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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“Massive cognitive lyclones. So I think what's scaling from zero, and I do think it goes all the way down, I think we can talk about even particles doing something like this. I think what scales is the size of the cognitive lycone. And so now this is an interesting, here I'll try for a definition of life or whatever it's worth. I spend no time trying to. I think we call things alive to the extent that”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 20 micron radius of spacetime, and that you have 20 minutes memory going back and maybe five minutes predictive capacity going forward, that tiny little cognitive lyco, and I'm going to see probably a bacterium. And if you say to me that, well, I'm able to care about several hundred yards sort of scale, I could never care about what happens three weeks from now, two towns over. Just impossible. I'm saying, you might be a dog. And if you say to me, okay, I care about really what happens, you know, the financial markets on earth, you know, long after I'm dead and this and that. So you're probably a human. And if you say to me, I care in the linear range. I actively not, I'm not just saying that I can actively care in the linear range about all the living beings on this planet. I'm going to say, well, you're not a standard human. You must be something else because humans, I don't know, these standard humans today, I don't think, can do that. You must be some kind of a bodysatva or some other thing that has”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I think is scaling is something I call the cognitive light cone. And the cognitive light cone is the size of the biggest goal state that you can pursue. This doesn't mean how far do your senses reach. This doesn't mean how far can you affect it. So the James Webb telescope has enormous sensory reach, but that doesn't mean that's the size of its cognitive lycone. The size of the cognitive lycone is the scale of the biggest goal you can actively pursue. But I do think it's a useful concept to enable us to think about very different types of agents of different composition, different provenance, you know, engineer, evolve, hybrid, whatever, all in the same framework. And by the way, the reason I use Lycone is that it has this idea from physics that you're putting space and time kind of in the same diagram, which I like here. So if you tell me that all your goals revolve around maximizing the amount of sugar in this, you know,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That. So I bring my, I focus on the engineering approach because I want to say, look, This is not a philosophical problem. This is not a linguistics problem. We are not trying to define terms and different ways to make anybody feel fuzzy. What I'm telling you is, if you want to reach certain capabilities, if you want to reprogram cancer, if you want to regrow new organs, you want to defeat aging, you want to do these specific things, you are leaving too much on the table by making an unwarranted assumption that the low-level tools that we have, so these are the rules of chemistry and the kind of remolecular rewiring, that those are going to be sufficient to get to where you want to go. It's an assumption only and it's an unwarranted assumption. And actually we've done experiments now, so not philosophy, but real experiments, that if you take these other tools, you can in fact persuade the system in ways that has never been done before. And we can unpack all of that. But it is absolutely correlated with intelligence. So let me flesh that out a little bit. What I think is scaling in all of these things, right? Because I keep talking about the scaling. So what is it that's scaling?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely correlated. So let me, I want to preface this with one thing. When I say it's an engineering perspective, I don't mean that the standard tools that we use in engineering and this idea of enforced control and steering is how we should view all of the world. I'm not saying that at all, and I want to be very clear because people do email me and say, ah, this engineering thing, you're going to drain the life and the majesty out of these high-end human conversations. My whole point is not that at all. Of course, at the right side of the spectrum, it doesn't look like engineering anymore, right? It looks like friendship and love and psychoanalysis and all these other tools that we have. But here's what I want to do. I want to be very specific to my colleagues in regenerative medicine. Just imagine if I, you know, if I went to a bioengineering department or a genetics department and I started talking about high level cognition and psychoanalysis, right? They didn't want to hear.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. It's a very important thinking aid to, first of all, what they call steel manning, right, to try to make the strongest possible case for the other side and to ask yourself, okay, what are all the places that I'm sort of glossing over because I don't know exactly what to say and where are all the holes in the argument and what would a really good critique really look like?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And behavioral science are you using to reach that conclusion, right? And so I think it's actually much more productive to take this operational stance and say, tell me what protocols you think you can deploy with this thing that would lead you to use these terms.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem spaces are operating in, what kind of mind does it have? What kind of cognitive capacities does it have? You have to actually be much more specific. And we can even name, right, that's fine. We can name different types of, I mean, this is doing predictive processing, this can't do that, but it can form memories, what kind, well, habituation and sensitization, but not associative conditioning. Like it's fine to have categories for specific capabilities, but it's actually, I think it actually makes for much more rigorous discussions because it makes you say, what is it that you're claiming this thing does? And it works in both directions. So some people will say, well, that's a cell. That can't be intelligent. They'll say, well, let's be very specific. Here are some claims, here's some problem solving that it's doing. Tell me why that doesn't, you know, why doesn't that match? Or in the opposite direction, somebody comes to me and says, you're right, you're right. The whole solar system, man, it's just like this amazing, okay, what is it doing? Like, tell me, tell me what tools of cognitive.