Richard Watson on Giant's Shoulder (Sept 2026): cognition before natural selection

The video is titled as a Levin episode but the guest is Richard Watson (Southampton). Core claim: any network whose connections 'give way under stress' (plastic springs, chemical networks, gene networks, ecosystems) learns better-than-random solutions to constraint problems, so problem-solving can precede natural selection without brains, genes, or design. The published models are peer-reviewed; that this is how life actually began is Watson's hypothesis. He also describes moving toward analytic idealism (Kastrup) and says 'the universe wants to know itself,' labeling that part metaphysics.