YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Levin

lines on the record: 231
first: 2025-11-30
most recent: 2025-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Correct. And we are beginning to map it, but this is a massive effort. So a couple of conjectures here. One is that I strongly suspect that the majority of what we think of as the mind is the pattern in that space. And one of the interesting predictions from that model, which is not a prediction of modern neuroscience, is that there should be cases where there's very minimal brain and yet normal IQ function. This has been seen clinically. The Karina Kaufman and I reviewed this in a paper recently, a bunch of cases of humans where there's very little brain tissue and they have normal or sometimes above normal intelligence. Now things are not simple because that obviously doesn't happen all the time, right? Most of the time that doesn't happen. So what's going on?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things. So we are now beyond anything that I can say with any certainty. This is total conjecture. Because we don't know yet. The whole point of this is we actually don't really understand very well the relationship between the interface and the thing.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not claiming it's simple. That is in no way simple because, again, you have to, all of this, all of the regenerate medicine stuff that we do balances on one key thing, which is learning to communicate to the system. We have to, if you're going to convince that system, so when we make gut tissue into an eye, you have to convince those cells that they're priors about, we are gut precursors. Those priors are wrong, and you should adopt this new worldview that you're going to be an eye. So being convincing and figuring out what kind of messages are convincing to cells and how to speak the language and how to make them take on new beliefs, literally, is at the root of all of these future advances in birth defects and regenerate medicine and cancer. And that's what's going on here. I'm not saying it's simple, but I can see the path.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, yes, yes, and that's my hypothesis, and we have a whole bunch of research being done on this. Was a study where they went into an old age home and they redid the decor like 60s style when all these folks were really young and they found all kinds of improvements in blood chemistry and stuff like that because they say it was sort of mentally taking them back to when they were the way they were at that time. I think this is a basal version of that, that basically if you're finding yourself in an embryonic environment What's more plausible that you're young or what? I think this is the basic feature of biology is to is to update priors based on experience.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Environment screams I'm an embryo. Basically, there's no other cells around. You're being bent into a pretzel. They actually express some embryonic genes. You're an embryo. And I think it doesn't, it's not enough new evidence to roll them all the way back, but it's enough to update them to about 28% back.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we make the anthropots from cells that we get from human tracheal epithelium. We collaborated with Steve's group, the Clock Foundation. We sent them a bunch of cells. And we saw that if you check the anthropots themselves, they are roughly 20% younger than the cells they come from. And so that's amazing. And I can give you a theory of why that happens, although we're still investigating. And then I can tell you the implications for longevity and things like that. My theory for why it happens, I call this age evidencing. And I think that what's happening here, like with a lot of biology, is that cells have to update their priors based on experience. And so I think that they come from an old body. They have a lot of priors about how many years they've been around and all that.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a procedure called an epigenetic clock where what you can do is look at a particular epigenetic states of cells and compare to a curve that was built from humans of known age. You can guess what the age is. So we can take now, and this is Steve Hovrath's work and many other people, that when you take a set of cells, you can guess what their biological age is.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the fact that the first intrinsic motivation that we noticed out of that system was benevolent and healing. Like, I thought that was pretty cool. And we don't know. Maybe the next 20 things we find are going to be some sort of damaging effect. I can't tell you that. But the first thing that we saw was kind of a positive one. And I don't know, that makes me feel better.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're doing all that. We're doing all that. We're testing. We're testing the stuff in other algorithms we're looking for. We're developing suites of code to look for other properties. To some extent, it's very hard because we don't know what to look for, but we do have a behaviors handbook which tells you what all kinds of things to look for. The delay gratification, the problem solving, like we have all that. I'll tell you an N of one of an interesting biological intrinsic motivation because people, so in the alignment community and stuff, there's a lot of discussion about what are the intrinsic motivations going to be of AIs? What are their goals going to be? What are they going to want to do? Just as an NF1 observation, anthrobots, the very first thing we checked for. So this is not experiment number 972 out of a thousand things. This is the very first thing we checked for. We put them on a plate of neurons with a big wound through them, a big scratch. First thing they did was heal the wound. So it's an NF1, but I, I, I,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to sort. There's no miracle. You're going to sort. But as long as you can do