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, the cognitive spectrum is much more interesting than the spectrum of life. I think really what we're talking about is a spectrum of cognition. And I know it's weird as a biologist to say, I don't think life is all that interesting a category. I think the categories of different types of minds, I think, is extremely interesting. And to the extent that we think our categories are complete and are cutting nature at its joints, we are going to be very poorly placed to recognize novel systems. So, for example, a lot of people will say, well, this is intelligent and this isn't, right? And there's a binary thing, and that's useful occasionally that's useful for some things. I would like to say instead of that, let's make, let's admit that we have a spectrum, but instead of just saying, oh, look, everything's intelligent, right? Because if you do that, you're right. You can't do anything after that. What I'd like to say instead is, no, no, you have to be very specific as to what kind and how much. In other words, what”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, categories are great when you want to say, look, I know there's a bunch of stuff hidden here. I'm going to ignore all that, and we're just going to get on with this particular thing. And all of that is great as long as you don't lose track of the stuff that you glossed over. And that was what I'm afraid is happening in a lot of different ways. And in terms of, look, I'm very interested in life beyond Earth and all of these kinds of things, although we should also talk about what I call SUTI SUTI, the search for unconventional terrestrial intelligences. I think we got much bigger issues than actually recognizing aliens off Earth. But I'll make this claim. I think the categorical stuff is actually hurting that search. Because if we try to define categories with the kinds of criteria that we've gotten used to, we are going to be very poorly set up to recognize life in novel embodiments. I think we have a kind of mind blindness. I think this is really key.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me make the opposite argument. They're absolutely useful. They're useful specifically when you want to gloss over certain things. The categories are exactly useful when there's a whole bunch of stuff. And this is what's important about science is like the art of being able to say something without first having to say everything, right? We should make it impossible.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In most of the cells in your body do the things that neurons do. So, what really is a neuron, right? So once you start scratching this, this happens, and I have some things that I think are coming out of our lab and others that are, I think, very interesting about the origin of life, but I don't think it's about finding that one boon like this is, yeah, there are innovations, right? There are innovations that allow you to scale in an amazing way, for sure. And lots of people that study those, right? So things that thermodynamic and metabolic things and all kinds of architectures and so on. But I don't think it's about finding a line. I think it's about finding a scaling process.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Questions. Nobody wants to get into that every time somebody has a traffic ticket. And so, okay, so we've just decided that this is an adult idea. And of course, it does come up in court because then somebody has a brain tumor or somebody's eating too many twinkies or something has happened. You say, look, that wasn't me. Whoever did that, I was on drugs. Well, why'd you take the drugs? Well, that was, you know, that was yesterday me. Today, this is, right? So we get into these very deep questions that are completely glossed over by this idea of an adult. So I think once you start scratching the surface, most of these categories are like that. They're convenient and they're good. I get into this with neurons all the time. I'll ask people, what's a neuron? Like, what's really a neuron? And yes, if you're in neurobiology 101, of course you just say, look, these are what neurons look like. Let's just study the neuroanatomy and we're done. But if you really want to understand what's going on, well, neurons develop from other types of cells. And that was a slow and gradual process.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody is going to say, look, I know what a baby is, I know what an adult is. You're crazy to say that there's no difference. Not saying there's no difference. What I'm saying is the word adult is really helpful in court because you just need to move things along. And so we've decided that if you're 18, you're an adult. However, what it hides, what it completely conceals is the fact that, first of all, nothing happens on your 18th birthday, right? That's special. Second, if you actually look at the data, the car rental companies actually have a much better estimate because they actually look at the accident statistics and they'll say it's about 25 is really what you're looking for, right? So theirs is a little better. It's less arbitrary. But in either case, what it's hiding is the fact that we do not have a good story of what happened from the time that you were an egg to the time that you're this supposed adult and what is the scaling of repersonal responsibility decision making judgment like these are deep fundamental content”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My suggestion is that much better than trying to, in my experience, much better than trying to define any kind of a line, okay? Because inevitably I've never found, and people try to, we play this game all the time when I make my continuum claim, then people try to come out, okay, well, what about this? What about this? And I haven't found one yet that really shoots that down, that you can't zoom in and say, yeah, okay, but right before then this happened. And then if we really look close, like here's a bunch of steps in between, right? Pretty much everything ends up being a continuum. But here's what I think is much more interesting than trying to make that line. I think what's really more useful is trying to understand the transformation process. What is it that happened to scale up? And I'll give you a really dumb example. And we always get into this because people often really, really don't like this continuum view. The word adult, right?