Thank you! So glad you enjoyed - Mike has an amazing, distinctive mind. Thanks for the kind donation too

Good to hear - and good luck with the paper! Do KZfaq citations count for my academic record? :)

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it - I certainly did. Michael has an amazing mind.

Well yeah one of the most baaic crituqes of resuctionism is that if you if you focus on components of a system in isolation, (or take a perspective in isolation), you are blind to emergent properties that arise from the interconnectedness of components. This is an issue in software engineering which is why we do component tests, but also integration tests (testing components integrated together).

@@ZM-dm3jg Makes sense 👍

Kind of like the western medical model and how that really does not work in psychology.

@@bryanmccaffrey4385 Maybe....... I'm not familiar with that argument.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I agree that Michael has both an expansive view of where sentience is found across the tree of life and that he has, in theory, a sentiocentric moral scope. I suspect the challenges in the comments are less about that theory and more about the practice - for example consuming products made through the exploitation / harming / killing of obviously sentient animals and in his approach to conducting experiments on sentient beings. So far most humans (given our social norm indoctrination) are in a similar place. We ~all say we care about non-human sentient animals yet (mostly) unthinkingly pay for them to be brutalised for fairly trivial reasons. Because it's "normal". Fortunately things are changing fast! It sounds as though you might favour biocentrism (moral consideration for all living things) over sentiocentrism. I'm pretty open minded about that as long as every sentient being still gets serious moral consideration. Even for a biocentrist or ecocentrist - it seems there should still be a radical moral difference between pushing a knife into a pig or a fish and pushing a knife into a carrot.

@@Sentientism thank you for this thoughtful reply! I'm not familiar with all the terms you and look forward to digging in!

@@tangofaebatelli1237 A pleasure. My amateur view of this moral scope "who matters?" question and the terminology is that views often fall into one of these rough camps: - Anthropocentrism: Humans matter (normally living humans!) - Sentiocentrism: Sentient beings matter (those capable of feeling/experiencing - of having their own perspectives/interests/values) - Biocentrism: Living things matter even if they're not sentient (e.g. plants/funghi) - Ecocentrism/holism: Ecosystems and their components matter even if they're not sentient and not alive (e.g. rocks, rivers, ecosystems as a whole) The boundaries aren't clear of course. Even most humans who default to anthropocentrism do care about some non-humans. Sentiocentrists just challenge us to care about them all. Then to put that care into practice! The Sentientism worldview (sentientism.info/) focuses on sentiocentrism and adds a naturalistic epistemology. Hence "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings". Per above - it's open minded about extensions of compassion into bio/ecocentrism as long as all the sentient beings get serious moral consideration such that we should at the very least avoid needlessly harming/killing/exploiting them. Sorry for rambling on - I blame the coffee!

Thanks Wayne - I'm so lucky getting to talk to all these amazing minds - Mike included!

Particularly when he goes vegan and switches away from sentient animal-based research...

if not chemistry language then what, a bioelectricity language? why not chakra and cosmic energies language? I actually don’t see Michael evolving his language beyond ‘bioelectricity’ term plus a bunch of pop-philosophy rhetorical seasoning on top. It also looks like he is not very convinced by recent developments of LLMs as a model of our soul he mentioned …. but map will never be a territory!

@illiakailli What are these alleged energies you mention, exactly? What are their characteristics, origins, and source?

@@LouisGedo oh, I was hoping you’ll get that it was a sarcastic comment. I was just getting some pseudoscientific vibes from Michael and decided to mock that particular direction of his research (or at least the way he chose to present it). Bioelectricity is a strange topic and I’m not sure why Levin mystifies it quite a bit more. It looks like a quirk that has an effect only in some model organisms, so it is not universal. Also Levin is not talking much about a full causal chain of biochemical events that leads to the ‘memory effect’ he is describing. It sounds like some ‘electricity magic’ is happening which is not DNA-coded, which violates ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology … and as you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! What’s next? Is it going to be healing antennas cleansing human’s bioelectricalfield to cure cancer?

