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

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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/

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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"