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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“Maybe what's actually happening is maybe the agent's finding it harder and harder to be embodied in the physical world. Why? Because the cells might get less responsive. In other words, the cells are sluggish. The patterns are fine. They're having a harder time making the cells do what they need to do. And that maybe what you need to do is not reinforce the memories. Maybe what you need to do is make the cells more responsive to them. And that is a different research agenda, which we are also doing. We have evidence for that as well actually now. And we published it recently. And so my point here is when we tell these crazy sci-fi stories, the only worth to them and the only reason I'm talking about them now, and I hadn't been up a year ago, I wasn't talking about this stuff, is because these are now actionable in terms of specific experimental research agendas that are heading to the clinic, I hope, in some of these biomedical approaches. And so now here we can go beyond this and we can say, okay, so up until now, we've considered what are disease states? Well, we”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The electrical pattern memories are just data. And what might happen during aging is that the data might get degraded. They might get fuzzy. And so what we need to do is reinforce the data, reinforce the memories, reinforce the pattern memories. That's one specific research program, and we're doing that. But that's not the only research program. Because the other thing you might imagine is that what if the patterns are the agent in exactly the same sense as we think in our brains, it's the patterns of electrophysiological computations and whatever else that is the agent, right? And that what they're doing in the brain are the side effects of the patterns working themselves out. And those side effects might be to fire off some muscles and some glands and some other things. From that perspective,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the data doing what data does. The machine is just the consequences, the scratch pad of it working itself out. And both of those stories make sense depending on what you're trying to do. Here's the biomedical side of things. So our program in bioelectrics and aging. One model you could have is the physical organism is the agent and the cellular collective has Pattern memories, specifically what I was saying before goals, anatomical goals. If you want to persist for a hundred.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stay tuned. I mean, this is exactly what we're doing. We're getting progressively more and more unconventional. I mean, so this whole distinction between software and hardware, I think it's a super important concept to think about. And yet the way we've mapped it onto the world, I would like to blow that up in the following way. And again, I want to point out, so I'll tell you what the practical consequences are because this is not just a fun stories that we tell each other. These have really important research implications. Think about a Turing machine. So one thing you can say is the machine's the agent. It has passive data and it operates on the data. And that's it. The story of agency is the story of whatever that machine can and can't do. The data is passive and it moves it around. You can tell the opposite story. You can say, look, the patterns on the data are the agent. The machine is a stigmergic scratch pad in the world.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can definitely apply this methodology to ideas and concepts and social whatevers, but you've got to do the experiment.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's further than that? Well, fragments, personality fragments of a dissociative personality disorder, they're more stable, and they're not just on autopilot, they have goals and they can do things. And then past that as a full-blown human personality, and who the hell knows what's past that? Maybe some sort of transhuman, like, I don't know, right? But this idea, again, I'm back to this notion of a spectrum. There is not a sharp distinction between we are real agents and then we have these thoughts. Yeah, patterns can be agents too. But again, you don't know until you do the experiment. So if you want to know whether a soliton or a hurricane or a thought within a cognitive system is its own agent, do the experiment. See what it can do. Can it learn from experience? Does it have memories? Does it have goal states? What can it do? Does it have language? So coming back to then your original question.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like some work that I've done with Chris Fields and others distinction between thoughts and thinkers. All agents are patterns within some excitable medium. We could talk about what that is, and they can spawn off others. And now you can have a really interesting spectrum. Here's the spectrum. You can have fleeting thoughts, which are like waves in the ocean when you throw a rock in. You know, they sort of go through the excitable medium and then they're gone. They pass through and they're gone, right? So those are kind of fleeting thoughts. Then you can have patterns that have a degree of persistence. So they might be hurricanes or solitons or persistent thoughts or earworms or depressive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of. They stick around for a little while. They often do a little bit of niche construction, so they change the actual brain to have to make it easier to have more of those thoughts, right? Like that's a thing. And so they stay around longer.