@@illiakailli Ah....... I didn't pick up on the sarcasm. For sure, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence......... 💯%

Me too - fascinating. Here are Mike's main web pages where you can find out more. This one is a less formal blog: thoughtforms.life/. This one is his academic page: www.drmichaellevin.org/

Thank you for the kind words William! It is a little odd I haven't had more biologist guests... Sentientism centres epistemology (preferring naturalistic) and moral scope (preferring sentiocentrism) but biology is a pretty central field for both... Thinking back there has been quite a bit of biology content - albeit not always from "biologists": Mark Solms, Lori Marino and Christof Koch re: neurology, Walter Veit on the evolution of sentience, Marc Bekoff on evolutionary biology, Frans de Waal and Barbara King on ethology and animal behaviour. As for learning everything Mike and his team have learned I'm not sure that's possible :). But hopefully we can take a great deal from their summaries / public writings / themes at least. I learned a lot through the conversation. It also reinforced my sense that while our (fuzzily bounded, indeterminate, imperfectly defined) human-created concepts are really useful we shouldn't kid ourselves that they are the underlying reality. And that patterns / waves / computations, often operating at various levels and sometimes scale-free, are much more interesting than the "stuff" they flow through.

@@Sentientism As I have let Mike know and many other scientists who are different fields I've added this conversation to a library I've been building for the last several years, I take no credit for anyone's own creative work and the their efforts in educating other people, this is primarily so my grandkids can know what papa thought was interesting, thank you for your response, and Mark is another great mind, here's a link to the library, I hope you don't mind that I've included your work Jamie. kzfaq.info/sun/PLEwpMD47png4zQ9gXjbsyHZCFC0gaeyRf&si=teYEeSmxu8wyzVzX

@@williamjmccartan8879 It's an honour to be on your list, William! Hope the grandkids enjoy.

Agree - it's such a simple approach but powerful. It also resolves so much of the pointless debate between a mindless reductionism that tries to ignore or deprecate the higher levels and an almost mystical focus on the higher levels that wants to deny the salience of what lies beneath. We get so obsessed with our human-constructed concepts - and they are useful - but reality doesn't care either way :)

That's so kind thank you! Rest assured every cent will go towards popularising the Sentientism worldview's "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings".

@@Sentientism this is important work. Thank you for asking these vital questions!

Sorry if I broke up his flow too much - feedback appreciated. At the same time, even great minds need challenging :)

@@Sentientism you are doing a great job man. just remember: a prepared set of questions must not limit the flow of conversation, if you think a tangent is interesting don't fear asking follow-up question.

@@ramanShariati Thank you!

It's interesting and frustrating. On the one hand there is a genuine, at least theoretical, sentiocentric compassion there - common among many public intellectuals. So many non-vegans wisely proclaim "future generations will condemn us for how we treat animals!". But even deep thinkers remain trapped by anthropocentric social and academic norms. My guess is that even before humans evolved there was catastrophic suffering amongst free-ranging animals in the wild (as well as many good experiences). So I'd put the human caused percentage of suffering much, much lower than 99.9% Regardless - the imperative to reduce/end our negative impacts is clear. The "playing god" balance is tricky. Doing things presents risks of course and we should beware of often catastrophic human hubris - but not doing things presents risks too - particularly when there's so much avoidable suffering in the world.

Oof, this comment reads like it’s informed by Scientism, rather than science 😬

Comment seems to me based in reality rather than theory.

Hm

@@tangofaebatelli1237 I'm always open to new evidence! :)

Thanks Graham. Agree. I've also shared my conversation with Aysha Akhtar with Mike. Often non-animal based testing is much more effective as well as being more ethical. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e8CPmsth0creoKM.html

Unfortunately he's not... yet... per my offer of help at the end. There seem to be quite a few scientists in this mould... Frans de Waal, Christof Koch, Mike, many others... who seem genuinely sentiocentric in theory based on their thinking... but remain trapped to some extent by our anthropocentric social norms. So they will condemn "factory farming" yet still consume animal products and will conduct harmful experiments on non-human animals (but never on human animals!) based more on a "this is the way we've always done things" inertia than on any robust moral justification. I often think of the positive impact all these public intellectuals with massive audiences could have if they really followed through publicly and practically on their sentiocentric compassion. Hopefully my conversations with them nudge both them and their audiences in a more coherent, consistent, compassionate direction.

@@Sentientism Thanks. Yes, that is very unfortunate. ☹ Makes me think Dr, Barnard of PCRM might make a good interview. He doesn't fit that mold you described, but he might shy away from the moral aspects and want to stick to the scientific evidence. They already label him as an animal rights guy as an attempt to discredit him. Veganism still discredits "true scientists", makes them seem too ideological (but it's OK to be Christian).☹

Yep - I think most people simply mean "in a body"... i.e. connected to a system that both senses and interacts with an external environment. But as you imply, (almost?) every entity interacts with its environment so could be seen as sort of "embodied". And even our minds aren't directly sensing the environment - we're building a mental simulation of our environment and sending out signals to control our body's impact on that environment. So in that sense being "embodied" is really just another stream of inputs and outputs - so even an entity in a completely virtual world could be considerded "embodied"?

