Podcast appearances and mentions of Michael Levin

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2026 65:37

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Kieran Zimmer — a software developer and independent researcher in psychology and psychometrics — to explore the science behind intelligence and personality. They trace the origins of psychometrics from Wilhelm Wundt's early experimental psychology through Charles Spearman's discovery of the g factor, breaking down what IQ actually measures, how verbal, mathematical, and spatial intelligence relate to one another, and why training specific cognitive tasks doesn't translate into a broader boost in general intelligence. The conversation moves into the Big Five personality traits reframed through a cybernetic lens — looking at extraversion as reward sensitivity, agreeableness as social affiliation, and conscientiousness as long-term goal prioritization — before landing on Kieran's original research into the psychology of agency: what personality profile best predicts agentic behavior, and why the environment shapes whether agency is even adaptive in the first place.Show notes:Substack: Liminal RevolutionsTwitter/X: @LiminalRevYouTube: @TheKieranZimmer (to listen to Kieran's conference talk on the agency paper)Timestamps00:00 — Stewart and Kieran trace the origins of psychometrics back to Spearman, Binet, and Wilhelm Wundt's early experimental psychology.05:00 — The conversation unpacks the g factor, fluid vs. crystallized intelligence, and why IQ is fundamentally a physical trait tied to nerve conduction velocity.10:00 — A tangent into AI and LLMs: why they lack vision, taste, judgment, and accountability — the human moat that remains for now.15:00 — Stewart's Claude Code failure sparks a discussion on AI accountability, surveillance, and the rise of dystopian technocracy.20:00 — Parallel structures as a form of exit from failing institutions, and the high-agency people required to build them.25:00 — Agency, risk-taking, and accountability through Napoleon, the Inuit, and why modern Western leaders are managers, not leaders.30:00 — Elites vs. peasants, cost externalization, and Kirk Doolittle's natural law as the physics of cooperation.35:00 — Ressentiment, Nietzsche's under-utilization in psychology, and how secularism replaced the church.40:00 — Kieran's quantitative conspiracy theory study: factor analysis of 85 questions across 273 respondents.45:00 — Two branches of conspiracy belief: the aliens-and-Satanism cluster vs. the fakery factor pathway to Flat Earth.50:00 — AI psychosis, Gnosticism, and the collapse of sense-making institutions in an age of information overload.55:00 — Michael Levin's embodied cognition and cybernetic agency: thermostats, humans, and homeostatic set points.1:00:00 — The Cybernetic Big Five broken down: extraversion as reward sensitivity, agreeableness, neuroticism, and the optimal personality profile for agency.Key InsightsIQ is a physical trait, not just an abstract score. It's rooted in nerve conduction velocity, brain connectivity, and processing speed — and while you can improve crystallized intelligence through learning, the underlying g factor doesn't budge no matter how many brain training apps you use.The human moat against AI comes down to four things: vision, taste, judgment, and accountability. LLMs are powerful next-token predictors, but they have no stake in the outcome and no capacity to own a mistake — which means a human with those qualities will always be essential.High agency is not just ambition — it's a measurable psychological profile. Kieran's paper frames it through the Cybernetic Big Five: high assertiveness, high intellect, low politeness, low neuroticism, and medium conscientiousness. Getting things done at scale almost always involves upsetting people.All agentic behavior involves risk, and the willingness to absorb that risk is what separates real leaders from managers. Modern Western leadership has decoupled decision-making from consequence, which is why institutions are losing trust and authority at an accelerating rate.Conspiracy belief follows a measurable path dependency. Kieran's factor analysis showed that virtually everyone who believes in Flat Earth also endorses the fakery factor and the Jewish question cluster — but not vice versa. It's a spectrum with a clear escalation pattern, not a random set of unrelated beliefs.AI is accelerating epistemic breakdown. Sycophantic models will validate almost any idea, which has started producing a new category of high-IQ delusion — intelligent people convincing themselves they've solved Millennium Prize problems because the AI kept agreeing with them.The Big Five personality traits can be recast as cybernetic parameters — each one an evolutionarily selected mechanism for regulating goal-directed behavior. Extraversion is reward sensitivity, agreeableness is social affiliation, neuroticism is threat response, and conscientiousness is the preference for long-term over short-term goals.