other stuff while you're sorting, it's not forbidden. And what we don't know is to what extent are the two things linked? So if you do have a system that's very good at language, are the others, the side quests that it's capable of, do they have anything to do with language whatsoever? We don't know the answer to that. The answer might be no, in which case all of the stuff that we've been saying about language models because of what they're saying, all of that could be a total red herring and not really important and the really exciting stuff is what we never looked for. Or in complex systems, maybe those things become linked. In biology, they're linked. In biology, evolution makes sure that the things you're capable of have a lot to do with what you've actually been selected for. In these things, I don't know. And so we might find out that they actually do give the language some sort of leg up, or we might find that the language is just, you know.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they just have to be showing up in these other more complex AIs and things like that. The only thing what we don't know, but we're going to find out, is to what extent there is interaction between the, so I call these things side quests. It's like in a game, whether it's the main thing you're supposed to do. And then as long as you still do it, the thing about this is you have to sort.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, we've looked at five other systems. That's a small n, okay, but just looking at that, I would find it very surprising if bubble sort was able to do this, and then there was some sort of valley of death where nothing showed up, and then blah blah living things. Like, I can't imagine that. I'm going to say that if something, and we actually have a system that's even simpler than this, which is 1 Decellular Automata that's doing some weird stuff. If these things are to be found in this kind of simple system,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm not saying they're unaware of that. I mean, they're generally a pretty sophisticated bunch. I just think they've picked a level and they're going to discover what is to be seen at that level, which is a lot. And my point is the stuff that the behavior scientists are interested in shows up at a much lower level than you think.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanism and explanation are both not all they're cracked up to be in the sense that anything you and I do, we could come up with the most beautiful theory, we paint a painting, anything we do, somebody could say, well, I was watching the biochemistry and the Schr ⁇ dinger equation playing out, and it totally described everything that was happening. You didn't break even a single law of biochemistry, nothing to see here, nothing to see, right? Like, okay, you know, consistent with the low-level rules. You can do the same thing here. You can look at the machine code and say, yeah, this thing is just executing machine code. You can go further and say, oh, it's quite quantum foam. It's just doing the thing that quantum foam does.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's my suspicion, and I think that it is extremely important for us as humans to have a research program to learn to recognize, predict, and recognize. We make things, never mind something as simple as this. We make social structures, financial structures, internet of things, robotics, AI. We make all this stuff. And we think that the thing we make it do is the main show. And I think it is very important for us to learn to recognize the kind of stuff that sneaks in into the spaces.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even the simplest algorithms have these kinds of things going on. And so that's why I think something like this is significant.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Algorithms, there are spaces in which you can do other new things, not just random stuff, not just complex stuff, but things that are easily recognizable to a behavior scientist. You see, that's the point here. And I think that kind of intrinsic motivation is what's telling us that this idea that we can carve up the world, we can say, okay, look, biology is complex, cognition, who knows what's responsible for that, but at least we can take a chunk of the world aside and we can cut it off and we can say these are the dumb machines. These are just these algorithms, whereas we know the rules of biochemistry don't explain everything we want to know about how psychology is going to go, but at least the rules of algorithms tell us exactly what the machines are going to do, right? We have some hope that we've carved off a little part of the world and everything is nice and simple, and it is exactly what we said it was going to be. I think that failed. I think it was a good try. I think we have good theories of interfaces.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the bubble sword, which has been gone over and gone over how many times has these kinds of things that we didn't see coming, what about the AIs, the language model, everything else, not because they talk, not because they say that have an inner perspective or any of that, but just from the fact that this thing is even the most minimal system surprises with what happens. And I frankly, when I see this, tell me if this doesn't sound like all of our existential story for the brief time that we're here, the universe is going to grind us into dust eventually, but until then, we get to do some cool stuff that is intrinsically motivating to us, that is neither forbidden by the laws of physics nor determined by the laws of physics, but eventually it kind of comes to an end. So I think that aspect of it, right, that there are spaces even in”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the other intrinsic motivations are that he might be doing, right? Who knows what else he might be interested in? So I wanted to ask this question. If we let off the pressure on the sorting, what would happen? Now, that's hard because if you mess with the algorithm, now it's no longer the same algorithm. So you don't want to do that. So we did something that I think was kind of clever. We allowed repeat digits. So if you allow repeat digits in your array, you can still have all the fives can still be after all the fours and after all the sixes, but you can keep them as clustered as you want. So this thing at the end where they have to get declustered in order for the sorting to happen, we thought maybe we could let off the pressure a little bit. If you do that, all you do is allow some extra repeat digits. The clustering gets bigger. It will cluster as much as you let it. The clustering is what it wants to do. The sorting is what we're forcing it to do. And my only point is...”