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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“You can try to make that distinction I think modern cognitive neuroscience will tell you that whatever you think this is, at most it is a very effective model for predicting the future experiences you're going to have.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like physics and for sure biology and cognition are the benefits of ingressions that are free lunches in some sense. We did not make them calling them emergent does nothing for a research program. That just means you got surprised. I think it's much better if you say if you make the optimistic assumption that they come from a structured space, that we have a prayer in hell of actually exploring. And in some decades, if I'm wrong, and it says, you know what, we tried, it looks like it really is random to bed, fine.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any effort into making them, they come from some distribution that seems to exist that we don't have to create. And exactly whether that space is sparse or dense, I don't know. So for example, if there is some kind of a platonic form for the movie The Godfather, if it's surrounded by a bunch of crappy versions and then crappier versions still, I have no idea, right? I don't know if the space is sparse or not. I don't know if it's finite or infinite. These are all things I don't know. What I do know is that”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a set of things that I feel very strongly about because the research is telling us that's what's going on. And then there's a bunch of other stuff that I see as hypotheses for next steps that guide experiment. So what I'm about to tell you, these are things I don't actually know. These are just guesses that you need to make some guesses to make progress. I don't think that there are specific, or I don't know, but it doesn't mean that there are going to be specific platonic patterns for this is the Titanic and this is the sister of the Titanic and this is some other kind of boat. This is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is in some way that we absolutely need to work out when we make minimal interfaces, we get more than we put in. We get behaviors, we get shapes, we get mathematical truths, and we get all kinds of patterns that we did not have to create. We didn't micromanage them. We didn't know they were coming. We didn't have to put.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it includes specific patterns that we have given names to. Some of those patterns we've named mathematical objects, some of those patterns we made, we've named anatomical outcomes, some of those patterns we've made psychological types.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've never seen any that work like that, right? Or we're going to find out that I'm wrong and that basically it's not worth calling it a space because it is so random and so jumbled up that there is we've been able to make zero progress in linking the embodiments that we make to 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
“Yeah, except that. I don't see how it would be separate because I'm not just talking about an anatomical shape in transcriptional profile. I'm also talking about behavioral competencies. So when we make something and we find out that, okay, it does habituation sensitization. It does not do Pavlovian conditioning, and it does do delayed gratification, and it doesn't have language. That is a very specific cognitive profile. That's a region of that space. And there's another region that looks different because I don't make a sharp distinction between biology and cognition. If you want to explain behaviors, they are drawn from some distribution as well. So I think in 20 years or however long it's going to take, one of two things will happen. Either we and other people who are working on this are going to actually produce a map of that space and say, here's why you've gotten systems that work like this and like this and like this.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can start to map out what all those are, right? Make that basically try to draw the latent space from which those things are pulled. And one of two things is going to happen in the future. And so this is come back in 20 years, and we'll see how this worked out. One thing that could happen is that we're going to see, oh yeah, just like the map of mathematics, we made a map of the space. And we know now that if I want a system that acts like this and this, here's the kind of body I need to make for it because those are the patterns that exist. The anthropots have four different behaviors, not seven and not one. And so that's what I can pull from. These are the options I have.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there is no space, if you don't want to call it a space, that's okay, but you can't get away from the fact that as a matter of research, there are patterns that relate to each other in a particular way. The final step of calling it a space is minimal. The bigger issue is, what the hell is it a map of then if it's not a space? So that's the first thing. Now, that's how it plays out, I think, in math and physics. Now, in biology, here's how we're going to know if this makes any sense. What we are doing now is trying to map out that space by saying look, we know that the frog genome maps to one thing and that's a frog. Turns out that exact same genome, if you just take the slightest step with the exact same genome, but you just”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the other key thing about this is that it has a metric. It's not just a random heap of facts, they are all connected to each other in a particular way. They literally make a space. And so when I say it's a space of patterns, what I mean is it is not just a random bag of patterns such that when you have one pattern, you are no closer to finding any other pattern. I'm saying that there's some kind of a metric to it so that when you find one others are closer to it and then you can get there. So that's the claim. And obviously this is not everybody buys this and so on. This is one idea. Now, how do we know that this exists? Well, I'll say a couple of things. If that didn't exist, Is that a map of”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, okay. I mean, so that's the beautiful part about this, and this is why I'm talking about this now, where I wasn't about a year ago, up until a year ago, I was never talking about this because I think this is now actionable. So there's this diagram that's called a map of mathematics, and they basically try to show how all the different pieces of math link together. And this is a bunch of different versions of it. There's two features to this. One is that what is it a map of? Well, it's a map of various truths. It's a map of facts that are thrust on you. You don't have a choice. Once you've picked some axioms, you just, you know, here's some surprising facts that are just going to be given to you.