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How do “you” emerge from a collection of cells? A biologist explains.

This interview is an episode from @The-Well our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation .

The concept of the “self” has long been considered philosophically significant: a foundation for exploring who we are and why we’re here. But where does the self begin? Developmental biologist Michael Levin explores this question, explaining how the “self” is constantly being constructed and created, starting in the early moments of embryogenesis. Levin argues against binary categorizations of selfhood, emphasizing that it is a continuous phenomenon with no sharp lines between different stages of development. Using the example of self-organizing cells in the formation of the embryo, Levin also asserts that the self is not a singular entity — rather, it is a collection of structures working together toward a specific goal.

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About Michael Levin: Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Prior to college, Michael Levin worked as a software engineer and independent contractor in the field of scientific computing. He attended Tufts University, interested in artificial intelligence and unconventional computation. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He led an independent laboratory from 2000 to 2007 at Forsyth Institute, Harvard. Now, his lab at Tufts studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems

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Higher education is broken. Can we make it affordable for everyone?, with Courtney Brown

Who are today's higher education students? They might not be exactly who you think. About 40% of today’s students work full time, while another 40% are at least 25 years old, with many coming from low-income families.

Today’s complex world of work increasingly calls for advanced skills and education. As a society, we have to help more people obtain quality learning that’s available to all. What does that mean, exactly? Lumina Foundation has an idea, embracing a national goal that by 2025, 60% of working-age adults will have a college degree, industry-recognized certification or other credential of value. Right now, we are at just over 50 percent, and we need to better understand who has access to higher education and who is succeeding in this system.

As Lumina's Courtney Brown notes, the organization’s mission is to help more people get this vital post-high school education, understanding that this learning remains a powerful force in addressing income and racial inequality, keeping America competitive in the fast-changing world economy.

This video was created in partnership with the Lumina Foundation.

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About Courtney Brown:

Courtney Brown, Ph.D, is vice president of impact and planning for Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. As the chief data and research officer, Brown oversees the foundation’s efforts in the areas of strategic planning, learning, impact, and effectiveness. She also leads Lumina’s international engagement.

Up next ►► College is absurdly expensive. Can a radical new model change that?   • College is absurdly expensive. Can a ...  

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Why Americans don’t trust each other, with Todd Rose

Up next ►► "Collective Illusions": Why false consensus in society is so dangerous   • "Collective Illusions": Why false con...  

Should we trust people to make choices for themselves, or control those choices for them?

As a free people in a free society, it is unacceptable that public institutions treat people as distrustful. If we continue to use the top-down control model, the consequences in terms of social trust will be too damaging.

What we need to do is trust communities to make decisions for themselves, trust families to make decisions for themselves, and trust people, too. If you want a trusting society, you have to work to dislodge this top-down view of our institutions and give more power to people. We must insist that our institutions treat the public with trust.

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Collective Illusions is a 9-part series brought to you by Stand Together: a community of changemakers tackling our biggest challenges

For more stories, ideas, and advice from changemakers, subscribe to Stand Together ►   / standtogethercc  

Watch the entire Collective Illusions playlist ►   • Collective Illusions  

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About Todd Rose:

Todd Rose is the co-founder and president of Populace, a think tank committed to ensuring that all people have the opportunity to pursue fulfilling lives in a thriving society. Prior to Populace, he was a faculty member at Harvard University where he founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality and directed the Mind, Brain, and Education program. Todd is the best selling author of Collective Illusions, Dark Horse, and The End of Average. He lives in Burlington, Massachusetts.

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The hunt for the theory of everything continues — but we won’t find it without understanding quantum gravity first.

This interview is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.

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There’s a pursuit of simplicity and unification in theoretical physics, aiming for a single mathematical law to unify quantum mechanics and gravity: a theory of everything. But while other forces have been successfully unified, gravity resists integration — casting doubt on the likelihood of ever unlocking the theory of all theories. As physicist Janna Levin explains, black holes, with their strong space-time curvature, provide insights into this challenge. Levin draws parallels to mathematicians' incompleteness theorems, noting the inherent limitations in such an overarching theory. Acknowledging the complexity of the endeavor, Levin emphasizes the need to embrace and explore gravity's enigmatic nature fully. In doing so, the pursuit of unification might still yield profound insights, even if a comprehensive theory of everything remains elusive.

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Ever wondered why you can sense when a loved one is in pain? This Columbia psychologist has an explanation.

This interview is an episode from@The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation.

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Clinical psychologist Lisa Miller rejects a materialist view of the brain as a factory producing thoughts. She believes that the brain might function more like an antenna — capable of sending and receiving consciousness, which holds information, love, and intelligence. In other words, consciousness can exist independently of matter. Miller highlights scientific research that has explored this idea of shared consciousness, particularly in bonded relationships and among twins. She emphasizes the interconnectedness of humanity, where our actions and treatment of others leave lasting imprints on a collective consciousness field. Miller wants to redefine how we understand human consciousness and interconnectedness. This view of our minds has implications for fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality: by recognizing our shared consciousness, we can live a less lonely and more mindful shared existence. About Lisa Miller: Lisa Miller, Ph.D., is a professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the Founder and Director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program and research institute in spirituality and psychology, and has held over a decade of joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical School. Her innovative research has been published in more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including Cerebral Cortex, The American Journal of Psychiatry, and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Spiritual Child.