Having heard much from Levin, I would say his focus on “embodied mind” comes from the fact that mind & body were studied quite *separately* for centuries. So it’s similar to his point that physics & biology aren’t actually separate and should be studied in tandem, same for “embodied mind”.

@@tangofaebatelli1237 Ah, okay....... that's actually a good thing as it's clear beyond a shadow of a doubt to me that mind is simply the emergent set of consequences of a functioning brain.......a type of non static brain state.

N.B. Before reading the following Glossary entry, it is absolutely imperative to understand that the term “mind” is being used according to the definition provided by the ancient Indian philosophical paradigm (in which it is called “manaḥ”, in Sanskrit), and NOT according to the manner in which the term is used in most all other systems (that is, as a broad synonym for “consciousness” - e.g. “The mind-body problem”). mind: Although the meaning of “mind” has already been provided in Chapter 05 of “A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, it shall prove beneficial to further clarify that definition here in the Glossary. It is NOT implied that mind is the sum of the actual thoughts, the sensations, the memories, and the abstract images that inhabit the mental element (or the “space”) that those phenomena occupy, but the faculty itself. This mental space has two phases: the potential state (traditionally referred to as the “unconscious mind”), where there are no mental objects present (such as in deep sleep or during profound meditation), and the actualized state (usually referred to as the “conscious mind”), where the aforementioned abstract objects occupy one’s cognition (such as feelings of pain). Likewise, the intellect and the pseudo-ego are the containers (or the “receptacles”) that hold conceptual thoughts and the sense of self, respectively. It is important to understand that the aforementioned three subsets of consciousness (mind, intellect, and false- ego) are NOT gross, tangible objects. Rather, they are subtle, intangible objects, that is, objects that can be perceived solely by an observant subject. The three subsets of consciousness transpire from certain areas of the brain (a phenomenon known as “strong emergence”), yet, as stated above, are not themselves composed of gross matter. Only a handful of mammal species possess intelligence (that is, abstract, conceptual thought processes), whilst human beings alone have acquired the pseudo-ego (the I- thought, which develops in infancy, following the id stage). Cf. “matter, gross”, “matter, subtle”, “subject”, and “object”. In the ancient Indian systems of metaphysics known as “Vedānta” and “Sāṃkhya”, mind is considered the sixth sense, although the five so-called “EXTERNAL” senses are, nonetheless, nominally distinguished from the mind, which is called an “INTERNAL” sense. This seems to be quite logical, because, just as the five “outer” senses involve a triad of experience (the perceived, the perception, and the perceiver), so too does the mind comprise a triad of cognition (the known, the knowing, and the knower). See also Chapter 06. Nota Bene: There is much confusion (to put it EXTREMELY mildly) in both Western philosophy and in the so-called “Eastern” philosophical traditions, between the faculty of mind (“manaḥ”, in Sanskrit) and the intellect (“buddhiḥ”, in Sanskrit). Therefore, the following example of this distinction ought to help one to understand the difference between the two subtle material elements: When one observes a movie or television show on the screen of a device that one is holding in one’s hands, one is experiencing auditory, textural, and visual percepts, originating from external objects, which “penetrate” the senses of the body, just as is the case with any other mammal. This is the component of consciousness known as “mind” (at least according to the philosophical terminology of this treatise, which is founded on Vedānta, according to widely-accepted English translations of the Sanskrit terms). However, due to our intelligence, it is possible for we humans (and possibly a couple of other species of mammals, although to a far less-sophisticated degree) to construct conceptual thoughts on top of the purely sensory percepts. E.g. “Hey - look at that silly guy playing in the swimming pool!”, “I wonder what will happen next?”, or “I hate that the murderer has escaped from his prison cell!”. So, although a cat or a dog may be viewing the same movie on the screen of our electronic device, due to its relatively low level of intelligence, it is unable to conceptualize the audio-visual experience in the same manner as a primate, such as we humans. To provide an even more organic illustration of how the faculty of mind “blends” into the faculty of the intellect, consider the following example: When the feeling of hunger (or to be more precise, appetite) appears in one’s consciousness, that feeling is in the mind. When we have the thought, “I’m hungry”, that is a conceptual idea that is a manifestation of the intellect. So, as a general rule, as animals evolve, they develop an intellectual faculty, in which there is an increasingly greater perception of, or KNOWLEDGE of, the external world (and in the case of at least one species, knowledge of the inner world). In addition to these two faculties of mind and intellect, we humans possess the false-ego (“ahaṃkāraḥ”, in Sanskrit). See Chapter 10 of "F.I.S.H" regarding the notion of egoity.

