Where Does the Mind Start. Michael Levin offers some clarity

Philosophy of Mind
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I love all the comments and questions I’m receiving, and the feedback is wonderful and appreciated, keeping up is a challenge.

I remember someone asking what I thought about Iain McGilchrist and I took a pass. Between slow and limited bandwidth plus other chores impinging on my days, that question was easy to table, but it nagged at me.

Last night, I had a chance to reacquaint myself with McGilchrist and his work. On the face of it, his career is as solid as it gets and speaks for itself. I’ll bet he’s made a huge difference to the lives of countless patients and I readily bow to his expertise. He’s one of the hero’s from my point of view.

Yet, his conception of the how the brain’s lateralization plays out feels at variance to all I’ve learned via other experts (which admitted isn’t that much). The Right Hemisphere Brain acting as receiver - is something that makes no sense to me. Also his panpsychism supporting stance turns me off, and that settled that in my mind, and I moved on.

To reacquainting myself with Michael Levin, who’s talks I’ve always found excellent, occasionally downright exciting, because of what an amazing job he’s done of getting down into the weeds of important questions.

(In fact, some suggest he’s on the short list for a Biology Nobel Prize, so worth paying attention to.)
I figured it was time to renew the acquaintance.

Levin discussion was great, especially the first hour that tracked harmoniously with my conceptions.

Though, surprise, Levin smacked me with some novel (for me) nuances to the discussion about the Materialist/Physicalist category.

It was eye opening and I will be chewing on it for a while.

The last half hour was a bit more challenging for me. Then, … Levin goes and pokes me in eye with his take on Panpsychism.

Talk about nuance. Everyone who speaks about “Panpsychism” ought to chew on his words.

Not saying he convinced me, but he certainly shattered my binary rejection.

Opening up my mind to a more nuanced understanding of the origin details.

And possibilities.

Sort of like E=mc² - it didn’t do anything to change our opinion about the reality of Earth’s gravity and Newton’s gravity equations remain in daily use.

But, oh boy, did it change our human Mindscape.

Mind May Be Older Than the Brain | Michael Levin on Life and Intelligence

Interview with Philosophy Everyday on YouTube

Chapters:

00:00 Mind Beyond the Brain

01:19 Is Mind Older Than the Brain?

04:06 Why Intelligence Is Not All-or-Nothing

06:58 How to Interact With Different Kinds of Minds

09:54 From Single Cells to Collective Intelligence

13:17 How Cells Build Bigger Goals

16:05 Life Recreated - Xenobots and Anthrobots

18:54 Where Do New Behaviours Come From?

21:57 Synthetic Life and the Limits of Evolution

35:01 What Happens When Biology Is Freed?

43:00 Why Biology Eventually Leads to Mathematics

46:07 Is “Emergence” Just a Fancy Word for Surprise?

53:11 Platonic Space: A Strange New Map of Reality

01:03:21 What We Received from Platonic Space

01:11:24 Human Evolution, Technology, and the Patterns Behind Progress

01:16:43 Regeneration, Cancer, and Aging

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Some questions I received wonder how tiny stuff like cells can we aware, or remember anything, and associated mysteries - I believe Michael Levin does a good job of show how latest findings help bring some answers to the table.

But it can’t happen if people don’t take an interest and learn about it.

:victory_hand:

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And then there's Qualia. What about it is a mystery?
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Well okay, there is this scathing critique

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Just beginning the video, and I already need to point something out –

He mentions human evolution has been slow, with no “boom” or “lightning flash” but that is not accurate.

There have been single gene mutations that caused great phenotypic change.

For example, recent research accounts for the rapid increase in human brain size to one small stretch of DNA mutating –

The sequence, known as HAR1984, belongs to a group called human accelerated regions, or HARs. These stretches of DNA remained nearly unchanged across mammals for millions of years, then evolved rapidly in humans.

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I actually got a lot more insight into Michael Levin from the critique by Johannes Jäger (‘Why TAME is Lame’, also posted above.)

I have been somewhat interested in Levin, who has a big internet presence, drawn by his references to platonism, the idea that there are universal forms that are instantiated in living and even non-living processes (me being a committed Ur-Platonist). I’ve downloaded two of Levin’s audience-friendly papers and slogged through them (and they’re not easy reads for the layman.)

But Johannes Jäger is infinitely more knowledgeable than am I about these topics, and his criticism is quite trenchant. He says that Levin is not really “anti-reductionist” at all. He says that he deploys a “motte and bailey” strategy*. He says Levin makes broad, poetic, apparently pan-psychist claims about how cells possess “minds,” “intelligence,” and “agency” to sound anti-reductionist (“the bailey”).

When pressed for scientific explanation, however, Levin retreats into standard mechanistic, computational terminology, treating cells like tiny computer hardware machines running software (the motte).

Jaeger calls this framework “vacuous” because it merely re-casts standard teleonomy and physical control loops as “intelligence”.

Apparently (I now learn) Jäger’s criticism created a firestorm on the internet with partisans on both sides stepping in. A Whitehead-based “Process Philosopher”, namely, Matthew David Seagall, then tried to mediate between the opposing parties. I won’t try and summarise that effort here.

The problem for us spectators however is that it is a highly-specialised area of debate that requires prior knowledge of advanced concepts in evolutionary biology and even organic chemistry. But worth knowing about, and following the links provided above provide plenty of reading material.

* Motte and Bailey: an informal fallacy in which an advocate conflates two positions that share similarities: one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the “bailey”).

Example:

  1. The Bailey: “Medicine is just a corporate scam run by pharmaceutical companies to make profit.”
  2. The Challenge: “That’s untrue. Antibiotics, vaccines, and surgical advancements save millions of lives every year.”
  3. The Motte Retreat: “Well, I’m just saying that corporations care about making money.” (An obvious point nobody can argue against).
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I found Matthew David Segall’s interview with Levin which touches on Jäger’s criticism. He says

while I share some of the concerns articulated in Jaeger’s blog post, I just don’t impute the nefarious ideology onto Levin that Jaeger seems to believe is at work

There’s a lot to consider in all this. I think some of Jäger’s criticisms are well-founded but his critique is vituperative — not only does he disagree with Levin, I think he really hates him.

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I agree.
After I posted the OP, (rather than before, since I was familiar and impressed with Levin for many years now.), some of the stuff he said in the video caught me off guard, and though I accepted them at face value at the listening, they also nagged at me. So I pulled out my Claudie.ai, and asked for an assessment of what his peers think of his work, and did a little homework.

Jäger’s article was openly hostile, but the critique still seems solid and landed. Very disturbing for me, but not to be ignored.

Learning is a contact sport. Fortunately, his clinical work still gets high marks from his peers, even if his talks may be outrunning his headlights, so to speak.

For me the readjustment and take away is that I’m still convinced nature is internally absolutely consistent, otherwise none of the complexity we see could have come about to begin with.

I see our job as unteasing nature’s secrets based on the evidence at hand. Also that at the end of the day we do have enough facts to make a simple assumption, our body/brain interacting with the world creates our mind, same as it is with all other Earthly creatures. The process has been documented back to single cells and beyond - with an internal consistence that can’t be dismissed.