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Living things are fundamentally different from non living things. Or if you think that cognitive things are these advanced brainy things that are very different from other kinds of systems, what you're not going to do is take the tools that are appropriate to these kind of cognitive systems, right? So the tools that have been developed in behavioral science and so on, you're never going to try them in other contexts because you've already decided that there's a categorical difference, that it would be a categorical error to apply them. And people say this to me all the time, is that you're making a category error. And as if these categories were given to us from on high and we have to obey them forevermore, the category should change with the science. So yeah, I don't believe in any such line. And I think a physics story is very often a useful part of the story. But for most interesting things, it's not the entire story.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let's talk about, well, first of all, of course it can mean it can help meaning that I'm not saying physics is not helpful. Of course it's helpful. It's a very important lens on one slice of what's going on in any of these systems. But I think the most important thing I can say about that question is I don't believe in any such line. I don't believe any of that exists. I think there is a continuum. I think we as humans like to demarcate areas on that continuum and give them names because it makes life easier. And then we have a lot of battles over so-called category errors when people transgress those categories. I think most of those categories at this point, they may have done some good service at the beginning of when the scientific method was getting started and so on. I think at this point they mostly hold back science many, many categories that we can talk about are at this point very harmful to progress because what those categories do is they prevent you from”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your ear, and the electrical signals went up to your brain. I mean, we have a complete accounting of what happened, done and done. But if you want to understand what's the more important aspect of that interaction, it's not going to be found in the physics department, it's going to be found in the math department. So that's my only claim that physics is an amazing lens with which to view the world, but you're capturing certain things. And if you want to stretch to sort of encompass these other things, we just don't call that physics anymore, right? We call that something else.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that mean then that when somebody is missing a finger or has a psychological problem or has these other high-level issues that you have something for them, that you're going to be able to do something? Because my claim is that you're not going to. And even if you have some theory of physics that is completely compatible with everything that's going on, that's not enough. That's not specific enough to enable you to solve the problems you need to solve. In the end, when you need to solve those problems, the person you're going to go to is not a physicist. It's going to be either a biologist or a psychiatrist or who knows, but it's not going to be a physicist. And the simple example is this. Let's say someone comes in here and tells you a beautiful mathematical proof. It's just really deep and beautiful. And there's a physicist nearby, and he says, well, I know exactly what happened. There were some air particles that moved from that guy's mouth to your ear. I see what goes on. It moved the silly.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the issue everything here hangs on what it means to understand for me because understand doesn't just mean have some sort of pleasing model that seems to capture some important aspect of what's going on. It also means that you have to be generative and creative in terms of capabilities. And so for me, that means if I tell you this is what I think about cognition and cells and tissues, it means, for example, that I think we're going to be able to take those ideas and use them to produce new regenerative medicine that actually helps people in various ways, right? It's just an example. So if you think as a physicist, you're going to have a complete understanding of what's going on from that perspective of fields and particles and who knows what else is at the bottom there.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, Richard. Yeah, you should talk to Richard as well. He's an amazing guy and he's got some very interesting ideas about the intersection of cognition and evolution. But I think what you bring up is very important because there has to be a kind of impedance match between what you're looking for and the tools that you're using. I think the reason physics always sees mechanism and not minds is that physics uses low agency tools. You've got voltmeters and rulers and things like this. And if you use those tools as your interface, all you're ever going to see is mechanisms and those kinds of things. If you want to see mind, you have to use a mind, right? You have to have, there has to be some degree of resonance between your interface and the thing you're hoping to find.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spectrum. If you're having interactions with even cells, but certainly dogs, other animals, maybe other creatures soon, you're not the same at the end of that interaction as you were going in. It's a mutual bi-directional relationship. So it's not just you persuading something else. It's not you pushing things. It's a mutual bidirectional set of persuasions, whether those are purely intellectual or of other kinds.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see persuadability, I mean different types of approaches. And we all know if you want to persuade your wind up clock to do something, you're not going to argue with it or make it feel guilty or anything. You're going to have to get in there with a wrench and you're going to have to tune it up and do whatever. If you want to do that same thing to a cell or a thermostat or an animal or a human, you're going to be using other sets of tools that we've given other names to. And so, of course, that spectrum, the important thing is that as you get to the right of that spectrum, whereas the agency of the system goes up, it is no longer just about persuading it to do things. It's a bi-directional relationship, what Richard Watson would call a mutual vulnerable knowing. So the idea is that on the right side of that spectrum, when systems reach the higher levels of agency, the idea is that you're willing to let that system persuade you of things as well. In