Michael Levin’s group at Tufts works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. They are interested in understanding how highly diverse minds are embodied in the physical world, and how cognition and intelligence scales and projects into new problems spaces. Using tools from behavioral, life, and computer sciences, Dr. Levin seeks to develop an empirically useful conceptual framework for identifying and ethically relating to a very wide range of possible minds. This work impacts regenerative medicine, AI, and bioengineering, as well as deep questions about the origin and future of natural and artificial intelligence.

Looking-Glass Universe takes a fascinating look at the wholeness revolution in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology and neurophysiology, and the scientists whose converging theories are changing our understanding of how the universe works. The series will explore how far the themes of the book Looking-Glass Universe have developed since it was first published.

Looking-Glass Universe by John Briggs and F. David Peat will be released in a new edition this year with physicist Jonathan Allday filling in readers on how science has evolved in the 40 years since the book first appeared. He reviews the progress towards a looking-glass view of the universe and updating aspects of the text in line with current scientific thinking.

John Briggs and David Peat wrote Looking Glass Universe in the wake of publishing events such as The Tao of Physics. At the time, physics was cool and popular, especially among New Age adherents looking to science to provide a context for their beliefs. The authors wanted to take different approach—to show how a range of sciences, not just physics, were converging on a new way of viewing the world: as a whole. In this context, they wanted to pose and answer the question: is a science of wholeness possible?
Now that the book is about to be re-released, it is interesting to review how things stood at the time, with one of the original authors, so that progress, or lack of, since then can but seen in context.
This will act as an introduction to the whole series.

One of the key scientists featured in the book Looking Glass Universe was David Bohm. One of the original authors, David Peat, was a friend and collaborator of Bohm. The philosopher, Paavo Pylkkänen, also knew Bohm and has worked on developments of his ideas. In this conversation, we will discuss Bohm’s life, his personality, important aspects of his work and view of wholeness and how the work continues to be developed. Inevitably, we will also talk about our mutual friend and Bohm collaborator, Basil Hiley, who died recently.

The premise of modern science is that it focuses on studying objective aspects of reality. It is on this basis that the scientific community claims that science is a sieve for fundamental ‘truth,’ i.e. establishing fact and weeding out subjective opinion. What has been forgotten along the way over the past few centuries is that the concept of the ‘objective’ is itself subjective. To wit, the measure of objectivity is consensus, i.e. things upon which the majority of people agree are considered ‘objectively true,’ with the remaining perspectives treated as ‘subjective,’ or even ‘subjectively biased.’

Since Ilya Prigogine’s ‘sudden Vortex’ was reflected in the ‘Looking Glass Universe,’ complexity theory has advanced by leaps and bounds. From a marginal theory in the corners of physics, it has become the cornerstone of many advanced new sciences. From physics, physical chemistry, biological systems and ecology to social networks and leadership in organisations, the very ideas he developed and put into practice—emergence, entropy, self-organisation, spontaneous symmetry breaking, bifurcations and chaos—are today’s bread and butter and central. The focus has shifted towards understanding how order and chaos lead to new structures and behaviours at higher levels of complexity, adaptivity and extended domains.

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI.

Heisenberg in 1958 proposed that quantum states are ‘potentia standing ghost-like between a dream and reality.’  The proposal of ontologically real potentia not obeying Aristotle’s Laws of the Excluded Middle and Non-Contradiction provides an interpretation of superpositions and answers the six mysteries of Quantum Mechanics. This suggest that potentia are real and that quantum measurement converts Possibles to Actuals. Radin’s work with colleagues is evidence at 6.49 sigma that mind can play a role in collapse of the wave function—the conversion of Possibles to Actuals. Qualia are never in superposition. These facts suggest that conscious qualia arise upon mind’s conversion of Possibles to Actuals. 

Building upon Bohmian (and Kauffmanian) physics, the Eastern metaphor of The Tao is employed to introduce the new emotion science. In this context, emotional sentience—from its simple binary evaluations to its complex informational content—is not only central to the ‘self-regulatory’ behavioral hardware and learning software of living systems but may be integral to the in-forming and trans-forming process of reality creation itself. To distinguish emotion as a separate and more ancient system than ‘cognition’ proper, is to honor the ‘agent in the machine,’ to discover the untold wonders embodied in the physical organism, and to reclaim the divine attributes of human being and becoming.

“The Edge of Belief” is a documentary film about the interplay of faith, imagination and science. The film looks at the modern UFO phenomenon through the lens of the Catholic theological, scientific and literary tradition. This impactful documentary gives viewers a holistic framework for thinking about the mysteries of the universe and dealing with the claims that we are not alone in it. “The Edge of Belief” features interviews with CS Lewis scholar and Oxford professor Michael Ward, religious studies researcher and author of American Cosmic, Diana Pasulka, icon artist and host of “The Symbolic World,” Jonathan Pageau, Notre Dame theologian Christopher Baglow, and Chair of Astronomy at Cornell, Jonathan Lunine, among others.