"Reductionism is well-named. It reduces what you can do." - Michael Levin - Sentientism 199
Sentientism
Exploring the Spectrum of Sentience and its Implications
This chapter explores the complex nature of sentience and consciousness, challenging the traditional binary view and proposing a spectrum of characteristics. It argues for the practical application of these concepts in fields like medicine, highlighting the need for enhanced empathy and cognitive capacities in humanity.
Michael is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. He is also an associate faculty at the Wyss Institute at Harvard. Michael is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. He is also co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms. Michael's Levin Lab focuses on "Embodied Minds: understanding diverse intelligence in evolved, designed, and hybrid complex systems" and works "at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science". This work includes the bioengineering of novel living machines and has clinical applications in regenerative medicine. Michael has editing roles at a number of academic journals and has published more than 350 papers.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips!
01:18 Welcome
- "We biologists have plenty of spherical cows"
03:50 Mike's Introduction
04:37 What's Real?
- A "not religious but highly spiritual" Jewish background
- Hebrew school " I harrassed everybody with questions.... how souls are supposed to work...the hard problem of consciousness... the answers weren't terribly forthcoming."
- At home "an emphasis on inquiry... asking big questions... things that matter"
- "The question of 'how do I know?' figured prominently in my childhood"
- "Rationality is an amazing tool but one can also ask questions about its limitiations... what are the things that we're not seeing"
- Being sceptical about the approaches you're bringing to a problem
- "I pretty much only have one supernatural belief which is that the universe is understandable... Once you've taken that on everything else becomes possible... I can't think of anything that would be truly supernatural..."
- "We are finite beings" trying to understand reality then "you have to ask yourself 'how is this working out?... is this helping me have a more meaningful life... be a more ethical person... have better relationships with others?'"
- "I don't really think of myself as a biologist... my fundamental commitment... has been to understand embodied mind"
- "I'm interested in cognition, intelligence and inner perspective in a wide range of diverse systems... some of which are alive"
- "I think cognition is a broader category than life"
- "It just so happens that life is, so far, our best example of how that can scale"
- "Molecular networks scaling into cells scaling into tissues scaling into organisms and beyond"
- Collective intelligence, goals... "biology is an excellent playground for these things"
- Cognition, mind etc. "All of these cognitive claims... where you think something is on the spectrum... how much mind... I don't think these are terms describing particular systems. I think these are terms describing our intended relationship to them... an engineering interaction protocol"
51:04 What and Who Matters?
01:08:53 A Better World?
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