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chosen aspects of our brain and our interaction, we're going to have to give that up no matter what to relate to these other beings.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is increasingly going to be more relevant as we make first augmented humans that have sensory substitution. You're going to be walking around, your friends are going to be like, oh man, I have this primary perception of the solar weather and the stock market because I got those implants. And what do you see? Well, I see the, you know, the traffic of the internet through the Trans-Pacific channel. We're all going to be living in somewhat different worlds. That's the first thing. The second thing is we're going to become better attuned to other beings, whether they be cells, tissues, you know, what's it like to be a cell living in a 20,000 dimensional transcriptional space, to novel beings that have never been here before that have all kinds of crazy spaces that they live in. And that might be AIs, it might be cyborgs, it might be hybrots, it might be all sorts of things. So this idea that we have a consensus reality here that's independent of some very specifically”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can get there more easily by synthetic bioengineering in the following sense. Do you feel a lack of X-ray perception? Do you feel blind in the X-ray spectrum or in the ultraviolet? I mean, you don't. You have absolutely no clue that stuff is there. And all of your reality as you see it is shaped by your evolutionary history. It's shaped by the cognitive structure that you have, right? There are tons of stuff going on around us right now that of which we are completely oblivious. There's equally all kinds of other stuff which we construct, and this is just modern cognitive science that says that a lot of what we think is going on is a total fabrication constructed by us. So I think this is not a, I don't think this is a philosophy. I mean, Descartes got there from a philosophical point. That's not what's not the leap I'm asking. I'm saying that depending on your embodiment, depending on your interface.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, who knows? It's a ride, right? But you see, it's not clear at all that the physical poking is your primary reality. That's not clear to me at all.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of. I mean, so Descartes got some stuff wrong, I think. But one thing that he did get right, the fact that, yeah, actually, you don't know what you can poke and what you can't poke. The only thing you actually know are the contents of your mind and everything else might be, in effect, what we know from Emil Seth and Don Hoffman and various other people. It's definitely a construct. You might be on drugs and you might wake up tomorrow and say, my God, I had the craziest dream of being Lex Friedman. Amazing.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming back to the point that I think the mind brain relationship is basically of the same kind as the math physics relationship, the same way that non-physical facts of physics haunt physical objects is basically how I think different kinds of patterns that we call kinds of minds are manifesting through interfaces like brains.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of you, primarily an already Descartes was getting crap for this when he first trotted out as this interaction problem. So the idea was, okay, well, if you have this non-physical mind, and then you have this brain that presumably obeys conservation of mass energy and things like that, how are you supposed to interact with it? There are many other problems there. So what I'm trying to point out is that, first of all, physics already had this problem. You didn't have to wait till you had biology and cognitive science to ask about it. And what I think is happening in the way we need to think about this is”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they're not the full extent of what lives in that space. That space is also home to some patterns that are very high agency, and if we give them a body, if we build a body that they can inhabit, then we get to see different behavioral competencies that the behavior scientists say, oh, I know what that looks like. That's this kind of behavioral mind or that kind of mind. In a certain sense, I mean, yes, what I'm saying is extremely radical, but it is a very old idea. It's an old idea of a dualistic worldview, right? Where the mind was not in the physical body and that it in some way interacted with the physical brain. So I just want to be clear, I'm not claiming that this is fundamentally a new idea. This has been around for forever. However, it's mostly been discredited. And it's a very unpopular view nowadays. There are very few people in the, for example, cognitive science community or anywhere else in science that like this kind of thing.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low agency because they're like fractals that stand still and they're like prime number distributions, although there's a mathematician that's talking in our symposium that's telling me that actually I'm too chauvinistic even there, that actually even those things have more oomph than even I gave them credit for, which I love. So what I'm saying is those kind of static patterns are things that we typically see in physics.