3 ms·
>They all use DNA. I really really recommend looking up Michael Levins bio work on intelligence at the cellular and organ level. His most recent work is start
by pixl97 23d ago
>They all use DNA.
I really really recommend looking up Michael Levins bio work on intelligence at the cellular and organ level.
His most recent work is starting to touch on some pretty far out concepts. And I should note, that he does not state they are true or not, but they are attempting to make empirical methods on testing them.
One of the concepts they are looking at is "math as an actual thing" and that some simple algorithms have new deeper behaviors that we're just finding now. The hypothesis is that over the eons life has probed mathematics at scales humanity cannot even begin to imagine and is exploiting this deep algorithmic efficiency in accomplishing any number of tasks. These algorithms could help explain the missing links.
I'd suggest starting with some of his older work to see they are a credentialed research scientist and not making up 'woo' whole cloth.
- bglazer 23d agoI’m curious how you found Michael’s work? Like what led you to familiarize yourself with his research? He seems to be essentially the only biologist that hackernews knows and he always (always!) comes up in biology discussion. I’m wondering how this particular situation arose.
- pixl97 23d agoIt's been long enough that I'm not really sure. It's every time I see some of his work the way he looks at problems always intrigued me. Dogma in science tends to blind people, and when a field starts slowing down and running into things we cannot address then we have to start looking at what we should be questioning.
- bglazer 23d agoHow do you keep up to date with his work?
- pixl97 23d agoJust searching it up in YouTube is a good starting place. He has visited a number of different podcasts. Then from there you can drill down into papers on the interesting things.
- bglazer 23d agoThanks, I was more asking from your perspective. I’m a working research biologist, and I’m genuinely curious how he became so well known among the hackernews slice of the public. He seems to have hit on some very effective combination of research interests and public communication strategy. I suspected it was the Lex Fridman podcast appearances, but I wasn’t sure if that was how most people became aware of him.
- randomImmigrant 22d agoI think it helps Levin is saying something very different. He’s also much more readable for a computer science crowd since his organizing principles are computation adjacent at least, though he, thankfully, isn’t a computational functionalist in the traditional sense.