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like a thin plasma to them. They are so dense. None of this is solid to them. They don't see any of this stuff. So they're walking around, you know, the planet is sort of, you know, covered in this like thin gas, you know. And one of them is a scientist and he's taken measurements of the gas and he says to the others, you know, I've been watching this gas and there are like these little whirlpools in this gas. And they almost look like agents. They almost look like they're doing things. They're moving around. They kind of hold themselves together for a little bit and they're trying to make stuff happen. And the others say, well, that's crazy. Patterns in the gas can't be agents. We are agents. We're solid. This is just patterns in an excitable medium. And by the way, how long do they hold together? He says, well, about 100 years. Well, that's crazy. No real agent can exist to be that dissipate that fast. Okay, we are all metabolic patterns, among other things, right? And so one of the things that, and so you see what I'm warming up to here, so one of the things that we've been trying to dissolve.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reinforced within one cognitive system. And now here I am on this memory. What do I need to do to persist into the future? Well, now I'm facing the paradox of change. If I try to remain the same, I'm gone. There's no way the butterfly is going to retain me in the original form that I'm in now. What I need to do is change, adapt, and morph. Now, you might say, well, that's kind of crazy. How are you taking the perspective of a pattern within an excitable medium, right? Agents are physical things. You're talking about information. So let me tell you another quick science fiction story. Imagine that some creatures come out from the center of the earth. They live down in the core. They're super dense. Okay, they're incredibly dense because they live down in the core. They have gamma ray vision and so on. So they come out to the surface. What do they see? Well, all of this stuff that we're seeing here.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remapped into a novel context. Now, here's what I'm getting weird. We can take a couple of different perspectives here. We can take the perspective of the caterpillar facing some sort of crazy singularity and say, my God, I'm going to cease to exist. But, you know, I'll sort of be reborn in this new higher dimensional world where I'll fly okay. So that's one thing. We can take the perspective of the butterfly and say that, well, here I am, but you know, I seem to be saddled with some tendencies and some memories and I don't know where the hell they came from. And I don't remember exactly how I got them. And they seem to be a core part of my psychological makeup. And they come from somewhere. I don't know where they come from. So you can take that perspective. But there's a third perspective that I think is really interesting and useful. And the third perspective is that of the memory itself. If you take a perspective of the memory, which, so what is a memory? It is a pattern. It is an informational pattern that was continuous.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out the butterfly retains that memory. Now, the obvious question is how the hell do you retain memories when the medium is being refactored like that? Let's put that aside. I'm going to get somewhere even weirder than that. There's something else that's even more interesting than that. It's not just that you have to retain the memory. You have to remap that memory onto a completely new context because guess what? The butterfly doesn't move the way the caterpillar moves and it doesn't care about leaves. It wants nectar from flowers. And so if that memory is going to survive, it can't just persist. It has to”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Okay, if you want to get really weird, we can get really weird here. Think about the caterpillar butterfly transition. So you got a caterpillar, soft bodied kind of creature as a particular controller that's suitable for running a soft body, you know, kind of robot. It has a brain for that task. And then it has to become this butterfly, hard-bodied creature flies around during the process of metamorphosis, its brain is basically ripped up and rebuilt from scratch, right? Now what's been found is that if you train the caterpillar, so you give it a new memory, meaning that if the caterpillar sees this color or disc, then it crawls over and eats some leaves.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the first couple of steps are all imagination. You have to ask yourself, what space is this thing even working in? And you really have to stretch your mind because we can't imagine all the spaces that systems work in, right? So step one is what space is it? Step two, what do I think the goal is? And let's not mistake step two, you're not done just because you hadn't made a hypothesis, that doesn't mean you can say, well, there I see it doing this, therefore that's the goal. You don't know that. You have to actually do experiments. Now, once you've made those hypotheses, now you do the experiments. You say, okay, if I want to block it from reaching its goal, how do I do that? And this, by the way, is exactly the approach we took with the sorting algorithms and with everything else. You hypothesize the goal, you put a barrier in, and then you get to find out what level of ingenuity it has. Maybe what you see is, well, that derailed everything, so probably this thing isn't very smart. Or you see, wow, it can go around and do these things. Or you might say, wow, it's taking a completely different approach using affordances in novel ways. Like that's a high level of intelligence.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least in some cases, we certainly haven't got them all, but we have some. If you can find where the goal state is encoded, read it out, reset it, and the system will now implement a new goal based on what you've just reset. That is the ultimate evidence that your goal-directed model is working. Because if there was no goal, that shouldn't be possible. Once you can find it, read it, interpret it, and rewrite it, it means that by any engineering standard, it means that you're dealing with a homeostatic mechanism.