Defenders of IIT and critics of unfounded AI consciousness attribution need to establish a strategic presence within the AI industry and community to prevent metaphysical misconceptions from corrupting public understanding and policy.

How does a cell on the tip of your thumb know to become an epithelial cell while a cell inside your head becomes a neuron when all cells originate from stem cells and the same fertilized egg, if not through morphogenetic organizing principles beyond genetic instruction?

Michael Levin's work is important not primarily for its philosophical implications but for the sheer experimental evidence that demonstrates organizing principles beyond DNA, as the experimental demonstrations themselves are mesmerizing regardless of metaphysical interpretation.

Critics of IIT who claim it is pseudoscience because it starts from introspectively-derived qualities of consciousness rather than purely external observations are themselves employing ad hominem arguments that signal desperation, since any theory of consciousness must start by describing what consciousness actually is.

The worst consequence of misdiagnosing locked-in patients as vegetative is not that they might be unplugged and killed, but that they are left alive in a state of complete solitude, boredom, and torture, conscious but unable to communicate or interact.

You can only refine IIT's model of consciousness based on data from living humans because only humans can report their subjective experience through introspection; cats cannot report and black holes cannot tell you what it is like to be a black hole.

In planaria experiments, Michael Levin's team trained flatworms to navigate a maze, then decapitated them and removed their entire nervous system. After two weeks, the regenerated head with a completely new nervous system remembered the maze navigation, proving memory is not encoded in the nervous system.

Kastrup worked at ASML as an engineer and later founded Silicon Hive in 2002 with partners who are now back with him at Synthetics; Silicon Hive was sold to Intel many years ago, and at age 50 Kastrup is now working with the same team again, which feels like returning to his entrepreneurial passion from age 26.

No organism has ever been created by pasting cells together; every organism on the planet has always grown from a cell, suggesting growth from a cell is fundamental to what life is.

Morphogenesis—the developmental process by which organisms form their shape—is governed by macrolevel imminent organizing principles in nature, which may be archetypal templates that inform the structure of life independent of and prior to genetic expression.

Michael Levin is able to manipulate bioelectric fields in such a way that human cancer cells with irreversible genetic defects, when implanted in a frog, do not develop into tumors, because the holistic organizing principles of the frog's bioelectric field override the genetic damage.

Autopsy studies of people who died in traffic accidents found that approximately 50% of people across all ages and health statuses had minor cancer tumors, suggesting that humans continuously develop small cancers throughout life that remain benign due to intact holistic organizing principles.

Bernardo Kastrup is currently still CEO of Synthetics but soon will become Chief Scientific Officer (within the next few days as of this conversation), transitioning from executive leadership to scientific direction of the company.

Michael Levin uses the language of 'cognitive glue' to describe bioelectric fields—they allow cells to cognitively understand and cooperate with one another, and when this cognitive bridge breaks down through dissociation, cells cease to obey the body plan.

Analytic idealism is the philosophical framework that the universe is fundamentally conscious—composed of one field of subjectivity or one mind—and everything else, including physical matter, is the appearance or expression of that fundamental consciousness.

According to Integrated Information Theory, consciousness emerges from or correlates with systems that maximize integrated information—the unification of diverse information into a coherent, irreducible whole—and dissociation occurs when a system optimizes integrated information by shedding parts that are diluting rather than contributing to total integration.

Artificial neural networks used in AI (like those running ChatGPT) are vastly oversimplified models of biological neural networks: artificial neurons are modeled as binary (firing or not firing) whereas real neurons operate on continuous analog potentials; artificial networks have far fewer connections than biological brains; and recent evidence suggests biological neurons can sustain quantum coherence in microtubules, orders of magnitude more complex than digital artificial systems.

Classical von Neumann digital computer architecture necessarily keeps integrated information low because successful engineering design requires managing complexity through subsystems with clear interfaces, and this modular design principle—which is essential for human cognitive tractability—precludes high integrated information, meaning ChatGPT and other current AI systems cannot be conscious by IIT measures.

IIT is the first scientific theory to bridge the noumenal (things as they are in themselves, the inner subjective realm) and the phenomenal (things as they appear to us, the physical measurements): it correlates subjective experience reports with brain activity measurements, building a mathematical bridge between first-person consciousness and third-person neuroscience.

Physical measurements (brain scans) can only give incomplete information about consciousness because physical measurements are appearances, not reality: just as you cannot see everything about a person from their appearance, brain activity need not reveal everything about inner experience, leaving room for aspects of consciousness (like psychedelic experiences) that correlate with minimal brain activity.