What questions are you willing to ask?

Never mind AI - what if we are already surrounded by intelligent minds that we didn't have the intelligence to notice? 

Harvard biologist Michael Levin is one of the most brilliant thinkers I've had the privilege to interact with, and last month answered my most pressing questions about how he investigates this very question.

He points out how the rules of mathematics don't depend on physics, but do affect things in the physical world. In other words, there are things that are true that aren't in the physical world, yet play a role on the physical world. For Michael, this means physicalism (the notion that reality is material and everything in it can be explained by physical things) is “dead on arrival.” 

His work in biology, philosophy and computer engineering is asking questions that no one thought to ask before, discovering patterns in nature that would be recognised as signs of life by any behavioural scientist. The implication is that minds are to be found everywhere, not just biology, and he proposes techniques to demonstrate this empirically.

If minds are everywhere, where are their boundaries?

This idea that mind is fundamental to reality is shared by Bernardo Kastrup. But there is still room for debate!

Discerning where one mind ends and another begins is no easy task, philosophically or experimentally. Michael and Bernardo engaged in a riveting debate on the topic last month, which I summarised here and which you can watch here. 

You can watch the hour long interview with Michael on youtube here.

You can download the slides from the talk here.