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm going to give you two pieces of evidence that suggest that there is a goal. One piece of evidence is that if you try to block these things from the outcome that they normally have, they will do some amazing things, sometimes very clever things, sometimes not at all the way that they normally do it. So this is William James's definition, by different means by following different trajectories, they will go around various local maxima and minima to get to where they need to go. It is navigation of a space. It is nod blind turn the crank and wherever we end up is where we end up. That is not what we see experimentally. And more importantly, I think, what we've shown, and this is something I'm particularly happy with in our lab over the last 20 years, we've shown the following. We can actually rewrite the goal states because we found them. We have shown through our work on bioelectric imaging and bioelectric reprogramming, we have actually shown how those goal memories are in code.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that model is testable. We can ask does that model explain what happens? Here's where that model falls down. If you have that model and situations change either there's damage or something in the environment that's happened, those kind of open loop models do not adjust to give you the same goal by different means. This is William James's definition of intelligence, his same goal by different means. And in particular, working them backwards, let's say you're in regenerative medicine and you say, okay, but this is the situation now. I want it to be different. What should the rules be? It's not reversible. So the thing with those kind of open loop models is they're not reversible. You don't know what to do to make the outcome that you want. All you know how to do is roll them forward, right? Now in biology, we see the following. If you have a developmental system and you put barriers,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You turn the crank, time goes forward, whatever happens happens. Now clearly you can get complexity from this. Clearly, you can get some very interesting looking things, right? So the game of life, all those kinds of cool things, right? You can get complexity. No, no problem. But the idea that that model is going to be sufficient to explain and control things like morphogenesis is a hypothesis. It's okay to make that hypothesis, but we know it's false. Despite the fact that that is what we learn in basic cell biology and developmental biology classes, when the first time you see something like this, inevitably, especially if you're an engineer in those classes, you raise it and go, hey, how does it know to do that? How does it know four fingers instead of seven? What they tell you is it doesn't know anything. That's very clear. They all insist that when we learn these things, they insist nothing here knows anything. There are rules of chemistry. They roll forward, and this is what happens. Okay.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying I don't have data for that one, but I'll tell you the stuff that I'm quite certain of. There are a couple of different formalisms that we have in control theory. One of those formalisms is Open loop complexity. In other words, I've got a bunch of subunits like a cellulite automaton. They follow certain rules and”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many, many experiments on this is that the system is navigating a space. It is navigating a space of anatomical possibilities if you try to block where it's going. It will try to get around you. If you try to challenge it with things it's never seen before, it will try to come up with a solution. If you really defeat its ability to do that, which you can, they're not infinitely intelligent, so you can defeat them. You will either get birth defects or you will get creative problem solving such as what you're seeing here with xenobots and anthrobots. You'll find another way to be in. You can be an anthropot, for example, or you'll be something else.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is the space they live in is very hard for us to imagine. What space do they live in? Well, your body, your body cells, long before we had a brain that was good for navigating three-dimensional space was navigating the space of anatomical possibilities. It was going from you start as an egg and you have to become a snake or a giraffe or whatever or a human, whatever, whatever we're going to be. And I specifically am telling you that this general idea when people modeled out with kind of cellular automata type of ideas, this open loop kind of thing where, well, everything just follows local rules and eventually there's complexity and here you go. Now you've got a giraffe or a human. I'm specifically telling you that that model is totally insufficient to grasp what's actually going on, what's actually going on.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is exactly the mission of my lab. It is to enable us to develop tools, to recognize these things, to learn to communicate with them, to ethically relate to them, and in general to expand our ability to do this in the world around us. I specifically chose these kinds of things because They're not as alien as proper aliens would be. So we have some hope. I mean, we're made of them. We have many things in common. There's some hope of understanding them.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to talk to it. That's exactly right. And not just to this, we're trying to talk to molecular networks. So we found a couple of years ago, we found that gene regulatory networks, never mind the cells, but the molecular pathways inside of cells can have several different kinds of learning, including Pavlovian conditioning. And what we're doing now is trying to talk to it. The biomedical applications are obvious. Instead of Hey Siri, you want Hay liver. Why do I feel like crap today? And you want an answer? Well, you know, your potassium levels are this and that. And I don't feel good for these reasons. And you should be able to talk to these things. And there should be able to be an interface that allows us to communicate, right? And I think AI is going to be a huge component of that interface of allowing us to talk to these systems. It's a tool to combat our mind blindness, to help us see diverse other very unconventional minds that are all around us.