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's, okay, so I'll circle back around to that whole thing. So, the only thing I was trying to do is blow up the idea that we're cool with how it works in physics, no problem there. I think that's a much bigger deal than people normally think it is. I think already there you have this weird haunting of the physical world by patterns that are not coming from the physical world. The reason I emphasize this is because now when I amplify this into biology, I don't think it sort of jumps as a new thing. I think it's just a much more, I think what we call biology is our systems that exploit the hell out of it. I think physics is constrained by it, but we call biology those things that make use of those kinds of things and run with it. And so again, I just think it's a scaling. I don't think it's a brand new thing that happens. I think it's a scaling, right? So what I'm saying is we already know from physics that there are non-physical patterns, and these are generally patterns of form, which is why I called”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying it's immutable. So I think Plato may or may or may not have thought that these forms are eternal and unchanging. That's one place we differ. I actually think that space has some action to it, maybe even some computation to it”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying that every alien everywhere is going to have the exact same math that we have. That's not what I'm claiming, although maybe, but that's not what I'm claiming. What I'm saying is you get more out than you put in. Once you've made a choice and maybe some aliens somewhere made a different choice of how they're going to do their math, but once you've made your choice, then you get saddled with a whole bunch of new truths that you discover that you can't do anything about. They are given to you from somewhere, and you can say they're random, or you can say, no, there's a space of these facts that they're pulled from. There's a latent space of options that they come from. So when you get, so when your E is exactly 2.718 and so on, there is nothing you can do in physics to change it.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, physicists do this. They'll say, okay, if we made the ratio between the gravitation and the electromagnetic force different, would we have matter? How many dimensions would we have? Would there be inflation? Would there be this or that? You can imagine playing with, there are, however, many unitless constants of physics. These are the kind of knobs on the universe that you could have could in theory be different. And then you'd have different physical properties.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is very controversial, right? And there are, of course, physicists and mathematicians who disagree with what I'm saying for sure. But what I'm leaning on is simply this. I don't know of anything you can do in the physical world. You're around at the Big Bang. You get to set all the constants. Set physics however you want. Can you change E? Can you change Feigenbaum's constant? I don't think you can.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, some of them are, you know, I mean, if you ask Don Hoffman, there's this amplituderon thing that is a set of mathematical objects that determines all the scattering amplitudes of the particles and whatever. They don't have to be simple. I mean, the old ones were simple now. They're like crazy. I can't imagine this amplitahedron thing, but maybe they can. But all of these are mathematical structures that explain and determine facts about the physical world, right? If you ask physicists, hey, why this many of this type of particle? Because this mathematical thing has these symmetries. That's why.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a very deep follow on question that we'll come back to in a minute. All I was saying about Newton is that you don't need quantum anything. You don't need to think about consciousness already, long before you get to any of that, as Pythagoras, I think knew Already we have the idea that this physical world is being strongly impacted by truths that do not live in the physical world.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Governed all sorts of properties of things that happen. That classical world was already haunted by patterns from outside that world. This should be like, this is wild. This is not saying that, okay, everything was cool, physicalism was grayed up until maybe we got quantum interfaces or we got consciousness or whatever. But originally it was fine. No, this is saying that it was that worldview was already impossible really from a very long time ago we already knew that there are non-physical properties that matter in the physical world.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay, a couple of things. First of all, when you said it makes sense for physics, I want to show that it's not as simple as it sounds because what it means is that even in Newton's boring sort of classical universe, long before quantum anything, Newton's world physicalism was already dead in Newton's world. I mean, think about what that means. This is nuts because already he knew perfectly well. I mean, Pythagoras and Plato knew that even in a totally classical deterministic world, already you have the ingression of information that determines what happens, what's possible and what's not possible in that world from a space that is itself not physical. In other words, it's something like the natural logarithm e, right? Nothing in Newton's world set the value of E. There is nothing you could do to set the value of E in that world. And yet, that fact that it was that and not something else”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consciousness is what it looks like from that direction looking out into the world. It's what we call the view from the perspective of the Platonic patterns.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see that pattern. If you want to see some of those mines, you have to build an interface, right? At least if you're going to interact with them in the physical world the way we normally do science. As Darwin said, mathematicians have their own new sense, like a different sense than the rest of us. And so that's right. Mathematicians can perhaps interact with these patterns directly in that space. But for the rest of us, we have to make interfaces. And when we make interfaces which might be cells or robots or embryos or whatever, what we are pulling down are minds that are fundamentally not produced by physics. So I don't believe that. I don't know if we're going to get into the whole consciousness thing, but I don't believe that we create consciousness, whether we make babies or whether we make robots. Nobody's creating consciousness. What you create is an interface, a physical interface through which specific patterns, which we call kinds of minds, are going to ingress, right?