Yep I think so - backwards and forwards in time? So sensory inputs / memory / architecture etc. on one side and choice options on the other.

Like what makes the understanding or the possibility of understanding the universe supernatural?

Here's a thought: If we define what's "natural" (based on our cognitive and observational abilities) - then almost everything is "supernatural". 😁- because we are so damn biased and limited. I'm also very wary of using the term "we". One person's natural is another person's supernatural... Mostly "we" are just great exploiters of things and beings in nature - and THAT to an unnatural degree.😈

@@LouisGedo Agree this isn't what I think of as supernatural. I think Mike may have been thinking of it as an article of faith? I.e. he hopes and believes the universe is understandable but doesn't really know whether it is or why it might be? I'm not sure why you need faith there either though - we have plenty of good evidence that the universe is understandable - at least to a degree.

@@Sentientism Maybe he more meant it was a metaphysical comment and something he cannot provide proof for. We cannot prove or know if the universe is fundamentally knowable

This Peter Joseph? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Joseph

@@Sentientism Yes 🐄

My guess is that Mike doesn't really think this is a supernatural belief - more that it's one he has "faith" in regardless of the evidence? Personally I think there's plenty of evidence that at least some aspects of the universe are understandable - and that our credences about the universe are at least somewhat correlated with whatever is out there :) Otherwise we and other sentient beings wouldn't have survived for long.

I'm only an amateur but I'm not sure that's the case. Genes seem pretty straightforwardly structured (e.g. CGAT) while memes are just too messy and various to be considered fractals? Neither have structure at arbitrarily small scales. Both have a pretty clear base layer? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal

@@Sentientism we have no other experience than meme and gene, high and low. Even genes are memes, and are imbedded there. There exists only information.

@@_Royalfool_ Sentientists have lots of different views on physics and metaphysics. Personally I like quite broad and deep interpretations of information - or maybe even more broadly, computation. Many physicists prefer fields as some sort of fundamental. Even those can be represented by information - but I'm not sure they actually "are" information... My sense is that computation and information require some sort of substrate - because computation and information are changes in that substrate. Maybe I'm wrong though and Tegmarks "maths is the foundation" is right instead. Even that's not just computation or information though... I find these ideas fascinating but remain very open minded.

Yes, they have been cut laterally. There was also a scientist (I think early 20th century?) who put one in a blender. It was cut every which way into over 200 pieces. All pieces grew into full planarians.

Thanks for the kind words. Mike has an amazing mind.

Thanks for watching. My sense is that people find his pragmatic approach to concepts at various levels of analysis refreshing. More "what does that do for you?" instead of the frustrating dichotomy between "only the base level is actually real" vs. a reification of higher level concepts that sometimes leaks into a magical strong emergence. I also think people like the mission-driven zeal and his prolific scientific output. They sense he's right that genetic engineering will soon hit a dead end and that has approach re: engaging the capabilities of higher levels of biology might be revolutionary in the health / longevity / quality of experience of sentient beings and elsewhere. Many like the transhumanist vibe - particularly because his seems driven by compassion rather than the tech-bro hero's journey elitist version more common in today's discourse. I loved talking to him - an amazing mind. I just hope that he'll put his sentiocentric moral scope more into practice through boycotting the animal exploitation industries and by shifting his research methods away from those that harm sentient animals. Aysha Akhtar shows us the way... kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e8CPmsth0creoKM.html

In order to make an omelette....😏

@@dannixon247 A momentary gustatory indulgence 😔

​@@LouisGedo The point was not about food... In order to significantly reduce future suffering of complex sentient beings our understanding of how biological systems work must continue. Levin goes to quite some lengths to make it known that he thinks 'experiments' should be strictly regulated. It's a ridiculous notion that we can have our modern medically Advanced cake and complete ethically clear conscience...... That's just childish. Like whining about the environment on your iphone while driving your Telsla to your bureaucratic paper shuffling job 🙄

Agree - frustrating. I've since shared my Aysha Akhtar conversation with Mike. Often non-animal based testing is much more effective as well as being more ethical. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e8CPmsth0creoKM.html

Wtf are you talking about how do you expect the man to EXPERIMENT AND RESEARCH FOR DEVELOPMENT fool