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is an anthropot. So often when I give talks about this, I show people this video and I say, what do you think this is? And people will say, well, it looks like some primitive organism you got from the bottom of a pond somewhere. And I'll say, what do you think the genome would look like? And, well, the genome would look like some primitive creature, right? If you sequence that thing, you'll get 100% Homo sapiens. And that doesn't look like any stage of normal human development. It doesn't act like any stage of human development. It has the ability to move around. It has, as I said, over 9,000 differential gene expressions. Also interestingly, it is younger than the cells that it comes from. So it actually has the ability to roll back its age. And we could talk about that and what the implications of that are. But to go back to your original question, what we're doing with these kinds of systems.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specific thing. Maybe this is just something unique to frog cells. So he said, okay, what's the furthest you can get from frog embryonic cells? How about human adult cells? And so we took cells from adult human patients who were donating tracheal epithelia for biopsies and things like that. And those cells in, again, no genetic change, nothing like that, they self-organized into something we call anthrobots. Again, self-motile little creature, 9,000 different gene expressions, so about half the genome is now different. And they have interesting abilities. For example, they can heal human neural wounds. So in vitro, if you plate some neurons and you put a big scratch through it, so you damage them, anthropots can sit down and they will try, they will spontaneously without us having to teach them to do it. They will spontaneously try to knit the neurons across it.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are bullied by their neighboring cells into having a very boring life. They become a two dimensional outer covering for the embryo and they keep out the bacteria and that's that. So you might ask, well, what are these cells capable of when you take them away from that influence? So when you do that, they form another little life form we call a xenobot. And it's this self-motile little thing that has cilia covering its surface. The cilia are coordinated, so they row against the water, and then the thing starts to move and has all kinds of amazing properties. It has different gene expression, so it has its own novel transcriptome. It's able to do things like kinematic self-replication, meaning make copies of itself from loose cells that you put in its environment. It has the ability to respond to sound, which normal embryos don't do. It has these novel capacities. And we did that, and we said, look, here are some amazing features of this novel system. Let's try to understand where they came from. And some people said, well, maybe it's a frog.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To basically force us as a community to dig deeper into where these things come from. And that means taking away the crutch where you just say, well, it's evolutionary selection. That's why it looks like that. So in order to do that, we have to make artificial synthetic beings. Now, to be clear, we are starting with living cells. So it's not that they had no evolutionary history. The cells do. They had evolutionary history in frogs or humans or whatever, but the creatures they make and the capabilities that these creatures have were never directly selected for. And in fact, they never existed. So you can't tell the same kind of story. And what I mean is we can take epithelial cells off of an early frog embryo and we don't change the DNA. No synthetic biology circuits, no material scaffolds, no nanomaterials, no weird drugs, none of that. What we're mostly doing is liberating them from the instructive influences of the rest of the cells that they were in in their bodies. And so when you do that, right, normally the cells”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that we've been doing is trying to create novel beings that have never been here before. The reason is that typically when you have a biological system, an animal or a plant, and you say, hey, why does it have certain forms of behavior, certain forms of anatomy, certain forms of physiology? Why does it have those? The answer is always the same. Well, there's a history of evolutionary selection, and there's a long, long history going back of adaptation, and there are certain environments, and this is what survived. And so that's why it has. So what I wanted to do was break out of that mold and to...”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the process is twofold. One is to get a better understanding of what the system, what space is the system navigating, what goals does it have, what level of ingenuity does it have to reach those goals. For example, Xenobots, right? We make Xenobots. Or anthropobots.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He doesn't understand geometry at all. All he understands is arithmetic. You don't think about arithmetic, you think geometry. The reason you guys are playing the same game is that there's this magic square, right, that somebody constructed that basically is a 3x3 square where if you pick the numbers right, they add up to 15. He has no idea that there's a geometric interpretation to this. He is solving the problem that he sees, which is totally algebraic. You don't know anything about that. But if there is an appropriate interface like this magic square, you guys can share that experience. You can have an experience. It doesn't mean you start to think like him. It means that you guys are able to interact in a particular way.