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it is. And so what I'm saying is, and this is what Pythagoras was saying, I think, that there is a whole space of these kinds of truths. Now, he was focused on mathematical ones, but he was embodying them in music and in geometry and then things like that. There are the space of patterns, and they make a difference in the physical world, to machines, to sound, to things like that. I'm extending it. And what I'm saying is, yeah. So far, we've only been looking at the low agency inhabitants of that world. There are other patterns that we would recognize as kinds of minds and that you don't see them in this space until there's an interface, until there's a way for them to come through the physical world. That interface, the same way that you have to make a triangular object before you can actually see the rule of, you know, what you're going to gain right out of the rules of geometry and whatever. Or you have to actually do the computation on the fractal before you actually.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where does this come from, or the fact that the way the biology exploits these things? Imagine a world in which the highest fitness belonged to a certain kind of triangle. So evolution cranks a bunch of generations and it gets the first angle right and cranks a bunch more generations, gets a second angle right. Now there's something amazing that happens. It doesn't need to look for the third angle because you already know if you know to, you get this magical free gift from geometry that says, why I already know what the third one should be. You don't have to go look for it. Or as evolution, if you invent a voltage-gated ion channel, which is basically a transistor, and you can make a logic gate, then all the truth tables and the fact that NAD is special and all these other things, you don't have to evolve all those things. You get those for free. You inherit those. Where do all those things live? These mathematical truths that you come across that you don't have any choice about. Once you've committed to certain axioms, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that is now just, it is.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay, let's try it this way. There are certain facts of mathematics. So the distribution of prime numbers, right, that if you map them out, they make these nice spirals, and there's an image that I often show, which is a very particular kind of fractal. And that fractal is the Halle map, which is pretty awesome that it actually looks very organic. It looks very biological. So if you look at that thing, that image, which has very specific complex structure, it's a map of a very compact mathematical object that formula is like, you know, z cubed plus seven, it's something like that. That's it. So now you look at that structure and you say, where does that actually come from? It's definitely not packed into the zq plus seven. There's not enough bits in that to give you all of that. There's no fact of physics that determines this. There's no evolutionary history. It's not like we selected this based on some, you know, from a larger set over time.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull down is much more complex patterns than we say, ah, that's a mind, that's a human mind, or that's a snake mind or whatever. So I think the mind brain relationship is exactly the kind of thing that the math physics relationship is. That in some very interesting way there are truths of mathematics that become embodied and they kind of haunt physical objects in a very specific functional way. And in the exact same way, there are other patterns that are much more complex higher agency patterns that basically inform in form living things that we see as obvious embodied minds.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All this crazy stuff that lives in that space. Yeah, I think that's one layer of stuff that lives in that space. But I think those patterns are the lower agency kinds of things that are basically studied by mathematicians. What also lives in that space are much more active, more complex, higher agency patterns that we recognize as kinds of minds, that behavioral scientists would look at that pattern and say, well, I know what that is. That's the competency for delayed gratification or problem solving of certain kinds or whatever. And so what I end up with right now is a model in which that latent space contains things that come through physical objects, so simple, simple patterns, right? So facts about triangles and Fibonacci patterns and fractals and things like that. But also, if you make more complex interfaces such as biologicals, but importantly not just biologicals, but let's say cells and embryos and tissues, what you will then”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then there's the physical space. So I find that much more appealing because it suggests a research program, which we are now undergoing in our lab. The research program is everything that we make cells, embryos, robots, biobots, language models, simple machines, all of it. They are interfaces. They are all physical things are interfaces to these patterns. You build an interface. Some of those patterns are going to come through that interface, depending on what you build. Some patterns versus others are going to come through. The research program is mapping out that relationship between the physical pointers that we make and the patterns that come through it. Understanding what is the structure of that space, what exists in that space, and what do I need to make physically to make certain patterns come through. Now, when I say patterns, now we have to ask, what kinds of things live in that space? Well, the mathematicians will tell you, well, we already know we have a whole list of objects, you