#159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down

<p>🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY</p><p>Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 </p><p>https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join</p><p><br /></p><p>John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it. So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been alive, long before there was a brain to think with.</p><p><br /></p><p>Expect to learn:</p><p>- Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in front of you and still land on what matters</p><p>- Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same thing your mind is, only smaller</p><p>- The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares, and what that rules out</p><p>- Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models collapse on open-ended problems and always will</p><p>- Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside your head but in the coupling with your world</p><p><br /></p><p>SPONSORS</p><p>Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants</p><p><br /></p><p>GS EPISODES MENTIONED</p><p>Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces &amp; Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM</p><p>Michael Levin &amp; Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA</p><p>Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI &amp; Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E</p><p>Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY</p><p>Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE</p><p>Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie