Why Cognition Doesn't Require a Brain - Damian Kelty-Stephen

Damian Kelty-Stephen is a cognitive scientist and psychologist.

What if cognition was not limited to neurons and brains, but rather everything from cells to molecules to groups of people could all do cognition?

In this podcast, learn about the intelligence capacities of organisms with no neurons, how scientists are re-thinking DNA's role in the body, how even molecules and proteins have a kind of cognition, radical ways to build computers, archetypes and patterns instantiating unconscious influence across individuals, new perspectives on how evolution works, and more...

Timestamps:
00:00 Intelligence in Single Cell Organisms
00:02:15 Michael Levin & New Perspectives on DNA
05:25 What does DNA Actually Do?
07:54 DNA Can't Encode for All Intelligence
09:39 Weird Competencies of DNA
15:20 Everything has Agency (to a degree)
18:08 False Subjective-Objective Dichotomy
19:38 The Reality of Myths and Archetypes
23:20 Cognition in Groups and Societies
26:20 How Cognition Works: Generalizing Cognition from Physics to Brains
36:08 Alan Turing's Strange Ideas and Evolution of Computing
38:11 The Nature of Symbols and Continuous Flows
41:40 Self-Organization and Symbolic Structures
43:35 Turing's Mercury Computer
50:02 Cognition and Computation: A Dual Perspective
56:10 The Interplay of Genes, Cognition, and Evolution
01:00:57 Understanding Consciousness and Experience
01:12:58 Current Research and Future Directions in Neuroscience

Find Damian:

Our previous podcast:    • Collective Intelligence, Swarms, and Multi...  
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/foovian/

Find me:

X: https://x.com/jack_roycroft
Substack (where I'll be writing soon): https://substack.com/@jackroycroftsherry