for
- youtube talk - Michael Levin
- youtube - Against mind-blindness - Recognizing and Communicating with Unconventional Intelligences
summary
- mind blindness is the unawareness of other types of minds that surround us
- This definition alludes to an expanded definition of "mind" that is based on Levin's research which is influenced by the work of William James
- The expanded definition of mind is based on living systems with the ability to perform problem-solving with respect to its environment
- Levin's experiments that suggest that problem-solving is an important definition of minds involves artificially manipulating morphological features of simpler life forms at very early stages of their development.
- He demonstrates that tadpoles, with morphologically displaced features such as eyes, follow a problem-solving arc with this novel situation and have some kind of collective blueprint that they follow that allows the eyes to migrate to the right place in a fully developed frog
- Hence, living organisms are equipped with problem-solving templates that guide them towards some collective target
- Even if the original morphological state is novel, the mind can solve to migrate to the final target
- Levin's other experiments show how implanting novel instructions in the target template will cause the living system to migrate towards a new final target, as demonstrated in his 2-headed worm, which reproduces with 2 heads for all future generations after the novel implant
- These findings have profound implications on our understanding what life itself is
- They also force us to expand the diversity of the definition of "mind", with many moral implications