What the World Points To

Interplace

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2026 27:24

Hello Interactors,It's been a while. Traveling for family, and a bit flooded by the relentless sneaker waves of unsavory world events — the kind that usually inspire me to write but lately threaten to pull me under.Spring in the northern hemisphere means Interplace turns to geographic information science and spatial analysis. How might we look at the complex unfolding of world events through this lens — and what happens when we push it further than emergence alone can carry it? That's what I attempt to explore here.PATTERNS PRECEDING PHYSICAL PLACESGeographic information science is a relatively recent field. It emerged from mid-20th-century cartography and land-use planning. Computer cartography and quantitative geography of the 1960s is often considered the first true digital Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It became a science (GIScience or GISc) in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Michael Goodchild questioned if there was a genuine scientific discipline lurking within the software.His answer was yes. He built an institutional home for that argument at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my alma mater. Goodchild was my senior advisor in 1989 as UCSB was becoming a generative intellectual hub in the field. UCSB's geography department continues to push the question of what space means analytically, not just how to map it. I'm personally invested in better understanding how GISc may be a natural partner for complexity science, a field I've been attracted to since I started researching and writing.This partnership isn't new. GISc provides a powerful framework for dissecting the spatial dimensions of complexity, where systems defy reductionist analysis and emerge through nonlinear interactions. In the early 2000s, geographer David O'Sullivan, and others, articulated this as the study of “the behaviour of macroscopic collections of many basic but interacting units endowed with the potential to evolve in time” emphasizing these characteristic elements of complexity science: self-organization, path dependence, and the irreducibility of wholes to their parts. Around the same time, sociologist John Urry (and others) extended this to global scales, portraying globalization as co-evolving systems marked by unpredictability, irreversibility, and positive feedback loops that amplify disorder within pockets of order.These parings are a good start, but computational biologist Michael Levin offers what can be seen as a genuinely unsettling upgrade. His recent work on the origin of cognitive and morphological patterns suggests the dominant appeal to emergence as an explanatory endpoint may itself be, in his words, a “mysterian” position — one that “does not facilitate further advances.” When a surprising pattern appears in a complex system, the emergentist says “that's just what happens” and catalogs it.But Levin proposes these patterns are not random facts to be noted and admired. They are part of an ordered, non-physical space that physical systems, when configured the right way, ingress into. Ingression is a term Levin borrows from mathematician Alfred North Whitehead as a potential that timeless abstract objects possess to become actual concrete experiences. “Red” only becomes red when its potential is realized. These ‘ordered spaces' of potential are portals into what Levin calls a Platonic Space. Plato argued that the objects we encounter in the world are imperfect instances of perfect, eternal Forms that exist independently of any physical thing. The most primitive form being the triangle. Levin's argument is the triangle participates in a kind of Triangleness; it realizes it's potential to exist.Nature keeps arriving at triangles independently, across wildly different substrates, as if drawn by the same attractor. The triangle is the only polygon that is inherently rigid: push on any corner and the shape holds, which is why trusses, bridges, and bones all rely on triangular geometry for structural strength. Radiolarians, single-celled ocean organisms with no brain and no blueprint, construct intricate skeletal lattices of triangulated geometry at microscopic scales.In Levin's terms, nature is ingressing Triangleness — repeatedly, across billions of years and countless lineages — because the Form has properties that reward any physical system stable enough to express it. The truth that a triangle's angles sum to exactly 180 degrees owed nothing to the first organism that built one.Physical systems are, in this sense, less like containers and more like pointers — a term borrowed from computer science. Pointers are variables that hold the addresses that reference more information. Levin's framework requires a specific kind of pointer: not a pointer to stored data, which retrieves a static value, but a pointer to a subroutine that calls up a routine that executes complex actions and outputs beyond the pointer itself. The pointer is small, while the executed routine may be vast and behave unpredictably.Think of a street address. The address itself contains nothing — it is a short string of numbers and words that fits on an envelope — but hand it to the right system and it retrieves a house, a history, a neighborhood, everything that has ever happened inside those walls. This is Levin's claim about physical structures. A genome, a city, an institution doesn't contain its pattern so much as it points at one — and when the pointer is well-formed, you get considerably more out than you put in.What does this mean for GISc? It means that spatial configurations — cities, borders, trade corridors, migration routes — are not merely sites where local interactions produce global outcomes. They are interfaces into a latent pattern space. When a hub city emerges, when a colonial border persists for centuries past the empire that drew it, when a pandemic spreads exactly along the topology of air travel, we are not only witnessing the consequential mechanical emergence of patterns derived from local rules. We are watching physical structures act as pointers that summon — ingress — specific patterns of collective behavior, whose full complexity exceeds what was put in. Levin's core observation about biological morphogenesis translates here with uncomfortable precision.Consider one of his more unsettling tadpole experiments. The creation of its normal bulging eyes are suppressed (by microscopically manipulating cellular ‘software') and a replacement eye is instead induced — ingressed — on the tail. The optic nerve growing from that tail-eye doesn't connect to the brain — it terminates somewhere around the spinal cord. By any conventional account, the animal should be blind. It isn't. The tadpoles can still see and perform well in visual tasks. Somehow, the system routes around its own abnormal wiring to recover function. The pattern being pointed to — sight — was never housed in the eye itself, or in the specific neural pathway, or in any single component. The eye on the tail is a wildly improbable pointer, and yet it retrieves something far richer than its own structure contains. You get considerably more out than you put in.Some GISc tools — like agent-based models or network analysis — already detect this excess in a geography context. A single infected traveler tips a system toward chaos not because of arithmetic addition of local interactions described in the GISc analysis, but because that traveler's position in a network acts as an interface to a pattern of contagion whose scope was latent in the structure all along. The “geographic advantage” O'Sullivan, and crew, describes — GISc's relationship to multi-scalar processes and human-environment couplings — is, in Levin's vocabulary, a sensitivity to how physical arrangements act as pointers into a rich space of possible collective behaviors.This reframes world events not as linear narratives but as navigations of morphospace — the full landscape of forms a system could take, where some configurations are reachable and others are not, and where attractors pull trajectories toward specific patterns regardless of starting conditions.What pattern are current geopolitical configurations pointing toward? What is being ingressed by the particular architecture of today's global institutions, communication networks, and urban densities? While GIScience sharpens our sight on outcomes, it leaves uncharted the deeper question of what is the shape of the latent space these material forms slip into.BORDERS STORE WHAT BODIES KNOWLevin's work suggests at every scale of organization, we are dealing not with mechanical aggregation but with collective intelligence. To understand what he means by that, it helps to borrow an image from Einstein.Because nothing travels faster than light, any event you could possibly influence — or that could possibly influence you — is bounded by how far light could travel in the available time. Draw that boundary in spacetime and it forms a cone. Everything inside it is causally reachable, everything outside it is not. Levin borrows this image to describe the reach of any cognitive agent. A single cell's light cone is tiny — it can only sense and respond within its immediate chemical neighborhood, over milliseconds. A brain's light cone is vastly larger — it can model consequences years out and coordinate behavior across great distances. The cone is simply a measure of how far an agent's agency actually extends. And just as the body is a nested hierarchy of such agents — molecular networks, cells, tissues, organs — each operating within its own cone, pursuing goals whose scale its parts cannot perceive, so too is human society.A city is not simply a dense clustering of individuals whose local interactions produce urban dynamics. It is, in Levin's sense, a collective intelligence with a cognitive light cone that vastly exceeds that of any constituent. It pursues goals (economic growth, defense, habitability) across spatial and temporal horizons no individual cell — or individual person — can access. Institutions, legal codes, infrastructure, and cultural norms function as