know, the amplitude and the, you know,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, then just willing to make a catalog of these amazing patterns. Why not, instead, and this is why I started with this Platonic terminology, why not do what the mathematicians already do? A huge number of them say we are going to make the same optimistic assumption that science makes, that there's an underlying structure to that latent space. There's not a random grab bag of stuff. There's a space to it where these patterns come from. And by studying them systematically, we can get from one to another. We can map out the space. We can find out the relationships between them. We can get an idea of what's in that space. And we're not going to assume that it's just random. We're going to assume there's some kind of structure to it. And you'll see all kinds of people, I mean, you know, well-known mathematicians that talk about this stuff. Penrose and then lots of other people who will say that, yeah, there's another space physically. And it has spatial structure. It has components to it and so on. We can traverse that space in various ways.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now you have an option. You can go one of two ways. You can either say, okay, look, I like my sparse ontology. I don't want to think about weird Platonic spaces. I'm a physicalist. I want the physical world, nothing more. So what we're going to do is when we come across these crazy things that are very specific, like anthropots have four specific behaviors that they switch around. Why four? Why not 12? Why not? Like four, why four? When we come across these things, just like when we come across the value of E or Feigenbaum's number or whatever, what we're going to do is we're going to write it down in our big book of emergence. And that's it. We're just going to have to live with it. This is what happens. We're just, there's some cool surprises. You know, when we come across them, we're going to write them down. Great. It's a random grab bag of stuff. And when we come across them, we'll write them down. That's one. The upside is you get to be a physicalist and you get to keep your sparse ontology. The downside is I find it incredibly pessimistic and mysterious because you...”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so then what people say is, well, it's emergent. And they say, what's that? What does that mean? And they say, besides the fact that you got surprised, right? Emergence often just means I didn't see it coming. Something happened. I didn't know that was going to happen. So what does it mean it's emergent? And people say, well, and there are many emergent things like this. For example, the fact that gene regulatory networks can do associative learning, like that's amazing. And you don't need evolution for that, even random genetic regulatory networks can do associative learning. I say, why does that happen? And he said, well, it's just a fact that holds in the world, just a fact that holds.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of all, where did that come from? And when did we pay the computational cost for it? Because we know when we paid the computational cost to design a frog or a humanof for the eons that the genome was bashing against the environment getting selected, right? So you paid the computational cost of that. There's never been any anthrobots. There's never been any Xenobots. When do we pay the computational costs for designing kinematic self-replication and all these things that they're able to do? So there's two things people say. One is, well, it's sort of, you got it at the same time that they were being selected to be good humans and good frogs. Now, the problem with that is it kind of undermines the point of evolution, the point of evolutionary theory was to have a very tight specificity between how you are now and the history of selection that got you here, right? The history of environments that got you to this point. If you say, yeah, okay, so this is what your environmental history was. And by the way, you got something completely different. You got these other skills that you didn't know about that. That's really strange.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, that there is a set of truths which impact the physical world, but they themselves are not defined by and determined by what happens in the physical world. You can't change them by things you do in the physical world. And so I'll make a couple of claims about that. One claim is I think we call physics those things that are constrained by those patterns. When you say, hey, why is this the way it is? Ah, it's because this is how symmetries or topology or whatever. Biology are the things that are enabled by those. They're free lunches. They're biology exploits these kinds of truths. And really, it enables biology and evolution to do amazing things without having to pay for it. I think there's a lot of free lunches going on here. And so I show you a Xenobot or an anthropot. And I say, hey, look, here are some amazing things they're doing that tissue has never done before in their history.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get to design them, you get more out than you put in in a certain way because you make very minimal assumptions and then certain facts are thrust upon you. For example, the value of Feigenbaum's constant, the value of natural logarithm e, these things you sort of discover, right? And the salient fact is this. If those facts were different, then biology and physics would be different, right? So they matter, they impact instructively, functionally, they impact the physical world. If the distribution of primes was something else, well, then that's okay. This would have been coming out at different times. But the reverse isn't true. What I mean is there is nothing you can do in the physical world to change E as far as I know, to change E or to change Feigenbaum's constant. You could have swapped out all the constants at the Big Bang, right? You can change all the different things. You are not going to change those things. So this, I think Plato and Pythagoras understood very clearly.