bioelectricity-morphogenesis

bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Metaphysics | Philosophy | Physics
Cognition All the Way Down (the Drain) 2.0: Michael Levin’s Thermodynamic Consciousness Shell Game, The Discovery Institute, and the Art of Making Everything Think by Defining “Thinking” as Everything 🔄️
ByNathan Sweet February 1, 2026February 2, 2026
A Comprehensive Examination of Basal Cognition, Platonic Morphospace, and the Discovery Institute Playbook Applied to Developmental Biology I finally had the time to sit down with Michael Levin and Robert Chis-Ciure’s new paper, “Cognition All the Way Down 2.0: Neuroscience Beyond Neurons in the Diverse Intelligence Era,” published in Synthese in November 2025. I approached…
Read More Cognition All the Way Down (the Drain) 2.0: Michael Levin’s Thermodynamic Consciousness Shell Game, The Discovery Institute, and the Art of Making Everything Think by Defining “Thinking” as Everything 🔄️
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Falsification | Philosophy | Physics
“Differences That Make a Difference”: Why Constraint-Based Explanations Succeed Where “Basal Cognition” Fails
ByNathan Sweet February 1, 2026February 1, 2026
A difference only “makes a difference” if it can persist long enough to constrain what comes next. Everything else is noise that thermodynamics erases. Prologue: The Question That Would Not Stay Answered In 1979, Gregory Bateson posed a question that would haunt systems theory, cybernetics, and philosophy of mind for nearly half a century: What is…
Read More “Differences That Make a Difference”: Why Constraint-Based Explanations Succeed Where “Basal Cognition” Fails
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Metaphysics
Dr. Michael Levin’s Response to My Critique: Misrepresentation, Platonic Morphospace, and Infinitely Unfalsifiable Metaphysics
ByNathan Sweet January 29, 2026January 31, 2026
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ― Richard Feynman Preliminary Note Dr. Levin’s December 28th, 2025 blog post, titled “Q&A & Recent Presentations 4,” claims to address my “36,000 words critiquing [his] positions,” which I posted on his Platonic Symposium discussion. However, this characterization is itself a misrepresentation. The post…
Read More Dr. Michael Levin’s Response to My Critique: Misrepresentation, Platonic Morphospace, and Infinitely Unfalsifiable Metaphysics
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Metaphysics | Philosophy | Physics
Platonic Patterns Without Platonic Baggage: Pavel Chvykov’s Physics Reveals What Michael Levin’s Symposium Can’t Admit
ByNathan Sweet January 26, 2026January 28, 2026
Platonic Patterns Without Platonic Baggage: Pavel Chvykov’s Physics Reveals What Michael Levin’s Symposium Can’t Admit How constraint-based thermodynamics accidentally became the latest exhibit in biological Platonism’s longest-running motte-and-bailey “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”— Daniel Dennett Pavel Chvykov’s talk at…
Read More Platonic Patterns Without Platonic Baggage: Pavel Chvykov’s Physics Reveals What Michael Levin’s Symposium Can’t Admit
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Critical Thinking | Epistemology | Falsification | Metaphysics | Ontology | Philosophy | Physics
Is Michael Levin’s Platonic Morphogenesis Scientific? Brian Cheung’s Bidrectional Relational Convergence Research Reveals the Motte-Bailey Problem
ByNathan Sweet January 21, 2026February 2, 2026
Is Michael Levin’s Platonic Morphogenesis Scientific? From Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.” Daniel Dennett An analysis of how a strong naturalistic talk on convergence in biology and AI inadvertently undermines the Platonic metaphysics it was invited…
Read More Is Michael Levin’s Platonic Morphogenesis Scientific? Brian Cheung’s Bidrectional Relational Convergence Research Reveals the Motte-Bailey Problem
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Epistemology | Metaphysics | Ontology | Philosophy | Physics
Michael Levin’s Platonic Space Symposium Discussion #1: TAME, Distributed Agency vs Individual Intent
ByNathan Sweet January 21, 2026January 24, 2026
Michael Levin’s Platonic Space Symposium Discussion #1: TAME, Distributed Agency vs Individual Intent “A deepity is a proposition that seems both important and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading it is true…
Read More Michael Levin’s Platonic Space Symposium Discussion #1: TAME, Distributed Agency vs Individual Intent
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Critical Thinking | Epistemology | Evolution | Falsification | Metaphysics | Ontology | Philosophy | Physics
Michael Levin’s Platonic Spiral: Evolution or Unfalsifiable Circle?
ByNathan Sweet January 18, 2026January 23, 2026
“Competence without comprehension is the way of life of the vast majority of living things on the planet and should be the default presumption until we can demonstrate that some individual organisms really do, in one sense or another, understand what they are doing.” ― Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of…
Read More Michael Levin’s Platonic Spiral: Evolution or Unfalsifiable Circle?
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Epistemology | Falsification | Metaphysics | Philosophy
When “No Scientific Evidence” Becomes an Unintentional Shield: The Philosophy of Matthew Segall, Whitehead, and the Testability of Consciousness and Falsifiability
ByNathan Sweet January 14, 2026January 22, 2026
Important Article Disclaimer: This article isn’t a refutation of Matt Segall. I have genuine respect for his scholarship and his willingness to do the difficult bridging work between process philosophy and empirical biology. What follows is offered in the spirit of collaborative falsification. I’m trying to stress-test both his framework and my own, with the…
Read More When “No Scientific Evidence” Becomes an Unintentional Shield: The Philosophy of Matthew Segall, Whitehead, and the Testability of Consciousness and Falsifiability
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Metaphysics | Physics
Thermodynamics Explains Everything Platonism Tries to Explain, But Can Not: Michael Levin’s December 2025 Max Planck School—Matter Meets Life Lecture
ByNathan Sweet January 12, 2026January 15, 2026
“Competence without comprehension is the way of life of the cell. The fact that evolution has created competent designs does not mean that those designs comprehend what they are doing.” — Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017) An analysis of rhetorical slippage, empirical falsification, and the path from mechanism to metaphysics in…
Read More Thermodynamics Explains Everything Platonism Tries to Explain, But Can Not: Michael Levin’s December 2025 Max Planck School—Matter Meets Life Lecture
bioelectricity-morphogenesis | Biology | Metaphysics | Ontology
Cognitive Platonism as Naturalistic Replacement: How Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and David Resnik’s Own Admissions Dissolve Michael Levin’s Transcendent Morphospace
ByNathan Sweet January 11, 2026January 22, 2026
When a symposium speaker explicitly denies the transcendence that defines the symposium’s topic, as Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic’s talk “Platonic Space as Cognitive Construct” does rigorously and comprehensively, that is not elaboration. It is replacement. When a Platonic Symposium participant and co-author on several of Michael Levin’s papers, David Resnik, identifies another speaker’s framework as “refangled Kantianism”…
Read More Cognitive Platonism as Naturalistic Replacement: How Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and David Resnik’s Own Admissions Dissolve Michael Levin’s Transcendent Morphospace

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