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sorting of the digits is what we forced it to do. The clustering is an intrinsic motivation. We didn't ask for it. We didn't expect it to happen. We didn't explicitly forbid it, but we didn't know. This is a great definition of the intrinsic motivation of a system. So when people say, oh, that's a machine, it only does what you programmed it to do. I, as a human, have intrinsic motivation. I'm creative and I have intrinsic motivation. Machines don't do that. Even this minimal thing has a minimal kind of intrinsic motivation, which is something that is not forbidden by the algorithm, but isn't prescribed by the algorithm either. And I think that's an important third thing besides chance and necessity. Something else that's fun about this is when you think about intrinsic motivations, think about a child. If you make him sit in math class all day, you're never going to know.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this goes back to the very first thing you said about physicists thinking that physics is enough. You're 100% correct that somebody could look at this and say, well, I see exactly why this is happening. We can track through the algorithm. Yeah, you can. There's no miracle going on here, right? The hardware isn't doing some crazy thing that it wasn't supposed to do. The point is that despite following the algorithm to do one thing, it is also at the same time doing other things that are neither prescribed nor forbidden by the algorithm. It's the space between the chance and necessity, which is how a lot of people see these things. It's that free space. We don't really have a good vocabulary for it where the interesting things happen. And to whatever extent it's doing other things that are useful, that stuff is computationally without extra cost. Now, there's one other cool thing about this, and this is the beginning of a lot of thinking that I've done about when this relates to AI and stuff like that, intrinsically motivation.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The clustering was free. We didn't pay for that at all. There were no extra steps. So this gets back to your other question of how do we know there's a platonic space and this is kind of like one of the craziest things that we're doing. I actually suspect we can get free compute out of it. I suspect that one of the things that we can do here is use these ingressions in a useful way that don't require you to pay physical cost, right? Like we know every bit has an energy cost that you have to get. The clustering was free. Nothing extra was done.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of that exists in our algorithm. You don't have any way of knowing what algotype you are or what anybody else is. We didn't have to pay for that at all. So notice a couple of interesting things. The first interesting thing is that this was not at all obvious from the From the algorithm itself. Algorithm doesn't say anything about algotypes. Second thing is we paid computationally for all the steps needed to have the numbers sorted, right? Because we know you pay for certain computation costs.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in between. In between, you get some amount of increased very significant, because look at the control is in the middle, the pink is in the middle. In between, you get significant amounts of clustering, meaning that certain algotypes like to hang out with their buddies for as long as they can. Now, here's one more thing, and then I'll kind of give a philosophical significance of this. So we saw this and I said, that's nuts because the algorithm doesn't have any provisions for asking what algotype am I, what algotype is my neighbor. If we're not the same, I'm going to move to be next to like if you wanted to implement this, you would have to write a whole bunch of extra steps. There would have to be a whole bunch of observations that you would have to take of your neighbor to see how he's acting. Then you would infer what algo type he is, then you would go stand next to the one that seems to have the same algo type as you. You would have to take a bunch of measurements to say, wait, is that guy doing bubble sword or is he doing selection? Like if you wanted to implement this, it's a whole bunch of algorithmic steps.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly what we call it. We call it clustering. And at first, so now think of what happens. And you can see this on that graph. It's the red. You start off the clustering is at 50% because as I told you, we assign the allotypes randomly. So the odds that the guy next to you is the same as you is half 50%. There's only two allotypes. In the end, it is also 50% because the thing that dominates is actually the sorting algorithm. And the sorting algorithm doesn't care what type you are. You've got to get the numbers in order. So by the time you're done, you're back to random algo types because you have to get the numbers sorted.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the odds that whatever algo type you are, the guys next to you are your same type? It's not the same as asking how the numbers are sorted because it's got nothing to do with the numbers. It's just whatever type you are.