molecular biology, you do things. Hopefully the system does what you want to do, but you haven't changed. You're still exactly the way you came in. But on the right side of that,”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's wrong. But the thing that we can say for sure is that you can't guess that. You have to do experiments and you have to see because you don't know where any given system is on that spectrum of persuadability. And it turns out that every time we look and we take tools from behavioral science, so learning different kinds of training, different kinds of models that are used in active inference and surprise minimization and perceptual multistability and visual illusions and all these kinds of interesting things, stress perception and memory, active memory reconstruction, all these interesting things when we apply them outside the brain to other kinds of living systems, we find novel discoveries and novel capabilities actually being able to get the material to do new things that nobody had ever found before and precisely because I think that people didn't look at it from those perspectives. They assumed that it was a low level kind of thing.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have many options. Some of those options are I'm going to micromanage all of the molecular events that have to happen, right? And there's an incredible number of those. Or maybe I just have to micromanage the cells and the stem cell kinds of signaling factors. Or maybe actually I can give the cells a very high level prompt that says you really should build the limb and convince them to do it. And so which of those is possible? I mean, clearly people have a lot of intuitions about that. If you ask standard people in regenerative medicine and molecular biology, they're going to say, well, that convincing thing is crazy. What we really should be doing is talking to the cells or better yet the molecular networks. And in fact, all the excitement of the biological sciences today are at single molecule approaches and big data and genomics and all of that. The assumption is that going down is where the action is going to be going down and scale.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Context. Yeah. The beginning of my work is very much in regenerative medicine, in bioengineering, things like that. So for those kinds of systems, the question is always, how do you get the system to do what you want it to do? So there are cells, there are molecular networks, there are materials, there are organs and tissues and synthetic beings and biobots and whatever. And so the idea is if I want your cells to regrow a limb, for example, if you're injured and I want your cells to regrow a limb”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decide or have feelings about from a philosophical armchair, you have to make a hypothesis about which tools, which interaction protocols you're going to bring to a given system. And then we all get to find out how that worked out for you. So you could be wrong in many ways. In both directions, you can guess too high or too low or wrong in various ways. And then we can all find out how that's working out. And so I do think that the behavior of certain objects is well described by specific formal rules, and we call those things the subject of mathematics. And then there are some other things whose behavior really requires the kinds of tools that we use in behavioral cognitive neuroscience. And those are other kinds of minds that we think we study in biology or in psychology or other sciences.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea basically is that where something is on that spectrum, and I've called it the spectrum of persuadability, you could call it the spectrum of intelligence or agency or something like that. I like the notion of the spectrum of persuasability because it's an engineering approach. It means that these are not things you can”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although, actually, I would turn that upside down. I think that pyramid is backwards. And I think it's behavior science at the bottom. I think it's behavior science all the way. I think in certain ways even math is the behavior of a certain kind of being that lives in a latent space. And physics is what we call systems that at least look to be amenable to a very simple low agency kind of model and so on. But that's what I'm interested in is understanding that and developing applications because it's very important to me that what we do is transition deep ideas and philosophy into actual practical applications that not only make it clear whether we're making any progress or not, but also allow us to relieve suffering and make life better for all sentient beings and enable to enable us and others to reach their full potential. So these are very practical things, I think.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Protocols that you bring. And then in first person, it's this notion of having an inner perspective and being a system that has valence and cares about the outcome of things, makes decisions, and has memories and tells a story about itself and the outside world. And how can all of that exist and still be consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry and various other things that we see around us? So that I find to be maybe the most interesting and the most important mystery for all of us to on the science and also on the personal level. So that's what I'm interested in.”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the fundamental tension is in both the first person, the second person, and third person descriptions of mine. So in third person, we want to understand how do we recognize them and how do we know looking out into the world what degree of agency there is and how best to relate to the different systems that we find. Are our intuitions any good when we look at something and it looks really stupid and mechanical versus it really looks like there's something cognitive going on there? How do we get good at recognizing them? Then there's the second person, which is the control, and that's both for engineering, but also for regenerative medicine. When you want to tell the system to do something, right? What kind of tools are you going to use? And this is a major part of my framework, is that all of these kinds of things are operational claims that you're going to use, the tools of hardware rewiring, of control theory and cybernetics, of behavior science, of psychoanalysis and love and friendship, like what are the interactions?”
2025-11-30 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source