#158 - Meet The Scientist Redefining Intelligence With Michael Levin

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Richard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all, and that biology has spent a century mistaking one for the other. With Michael Levin he published Natural Induction, which shows that any network whose connections give way under stress will begin to learn on its own. Ecosystems. Gene networks. Possibly the chemistry of the early Earth, long before anything was alive to be selected.

Expect to learn:

- Cognition before selection: why learning came first and natural selection came second

- The spring mechanism: how falling masses solve hard puzzles with no brain, no genes and no designer

- Ecosystems that compute: the model where an ecosystem solves a Sudoku without reproducing or inheriting

- The limits of the genome: why no amount of sequencing will explain what a cell is actually doing

- Medicine as persuasion: treating tissues as cognitive systems to negotiate with, not machines to fix

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

GUEST LINKS

University of Southampton Profile: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x27lw/professor-richard-watson

Personal Website: https://www.richardawatson.com

Natural Induction (Entropy, 2024, with Michael Levin): https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/9/765

Publications: https://www.richardawatson.com/publications-1

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Watson-10

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Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:43 The Assumptions Every Biologist Knows Are Wrong

0:03:53 "All of Life Is Cognitive"

0:06:58 Survival Is a Consequence, Not the Driver

0:09:32 How Cognition Could Come Before Natural Selection

0:14:03 Adaptation Isn't What Natural Selection Does

0:17:57 What a Sudoku Puzzle Teaches About Life

0:20:41 Masses, Springs and the Physics of Learning

0:23:45 When Springs Start to Remember

0:26:18 Learning as "Second-Order Falling"

0:28:56 No Selection, No Neural Nets, No Design

0:31:03 What "Memory" Actually Means

0:35:59 Gene Networks That Learn

0:38:13 An Ecosystem Solving Sudoku

0:43:22 Natural Selection "Isn't Doing Anything Clever"

0:52:08 No Amount of Sequencing Will Answer This

0:57:23 Will We Ever Model a Cell? "Bottom Up, Never"

1:01:23 Rethinking Medicine: Persuadable Systems

1:08:01 Agency, or Just Complex Biochemistry?

1:20:47 "I Don't Do Consciousness"

1:23:30 Three Things That Changed His Mind

1:25:39 Analytic Idealism and the Dream Argument

1:33:31 Why Doesn't Your Consciousness Blur Into the Chair?

1:35:47 McGilchrist and Why We're Blind to It

1:38:47 It Was Never About Survival

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