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is that? And then you get this explanation for well, it's because they're trying to be off cycle from their predators. Because if it was 12 years, then every two year, every three year, every four year, every six year predator would eat you when you come out, right? So, and you say, okay, okay, cool, that makes sense. What's special about 13 and 17? Oh, they're prime. And why are they prime? Well, now you're in the math department. You're no longer in the biology department. You're no longer in the physics department. You're now in the math department to understand why the distribution of primes is what it is. Another example, and I'm not a physicist, but what I see is every time you talk to a physicist and you say, hey, why do the leptons do this or that or the fermions are doing whatever? Eventually the answer is, oh, because there's this mathematical, you know, this SU8 group or whatever the heck it is, and it has certain symmetries in these certain structures. Yeah, great. Once again, you're in the math department. So something interesting happens is that there are facts that you come across. Many of them are very surprising.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first thing I want to say is that while I'm currently calling it the Platonic space I am in no way trying to stick close to the things that Plato actually thought about. In fact, to whatever extent we even know what that is, I think I depart from that in some ways. And I'm going to have to change the name at some point. The reason I'm using the name now is because I wanted to be clear about a particular connection to mathematics, which a lot of mathematicians would call themselves Platonists because what they think they're doing is discovering, not inventing as a human construction, but discovering a structured ordered space of truths. Let's put it this way. In biology, as in physics, there's something very curious that happens, that if you keep asking why, then something interesting goes on. I'll give you two examples. First of all, imagine Ticadas. So the Ticadas come out at 13 years and 17 years. And so if you're a biologist and you say,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every week in our center, somebody gives a talk. We kind of discussed it. It all goes on this thing. I'll give you a link to it. And then there's a huge running discussion after that. And then at the end, we're all going to get together for a natural real-time discussion section and talk about it. But there's going to be probably 15 or so talks about this from all kinds of disciplines. It's blown up in a way that I didn't realize how much undercurrent of these ideas had already existed that were ready. Like now is the time. And I think this is like I've been thinking about these things for, I don't know, 30 plus years. I never talked about them before because they weren't actionable before. There wasn't a way to actually make empirical progress with this now. You know, this is something that Pythagoras and Plato and probably many people before them talked about. But now we're to the point where we can actually do experiments and they're making a difference in our research program.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happened was this crazy notion, which I'll describe momentarily, I have given a couple talks on it. I then found a couple papers in the machine learning community called The Platonic Representation Hypothesis. And I said, that's pretty cool. These guys are climbing up to the same point where I'm getting at it from biology and philosophy and whatever. They're getting there from computer science and machine learning. We'll take a couple hours. I'll give a talk. They'll give a talk. We'll talk about it. I thought there were going to be three talks at this thing. Once I started reaching out to people for this, everybody sort of said, you know, I know somebody who's really into this stuff, but they never talk about it because there's no audience for this. So I reached out to them. And then they said, yeah, I know this mathematician or I know this economist, whatever, who has these ideas and there's nowhere we can ever talk about them. So I got this whole list and it became completely obvious that we can't do this in a normal, you know, we're now booked up through December.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by saying scratch bit, I don't mean it's not important. When we get to talking about the Platonic space, we have to talk about how important the interface actually is. The scratch bite isn't unimportant to scratch bite, it's critical. It's just that my only point is that when we have these formalisms of software, of hardware, of other things, the way we map those formalisms onto the world is not obvious. It's not given to us. We get used to certain things, right? But who's the hardware? Who's the software? Who's the agent? And who's the excitable medium is to be determined.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm well aware these are not, the ideas are not new. What's new is being able to now take this and make them actionable and say, yeah, but we can image this now. I can now actually see the bioelectric patterns and why they go here and not there. And we have the tools that now hopefully will get us to therapeutics. So this is very actionable stuff and it all leans on not assuming we know minds when we see them because we don't and we have to do experiments.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's organic disease, something is physically broken, we can see the tissue is breaking down this damage in the joint, whether the liver is doing whatever we can. We can see these things. But what about disease states that are not physical states, they're physiological states or informational states or cognitive problems? So in other words, in all of these other spaces, you can start to ask, what's a barrier in gene expression space? What's a local minimum that traps you in physiological state space? And what is a stress pattern that keeps itself together, moves around the body, causes damage, tries to keep itself going, right? What level of agency does it have? This suggests an entirely different set of approaches to biomedicine. And anybody who's, let's say, in the alternative medicine community is probably yelling at the screen and saying, we've been saying this for hundreds of years. And yeah.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source