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're in a room, you don't see him. So you draw the tic-tac-toe thing on the floor, and you know what you're doing. You're trying to make straight lines with X's and O's. And you're having a nice game. It's obvious that he understands the process. Like sometimes you win, sometimes you lose like it's obvious. In that one little segment of activity you guys are sharing a world. What's happening in the other room next door? Well, let's say the alien doesn't know anything about geometry, then understands straight lines. What he's doing is he's got a box and it's full of basically billiard balls, each one of which has a number on it. And all he's looking, he's doing is he's looking through the box to find a billiard balls whose numbers add up to 15.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There may well be, we have to do experiments. I don't know. There's an example somebody will say to me, well, you know, with your kind of panpsychist, you probably think the weather is essential too. Well, I can't say that, but we don't know. But have you ever tried to see if a hurricane has habituation or sensitization? Maybe we haven't done the experiment. It's hard, but you could, right? And maybe weather systems can have certain kinds of memories. I have no idea. We have to do experiments. So I don't know what the entire human society is doing, but I'll just give you a simple example of the kinds of tools, and we're actively trying to build tools now to enable radically different agents to communicate. So we are doing this using AI and other tools to try and get this kind of communication going across very different spaces. I'll just give you a very kind of dumb example of how that might be. Imagine that you're playing tic-tac-toe against the nation.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life doesn't really care if the thing it's working with was evolved through random trial and error or was engineered with a higher degree of agency. Because at every level within the cell, within the tissue, within the organism, within the collective, you can replace and substitute engineered systems with the naturally evolved systems. And that question of is it really, you know, is it biology or is it technology, I don't think is a useful question anymore. So I was trying to warm people up with this idea that what we're going to do now is talk about minds in general, regardless of their history or their composition. It doesn't matter what you're made of. It doesn't matter how you got here. Let's talk about what you're able to do and what your inner world looks like. That was the goal of that.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Body. It's not embodied. Yeah, it's not embodied by moving around in 3D space, but biology has embodiments in all kinds of spaces that are hard for us to imagine. So your cells and tissues are moving in high-dimensional physiological state spaces, in gene expression state spaces, in anatomical state spaces. They're doing that perception, decision-making, action loop that we do in 3D space when we think about robots wandering around your kitchen. They're doing those loops in these other spaces. And so the first thing I was trying to point out is that, yeah, every layer of your body has its own ability to solve problems in those spaces. And then on the right, what I was saying is that this distinction between people say, well, there are living beings, and then there are engineered machines, and then they often follow up with all the things machines are never going to be able to do and whatever. And so what I was trying to point out here is that it is very difficult to maintain those kind of distinctions because life is incredibly interoperable.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scaling, right, of all of these things, the way you regulate yourself is not by, oh my God, you don't have to sit there and think, wow, I really have to push some sodiums across this membrane. All of that happens automatically. And that's the incredible benefit of these multiscale materials. So what I was trying to do in this paper is a couple things. All of these were, by the way, drawn by Jeremy Gay, who's this amazing graphic artist that works with me. First of all, in panel A, which is the spiral I was trying to point out, is that at every level of biological organization, like we all know we're sort of Nesta dolls of orkins and tissues and cells and molecules and whatever. But what I was trying to point out is that this is not just structural. Every one of those layers is competent and is doing problem solving in different spaces. And spaces that are very hard for us to imagine. We humans are, because of our own evolutionary history, we are so obsessed with movement in three-dimensional space that even in AI, you see this all the time. They say, well, this thing doesn't have a robotic.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't need physics to convince you, and I don't need to know how you work. I don't need to understand all of the steps. What I do need to have is trust that you are a multi-scale cognitive system that already does that for yourself. And you do. Like this is an amazing thing. People don't think about this enough, I think. When you wake up in the morning and you have social goals, research goals, financial goals, whatever it is that you have, in order for you to act on those goals, sodium and calcium and other ions have to cross your muscle membranes. Those incredibly abstract goal states ultimately have to make the chemistry dance in a very particular way, right? Our entire body is a transducer of very abstract things. And by the way, not just our brains, but other, you know, our organs have anatomical goals and other things that we can talk about because all of this plays out in regeneration and development and so on. But the”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you an example about that panel C here with the dog. Isn't it amazing that humans have been training dogs and horses for thousands of years knowing zero neuroscience? Also amazing is that when I'm talking to you right now, I don't need to worry about manipulating all of the synaptic proteins in your brain to make you understand what I'm saying and hopefully remember it. You're going to do that all on your own. I'm giving you very thin in terms of information content, very thin prompt, and I'm counting on you as a multi-scaling agential material to take care of the chemistry underneath.