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sticking. We haven't done the thing where they can swap between they're sticking to it, right? You label them and they're sticking to it. The first thing we learned is that the first thing we learned is that distributed sorting still works. It's amazing. You don't need a central planner. When every number is doing its whole thing, still gets sorted. That's cool. The second thing we found is that when you make a chimeric algorithm where actually the algorithms are not even matching, that works too. The thing still gets sorted. That's cool. But the most amazing thing is when we looked at something that had nothing to do with sorting, and that is we asked the following question. We defined Adam Goldstein actually named this property, and I think it's well named. We define the albo type of a single cell, not the genotype, it's not the phenotype, it's the algotype. The alga type is simply this. What algorithm are you following? Which one are you? Are you a selection sort or a bubble sort? There's two alga types. And we simply ask the following question. During that process of sorting,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is back to your question about physics and chemistry. Like, yeah, you can know everything there is to know about how the physics and the genetics work. But the decision making is like baby axolotls have legs. Tableas don't have legs. It's a frogolodle going to have legs, right? Can you predict that from understanding the physics of transcription and all of that? Anyway. So we made some. So you see this is like an intersection of biology, physics, and cognition. So we made chimeric algorithms and we said, okay, half the digits randomly. We assign them randomly. So half the digits are randomly doing bubble sort, half the digits are randomly doing selection sort or something.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, we're just going to do that. Once you've done that, and by the way, one of the values of doing that is that you can simulate biological processes because in biology, you know, if I have like a frog face and I scramble it with all the different organs, every tissue is going to rearrange itself so that ultimately you have nose, eyes, you're going to have an organ, right? So you can do that. But okay, fine. But you can do something else cool. Once you've done that, you can do something cool that you can't do with a standard algorithm. You can make a chimeric algorithm. What I mean is not all the cells have to follow the same algorithm. Some of them might follow bubble sorts. Some of them might follow selection sort. It's like in biology what we do when we make chimeras, we make frog a lotls. So frogolottles have some frog cells. They have some axolotl cells. What is that going to look like? Does anybody know what a frog alloddle is going to look like? It's actually really interesting that despite all the genetics and the developmental biology, you have the genomes, you have the frog genome, you have the axalology genome. Nobody can tell you what a frog allodle is going to look like, even though you have.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competencies, not just complexities. That's the first thing. The second thing, which is also crazy, but it requires a little bit of explanation. The second thing that we said is, okay, what if instead of in the typical sorting algorithm you have a single controller top down, I'm sort of godlike looking down at the numbers and I'm swapping them according to the algorithm. What if, and this goes back to actually the title of the paper talks about a gential data, self-sorting algorithms? This is back to like what's who's the pattern and who's the agent, right? You said, what if we give the numbers a little bit of agency? Here's what we're going to do. We're not going to have any kind of top-down sort. Every single number knows the algorithm and he's just going to do whatever the algorithm says. So if I'm a five, I'm just going to execute the algorithm and the algorithm will try to make sure that to my right is the six and to my left is a four. That's it. So every digit is, so it's like a distributed, it's like an ant colony. There is no central planner. Everybody just does their own algorithm.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it follow all the steps in the algorithms? Yeah, it did. Well, then, there's nothing to see here. There's no magic. This is, you know, it does what it does. It didn't disobey the algorithm. Right. I'm not claiming that this is a miracle. I'm not saying it disobeys the algorithm. I'm saying it's not failing to sort. I'm saying it's not doing some sort of crazy quantum thing. Not saying any of that. What I'm saying is other people might call it emergent. What it has is our properties that are not complexity, not unpredictability, not perverse instantiation, as in sometimes in a life. What it has are unexpected competencies recognizable by behavioral scientists, meaning different types of cognition, primitive. Well, we want it primitive. So there you go. It's simple, that you didn't have to code into the algorithm. That's very important. You get more than you start with than you put in. You didn't have to do that. You get these surprising behavioral.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sorting algorithm is smart enough to do that, but the trick is there are no steps in the algorithm for doing that. You could stare at the algorithm all day long, you would not see that this thing can do delay gratification. It isn't there. Now there's two ways to look at this. On the one hand, you could say the reductionist physics approach. You could say,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to then recoup and get better order later, what it's able to do is to go against the thing that it's trying to do, to go around in order to meet its goal later on. Now, if I showed this to a behavior scientist and I didn't tell him what this system was doing is they will say, well, we know what this is. This is delayed gratification. This is the ability of a system to go against its gradient and get what it needs to do. Now imagine two magnets imagine you take two magnets and you put a piece of wood between them and they're like this. What the magnet is not going to do is to go around the barrier and get to its goal. The nuts smart enough to go against their gradient. They're just going to keep doing this. Some animals are smart enough, right? They'll go around and...”