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Michael Levin is a developmental biologist who builds living creatures that have never existed before, and Earl Miller is a neuroscientist who has spent thirty years arguing that your thoughts live in the brain's electric fields, not its wiring. In the same room together for the first time, they agree on something that sounds insane — that bioelectricity is the engine of mind at every scale of life, from a single cell deciding to grow an eye to a human deciding what to eat for lunch.
Expect to learn how cells use a bioelectric code you can read and rewrite to grow an eye on a tadpole's tail, why no single cell knows what an eye is but the collective does, how a flatworm regrows a whole new brain and keeps its old memories, why the brain is an orchestra of electric waves and not a telegraph of wires, how three different anaesthetics switch off consciousness through one mechanism reductionism can't explain, why consciousness may just be the story your brain tells about what it already did, whether memories can be transplanted between bodies, what the Platonic space of minds is and why Levin thinks physicalism died with Pythagoras, and much more
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Timestamps:
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:46 The Vacuum Tubes That Started It All
0:08:36 How to Read and Rewrite the Bioelectric Code
0:12:36 Why No Single Cell Knows What an Eye Is
0:15:22 Your Brain Is Not a Telegraph System
0:19:30 Why They Called It Magic and Bullshit
0:24:56 Flatworm or Human Brain — Same Code?
0:30:00 Where Is Memory Actually Stored?
0:32:24 The Flatworm That Regrows Its Memories
0:34:34 People Living Without Most of Their Brain
0:40:32 Can Memories Live Outside the Brain?
0:43:26 Will a Rat Pop Down to the 7-Eleven for Smokes?
0:49:14 Consciousness Is Overrated (Says a Neuroscientist)
0:53:17 Hey Liver, Why Do I Feel Like Crap?
0:54:20 Nobody Knows Why Anaesthesia Works
0:57:21 Three Drugs, One Mystery, One Mechanism
0:58:50 Why Anaesthesia Is Dangerous When You're Old
1:02:12 What Is a Neurobot?
1:08:18 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist
1:13:28 What Is the Platonic Space of Minds?
1:20:44 Devil's Advocate: Have We Just Not Figured It Out?
1:24:03 The Free Lunch: More Out Than You Put In
1:29:36 Why Physicalism Died With Pythagoras
1:32:52 How Bioelectricity Touches the Platonic Space
...
GS Episodes Mentioned
Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o
Guest Links
Michael Levin — Allen Discovery Center (Tufts): https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/michael-levin/
Michael Levin — Website: https://www.drmichaellevin.org
Earl Miller — The Miller Lab (MIT): https://ekmillerlab.mit.edu/
Earl Miller — X: https://x.com/MillerLabMIT
