £200:

My as yet unpublished paper relates:
ASSOCIATION AS TOP-DOWN CAUSATION

Association (conditioning, associative learning) is an important concept in semiotic theory (CS Peirce). Birch, Ginsburg and Jablonka (2020) introduce Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) as a benchmark for establishing cognition in living agents, all the way down to the cellular level. What do you think of association, or UAL, as a fundamental principle in top-down causation, which begins with multicellular organisms such as us, and which extends not only to the cellular level, but also to the subatomic domain to include the subatomic agents depicted in the Feynman diagrams?

ESSENTIAL BACKGROUND TO MY QUESTION

This question is of particular significance for three main reasons:

1) The idea of top-down causation is not new. It fits within the framework of dual-aspect monism;
2) My paper introduces cube root scaling (CRS). CRS releases atomic and subatomic particles from their classical (Newtonian) constraints, with implications for a phenomenology and ontology at the subatomic domain. By factoring in Bell’s inequality and the Kochen-Specker theorem (1967), we advance a framework for extending association, in the context of dual aspect monism, to the subatomic domain;
3) There is a crisis in physics, and my paper provides one response to it. To appreciate the scale of the crisis, the Youtube presentations listed below, relate (if anyone hasn't heard of Curt Jaimungal or Sabine Hossenfelder, their URLs are easily searchable online).

THE CRISIS IN PHYSICS

Curt Jaimungal - The Crisis in String Theory is Worse Than You Think... (Oct 31, 2024) https://youtu.be/2p_Hlm6aCok?si=e14s6SxWKfMhKk3n
Sabine Hossenfelder - The crisis in physics is real: Science is failing (Nov 4, 2024) https://youtu.be/HQVF0Yu7X24?si=zwkSvI2_0YoV2txX
Sabine Hossenfelder - This is why physics is dying (Oct 5, 2024) https://youtu.be/cBIvSGLkwJY?si=NesQ-DGz560hzqgu
Bryan Callen - There's a Crisis in Physics - Sabine Hossenfelder (Oct 12, 2024) https://youtu.be/uk0QkyFSEUc?si=bmkU1_eW3Xbbqul8

Debating the crisis in physics with others

Curt Jaimungal - 20th Century’s Greatest Living Scientist - Sir Roger Penrose (Sep 28, 2024) https://youtu.be/sGm505TFMbU?si=Ed7-1Nn4S17IpZ5U
Curt Jaimungal - Sean Carroll on the CRISIS IN FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS (Aug 5, 2024) https://youtu.be/7WzMJ7RjIGY?si=69pGYPxumVCA-oVR

REFERENCES:

Birch, J., Ginsburg, S., & Jablonka, E. (2020, December 3). Unlimited Associative Learning and the origins of consciousness: a primer and some predictions. Biology & Philosophy, 35(6), 1-23.

Kochen, S. B., & Specker, E. P. (1967). The problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics, 17, 59–87.

Raised £25:

Is your work changing only the current biological paradigm or also physicalism? What are your thoughts about panpsychism, idealism, and process philosophy?

Raised £10:

Please comment on Federico Faggin's theory of quantum consciousness and how it relates to Michael's and Bernardo's work.

Raised £10:

When considering the potential scaling up or down of cognition, you seem to have no problem with the idea that cognition doesn't bottom out when going lower in scale. I'm curious to know if you also feel the same when cognition scales up. For example, I'm sure you are well aware of Rupert Sheldrakes notion that the sun and all stars are conscious, which in turn are subunits within the galactic mind. So my question is, do you believe that the evidence suggests that this is the case? Secondly, if this is granted, how might this tie in with the work of Richard Tarnas?

Raised £5

Could you just provide some insights into how you go about selecting gap junction modulators and how BETSE plays a role in that process.

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.
 

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