Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jordan Yanowitz's avatar

The ethics of relationality you discussed — implicit in every interaction we have with in other systems, be it machines or organisms — sounds quite similar to Martin Buber’s framing of I-it vs I-thou. It’s critical we engage with other beings not as means to an end, but ends in of themselves, and yet, in our society, it can be so hard to approach others with the openness and vulnerability necessary to do so.

Expand full comment
Michael Levin's avatar

Thanks Matt, looking forward to our discussion later today. For now, I just want to say that

1) bioelectricity is not required for any of the points I make about cognition. It's just an extremely convenient model system in which we've been able to show how specific philosophical ideas lead to empirical advances (e.g., in the field of biomedicine). There's nothing magic about bioelectricity, but as we see from neuroscience, it's a very tractable modality in which to study how minds become embodied, and we've used it to show deep symmetries between what happens in brains and what happens elsewhere. My only claim about it is that it enables one to see the value of certain philosophical approaches cashed out in empirical progress of new discoveries because of inescapable facts of mechanistic conservation. Critiquing the continuity thesis is alright, but even better would be producing something new and useful (capabilities, research trajectories, discoveries) to reveal the value of alternative approaches.

2) with respect to:

> Is Mike suggesting that what had appeared machine-like to the old materialist paradigm is actually mind-like and fundamentally organic or organism-derived? Or is he saying that what appears to be alive and ensouled is actually just a sophisticated computational algorithm that engineers can hack?

it's a variant of the former. Organicists push the idea that the story of life and mind is not captured by the mechanistic rules of chemistry. Bravo. But suddenly when it comes to simpler systems (and perhaps not made of proteins), they give up their well-placed humility, slide into the Mechanist camp, and claim strongly that algorithms and physics tells the entire story of "machines". I think they should take their ideas more seriously, and follow them to the end (which again, is an approach that is generating novel discoveries - not just philosophy). Both simple, engineered agents ("machines") and complex evolved ones ("life") benefit from (are ensouled by) patterns that thus come into the physical world. Random mutation + selection has no monopoly on this process, it shows up for engineers too. Drawing sharp distinctions to prop up sterile categories produces no new advances, but studying the mapping between the pointers we make (devices, embryos, cyborgs, etc.) and the Platonic patterns they exploit, does. It's a weirdly uncomfortable notion for both communities that otherwise agree on nothing else :-)

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts