YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Levin

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231
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2025-11-30
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2025-11-30
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  1. “If that's what I was about to say, is that my guess is it's going to be exactly the problem you said, which is going to say, oh my God, I mean, right in this room, you got, you know, like, oh man. Yeah.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You know, the second question I would ask is what's the answer I should be? What's the question I should be asking you that I probably am not smart enough to ask you? That's the other thing I would say.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It may well be. It may say, what the hell did you make me for in the first place? You guys are screwed. Like, that's possible.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I mean, if it's really an HGF squash. Yeah, if it's really an AGI, I'm like, tell me what the balance is. Like, how much should I be talking to you versus stumbling around in the lab and making all my, you know, all my own mistakes? Was it 70, 30, 1090? I don't know. So that would be the first 80.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Sometimes it's just like, come on, just give me the insulin, let's move on with this cancer protocol and whatever, great. But in the long run, the process of discovering it yourself, how much of that are we willing to give up? And by getting a final answer, how much have we missed of stuff we might have found along the way? Now, I don't know what the thing is, I don't think it's correct to say don't do that at all. Take the time and all the blind alleys and like that may not be optimal either, but we don't know what the optimal is. We don't know how much we should be stumbling around versus having somebody tell us the answer.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, the first thing I would ask is. How much should I even be talking to? For sure, because it's not clear to me at all that getting somebody to tell you an answer in the long run is optimal. It's the difference between when you're a kid learning math and having an older sibling that'll just tell you the answers.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “They're kind of shy, meaning that they're very subtle, not invisible. If you work hard, you can catch them, but they're not invisible, but they're hard to see. And the fact that I think they also affect quote-unquote machines as much as they certainly affect living organisms, I think is incredibly beautiful. And I personally am happy to be part of that same spectrum and the fact that that magic is sort of applicable to everything. A lot of people find that extremely disturbing. And that's some of the hate mail I get is like, yeah, we were with you on the majesty of life thing until you got to the fact that machines get it too. And now that's like terrible, right? You're kind of devaluing the majesty of life. And I don't know. The idea that we're now catching these patterns and we're able to do meaningful research on the interfaces.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I mean, I must say that I sometimes think about these ingressions from this space as a kind of steganography. So steganography is when you hide data and messages within the bits of another pattern that don't matter, right? And the rule of stegonography is you can't mess up the main thing. So if it's a picture of a cat or whatever, you've got to keep the cat. But if there's bits that don't matter, you can kind of stick stuff. So I feel like all these aggressions are a kind of universal steganography that there's this like these patterns seep into everything everywhere they can.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “The more you think about how to present things so that other people get it, it constrains and it bends you start to think. And what I tell my students and others is there's two kinds of advice. There's very practical specific things. Like somebody says, well, you forgot this control or this isn't the right method or you shouldn't be. That stuff is gold and you should take that very seriously and you should use it to improve your craft. And that's like super important. But then there's the meta advice where people like, that's not a good way to think about it. Don't work on this. This stuff is garbage and even very successful people often give very constraining, terrible advice. Like one of my reviewers in the paper years ago said, I love this Freudian slip. He said he's going to give me constrictive criticism. And that's exactly what he gave me, was constrictive criticism. I was like, that's awesome. That's a great typo.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You need another part of your mind that ignores all that shit completely because this other part of your mind has to be pure. It has to be, I don't care what anybody else thinks about this, I don't care whether this is publishable, describable. I don't care if anybody gets it. I don't care if anybody thinks it's stupid. This is what I think and give it space to sort of grow, right? And if you keep, if you try to mush them together, I found that impossible because the practical stuff poisons the other stuff. If you're too much on the creative end, you can be an amazing thinker. It's just nothing ever materializes. But if you're very practical, it tends to poison the other stuff because”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Describe it, you need to, it's the act of bifurcating your mind, and you need to have two different regions. One region is the practical region of impact. In other words, how do I get my idea in out into the world so that other people recognize it? What should I say? What are people hearing? What are they able to hear? How do I pivot it? What parts do I not talk about? Which journal am I going to publish? And is it time now? Do I wait two years for this? All the practical stuff that is all about how it looks from the out. All the stuff that I can't say this or I should say this differently or this is going to freak people out or this is, you know, this community wants to hear this so I can pivot it this way. Like all that practical stuff, it's got to be there, otherwise you're not going to be in a position to follow up any of your ideas. You're not going to have a career. You're not going to have resources to do anything. But it's very important that that can't be the only thing.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Let's see. Well, the first and most important thing I've learned is not to take too much advice. And so I don't like to give too much advice. But I do have one technique that I found very useful. And this isn't for everybody, but there's a specific demographic is a lot of unconventional people reach out to me and I try to respond and help them and so on. This is a technique that I think is useful for some people”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I mean, I hate to bring up the Platonic space again, but I need to bust my ass and be prepped in one A to work hard, to be able to recognize the idea when it comes, and B, to actually have an outlet for it so that when it does come, we have a lab and we have people who can help me do it and then we can actually get it out. So that's my part is be up at 4 30 a.m. doing your thing and be ready for it. But the other side of the collaboration is that, yeah, when you do that, like amazing ideas come and to say that it's me, I don't think would be would be right. I think it's definitely coming from other places.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “This is anthropoting. This is limb regeneration. This is the new cancer paper. This is whatever. Yeah, those things are very linear.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “But that's just the theoretical philosophical stuff. The empirical work that we're doing with in the lab, I mean, those are, we know exactly, you know.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And then there's more that isn't for anybody else's view. But yeah, I try to be very organized because otherwise I forget. So everything is in the mind map. Things are in manuscripts. I have something like right now probably 163, 62 open manuscripts that are in process of being written at various stages. And when things come up, I stick them in the right manuscript in the right place so that when I'm finally ready to finalize, then I'll put words around it, whatever. But there's like outlines of everything. So I try to be organized because I can't, I don't have to, you know.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I tend to leave myself a lot of voicemails because as I'm walking around, I'm like, oh man, this idea. And so I'll just call my office and leave myself a voicemail for later to transcribe. I don't have a good enough memory to remember any of these things. And so what I keep is a mind map. So I have an enormous mind map. one piece of it hangs in my lab so that people can see like these are the ideas this is how they link together here's everybody's project i'm working on this how the hell does this attach to everybody else so they can track it the thing that hangs in the lab is about nine feet wide it's a silk sheet and i you know it's it's out of date within a couple of weeks of my of my printing because new stuff keeps moving around”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And mentally, right? So because I'm not walking around thinking, okay, let's see. So, for this experiment, we got a, you know, I got to get this piece of equipment and this, like, that goes away. And it's like, okay, what's the lighting and what's the, what am I looking at? And during that time, when you're not thinking about that other stuff, then they say, well, yeah, I got to get a notebook. And I'm like, look, this is what we need to do. So that kind of stuff.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Brain off of the linear, like logical careful train of thought enough to release it so that you can ideate a little more while your hands are busy.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Kinds of, I look for symmetries a lot, and I'm like, okay, this thing is like that way, in what way? What's the fewest number of things I would have to move to make this map onto that? So those are, you know, those are kind of mental tools. The physical process for me is basically, I mean, obviously I'm fortunate to have a lot of discussions with very smart people. And so in my group, I've hired some amazing people. So we, of course, have a lot of discussions and some stuff comes out of that. My process is I do pretty much every morning, or I'm outside for sunrise, and I walk around in nature. This is not really anything better than as inspiration, right, than nature. I do photography, and I find that it's a good meditative tool because it keeps your hands and brain just busy enough. Like you don't have to think too much, but, you know, you're sort of twiddling and looking and doing some stuff. And it keeps your...”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, a lot of it is releasing the constraints that mentally have been placed on us. And part of it is my education has been a little weird because I was a computer scientist first and only later biology. And so by the time I heard all the biology things that we typically just take on board, I was already a little skeptical and thinking a little differently. A lot of it comes from releasing constraints. And I very specifically think about, okay, this is what we know. What would things look like if we were wrong? Or what would it look like if I was wrong? What are we missing? What is our worldview specifically not able to see, right? Whatever model I have. Or another way I often think is I'll take two things that are considered to be very different things and I'll say, let's just imagine those as two points on a continuum. What does that look like? What does the middle of that continuum look like? What's the symmetry there? What's the parameter that I can't knob I can turn from to get from here to there.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Well, the mental part is a lot of it, much like funny enough, much like making Zanobots. We make Xenobots by releasing constraints, right? We don't do anything to them. We just release them from the constraints they already have. And then we see.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “What kinds of things do we need to take seriously as other beings with which to relate to? So I've already pushed it. So like we knew brainy things and then we said, well, it's not just brains. And then we said, well, it's not just in physical space and it's not just biologicals and it's not just complexity. There's a couple of other steps to take that I'm. Pretty sure are there, but we're going to have to do the actual work to make it actionable before we really talk about it. So that direction.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Yeah. Well, the kind of background to this is simply that I've had a lot of weird ideas for many, many decades. And my general policy is not to talk about stuff until it becomes actionable. And the amazing thing, I mean, I'm really kind of shocked is that in my lifetime, the empirical work, like I really didn't think we would get this far. And the knob, I have this like mental knob of what percentage of the weird things I think do I actually say in public, right? And every few years when the empirical work moves forward, I sort of turn that knob a little, right, as we keep going. So I have no idea if we'll continue to be that fortunate or how long I can keep doing this or however, like, I don't know. But just to give you a direction for it, it's going to be in the direction of”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “I would be very excited about it because it would give us some more unconventional embodiments to think about, right? A data point that's pretty far away from our existing data points, at least in this solar system. So that'd be cool. I'd be very excited about it. But I must admit that my level of my set point for surprise has been pushed so high at this point that it would have to be something really weird to make me shocked. I mean, the things that we see every day is just, yeah.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Think it's essential. I think it's essential. We are so parochial in what we expect to find in terms of life that we are going to be just completely missing a lot of stuff. If we can't even agree on, never mind definitions of life, but what's actually important. I led a paper recently where I asked whatever, 65 or so modern working scientists for a definition of life. And we had so many different definitions across so many different dimensions. We had to use AI to make amorphous space out of it. And there was zero consensus about what actually is important. And if we're not good at recognizing it here, I just don't see how we're going to be good at recognizing it somewhere else.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I'm sure we are. But one of my favorite things about that kind of work have you seen three or four papers showing that ant colonies fall for the same visual illusions that we fall for? Not the ants, the colonies. So, if you lay out food in particular patterns, they'll do things like complete lines that aren't there and all the same shit that we fall for.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “We don't know because it's really hard to do experiments on larger systems. It's a lot easier to go down than it is to go up. But my suspicion is, you know, like the Buddhists say innumerable sentient beings. I think by the time you get to that degree of infinity, it kind of doesn't matter to compare. I suspect there's just massive numbers of them.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “However, we have to be humble about these things and recognize that all of those IQ metrics that we've come up with so far were derived from an N of one example of the evolutionary lineage here on Earth. And so we are probably missing a lot of them. So I would say we have plenty to start. We have so much to start with WikiFive, tens of thousands of people busy just testing things now. But we have to be aware that we're probably missing a lot of important ones.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, yes and no. The yes part is that what, as we have shown, you can take existing IQ metrics, I mean literally existing kinds of ways that people used to measure intelligence of animals and humans and whatever, and you can apply them to very weird things. If you have the imagination to make the interface, you can do it. And we've done it, and we've shown creative problem solving and all this kind of stuff. So, yes.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I mean, guaranteed, we've already seen in our own bodies, and I don't just mean that we are host to a bunch of microbiome or any of that, I mean that your cells, and we have all kinds of work on this every day, they traverse these alien spaces, 20,000-dimensional spaces and other spaces. They solve problems. I think they suffer when they fail to meet their goals. They have stress reduction when they meet their goals. These things are inside of us. They are all around us. I think that we have an incredible degree of mind blindness to all of the very alien kinds of minds around us. And I think that looking for aliens off the earth is awesome and whatever. But if we can't recognize the ones that are inside our own bodies, what chance do we have to really recognize the ones that are out there?”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “That's our cancer therapeutic, which is that what you see in cancer literally is cells electrically disconnect from their neighbors when they were part of a giant memory that was working on making a nice organ. Well, now they can't remember any of that. Now they're just amoebas and the rest of the body is just external environment. And what we found is if you then physically reconnect them to the network, you don't have to fix the DNA. You don't have to kill the cells with chemo. You can just reconnect them. and they go back to because they're now part of this larger collective. They go back to what they were working on. And so yeah, I think we can intervene at that scale.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Yeah, we have some collaborators in a company called SoftMax that we're working with to do some of that stuff. In biology”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Mind melt between the two cells where nobody's quite sure whose memory it is, and when you share memories like this, it's harder to say that I'm separate from you. If we share the same memories, we're kind of a, and I don't mean every single memories, right? So they still have some identity, but to a large extent they have a little bit of a mind melt. And there's many complexities you can lean on top of it. But what it means is that if you have a large group of cells, they now have joint memories of what happened to us as opposed to you know what happened to you and I know what happened to me. And that enables a higher cognitive light cone because you have greater computational capacity, you have a greater area of concern of things you want to manage. I don't just want to manage my tiny little memory states because I'm getting your memories now. I know I got to manage this whole thing. So both of these things end up scaling the size of things you care about. And that is a major ladder for cognition is this scale, the degree of, you know,”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “So imagine your two cells, and imagine something happens to this cell. And it sends a signal over to this cell. Traditionally, you send a signal over this cell receives it. It's very clear that it came from outside. So this cell can do many things. It could ignore it. It could take on the information. It could just ignore it. It could reinterpret it. It could do whatever. But it's very clear that came from outside. Now imagine the kind of thing that we study, which is called gap junctions. These are electrical synapses that could directly link the internal milliers of two cells. If something happens to this cell and let's say it gets poked and there's a calcium spike or something, that propagates through the gap junction here. This cell now has the same information, but this cell has no idea. Wait a minute, is that my memory or is that his memory? Because it's the same. It's the same components. And so what you're able to do now is to have a mind melt.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Irritated by them as if it was their own stress. So they become a little more plastic, they become ready to kind of adopt different fates. You get up to where you're going and then everybody's stress can drop. So notice what can happen by a very simple mechanism, just be leaky for your own stress. My problems become your problems. Not because you're altruistic, not because you actually care about my problems. There's no mechanism for you to actually care about my problems. But just that simple mechanism means that Faraway regions are now responsive to the needs of other regions, such that complex rearrangements and things like that can happen. It's alignment of everybody to the same goal through this very dumb, simple stress sharing thing.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “It's a physical implementation of the error function. It's basically the amount of stress is basically the delta between where you are now and where you need to be, not necessarily in physical position. This could be an anatomical space and physiological space, in transcriptional space, whatever, right? It's just the delta from your set point. So you're stressed out, but these guys are happy. They're not moving. You can't get past them. Now imagine if what you could do is you could leak your stress, whatever your stress molecule is. And the cool thing is that evolution is actually conserved these highly. So these are all, and we're studying all of these things. They're actually highly conserved. If you start leaking your stress molecules, then all of this stuff around here is starting to get stressed out. When things get stressed, starting to get stressed out, their temperature in the not physical temperature, but in the sense of like simulated annealing or something, right? Their ability to, their plasticity goes up because they're feeling stress. They need to relieve that stress. And because all the stress molecules are the same, they don't know it's not their stress.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I'll give you two mechanisms that we found, but again, just to be clear these are mechanisms of the physical interface. What we haven't gotten is a mature theory of how they map onto the space. That's just like just beginning. But I'll tell you what the physical side of things look like. The first one has to do with stress propagation. Imagine that you got a bunch of cells and there's a cell down here that needs to be up there. All of these cells are exactly where they need to go. So they're happy, their stress is low. This cell, now let's imagine stress is basically a”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “That's just a molecular network. Then you become a cell, and then you're many cells, and now you're navigating anatomical morphosphosph space, and you're hosting all kinds of other patterns. And eventually, and I think, again, I think there's, and this is like what, you know, all the stuff that we're trying to work out now, there's a consistent feedback between the ingressions you get and the ability to have new ones, which again, I think it's this like positive feedback cycle where the more of these free gifts you pull down, they allow you physically to develop to ways where, oh, look, now we're suitable for more and higher ones. And this continuously goes and goes and goes until you're able to pull down a full human set of behavioral capacities.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “I think we have to keep in mind that physics and chemistry are not real things. They are lenses that we put on the world, that they are perspectives where we say we are, for the time being, for the duration of this chemistry class or career or whatever, we are going to put aside all the other levels and we're going to focus on this one level and that what is fundamentally going on during that process is an amazing positive feedback loop of collective intelligence for the interface. It's the physical interface is scaling the cognitive light cone that it can support. So it's going from a molecular network, the molecular network can already do things like Pavlovian conditioning. You don't start with zero. When you have a simple molecular network, you are already hosting some patterns from the platonic space that look like Pavlovian conditioning. You've already got that starting out.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “It's a virtuous cycle, it's an asymmetry that points upwards for agency and intelligence, and now back to our Platonic space stuff, where does that come from? Doesn't come from evolution, you don't need to have any evolution for this evolution will optimize the crap out of it for sure, but you don't need evolution to have this. Does it come from physics? It comes from the rules of information, the causal information theory, and the behavior of networks, the mathematical objects. This is not anything that was given to you by physics or by a history of selection. It's a free gift from math. And those two free gifts from math lock together into a spiral that I think causes simultaneously arise in intelligence and arise in collective agency. And I think that's just, you know, that's been just amazing to think about.