Platonizing Biology: A Dialogue with Michael Levin

Discussing the relevance of Whiteheadian metaphysics to developmental biology.

Our dialogue centered on bridging the gap between philosophy and science, particularly developmental biology, a field in which Levin is a pioneer.

I initiated the dialogue by clarifying the role of philosophy in relation to the sciences. I emphasized that my role is not to impose definitions on scientists but to draw out the wider implications of specific scientific findings. I also want to understand the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge itself. As Whitehead is careful to note, epistemological problems, which concern our understanding and knowledge, are often disguised ontological problems.

We explored the role of different factors like behavior, environment, time, and necessity in shaping life. Here, science and philosophy are woven together, with the implication that advances in scientific fields like developmental biology can refine and enhance philosophical concepts and categories. I mention traditional philosophical views including Plato's static forms and Aristotle's great chain of being, and discuss how while they are insufficient as an account of the emergence of forms in evolutionary history, they may still have important lessons to teach contemporary scientists. This is particularly true of scientists, like Levin, who realize that standard materialism is ill-equipped to understand the way cellular collectives intelligently and purposively exploit morphodynamic possibility space in the course of their developmental trajectories.

I tried to point to the limitations of mechanistic science, which, despite its success in instrumental knowledge (knowledge used to control or manipulate the world), often overlooks the sort of formal and final causes that would be necessary to understand developmental biology, not to mention to naturalize scientific epistemology itself. If science is possible, then avoiding dualism (whereby human minds would be a different sort of thing entirely from what we find in the rest of nature) requires that we come to understand how it is that organisms are capable of searching possibility space (Plato’s realm of forms) for relevant novelty so as to realize their goals, whether that goal is building a functional eye or a predictive theory of cellular development.

See also my comments under the YouTube video, which I added after rewatching our dialogue later:

Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:20 Question regarding Michael Levin's view of the relationship of philosophy and science. 06:15 Developmental biology is the key to looking at the relationship between philosophy and science. 22:30 Whitehead's injunction to take self-organization seriously 28:30 Free energy principle and the agency of the environment 28:50 The environment is massively under-determined 32:45 Engineering protocols. What do I need to know in that spacetime environment to most optimally relate to that system? 33:45 How Whitehead might relate to the idea of cognitive light cones 36:50 The Ideal is a judge (Jordan Peterson). Does this scale? 40:15 Tracking microstates, or macrostates? 47:55 Anomaly 51:30 Determinism is a side effect of the deistic hangover of Newton and Descartes The Observer is within the world being observed, and has an impact on it. 55:40 Mechanistic cosmology is deism, basically. We need a new metaphysic. 58:30 We are more than just perceiving beings 1:01:45 Every cell is trying to behavior shape its neighbors 1:11:00 The Logos as ordering principle 1:13:20 Ingression of relevant novelty The relationship between perception, agency, and intelligence as collective efforts. 1:16:10 Does the prompting of the oak tree leaf presuppose that the subroutine that creates the gall is already present in the leaf? 1:20:00 When a salamander regrows a limb, is that a memory capacity? 1:22:50 Energetic transmission is a kind of vector feeling (Whitehead) What is the Place of Thinking, Feeling, and Willing in Nature? 1:23:50 The project is the sentience of physics and the physics of sentience 1:24:34 The distinction between control and relationship The Paradigms of Control v. Relationship The Spectrum of Persuadability Levels of Controllability 1:28:50 Ethical considerations and the movement from force to persuasion