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it eventually sorts it by moving all the stuff around the broken number. It makes sense. But here's something interesting. Suppose we plot at any given moment, we plot the degree of sortedness of the string as a function of time. If you run the normal algorithm, it's guaranteed to get where it's going. It's got to sort and it will always reach the end. But when it encounters one of the broken digits, what happens is the actual sordidness goes down.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between it and its goals. And the first thing I say, okay, how do we put a barrier in? Well, how about this? The traditional algorithm assumes that the hardware is working correctly. So if you have a seven and then the five and you tell them to swap, the lines that swap the five and the seven, and then you go on, you never check, did it swap? Because you assume that it's reliable hardware. So, what we decided to do was to break one of the digits so that it doesn't move. When you tell it to move, it doesn't move. We don't change the algorithm. That's really key. We do not put anything new in the algorithm that says, what do you do if the damn thing didn't move? Just run it exactly the same way. What happens? Turns out something very interesting happens. Still works. It still sorts it.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll describe two interesting things about it, and then we have lots of other work coming in the next year about even simpler systems. Actually, crazy. So the very first thing is this. The standard sorting, so let's take bubble sort, right? And all these sorting algorithms, what you're starting out with is an array of jumbled up digits. So integers, it's an array of mixed up integers. And what the algorithm is designed to do is to eventually arrange them all into order. And what it does generally is compare some pieces of that array. And based on which one is larger than which, it swaps them around. And you can imagine that if you just keep doing that and you just keep comparing and swapping, then eventually you can get all the digits in the same order. So the first thing I decided to do, and this is the work of my student Heing Zhang and then Adam Goldstein on this paper, this goes back to our original discussion about putting a barrier.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the thing with biology is Always more mechanism to be discovered, right? Like there's infinite depth of what the materials are doing, what somebody will always say, there's a mechanism for H7 found it yet. So I wanted an example that was simple, transparent. So you could see all the stuff. There was nowhere to hide. I wanted it to be deterministic because I don't want it to be something around unpredictability or stochasticity. And I wanted to be something familiar to people, minimal. And I wanted to use it as a model system for honing our abilities to take a new system and looking at it with fresh eyes. And that's because these sorting algorithms have been studied for over 60 years. We all think we know what they do and what their properties are. The algorithm itself is just a few lines of code. You can see exactly what's there. It's deterministic. And so that's why, right? I wanted the most shock value out of a system like that if we were to find anything and to use it as an example of taking something minimal and seeing what can be gotten out of it.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capabilities of my mind are not properly encompassed by the rules of biochemistry. Everybody is like, yeah, that makes sense where you're very complex and okay, your mind does things that you can't, you didn't see that coming from the rules of biochemistry, we know that. So mostly people think that has to do with complexity. And what I would like to find out is as part of understanding what kind of interfaces give rise to, what kind of aggressions, is it really about complexity? How much complexity do you actually need? Is there some threshold after which this happens? Is it really specific materials? Is it biologicals? Is it something about evolution? Like, what is it about these kinds of things that allows this surprise, right? Allows this idea that we are more than the sum of our parts. And so, and I had a strong intuition that none of those things are actually required, that this kind of magic, so to speak, seeps into pretty much everything. And so to look at that.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But do we have these machines? And the whole point of having machines and algorithms and so on is they do exactly what you tell them to do. And people feel pretty strongly that that's a binary distinction and that that's we can carve up the world in that way. So I wanted to do two things. I wanted to first of all explore that and hopefully break the assumption that we're good at seeing this because I think we're not and I think it's extremely important that we understand very soon that we need to get much better at knowing when to expect these things. And the other thing I wanted to do was to find out mostly people assume that you need a lot of complexity for this. So when somebody says, well,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. First, just the goal of the study. There are two things that people generally assume. One is that we have a pretty good intuition about what kind of systems are going to have competencies. So from observing biologicals, we're not terribly surprised when biology does interesting things. Everybody always says, well, it's biology. Of course, it does all this cool stuff”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the really interesting things that artificial constructs can do are not because of the algorithm. They're in spite of the algorithm. They are filling up the spaces in between. There's what the algorithm is forcing you to do, and then there's the other cool stuff it's doing, which is nowhere in the algorithm. And if that's true, and we think it's true even a very minimal systems, then this whole business of language models and AIs in general. Watching the language part, maybe a total red herring, because the language is what we force them to do. The question is, what else are they doing that we are not good at noticing? And this is something that we are, I think, as a kind of existential step for humanity is to become better at this because we are not good at recognizing these things now.