Giants Shoulder

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Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic is a physicist turned cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus at Chalmers University of Technology, with doctorates in both physics and computer science. Across three careers she built info-computationalism: the idea that nature is information and computation at every level, from particles to minds. Her conclusion puts her at odds with much of her own field. Cognition arrives with life itself, which puts consciousness in a single bacterium and nowhere in today's AI.

Expect to learn:
- Info-computationalism: why nature is information and computation all the way down
- Cell consciousness: why a single cell is already sensing, deciding and minimally aware
- The Levin divide: where she draws the line Michael Levin won't
- Anaesthetised bacteria: why ether switches off organisms with no brain
- Machines that can't feel: why today's AI has intelligence but no goals of its own

SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA

William B. Miller Jr. - Meet The Scientist Proving Your Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent: https://youtu.be/xrV5oGyyKSI

Mark Solms - Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc

GUEST LINKS
Chalmers Profile: https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/dodig/
X: https://x.com/DodigGordana
Chalmers Research Publications: https://research.chalmers.se/en/person/dodig
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bvc5bBsAAAAJ
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-400X
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordana-dodig-crnkovic/

LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/D4jBgWV8BoY
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:44 Physicist, Computer Scientist, Cognitive Scientist
0:08:05 What Is Information, Really?
0:13:16 You Can't Observe Without Changing The System
0:16:14 Are Conscious Agents The Most Fundamental Thing?
0:20:06 A Single Cell Is Already Conscious
0:27:16 Where She Parts Ways With Michael Levin
0:28:41 Can We Build A Machine That Creates Itself?
0:33:38 Why A Book Is Just Food To An Insect
0:39:40 You Are Trillions Of Information Agents
0:44:09 Science's Obsession With Measurement
0:46:40 Xenobots And The Cells Nobody Programmed
0:51:02 Agency Or Just Complicated Chemistry?
0:55:58 Why No Experiment Can Settle This
0:57:22 Where Computation Ends And Cognition Begins
1:01:08 Would Levin Say Gene Networks Think?
1:03:37 Why Survival Might Be Essential For Consciousness
1:07:07 You Can Anaesthetise A Bacterium
1:11:08 Can Consciousness Be Written Down As Maths?
1:19:31 How AI Could Help Us Understand Minds
1:22:35 Should We Ever Build Conscious AI?

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it. So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been alive, long before there was a brain to think with.

Expect to learn:
- Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in front of you and still land on what matters
- Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same thing your mind is, only smaller
- The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares, and what that rules out
- Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models collapse on open-ended problems and always will
- Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside your head but in the coupling with your world

SPONSORS
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM
Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA
Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E
Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY
Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE
Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS
University of Toronto Faculty Profile: https://www.psych.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/john-vervaeke
Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/
X: https://x.com/vervaeke_john
YouTube (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis): https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (book): https://johnvervaeke.com/books/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/

LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98

SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:54 The Meaning Crisis, Explained by a Cognitive Scientist
0:04:16 The Patterns in This Room Outnumber the Particles in the Universe
0:06:45 How Your Mind Ignores Almost Everything
0:09:09 "Dad, It's Relevance Realisation All The Way Down"
0:10:24 Noise Is Just Information Nobody Needs
0:15:33 Comparing a Human Mind to a Single Cell
0:18:01 Michael Levin's Cognitive Light Cone
0:19:49 The Cone of Caring
0:23:20 How Far Down Does Mind Actually Go?
0:24:15 Why a Tornado Isn't Alive
0:25:34 Pressing Michael Levin to Admit He's a Platonist
0:34:01 The Water Bottle Experiment
0:40:34 Where Levin Leaps From Patterns to Minds
0:48:12 The Problem With Symmetry Theories of Consciousness
0:55:03 Why LLMs Fall Apart on Open-Ended Problems
1:00:16 Obviousness Is Not a Physical Property
1:05:11 The Shark That Dies in the Sahara
1:10:49 What Consciousness Is Actually Doing
1:15:12 Are Neural Correlates a Dead End?
1:22:07 "We Should Stop Funding It"

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Richard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all, and that biology has spent a century mistaking one for the other. With Michael Levin he published Natural Induction, which shows that any network whose connections give way under stress will begin to learn on its own. Ecosystems. Gene networks. Possibly the chemistry of the early Earth, long before anything was alive to be selected.

