The Computational Boundary of a “Self” (2019)
Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor, and a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. He is also co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Josh Bongard.
Alphabetic
Date
Duration
Word Count
Popularity
Date
May 16, 2022
Format
Research Article
Views
116
Intelligence is a central feature of human beings’ primary and interpersonal experience. Understanding how intelligence originated and scaled during evolution is a key challenge for modern biology. Some of the most important approaches to understanding intelligence are the ongoing efforts to build new intelligences in computer science (AI) and bioengineering. However, progress has been stymied by a lack of multidisciplinary consensus on what is central about intelligence regardless of the details of its material composition or origin (evolved vs. engineered). We show that Buddhist concepts offer a unique perspective and facilitate a consilience of biology, cognitive science, and computer science toward understanding intelligence in truly diverse embodiments.
Date
May 18, 2023
Format
Lecture
Duration
01:17:15
Views
23
Date
May 23, 2023
Format
Research Article
Views
46
Collective intelligence and individual intelligence are usually considered to be fundamentally different. Individual intelligence is uncontroversial. It occurs in organisms with special neural machinery, evolved by natural selection to enable cognitive and learning functions that serve the fitness benefit of the organism, and then trained through lifetime experience to maximise individual rewards. Collective intelligence, in contrast, is a much more ambiguous idea. What exactly constitutes collective intelligence is often vague, and the mechanisms that might enable it are frequently domain-specific.
Date
December 13, 2019
Format
Research Article
Word Count
15,248
Reading time
≈ 1.4 hours
Quotes
6
Views
345
All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, and molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own native contexts. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents?
Date
April 26, 2024
Format
Lecture
Views
9
A talk given to undergraduate students about ideas from biology that might help them think about AI and related topics.
Francis Heylighen and David Sloan Wilson
Glimpsing the Global Brain
Complex systems theorist Heylighen and evolutionary biologist Wilson discuss a possible phase transition of humanity in which the members of our species become neurons in a planetary brain, utilizing the Internet as a shared exocortex.