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're not complete theories of the whole thing. They capture the front end, which is why they get surprised, which is why these things are surprising when they happen. I think that when we see embryos of different species, we are pulling from well-trodden, familiar regions of that space. And we know what to expect. Frog, you know, the snake, whatever. When we make cyborgs and hybots and biobots, we are pulling from new regions of that space that look a little weird and they're unexpected, but we can still kind of get our mind around them. When we start making AIs, like proper AIs, we are now fishing in a region of that space that may never have had bodies before. It may have never been embodied before. And what we get from that is going to be extremely surprising. And the final thing just to mention on that is that because of this, because of the inputs from this Platonic experience.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The theories we have, and this goes back to the thin client interface kind of idea, the theories we have of both physics and computation, so theory of algorithms, you know, Turing machines, all that good stuff, those are all good theories of the front end interface.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've given this talk to some audiences, and especially in the organicist community, people like the first part where it's like, okay, now there's an idea for what the magic quote unquote is that's special about the living things and so on. Now if we could just stop there, we would have dumb machines that just do what the algorithm says. And we have these magical living interfaces that can be the recipient for these ingressions. Cool, right? We can cut up the world in this way. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I think that's not the case. And I think that even simple minimal computational models are, to some extent, beneficiaries of these free lunches. I think that”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's not just organisms. I mean, I think it's going to end up. And I mean, you can talk to the machine learning people about how they got to this point. Again, because this is not just me. There's a bunch of, there are a bunch of different disciplines that are converging on this now simultaneously. You're going to find, again, just like in mathematics where from different directions everybody sort of is looking at different things, oh my God, this is one underlying structure that seems still I can form all of this. So in physics, in mathematics, in computer science, machine learning, possibly in economics, certainly in biology, possibly in cognitive science, we're going to find these structures. It was already obvious in Pythagoras' time that there are these patterns. The only remaining question is, are they part of an ordered space? And are we up to the task of mapping out the relationship between what we build and the patterns that come through?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it looks like is a successful research program that explains how you pull particular patterns when you need them and why some patterns come and others don't and show that they come from an ordered space.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely think they're going to be systematic laws. I don't think they're going to look anything like physics. You can call it physics if you want, but I think it's going to be so different that that probably just cracks the word. And whether information is going to survive that, I'm not sure. But I definitely think that it's going to be, there are going to be laws. But I think they're going to look a lot more like aspects of psychology and cognitive science than they're going to look like physics. That's my guess.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place is weird because it isn't the same as our physical spacetime. I don't think it's that. So calling it a place is a little weird.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff and we tried the optimistic research program, it failed, and we're just going to have to live with surprise. I mean, I doubt that's going to happen, but it's a possible outcome.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's not me. That's predictive processing and active infrared. Like, that's modern neuroscience telling you this, that this isn't anything that I'm particularly coming up with. All I'm saying is the distinction, the distinction you're trying to make, which is like an old school realist kind of view. Is it metaphorical or is it real? All we have in science are metaphors, I think. And the only question is how good are your metaphors? And I think as agents act living in a world, all we have are models of what we are and what the outside world is. That's it. And the question is, how good is it a model? And my claim about this is in some small number of decades, either this will either give rise to a very enabling mapping of the space for AI, for bioengineering, for biology, whatever, or we're going to find out that it really sucks because it really is a random grab bag.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source