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If your engineering active matter or your engineering computational materials, or better yet agential materials like some very high level prompting and let the system then do very complicated things that you don't need to micromanage. And we all know that that increases when you're starting to work with intelligent systems like animals and humans and so on. And the other thing that goes down as you get to the right is the amount of mechanism or physics that you need to exert the influence goes down. So if you know how your thermostat is to be set as far as its set point, you really don't need to know much of anything else, right? You just need to know that it is a homeostatic system and that this is how I change the set point. You don't need to know how the cooling and heating plant works in order to get it to do complex things.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so on. Technological approach to mind everywhere, this idea that we don't know yet where different kinds of minds are to be found, and we have to empirically figure that out. And so what you see here in figure two is basically this idea that there is a spectrum, and I'm just showing four waypoints along that spectrum. And as you move to the right of that spectrum, a couple things happen. Persuadability goes up, meaning that the systems become more reprogrammable, more plastic, more able to do different things than whatever they're standardly doing. So you have more ability to get them to do new and interesting things. The effort needed to exert influence goes down. That is, autonomy goes up. And to the extent that you are good at convincing or motivating the system to do things, you don't have to sweat the details as much, right? And this also has to do with what I call engineering agential materials. When you engineer what metal plastic things like that, you are responsible for absolutely everything because the material is not going to do anything other than hopefully hold its shape.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the version 1.0, and there's a kind of update at 2.0 that I'm writing at the moment Trying to formalize in a careful way all the things that we've been talking about here. And in particular, this notion of having to do experiments to figure out where any given system is on a continuum. And we can, let's just start with figure two, maybe for a second, and then we'll come back to figure one. And first, just to unpack the acronym. I like the idea that it spells out TAME because the central focus of this is interactions and how do you interact with a system to have a productive interaction with it. And the idea is that cognitive claims are really protocol claims. When you tell me that something has some degree of intelligence, what you're really saying is this is the set of tools I'm going to deploy and we can all find out how that worked out for you. And so technological, because I wanted to be clear with my colleagues that this was not a project in just philosophy. This had very specific empirical implications that are going to play out in engineering and regenerative medicine.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, because you see the thing to remember is we don't have a magic sense or really good intuition for what the mapping is between the embodiment of something and the degree of intelligence it has. We think we do because we have an n of one example on Earth and we kind of know what to expect from cells, snakes, you know, primates. But we really don't. We don't have, and this is, we'll get into more of this stuff on the platonic space, but our intuitions around that stuff is so bad that to really think that we know enough not to try things at this point is, I think, really short-sighted.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting thing is that, yeah, there is no generic rule that tells you when do you need to stop. We make those up. Those are completely made up. You have to do the science and find out”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've used everything from basic habituation conditioning all the way through anxiolitics, hallucinogens, all kinds of cognitive modification on the range of things that you wouldn't believe. And by the way, I'm not the first person to come up with this. So there was a guy named Bose well over 100 years ago who was studying how anesthesia affected animals and animal cells and drawing specific curves around electrical excitability. And he then went and did it with plants and saw some very similar phenomena. And being the genius that he was, he then said, well, I don't know when to stop, but there's no, you know, everybody thinks we should have stopped long before plants because people made fun of them for that. And he's like, yeah, but the science doesn't tell us where to stop. The tool is working. Let's keep going. And he showed interesting phenomena on materials, metals and other kinds of materials, right? And so.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mold, all I'm arguing for is the scientific method. Really, that's really all this is. All I'm saying is you can't just make pronouncements such as humans are this and let's not sort of push that. You have to do experiments. After you've done your experiments, you can say either I've done it and I found, look at that, that thing actually can predict the future for the next 12 minutes. Amazing. Or you say, you know what? I've tried all the things in the behaviorist handbook. They just don't help me with this. It's a very low level of like that's it. It's a very low level of intelligence fine. Right. Done. So that's really all I'm arguing for is an empirical approach. And then things like anthropomorphism go away. It's just a matter of have you done the experiment and what did you find?