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Quantum wormholes are mathematically possible — but might also be physically impossible. Physicist Janna Levin explains the wormhole paradox. Theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin challenges long-held assumptions about the behavior of black holes, information conservation, and the fundamental nature of space, time, and gravity. She uses black holes to explore the physical feasibility of wormholes: theoretical passages or tunnel-like structures that connect separate points in spacetime. Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes emit energy via quantum particles, causing them to eventually evaporate and challenge the conservation of information. The holographic principle suggests that information is encoded on a black hole's surface, addressing the information paradox. Levin metaphorically likens black holes to embroidery, woven from quantum threads. Her quantum perspective has profound implications, potentially altering our understanding of gravity and spacetime's fundamental nature — even questioning our pursuit of a theory of everything.

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About Janna Levin: Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is also director of sciences at Pioneer Works, a center for arts and sciences in Brooklyn, and has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Her previous books include How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize. She was recently named a Guggenheim fellow.

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For our own mental health, we must occasionally disconnect from the world and reconnect to ourselves and to each other.

This leads us to some of the most powerful and often taboo things that humans have ever experienced.

They include: breathing, sexuality, embodiment, substances, and music — what Jamie Wheal calls the Alchemist Cookbook.

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About Jamie Wheal:

Jamie Wheal is the author of the global best-seller and Pulitzer Prize-nominated Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of ultimate human performance. Since founding the organization in 2011, it has gone on to become the leading voice of evidence-based peak performance in the world, counting award-winning academics, legendary professional athletes, special operations commanders, and Fortune 500 business leaders among the hundreds of thousands of people in its global community.

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Is reality real? These neuroscientists don’t think so, with Richard Dawkins, Heather Heying, Donald Hoffman & more Is there an external reality? Is reality objective? Is the information your senses are feeding you an accurate depiction of reality? Most neuroscientists, biologists, and scientific leaders believe that we only understand a sliver of what is real. Although we assume our senses are telling us the truth, they’re actually fabricated to us. Considering senses are unique from person to person, and through our unique senses we can only intemperate a fraction of what is real, there is no all-encompassing perspective one can have. Because of this, we need to take our perceptions seriously, but not literally. Multiple perspectives have to be taken, as each will have some sort of truth lies within them. Seeing partial truth in multiple perspectives is fundamental to navigating the world and making informed decisions.

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CHAPTERS:

0:00 Beau Lotto on how we perceive our external reality.

0:32 Alva Noë on how our reality projects into our nervous system.

1:20 Donald Hoffman on if our senses are telling us the truth.

2:58 Frank Wilczek on how we perceive color and sound.

4:41 Daniel Schmachtenberger on perception, choice making, and navigating reality.

6:01 Heather Heying on how to figure out what is true in reality.

6:28 Richard Dawkins on objective reality vs. science

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About the video: “You can find examples of really big environmental problems that we've already solved.” Climate change is solvable, argues Hannah Ritchie.

Doomerism about the state of the planet is widespread right now. Many see climate change as an insurmountable problem that we won’t be able to tackle. But the reality tells a different story, says data scientist Hannah Ritchie.

By stepping back to look at the data and at how the world has changed over centuries, you can actually find examples of really big environmental problems that we've already solved.

By tracing the evolution of human history, we can see that human progress was often very much in conflict with environmental impact. The more that humans progressed, the more the environment degraded. Ritchie argues that now, we're in a unique position where these two things are no longer in conflict, thanks to recent technologies that decouple our human wellbeing with our environmental impact.

chapters for easier navigation:

0:00 - An ‘insurmountable’ problem?

1:10 - 4 key targets to solve climate change

04:27 - How we reduce our emissions

09:36 - Being an ‘urgent optimist’

Up next, The overpopulation myth, debunked by a data scientist ►   • The overpopulation myth, debunked by ...  

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About Hannah Ritchie:

Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and science communicator focused on the largest problems that shape our world, and how to solve them.

Ritchie's work focuses on environmental sustainability, including climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution and deforestation.

Ritchie is a Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development, at the University of Oxford.

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If Einstein couldn’t solve the theory of everything, could anyone? Physicist Michio Kaku explains what it would take. Albert Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life pursing a “theory of everything,” aiming to find a concise equation summarizing the fundamental laws of the Universe. His downfall? Subatomic particles. Physicist Michio Kaku offers an alternative to Einstein’s elusive theory: “string theory.” We could try to explain it, but he does a much better job. After all, he’s one of the co-inventors of it. If you aren’t sold on string theory, Kaku breaks down the three criteria needed to figure out what makes our Universe tick: it must incorporate Einstein’s theory of gravity, explain particle physics, and be mathematically sound. No pressure.

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About Michio Kaku: Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as New York University (NYU).....

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