Why Cognition Doesn't Require a Brain - Damian Kelty-Stephen

Damian Kelty-Stephen is a cognitive scientist and psychologist.What if cognition was not limited to neurons and brains, but rather everything from cells to molecules to groups of people could all do cognition?In this podcast, learn about the intelligence capacities of organisms with no neurons, how scientists are re-thinking DNA's role in the body, how even molecules and proteins have a kind of cognition, radical ways to build computers, archetypes and patterns instantiating unconscious influence across individuals, new perspectives on how evolution works, and more...Timestamps:00:00 Intelligence in Single Cell Organisms 00:02:15 Michael Levin & New Perspectives on DNA 05:25 What does DNA Actually Do?07:54 DNA Can't Encode for All Intelligence09:39 Weird Competencies of DNA15:20 Everything has Agency (to a degree)18:08 False Subjective-Objective Dichotomy19:38 The Reality of Myths and Archetypes23:20 Cognition in Groups and Societies26:20 How Cognition Works: Generalizing Cognition from Physics to Brains36:08 Alan Turing's Strange Ideas and Evolution of Computing38:11 The Nature of Symbols and Continuous Flows41:40 Self-Organization and Symbolic Structures43:35 Turing's Mercury Computer50:02 Cognition and Computation: A Dual Perspective56:10 The Interplay of Genes, Cognition, and Evolution01:00:57 Understanding Consciousness and Experience01:12:58 Current Research and Future Directions in NeuroscienceFind Damian: Our previous podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwj9TZDguwc Website: https://sites.google.com/site/foovian/Find me: X: https://x.com/jack_roycroft Substack (where I'll be writing soon): https://substack.com/@jackroycroftsherry