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what it allows us to do is to get beyond just the what you call it anthropomorphizing claims of saying, oh yeah, I think this thing is trying to do this or that. The question is, let's do the experiment. And one other thing I want to say about anthropomorphizing is people say this to me all the time. I don't think that exists. I think that's kind of like, and I'll tell you why, I think it's like heresy or like other terms that aren't really a thing because if you unpack it, here's what anthropomorphism means. Humans have a certain magic and you're making a category error by attributing that magic somewhere else. My point is we have the same magic that everything has. We have a couple of interesting things besides a cognitive licone and some other stuff. And it isn't that you have to keep the humans separate because there's some bright line. It's just that same.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, how do you know what the cognitive licone of something is? Because as you've said, it could be almost anything. The key is you have to do experiments. And the way you do experiments is you put barriers, you have to do interventional experiments. You have to put barriers between it and its goal, and you have to ask what happens. And intelligence is the degree of ingenuity that it has in overcoming barriers between it and its goal. Now, if it were to be that, now this is, I think, a totally doable, but impractical and very expensive experiment, but you could imagine setting up a scenario where the bacteria were blocked from becoming more complex and you can ask if they were trying to find ways around it, or whether it's actually now their goals are actually metabolic, and as long as those goals are met, they're not going to actually get around your barrier. This business of putting barriers between things in their goals is actually extremely powerful because we've deployed it in all kinds of, and I'm sure we'll get to this later, but we've deployed it in all kinds of weird systems that you wouldn't think are gold-driven systems.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You sort of, right? If you think about that curve, we reach a saturation point. I have some amazing colleagues in the Buddhist community with whom we've written some papers about this, the radius of compassion is like, can you grow your cognitive system to the point that, yeah, it really isn't just your family group, it really isn't just the hundred people you know in your circle. Can you grow your cognitive light cone to the point where, no, no, we care about the whole, whether it's all of humanity or the whole ecosystem or the whole, whatever, can you actually care about that the exact same way that we now care about a much smaller set of people? That's what I mean by linear range.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, sorry, I didn't mean that. First of all, the goal necessarily is often removed in time. So, in other words, when you're pursuing a goal, it means that you have a separation between current state and target state. Your thermostat, right? Let's just think about that. There is a separation in time because the thing you're trying to make happen so that the temperature goes to a certain level is not true right now. And all your actions are going to be around reducing that error, right? That basic homeostatic loop is all about closing that gap. When I said linear range, this is what I meant. If I say to you, this terrible thing happened to 10 people and you have some degree of activation about it. And then they say, no, no, no, actually it was 10,000 people. You're not a thousand times more activated about it. You're somewhat more activated, but it's not a thousand. And if I say, oh my God, it was actually 10 million people, you're not a million times more activated. You don't have that capacity in the linear.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're looking for scales of cognitive life, and we're looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals in spaces that the parts could not comprehend.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those systems have grandiose goals. They're making limbs, and if you're a salamander limb and you chop it off, they will regrow that limb with the right number of fingers, then they'll stop when it's done. The goal has been achieved. No individual cell knows what a finger is or how many fingers you're supposed to have, but the collective absolutely does. And that process of growing that cognitive lycone from a single cell to something much bigger, and of course the failure mode of that process, so cancer, right? When cells disconnect, they physiologically disconnect from the other cells. Their cognitive lycone shrinks, the boundary between self and world, which is what the cognitive lycone defines, shrinks. Now they're back to an amoeba as far as they're concerned. The rest of the body is just external environment. And they do what amoebas do. They go where life is good. They reproduce as much as they can, right? So that cognitive lycoe, that is the thing that I'm talking about that scales. And so when we're looking for life, I don't think we're looking for specific materials. I don't think we're looking for specific metabolic states.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cognitive light cone of that thing is bigger than that of its parts. So, in other words, rocks aren't very exciting because the things it knows how to do are the things that its parts already know how to do, which is follow gradients and things like that. But living things are amazing at aligning their competent parts so that the collective has a larger cognitive lycone than the parts. I'll give you a very simple example that comes up in biology and that comes up in our cancer program all the time. Individual cells have little tiny cognitive lichenes. What are their goals? Well, they're trying to manage pH, metabolic state, some other things. There are some goals in transcriptional space, some goals in metabolic space, some goals in physiological state space, but they're generally very tiny goals. One thing evolution did was to provide a kind of cognitive glue, which we can also talk about, that ties them together into a multicellular system.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source