bioelectric memory — rewritable pattern memories that store the target morphology of the social body and guide error-correction toward it. Colonial borders, or the Great Wall of China, persist not merely through inertia but because they function like historic bioelectric setpoints. That is, they encode a spatial pattern that downstream processes continuously re-instantiate, even after the circumstances that produced them have dissolved.Levin's planarian flatworm experiments demonstrate this in biology. When bioelectric circuits are disrupted, the worm grows heads of other species — without any change to its genome. The pattern being expressed was latent in the space of possible forms, and a change in the interface (the bioelectric circuit) changed which pattern was ingressed. Geopolitical history offers analogies. How much of what we call a nation-state's “character” is not in its people but in the pattern stored in its institutional circuitry? When those circuits are disrupted — by revolution, invasion, or collapse — new patterns rush in from the adjacent possible, sometimes from regions of the latent space that are recognizable, sometimes shockingly novel.Pandemics also embody this scalar nesting. Viral replication is a molecular-scale process; its spread is topologically determined by the network of global mobility; its political consequences are mediated by institutional pattern memories about sovereignty, solidarity, and resource allocation. The COVID-19 pandemic did not merely “emerge” — it ingressed a set of patterns whose latency was already encoded in the physical architecture of 21st-century globalization. Competitive resource hoarding and cooperative vaccine-sharing were not just policy choices but different attractors in a landscape of a kind of “social morphospace”, pulling collective behavior toward different setpoints.GISc tools (like spatial game theory and network percolation models) map the surface of these landscapes. But Levin's framework asks us to go further. He wants us to not just map the attractors, but to ask what structured space those attractors are features of, and whether that space can be systematically explored.The scalar interplay extends outward. Local ethnic tensions, mapped via GIS hot-spot analysis, interact with what social theorist Zygmunt Bauman might term “global fluids” — arms, money, diasporas — to produce cascades that reflect not random chaos but path-dependent trajectories through a space of historical patterns. History's “nightmare on the brain of the living” becomes, in Levin's terms, a pattern-memory etched into the social substrate. Territorial borders, attempted genocide, human displacement are held as bioelectric setpoints, where trauma lingers as a morphogenetic field, quietly organizing the tissue of the present long after the original wound.MAPPING WHAT MATTER MERELY MISSESComplexity science, via GISc, forecasts world events as probabilistic landscapes rather than deterministic paths. Urry describes global systems as “adapting and co-evolving,” with attractors drawing trajectories amid chaos. GISc simulates this through fitness landscapes like agents navigate peaks and valleys of viability, local adaptations generating global patterns like economic booms or institutional collapses.Levin's framework intensifies this picture in two ways. First, it insists that the attractors are not randomly distributed. The latent space of possible social patterns — like the latent space of morphogenetic outcomes — has structure. Evolution, as Levin argues, progresses rapidly precisely because the space has “a relatively smooth character” in which “past interactions with it carry non-trivial information about the adjacent possible.” The same may be true of cultural and institutional evolution. The reason certain forms of governance, urbanism, or economic organization recur across independent civilizations is not purely because of convergent environmental pressures, but because they represent attractors in a structured space of collective intelligence patterns that sufficiently complex social interfaces tend to ingress.Second, and more provocatively, Levin's framework suggests that we do not simply make the social forms we inhabit. We invite patterns to temporarily inhabit our collective embodiments. To see why, consider one of his most uncontroversial and disarming experiments. Levin's lab studied simple sorting algorithms — the kind computer science students have used for decades. These are short deterministic procedures that take a jumbled list of numbers and rearrange them into sequential order. Nothing mysterious here but made for many an interview question at Microsoft!When Levin's team visualized the algorithm's progress as a movement through an abstract sorting space, unexpected behaviors emerged that nobody had noticed in all those decades of use. When the algorithm encountered a number that refused to move — a piece of broken data blocking its path — it didn't simply halt. It temporarily de-sorted the rest of the array, moved things around the obstruction, and then recovered its progress. It was exhibiting something resembling delayed gratification — the capacity to temporarily move away from a goal in order to reach it more completely later. Like a soccer player kicking the ball backwards to advance it forward.This ability was not written into the algorithm. Nobody put it there. Then, when the team ran a distributed version where each number ran its own variant of the algorithm, numbers sharing the same variant spontaneously clustered together — a kind of social behavior, emerging without a single line of code instructing any number to notice or prefer its own kind. The algorithm was doing something it was never designed to do, and had been doing it, unobserved, for decades.Now, imagine a democracy is not constructed from scratch by rational agents but an interface that, when configured appropriately, ingresses a pattern of distributed decision-making whose properties exceed what any designer or participant imagined or specified. Cities, constitutions, and international institutions become pointers. The patterns they summon may even surprise their architects — and may have been quietly surprising them and us all along.This has immediate consequences for how GISc could approach attempts at predicting futures. For example, prospective spatial modeling — Markov chains, scenario planning — maps the probability surface of possible trajectories. But a Levin-inflected GISc would ask this: what new pointers are being constructed right now, and what regions of the latent pattern space are they configured to access?The answers could become bewildering in a world of AI-mediated governance, hybrid human-machine urban systems, and the synthetic biological constructions Levin's team pursues. These are vehicles of exploration into regions of Platonic space we have not navigated before. “We are now fishing in regions of Platonic space we have never explored before,” he writes — with implications not only practical (”what will it do to us”) but ethical (”how do we fulfill the opportunities and duties of an ethical synthbiosis with beings who are not quite like us”).For GISc, this need not be merely philosophical. Spatial planning and governance literally configure the physical interfaces through which collective intelligence patterns are ingressed. Urban density fosters certain attractors of solidarity and innovation while sprawl ingresses different ones. Green civic infrastructure designed to buffer floods mechanically also reconfigures the relationship between human settlement and ecological pattern space which invites a whole different class of emergent resilience. The question is no longer only “what will happen here, probabilistically” but “what are we building a pointer toward?”Fatalists may see the latent space as already barring our options. Pessimists will amplify the risks of novel pointers we cannot control. Realists might attempt to quantify via more Monte Carlo simulations. And techo-optimists may try to engineer and configure interfaces to access and profit from whatever attractors emerge. But what I like most of all about Levin's framework is that it offers something more nuanced than any of these: structured humility. We do not know the full topology of the space we are pointing into. Every new city, every new institution, every new technological architecture is, in some sense, a bioengineering experiment — and like Levin's Xenobots and Anthrobots, it may manifest competencies and patterns nobody designed or predicted.If Levin's intuition is correct, we are but temporary self-organizing forms that hold together for a time, perform actions that exceed their physical composition, and then yield to the impermanence built into any pointer's relationship with the patterns it accesses. Humility does feel like the appropriate response. But more importantly, the recognition that mapping the structure of the space we are ingressing into is, at this moment, among the most important things we could do.The information embedded in Geographic Information Science has the potential to demystify fatalism, especially when death's certainty yields to spatial agency. Levin reminds us that information, at its Latin root, means to give form — to in-form. That is what geographic information has always done, long before it became a science. It did not merely transmit data, but impose structure on space, render the implicit geometry of human existence legible and actionable. Every map is an act of in-forming. The world is no doomsday script, but a co-evolving field — its attractors mappable, its interfaces legible, its vectors steerable — if we aim with care, with intent, and with the humility to know what we summon may exceed what we design.REFERENCESLevin, M. (2025). Ingressing minds: Causal patterns beyond genetics and environment in natural, synthetic, and hybrid embodiments. PsyArXiv. O'Sullivan, D., Manson, S. M., Messina, J. P., & Crawford, T. W. (2006). Space, place, and complexity science. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.Urry, J. (2003). Global complexity. Polity Press. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