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Positive feedback loop between every time you learn something. You become more of an integrated agent, and every time you do that, it becomes easier to learn. And so it's”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “There's no individual cell that had both experiences, right? The cells at your POG had touched the lever, the cells in your gut got the delicious reward. No individual cell has both experiences. Who owns that associative memory? Well, the rat. So that means you have to be integrated, right? If you're going to learn associative memories from different parts, you have to be an integrated agent that can do that. And so we can measure that now with metrics of causal emergence like phi and things like that. So we know that in order to learn, you have to have significant phi. But I wanted to ask the opposite question. What does learning do for your phi level? Does it do anything for your degree of being an agent that is more than the sum of its parts? So we trained the networks, and sure enough, some of them, not all of them, but some of them, as you train them, their phi goes up. So basically what we were able to find is that there is this”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “And so, what I asked them to do was to calculate the causal emergence of those networks while they're learning. And what I mean by that is this. If you're a rat and you learn to press a lever and get a reward,”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Where does he begin? You have to know what your borders are. So that action of aligning your parts and coming to be this, I mean, I'm even going to say this emergence. We just don't have a good vocabulary for it, this emergence of a model that aligns all the parts is really critical to keep that thing going. There's something else that's really interesting. I was thinking about this in the context of this question of these beautiful kind of ideas. There's this amazing thing that we find in this is largely the work of Federico Pagosi and my group. So a couple of years ago, we saw that networks of chemicals can learn. They have five or six different kinds of learning that they can do.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And give them, bend their action space. You're going to have to deform their option space with signals, with behavior shaping cues, with rewards and punishments, whatever you got. Your job as an agent is ownership of your parts, is alignment of your parts. I think that fundamentally is going to give rise to this ability. Now, that also means having a boundary saying, okay, this is the stuff I control. This is me, this other stuff over here is outside world. I have to figure out, you don't know where that is, by the way. You have to figure it out. And an embryogenesis, it's really cool. You can, as a grad student, I used to do this experiment with duck embryos. It's a flat blastidisc. And you take a needle and put some scratches into it. And every island you make for a while until they heal up thinks it's the only embryo. There's nothing else around. So it becomes an embryo. And eventually you get twins and triplets and quadruplets and things like that. But each one of them at the border, you know, they're joined. Well, where do I end?”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Well, I think so. I think so in two ways. The first thing is just physically what happens. So I think that your first task as a being, and again, I don't think this is a binary thing. I think this is a positive feedback loop that sort of cranks up and up. Your first task as a being coming into this world is to tell a very compelling story to your parts. As a biological, you are made of a gentle parts. Those parts need to be aligned, literally, into a goal they have no comprehension of. If you're going to move through anatomical space by means of a bunch of cells which only know physiological and metabolic spaces and things like that, you are going to have to develop a model.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I suspect so, and I think so because of the way we come into being. So one of the things that I should be working on is this paper called Booting Up the Agent. And it talks about the very earliest steps of becoming a being in this world. Kind of like you can do this for a computer. And before you switch to power on, it belongs to the domain of physics, right? It obeys the laws of physics. You switch the power on. Some number of, what, nanoseconds, microseconds, I don't know, later, you have a thing that, oh look, it's taking instructions off the stack and doing them, right? So now it's executing an algorithm. How did you get from physics to executing an algorithm? What was happening during the boot up exactly before it starts to run code or whatever, right? And so we can ask that same question in biology. What are the earliest steps of becoming a being?”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “For the interface. So if you could. So here's my prediction for Star Trek Transporter. For whatever reason right now, your brain and body are very attuned and attractive to a particular pattern, which is your set of psychological propensities. If we could rebuild that exact same thing somewhere else, I don't see any reason why that same pattern wouldn't come through it the same way it comes through this one. That would be a guess, you know? So I think what you will be copying is the physical interface and hoping to maintain whatever it is about that interface that was appropriate for that pattern. We don't really know what that is at this point.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “On. We don't understand, but it is a very curious thing that is not a prediction of, I'm not saying it can't, you know, you can take modern neuroscience and sort of bend it into a pretzel to accommodate it. You can say, well, there are these kind of redundancies and things like this, right? So you can accommodate it, but it doesn't predict this. So there are these incredibly curious cases. Do I think you can copy it? No, I don't think you can because what you're going to be copying is the interface, the front end, the brain or whatever. The action is actually the pattern the Platonic space. You're going to be able to copy that? I doubt it. But what you could do is produce another interface through which that particular pattern is going to come through. I think that's probably possible. I can't say anything about at this point about what that would take, but my guess is that that's possible.”

    2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source