Expect to learn:
- Cognition before selection: why learning came first and natural selection came second
- The spring mechanism: how falling masses solve hard puzzles with no brain, no genes and no designer
- Ecosystems that compute: the model where an ecosystem solves a Sudoku without reproducing or inheriting
- The limits of the genome: why no amount of sequencing will explain what a cell is actually doing
- Medicine as persuasion: treating tissues as cognitive systems to negotiate with, not machines to fix

SPONSORS
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

GUEST LINKS
University of Southampton Profile: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x27lw/professor-richard-watson
Personal Website: https://www.richardawatson.com
Natural Induction (Entropy, 2024, with Michael Levin): https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/9/765
Publications: https://www.richardawatson.com/publications-1
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Watson-10

LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/wAGFE2S6qXg
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:43 The Assumptions Every Biologist Knows Are Wrong
0:03:53 "All of Life Is Cognitive"
0:06:58 Survival Is a Consequence, Not the Driver
0:09:32 How Cognition Could Come Before Natural Selection
0:14:03 Adaptation Isn't What Natural Selection Does
0:17:57 What a Sudoku Puzzle Teaches About Life
0:20:41 Masses, Springs and the Physics of Learning
0:23:45 When Springs Start to Remember
0:26:18 Learning as "Second-Order Falling"
0:28:56 No Selection, No Neural Nets, No Design
0:31:03 What "Memory" Actually Means
0:35:59 Gene Networks That Learn
0:38:13 An Ecosystem Solving Sudoku
0:43:22 Natural Selection "Isn't Doing Anything Clever"
0:52:08 No Amount of Sequencing Will Answer This
0:57:23 Will We Ever Model a Cell? "Bottom Up, Never"
1:01:23 Rethinking Medicine: Persuadable Systems
1:08:01 Agency, or Just Complex Biochemistry?
1:20:47 "I Don't Do Consciousness"
1:23:30 Three Things That Changed His Mind
1:25:39 Analytic Idealism and the Dream Argument
1:33:31 Why Doesn't Your Consciousness Blur Into the Chair?
1:35:47 McGilchrist and Why We're Blind to It
1:38:47 It Was Never About Survival

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it.

Expect to learn:
- The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens
- Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex
- Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate
- Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it
- The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip

SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0

Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE

Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk

GUEST LINKS
Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com
Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/
Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006
X: https://x.com/onemorebrown
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social

LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/RBP-w5Z9t1g
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy
0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It"
0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux
0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip
0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says
0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness
0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience
0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind
0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives
0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear"
0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same
0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory
0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar
0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black?
0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye
0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach
0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem
0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes
1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology"
1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS
1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This
1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint"
1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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Dean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls out of the dynamics of neural circuits themselves. He wrote the bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine, then took the argument to physics, co-authoring a paper with Carlo Rovelli on whether the past still exists. He is a presentist in a field that mostly isn't.

Expect to learn:
- The clockless brain: why there is no central timer anywhere in your head
- Timing in a dish: how isolated brain tissue can be taught intervals
- Death and religion: how foresight forced our ancestors to invent the afterlife
- The ten-second test: the one simple thing no language model can do
- Pause the computer: the thought experiment that breaks state-based theories of consciousness

SPONSORS
Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED
György Buzsáki - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/95FFRTIiLDY

Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0

Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM

Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc

Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o

GUEST LINKS
UCLA Neurobiology Profile: https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/dean-buonomano-phd
Buonomano Lab: http://www.buonomanolab.com/
X: https://x.com/DeanBuono
Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (with Carlo Rovelli): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01976

LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/G2LaKtxUng0
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:01 The Brain Has No Central Clock
0:04:17 How Neural Population Clocks Work
0:05:40 Teaching Brain Tissue To Tell Time
0:06:57 Prediction Is Really About When
0:09:10 Even Bacteria Keep Time
0:10:27 Mental Time Travel Built Civilisation
0:11:39 Realising You'll Die Invented Religion
0:14:57 Squirrels Don't Actually Plan Ahead
0:18:19 Waking Up Before Your Alarm
0:23:29 Why Time Is Central To Consciousness
0:24:01 Block Universe vs Only Now
0:29:24 The Runner Who Lost Time
0:33:18 Why Marathons Destroy Time Perception
0:37:18 The Memories With No Timestamp
0:42:02 Your Brain Runs Many Clocks
0:43:31 AI Cannot Wait Ten Seconds
0:45:38 How Transformers Deleted Time
0:49:29 What If You Paused The Computer?
0:53:05 Could We Ever Build Conscious AI?
0:58:17 Arguing About Time With Carlo Rovelli
1:01:40 A Time Traveller Would Prove Me Wrong
1:07:05 You Can't Measure Time With Time
1:12:25 Which Theory Of Consciousness Is Right?
1:21:55 Why We Invented The Soul

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com