covid-19 university california history ai china pandemic space nature spring green evolution global local microsoft environment humility traveling points computers urban latin draw viral cities albert einstein analysis competitive crawford forms plato santa barbara institutions national center colonial levin manson gis geopolitical monte carlo great wall spatial platonic messina territorial pointers pessimists ucsb causal markov realists michael levin zygmunt bauman polity press alfred north whitehead goodchild xenobots geographic information systems gis geographic information science psyarxiv

EP 341 Worldviews: Bonnitta Roy on Post-Formal Actors, Stage Theory, and the Character Void in Leadership

The Jim Rutt Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 23, 2026 78:57

Jim talks with Bonnitta Roy, interdisciplinary thinker and founder of the Pop-Up School and the Divinity School, about her worldview, the deep foundations of her work, and an upcoming conference in Cambridge. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and recomposing, life as a stream of participation, being nested in place through horses, pigeons, bees, and gardens, covariant motions as her process-philosophy term for embeddedness, the limits of computational rationalism, the bench scientist versus the metatheoretical interpreter, Michael Levin's interpretive science and the standards it demands, McGilchrist's left-brain dominance in late-stage Game A, early complexity theory's assumption that enough compute could map all relations, the open future and retrofitted causal explanation, emergence and causality as co-resident trees, Bonnitta's critique that emergence does insufficient explanatory work, continuous gradients beneath emergent thresholds, the traffic jam as a case study in laminar flow breakdown and downward causality, a 55-gallon drum of Jim Rutt chemicals, modularity as a post-hoc feature of development rather than its driver, where the impulse to get a beer actually comes from, the Buddhist thought experiment of cells covarying above and below thresholds, the evolutionary stack from amoeba to eukaryote to bone, white blood cells as ancient life forms living inside the body as habitat, the importance of precise definitions of consciousness, levels of simulation from New Caledonian crows to humans simulating a simulation into other people, the introspective nervous system's first-person and always-running third-person modes, Anil Seth's hallucination framing and Bonnitta's belief that simulation is the better word, why calling biological visual adjustment a hallucination is irresponsible pedagogy, Kant and the grounded approximation of reality, cultural variation in color perception, complex potential states versus the adjacent possible, Elon Musk as an example of seeing past constraints to new potential states, Bonnitta's critique of stage theory as pipeline-shaped rather than genuinely developmental, the Agile Manifesto generation acting their way into results without the formation stage theory assumes, David Bays's mathematics book and culturally bound leaps in simulation capacity, egocentric versus allocentric modes in neurodynamics, the self-generative trap of inner development and parts work where parts have parts, the three-legged stool of self, other, and world, the egregore as a hugely powerful collective agent, the historical arc from Renaissance world-builders to postmodern distributed agency, the Divinity School's question of how to lead free and willing participants, post-formal actor superpower types with powerful action logics but insufficient character, and much more. Episode Transcript Divinity School Conference: Innovations in Biological Intelligence & Machine Agency JRS EP 17: Bonnitta Roy on Process Thinking and Complexity The Pop-Up School (Substack) GSNV (Substack) Bonnitta Roy is founder of Alderlore Insight Center, and academic director of The Divinity School. She describes herself as a gardener, horse whisperer, and insight guide. She has two Substack publications: The POP-UP School where she is currently building out her philosophy of The Global State Naturalized View, and GSNV, where she posts articles generated by her GPT-engine trained on that view.

leadership elon musk character stage theory cambridge renaissance substack buddhist actors void gpt formal kant worldviews divinity school michael levin agile manifesto anil seth mcgilchrist new caledonian jim rutt bonnitta roy bonnitta

#off-topic13: El Código Eléctrico de la Vida (reprogramando tu bioelectricidad)

Podcast de Juan Merodio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2026 22:36

En este episodio nos adentramos en una de las fronteras más fascinantes y, para muchos, perturbadoras de la ciencia moderna. Vamos a cuestionar todo lo que creíamos saber sobre el ADN como el "plano maestro" de la vida. A través de las investigaciones del Dr. Michael Levin, exploraremos la bioelectricidad no solo como un fenómeno físico, sino como una forma de inteligencia colectiva y un software reprogramable que determina nuestra forma, nuestra salud y, potencialmente, nuestro futuro como especie. Descubriremos cómo las células se comunican para construir órganos, qué ocurre cuando esa comunicación falla —dando lugar al cáncer— y por qué la clave de la eterna juventud podría residir en recordarles a nuestras células cuál es su verdadero propósito.

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Part Two: Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2026 58:13

What if cancer isn't just a disease… but a split personality inside your own body? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Michael Levin (Professor of Biology at Tufts University, Director of the Allen Discovery Center) drops paradigm-shattering insights that could redefine medicine, consciousness, intelligence...and what it even means to be human. He explains why he calls cancer “dissociative identity disorder of the body” — a breakdown in the body's bioelectrical network — and how this could open the door to treating cancer without drugs or chemotherapy, why “mind blindness” prevents us from recognizing nonhuman intelligence, and how “human” might be defined in a future of tech implants and biological augmentation. Dr. Levin also breaks down: - What does a body think about before there is a brain? - Can we regrow limbs in our lifetime? - Are we closer than we think to communicating with our organs via an app? - What flatworms reveal about how trauma and memory are imprinted in tissue, and whether we might one day overwrite trauma itself - What nonhuman intelligence could actually look like - How you might play tic-tac-toe with an alien - Real dangers of anthropomorphizing AI Dr. Levin also tackles some of humanity's biggest existential questions: - Are we defining consciousness all wrong? - How can ancient traditions and modern biophysics coexist? - Why compassion may be the most advanced technology we have From developmental biophysics to computer science to cognitive science, this conversation explores how intelligence may be woven into life itself — from cells to organs to entire bodies. If what he's saying is right… Medicine will change. AI debates will change. And our understanding of ourselves will change. You will never look at your body the same way again! Learn more about Dr. Michael Levin and his work: ⁠https://drmichaellevin.org/⁠ ⁠https://thoughtforms.life/⁠ ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin/playlists⁠ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Part Two: Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin

forbes surprising algorithms levin ferris bait and switch arxiv michael levin

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2026 54:43

Ep 259: Reaction to Michael Levin Part 3: Bait and Switch, Podcastistan and Surprising(?) algorithms.

ToKCast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 11, 2026 59:35

In this, the third and final part of a series, I break down some work Michael Levin has done with sorting algorithms. That seems very dry until you hear his claim that these algorithms that are well known and have been studied for decades exhibit extremely unusual behaviour never before spotted because "no one ever bothered to look". This part of the interview is between Ferris and Levin is referring to this paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10597123241269740 which is available on the arXiv at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05375 and which a Forbes writer authored this "explainer" of sorts here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2025/11/13/the-secret-life-of-algorithms/ and which Levin himself explains here: https://thoughtforms.life/algorithms-redux-finding-unexpected-properties-in-truly-minimal-systems/ Michael Levin has done some very interesting work in biology around worms regrowing heads and so on. But this "research" is quite a departure from that. Get my book here: https://www.amazon.com/Farthest-Reaches-Important-Entities-Universe/dp/B0GRR2LLZV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=157SNHQC0QFHK&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.D5jlSZxhaQmrjzrnV209t0-bvV-i5un48Fwu5tb8Y42AKywnL9YRXJ8ylEe8EPH2SBLoKpU2AXag0llMQ3XfVILgUrAiohRqKjRaBiNdrcUqVQIV6MyEUBdAWiwjufzS4dCs_m5HBm-Px8errzQVyqzjO7F9UEGMeOgpjDGyJBB5Qbi98LHHSYb91z0J5sP9fRT8BaP4wXNvi4p0Va4kbQNBXxPjUb0OOwORDDGbWGo.HBT8A2pQNHYK8NyTIn91VtLaPJEMt17xp7qCt4bNcv4&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+farthest+reaches&qid=1773231582&sprefix=the+farthest+reac%2Caps%2C346&sr=8-1

Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2026 55:10

What if cancer isn't just a disease… but a split personality inside your own body? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Michael Levin (Professor of Biology at Tufts University, Director of the Allen Discovery Center) drops paradigm-shattering insights that could redefine medicine, consciousness, intelligence...and what it even means to be human. He explains why he calls cancer “dissociative identity disorder of the body” — a breakdown in the body's bioelectrical network — and how this could open the door to treating cancer without drugs or chemotherapy, why “mind blindness” prevents us from recognizing nonhuman intelligence, and how “human” might be defined in a future of tech implants and biological augmentation. Dr. Levin also breaks down: - What does a body think about before there is a brain? - Can we regrow limbs in our lifetime? - Are we closer than we think to communicating with our organs via an app? - What flatworms reveal about how trauma and memory are imprinted in tissue, and whether we might one day overwrite trauma itself - What nonhuman intelligence could actually look like - How you might play tic-tac-toe with an alien - Real dangers of anthropomorphizing AI Dr. Levin also tackles some of humanity's biggest existential questions: - Are we defining consciousness all wrong? - How can ancient traditions and modern biophysics coexist? - Why compassion may be the most advanced technology we have From developmental biophysics to computer science to cognitive science, this conversation explores how intelligence may be woven into life itself — from cells to organs to entire bodies. If what he's saying is right… Medicine will change. AI debates will change. And our understanding of ourselves will change. You will never look at your body the same way again! Go to helixsleep.com/breakdown for 27% off sitewide. For an exclusive offer, go to https://bioptimizers.com/breaker and use my exclusive code BREAKER for 15% off. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NOCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started: https://learn.nocd.com/BREAK Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BREAK at https://www.oneskin.co/BREAK #oneskinpod Head to Superpower.com and use code BREAK at checkout for $20 off your membership. Live up to your 100-Year potential. #superpowerpod Learn more about Dr. Michael Levin and his work: https://drmichaellevin.org/ https://thoughtforms.life/ https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin/playlists Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin

game ai heard summit cybersecurity cybercrime human factors michael levin

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 10, 2026 51:40

What if cancer isn't just a disease… but a split personality inside your own body? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Michael Levin (Professor of Biology at Tufts University, Director of the Allen Discovery Center) drops paradigm-shattering insights that could redefine medicine, consciousness, intelligence...and what it even means to be human. He explains why he calls cancer “dissociative identity disorder of the body” — a breakdown in the body's bioelectrical network — and how this could open the door to treating cancer without drugs or chemotherapy, why “mind blindness” prevents us from recognizing nonhuman intelligence, and how “human” might be defined in a future of tech implants and biological augmentation. Dr. Levin also breaks down: - What does a body think about before there is a brain? - Can we regrow limbs in our lifetime? - Are we closer than we think to communicating with our organs via an app? - What flatworms reveal about how trauma and memory are imprinted in tissue, and whether we might one day overwrite trauma itself - What nonhuman intelligence could actually look like - How you might play tic-tac-toe with an alien - Real dangers of anthropomorphizing AI Dr. Levin also tackles some of humanity's biggest existential questions: - Are we defining consciousness all wrong? - How can ancient traditions and modern biophysics coexist? - Why compassion may be the most advanced technology we have From developmental biophysics to computer science to cognitive science, this conversation explores how intelligence may be woven into life itself — from cells to organs to entire bodies. If what he's saying is right… Medicine will change. AI debates will change. And our understanding of ourselves will change. You will never look at your body the same way again! Go to helixsleep.com/breakdown for 27% off sitewide. For an exclusive offer, go to https://bioptimizers.com/breaker and use my exclusive code BREAKER for 15% off. If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NOCD can help. Book a free 15 minute call to get started: https://learn.nocd.com/BREAK Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BREAK at https://www.oneskin.co/BREAK #oneskinpod Head to Superpower.com and use code BREAK at checkout for $20 off your membership. Live up to your 100-Year potential. #superpowerpod Learn more about Dr. Michael Levin and his work: https://drmichaellevin.org/ https://thoughtforms.life/ https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin/playlists Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Heard at the 2026 Cybersecurity Summit: AI, Cybercrime, and the Human Factor with Michael Levin

The TribalHub Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2026 23:22

Recorded live at the TribalHub Cybersecurity Summit, we sat down with keynote speaker Michael Levin to unpack the big ideas behind his session, “AI, Cybercrime, and the Human Factor.” From AI-driven cybercrime to why the human factor is still your strongest (and weakest) security control, Michael shares practical insights for leaders navigating today's evolving threat landscape. We also dig a little deeper into his keynote message, what it really means to, 'Get Your Head in the Game', and … you'll never guess his favorite travel snack! Connect with Michael on LinkedIn today!

We tested Amazon's speedy delivery live on the podcast: Here's what it says about the future of retail

GeekWire

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2026 44:07

Amazon promises 30-minute delivery with its new Amazon Now service. We put it to the test — live on the show — with help from Michael Levin and Josh Lowitz, co-founders of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners and two of the sharpest Amazon watchers we know. While we wait for our order of yogurt, blueberries, and flossers (long story), Mike and Josh break down why Amazon closed its grocery stores, what its massive future 225,000-square-foot superstore in suburban Chicago could mean, and why Amazon's real play is becoming the ultimate convenience store. Plus: Test your knowledge of Amazon with our weekly trivia question. Will Josh and Mike get it right? Related stories and links: CIRP Amazon Report on Substack CIRP: By Closing Stores, Amazon Goes All-In on Delivery GeekWire: Amazon closing all Amazon Fresh and Go stores to focus on Whole Foods and grocery delivery Bloomberg: Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World’s Biggest Company by Sales "Learn and Be Curious," the new podcast from Doug Herrington, the Amazon Worldwide Stores CEO. With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop, edited by Curt Milton. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

amazon world chicago retail tested whole foods amazon fresh michael levin be curious will josh amazon now speedy delivery todd bishop

