Michael Levin is a synthetic biologist at Tufts University who believes that asking questions about “life” is a fruitless project. Instead, he argues that we ought to be trying to understand the emergence of cognition - a feature that he believes appears long before cells emerge. As part of this project, Levin has started to pull on a series of threads woven through the origin of life debate that seem to show basic elements of thinking systems - habituation, sensitization, conditioning - can be found in simple physical networks. We dig into how these systems work, what they reveal about life, and how his approach to understanding nature resolves a lot of biological paradoxes.

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00:05:11 Exploring the Origins and Definitions of Life

00:11:30 The Complexity of Defining Life

00:14:30 The Limitations of Scientific Categories

00:17:58 Re-evaluating Life and Cognition

00:19:40 Theoretical Perspectives on Life

00:20:08 The Spectrum of Cognition and the Re-enchantment of Nature

00:24:09 Experimental Approaches to Understanding Cognition in Networks

00:30:14 Feedback Loops in Learning and Causal Emergence

00:35:34 The Role of Chemical Interactions in the Origins of Life

00:39:27 Discussion on Learning and Molecular Networks

00:41:35 The Nature of Complexity and Consciousness

00:45:04 Science and the Crisis of Meaning

00:49:34 Expanding Compassion in Understanding Life

00:54:13 Methodology of Chemical Experimentation

00:58:53 Analysis at Different System Levels

01:01:56 Causal Powers of Networks

01:04:31 Collective Intelligence in Biological Systems

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Politicology Mailbag with Ron Steslow & Lucy Caldwell