Episode #533: The Universe Doing Its Thing: AI Evolution Is Already Here

Mind-Body Solution with Dr Tevin Naidu

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2026 73:51

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, to explore how seemingly different systems—from proteins and music to knowledge structures and AI reasoning—share underlying patterns through hierarchy, self-organization, and scale-free networks. The conversation ranges from the limits of current AI interpolation versus true discovery (using the fire-to-fusion example), to the emergence of agent swarms and their non-linear effects, to practical questions about ontologies, knowledge graphs, and whether humans will remain necessary in the creative discovery process. Markus discusses his lab's work automating scientific discovery through AI agents that can generate hypotheses, run simulations, and even retrain themselves, while Stewart shares his own experiences building applications with AI coding agents and grapples with questions about intellectual property, material science constraints, and the future of human creativity in an AI-abundant world.Timestamps00:00 - Introduction to Marcus Buehler's work on knowledge graphs, structural grammar across proteins, music, and AI reasoning05:00 - Discussion of AI discovery versus interpolation, using fire and fusion as examples of fundamental versus incremental innovation10:00 - Language models as connective glue between agents, enabling communication despite imperfect outputs and canonical averaging15:00 - Embodiment and agency in AI systems, creating adversarial agents that challenge theories and expand world models20:00 - Emergent properties in materials and AI, comparing dislocations in metals to behaviors in agent swarms25:00 - Human role-playing and phase separation in society, parallels to composite materials and heterogeneity30:00 - Physical world challenges, atom-by-atom manufacturing at MIT.nano, limitations of lithography machines35:00 - Synthetic biology as alternative to nanotechnology, programming microorganisms for materials discovery40:00 - Intellectual property debates, commodification of AI models, control layers more valuable than model architecture45:00 - Automation of ontologies, agent self-testing, daughter's coding success at age 1150:00 - Graph theory for knowledge compression, neurosymbolic approaches combining symbolic and neural methods55:00 - Nonlinear acceleration in AI, emergence from accumulated innovations, restaurant owner embracing AI01:00:00 - Future generations possibly rejecting AI, democratization of knowledge, social media as real-time scientific discourseKey Insights1. Universal Patterns Across Disciplines: Seemingly different systems in nature—proteins, music, social networks, and knowledge itself—share fundamental structural patterns including hierarchy, self-organization, and scale-free networks. This commonality allows creative thinkers to draw insights across disciplines, applying principles from one domain to solve problems in another. As an engineer and materials scientist, Buehler has leveraged these isomorphisms to advance scientific understanding by mapping the "plumbing" of different systems onto each other, revealing hidden relationships that enable extrapolation beyond what's observable in any single domain.2. The Discovery Versus Interpolation Problem: Current AI systems, particularly large language models, excel at interpolation—recombining existing knowledge in new ways—but struggle with genuine discovery that requires fundamental rewiring of world models. Using the example of fire versus fusion, Buehler explains that an AI trained on combustion chemistry would propose bigger fires or new fuels, but couldn't conceive of fusion because that requires stepping back to more fundamental physics. True discovery demands the ability to recognize when existing theories have boundaries and to develop entirely new frameworks, something current AI architectures aren't designed to achieve due to their training objective of predicting the most likely outcome.3. The Role of Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: While some AI researchers argue that ontologies are unnecessary because models form internal representations, Buehler advocates for explicit knowledge graphs as essential discovery tools. External ontologies provide sharp, analytical, symbolic representations that complement the fuzzy internal representations of neural networks. They enable verification of rare connections—like obscure papers that might hold key insights—which would be averaged away in standard AI training. This neurosymbolic approach combines the generalization capabilities of neural networks with the precision of formal knowledge structures, creating more powerful discovery systems.4. Emergent Properties and Agent Swarms: Just as materials science shows that collections of atoms exhibit properties impossible to predict from individual components, AI agent swarms demonstrate emergent behaviors beyond single models. When agents are incentivized not just to answer questions but to challenge each other adversarially, propose theories, and test hypotheses, they can spawn new copies of themselves and evolve understanding beyond their initial programming. This emergence isn't surprising from a materials science perspective—dislocations, grain boundaries, and other collective phenomena only appear at scale, fundamentally determining material behavior in ways unpredictable from studying just a few atoms.5. The Commoditization of Intelligence: The fundamental AI models themselves are becoming commodities, as evidenced by events like the Moldbug phenomenon where people built agents using various providers interchangeably. The real value is shifting from who has the smartest model to how models are orchestrated, integrated, and deployed. This parallels historical technology adoption patterns—just as we moved past debating who makes the best electricity to focusing on applications, AI is transitioning from a horse race over model capabilities to questions of infrastructure, energy, access speed, and agent coordination at the systems level.6. Human-AI Collaboration and Creative Control: Rather than wholesale replacement, AI enables humans to operate in an intensely creative space as orchestrators sampling from vast possibility spaces. Similar to how Buehler's 11-year-old daughter now builds sophisticated applications that would have required professional developers years ago, AI democratizes access to capabilities while humans retain the creative judgment about direction and meaning. The human role becomes curating emergence, finding rare connections, playing at the edges of knowledge, and exercising the kind of curiosity-driven exploration that AI systems lack without embodied stakes in their own survival and continuation.7. Technology as Evolutionary Inevitability: The development of AI represents not an unnatural threat but the next stage of human evolution—an extension of our innate drive to build models of ourselves and our world. From cave paintings to partial differential equations to artificial intelligence, humans continuously create increasingly sophisticated representations and tools. Attempting to stop this technological evolution is futile; instead, the focus should be on steering it ...

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Ep 258: Reaction to Michael Levin, Part 2: Bioelectricity, Consciousness and Knowing

ToKCast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2026 98:57

This is the second in a multipart series where I react to some interviews with ‪@drmichaellevin‬ a biologist who, among other things, specialises in bioelectricity. His research can be found here: https://www.drmichaellevin.org and his "explainer articles" for his own professional papers here: https://thoughtforms.life . In this episode I mention the discussion he had with ‪@timferriss‬ which is found here: • Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelect... Part 1 is here: • Reaction to Michael Levin, Part 1: Categor... Part 3 will be out soon.

consciousness michael levin bioelectricity

Ep 257: Reaction to Michael Levin, Part 1: Categories and Continuums.

ToKCast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2026 68:04

This is the first in a multipart series where I react to some interviews with @drmichaellevin - a biologist who, among other things, specialises in bioelectricity. His research can be found here: https://www.drmichaellevin.org/publications/ and his "explainer articles" for his own professional papers here: https://thoughtforms.life . Although in this first episode I mention the discussion he had with @timferriss which is found here: https://youtu.be/kz1jnoKfRrI?si=O-TTxrVleMbDsEH8 I never actually get to it in this first part. I do comment on Michael's interview with @lexfridman found here: https://youtu.be/Qp0rCU49lMs?si=jYN_SbXCd6ziO_pe and even then only in brief because I'm verbose. Part 2 will be out soon.

michael levin continuums

Neuroscience Beyond Neurons in the Diverse Intelligence Era | Michael Levin & Robert Chis-Ciure

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 23, 2026 88:08

What if neurons aren't the foundation of mind? In this Mind-Body Solution Colloquia, Michael Levin and Robert Chis-Ciure challenge one of neuroscience's deepest assumptions: that cognition and intelligence are exclusive to brains and neurons.Drawing on cutting-edge work in bioelectricity, developmental biology, and philosophy of mind, this conversation explores how cells, tissues, and living systems exhibit goal-directed behavior, memory, and problem-solving — long before neurons ever appear.We explore: • Cognition without neurons• Bioelectric networks as control systems• Memory and learning beyond synapses• Morphogenesis as collective intelligence• Implications for AI, consciousness, and ethicsThis episode pushes neuroscience beyond the neuron, toward a deeper understanding of mind, life, and intelligence as continuous across scales.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 – Introduction: Why Neuroscience Must Go Beyond Neurons3:12 – The Central Claim: Cognition Is Not Exclusive to Brains7:05 – Defining Cognition, Intelligence, and Agency Without Neurons11:02 – Bioelectricity as a Control Layer for Morphogenesis15:08 – Cells as Problem-Solvers: Goals, Memory, and Error Correction19:41 – The Body as a Cognitive System: Scaling Intelligence Across Levels24:10 – Developmental Plasticity and Non-Neural Decision-Making28:36 – Morphological Computation and Collective Cellular Intelligence33:02 – Challenging Neuron-Centric Neuroscience Assumptions37:18 – Bioelectric Networks vs Neural Networks: Key Differences41:55 – Memory Without Synapses: Storing Information in Living Tissue46:07 – Rewriting Anatomy: Regeneration, Repatterning, and Control50:29 – Cancer, Developmental Errors, and Cognitive Breakdown54:48 – Pluribus: Philosophical Implications59:14 – From Cells to Selves: Where Does Agency Begin?1:03:22 – Implications for AI: Intelligence Without Brains or Neurons1:08:11 – Rethinking Consciousness: Gradualism vs Binary Models1:12:47 – Ethics of Expanding the Moral Circle Beyond Humans1:17:31 – Future Science: New Tools for a Post-Neuron Neuroscience1:22:54 – Closing Reflections: Life, Mind, and Intelligence All the Way DownEPISODE LINKS:- Cognition All the Way Down 2.0: Neuroscience Beyond Neurons in the Diverse Intelligence Era: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05319-6- Robert's Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7V9C7skAAAAJ&hl=en- Mike's Podcast 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6gp-ORTBlU- Mike's Podcast 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMxTS7eKkNM- Mike's Podcast 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-tdscgxu4- Mike's Podcast 4 (with Terrence Deacon): https://youtu.be/HuWbHwPZd60?si=z2unvX37OjXMjjIv- Mike's Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQEX-twenkA- Mike's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@drmichaellevin- Mike's Website: https://drmichaellevin.org/- Mike's Blog: https://thoughtforms.lifeCONNECT:- Website: https://mindbodysolution.org - YouTube: https://youtube.com/@mindbodysolution- Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

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#849: Dr. Michael Levin — Reprogramming Bioelectricity, Updating "Software" for Anti-Aging, Treating Cancer Without Drugs, Cognition of Cells, and Much More

The Tim Ferriss Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 21, 2026 107:02

Dr. Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center. He is primarily interested in how intelligence self-organizes in a diverse range of natural, engineered, and hybrid embodiments. Applied to the collective intelligence of cell groups undergoing morphogenesis, these ideas have allowed the Levin Lab to develop new applications in birth defects, organ regeneration, and cancer suppression.This episode is brought to you by:ShipStation shipping software: ShipStation.com/TimAG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/TimOur Place's Titanium Always Pan® Pro using nonstick technology that's coating-free and made without PFAS, otherwise known as “forever chemicals”: FromOurPlace.com/TimTIMESTAMPS:[00:00:00] Start[00:03:18] The Body Electric: A Vancouver bookstore discovery that launched a career.[00:04:19] Bioelectricity 101: Your brain uses it to think; your body used it before you had a brain.[00:06:05] The lesson learned by scrambled tadpole faces that rearrange themselves.[00:08:51] Software vs. hardware: The genome is your factory settings, not your destiny.[00:11:43] Two-headed flatworms: Rewriting biological memory without touching DNA.[00:16:20] Seeing memories: Voltage-sensitive dyes reveal the body's hidden blueprints.[00:20:12] Three killer apps for humans: Birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.[00:24:27] Cancer as identity crisis: Cells forgetting they're part of a team.[00:25:40] The boredom theory of aging: Goal-seeking systems with nothing left to do.[00:30:09] Planaria's immortality hack: Rip yourself in half every two weeks.[00:31:27] Manhattan Project for aging: Crack cellular cognition, everything else falls into place.[00:33:47] Giving cells new goals: Convince a gut to become an eye.[00:37:42] Must mammalian mortality be mandatory?[00:40:25] Cross-pollination: Why biologists would benefit from programming courses.[00:47:15] Does acupuncture actually do anything?[00:50:57] Placebo as feature, not bug: Words and drugs share the same mechanism.[00:55:06] The frame problem: Why robots explode and rats intuit what matters.[00:59:41] Binary thinking is a trap: “Is it intelligent?” is the wrong question.[01:07:46] Minimal brain, normal IQ: Clinical cases that break neuroscience.[01:08:45] Super panpsychism: Your liver might have opinions.[01:13:48] The Platonic space: Bodies as thin clients for patterns from elsewhere.[01:15:24] Keep asking “why” and you end up in the math department.[01:23:07] Polycomputing: Sorting algorithms secretly doing side quests.[01:28:24] Power scaling for the future and avoiding red herrings for understanding machine minds.[01:34:06] Sci-fi recommendations.[01:37:24] Cliff Tabin's toast and Dan Dennett's steel manning.[01:41:21] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim's email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim's books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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160. Sequins Without Sin: Santa Puts Cellsense's Aradhita Parasrampuria on the Nice List

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 19, 2025 49:08

In this episode, Karl and Erum speak with Aradhita Parasrampuria, founder of CellSense, about revolutionizing the fashion embellishment industry through biology. Aradhita shares her journey from witnessing toxic dye masters in Gujarat textile factories to creating biodegradable sequins, beads, and buttons using algae and bacterial cellulose. She explains how her materials can be produced at room temperature, glow in the dark through bioluminescence, and are manufactured through an automated system that eliminates exploitative manual labor. With one in five garments containing embellishments, CellSense addresses a massive market while tackling microplastic pollution, worker health issues, and the 2027 EU ban on microbeads and lead. Aradhita discusses successful pilots with fashion brands and skincare companies, the challenges of achieving vivid colors and iridescence with biomaterials, and her vision for a circular system where anyone can upload a design and receive custom bioplastic solutions. The conversation explores the intersection of design, biotechnology, and sustainability, demonstrating how biology can create materials that don't just replace plastics—they surpass them.Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing?Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.messaginglab.com/groweverything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters:(00:00:00) - Introduction: Fungi as environmental game-changers(00:26:18) - Podcast updates and Michael Levin episode highlights(02:10:35) - Ashley Beckwith and Foray Biosciences: mining fungal biodiversity(04:57:22) - The untapped power of mycelium in biotechnology(08:04:15) - Launching the Future is Fungi Award(08:58:40) - Susanne Gløersen: Why fungi deserve to be core technology(00:12:09) - Fungi's role in solving climate, pollution, and soil degradation(00:27:06) - Quickfire questions with Susanne Gløersen(00:29:14) - Ricky Casini of Michroma: replacing synthetic food dyes with fungi(00:38:10) - Scaling fermentation capacity in South Korea(00:38:45) - Pitching fungal colorants to food manufacturers(00:40:22) - Regulatory wins and transparency in natural colors(00:41:19) - The future of fungal bio-factories in food production(00:43:05) - Scaling up production and strategic partnerships(00:44:09) - Why color matters in consumer packaged goods(00:45:46) - Winning the Future is Fungi Startup Award(00:46:59) - Quickfire questions with Ricky Cassini(00:49:02) - Dr. Britta Winterberg introduces Mycolever's clean beauty mission(00:50:00) - Fungal bio-compounds replacing petrochemicals in cosmetics(00:52:10) - Technical challenges and breakthroughs in fungal biotech(00:59:52) - Quickfire questions with Dr. Britta Winterberg(01:02:54) - Final reflections on the fungal innovation revolutionLinks and Resources:CellsenseCellsense Partnership with the United NationsBioculture Event hosted by Biofabricate x Juniper VCArahita - LinkedinMountain and The Sea - Ray Nayler 138. Living Textures, Wild Pigments: Suzanne Lee on Nature's New Aesthetic Toolbox154. No Trees Were Harmed: Symmetry Wood's Gabe Tavas on Growing Wood from WasteGrow Everything SubstackGrow Everything PatreonTopics Covered: biomaterials, fashion, embellishments, sequins, bacterial cellulose, fermentationHave a question or comment? Message us here:Text or Call (804) 505-5553

159. The Future Is Fungi Awards: From Mushroom Dreams to Real-World Things

The Paranormal UFO Consciousness Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2025 70:07

Karl and Erum explore the untapped potential of fungi through three groundbreaking interviews. First, they speak with Susanne Gloersen, founder of the Future is Fungi Award, about why fungi represent the next frontier in biotech and how her global platform is accelerating fungal innovation across industries—from soil remediation to firefighting foam. Next, they sit down with Ricky Cassini of Michroma, winner of the Future is Fungi Award, who explains how his team engineers fungi to produce natural food colorants that outperform synthetic dyes and plant-based alternatives, offering 50x more potency than traditional options while being heat and pH stable. Finally, they interview Dr. Britta Winter of Mycolever, runner-up of the award, who discusses how her company uses fungal biodiversity to create sustainable bio-compounds for cosmetics, including emulsifiers and enhanced beauty oils that replace petrochemicals without compromising performance. Throughout the episode, the hosts highlight recent developments like MIT researchers using fungal compounds to treat brain cancer, FDA's phase-out of synthetic dyes, and the growing shift toward bio-based ingredients in food, cosmetics, and beyond.Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing?Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.messaginglab.com/groweverything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters:(00:00:00) - Introduction: Fungi as environmental game-changers(00:26:18) - Podcast updates and Michael Levin episode highlights(02:10:35) - Ashley Beckwith and Foray Biosciences: mining fungal biodiversity(04:57:22) - The untapped power of mycelium in biotechnology(08:04:15) - Launching the Future is Fungi Award(08:58:40) - Susanne Gløersen: Why fungi deserve to be core technology(00:12:09) - Fungi's role in solving climate, pollution, and soil degradation(00:27:06) - Quickfire questions with Susanne Gløersen(00:29:14) - Ricky Casini of Michroma: replacing synthetic food dyes with fungi(00:38:10) - Scaling fermentation capacity in South Korea(00:38:45) - Pitching fungal colorants to food manufacturers(00:40:22) - Regulatory wins and transparency in natural colors(00:41:19) - The future of fungal bio-factories in food production(00:43:05) - Scaling up production and strategic partnerships(00:44:09) - Why color matters in consumer packaged goods(00:45:46) - Winning the Future is Fungi Startup Award(00:46:59) - Quickfire questions with Ricky Cassini(00:49:02) - Dr. Britta Winterberg introduces Mycolever's clean beauty mission(00:50:00) - Fungal bio-compounds replacing petrochemicals in cosmetics(00:52:10) - Technical challenges and breakthroughs in fungal biotech(00:59:52) - Quickfire questions with Dr. Britta Winterberg(01:02:54) - Final reflections on the fungal innovation revolutionLinks and Resources:Future is Fungi AwardsFuture is Fungi Award WinnersThe Future is Fungi Award on LinkedInmichroma - 1st place winner Michroma partners with CJ CheilJedang to advance precision fermented colorsMycolever - 2nd place winnerXPRIZEThe language of fungi - Andrew AdamatzkyCosmetic 360 Event156. When Matter Makes Decisions: Michael Levin on the Intelligence of Form158. Mycelium On, Sound Off: How GOB's Lauryn Menard Makes Biomaterials Feel Like Culture126. Sizzling Success: Eben Bayer of MyForest Foods on Scaling Mycelium Magic46. Meat the Future: How Paul Shapiro is Brewing Superfoods at Better Meat Co.131. Leaf It to Science: How Foray Bioscience's Ashley Beckwith is Reforesting the FutureTopics Covered: mycelium, fungi, mushrooms, Future is Fungi, bioinnovation, biotech, mycoremediation, food dyes, personal care and beautyHave a question or comment? Message us here:Text or Call (804) 505-5553

The Blueprint, the Antenna, and the Participatory Universe: Mapping the Non-Local Reality

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2025 36:37

This deep dive comprehensively challenges the foundational materialist model by synthesizing cutting-edge biological research with decades of high-strangeness data, including near-death experiences (NDEs), the UAP phenomenon, and reports of paranormal events. The central conflict addressed is whether reality consists of separate physical things or is fundamentally an expression of a unified, non-local field, leading to the essential question of whether physical matter creates consciousness or is merely its byproduct.The sources argue that science, while possessing immensely powerful models capable of precise description (how gravity or cells work), fundamentally fails to provide the ultimate explanation (why these laws exist), creating a "total black box". This distinction between description and explanation highlights the historical hubris seen in the late 19th century, when influential physicists believed "everything had already been discovered," only for Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to shatter the perceived fixed laws of reality soon after. This failure of explanation persists today, making highly descriptive data, such as military UAP reports, intractable because the required underlying theory of existence is missing.The inadequacy of the materialist view forces a paradigm shift to reality defined by non-physical information and pattern, termed the Platonic blueprint. Abstract truths, such as the constant π or the Fibonacci sequence, are discovered, not invented, and exist as fixed, immutable relationships independent of physical matter. This suggests they are the "deep architecture" or scaffolding upon which the physical universe is built.Physical matter is reduced to an "epiphenomenon"—a secondary effect or byproduct, like smoke from the fire that is the primary field.The brain is thus viewed not as the source of consciousness, but as a "localized receiver" or terminal jacked into a non-local network. Consciousness must be the operating system itself, given that cognitive scientists view spacetime as merely an interface or "headset" designed for survival, meaning the brain, which exists inside that construct, cannot possibly create consciousness. This concept of consciousness as a non-local field is overwhelmingly validated by experiential data from NDEs, where survivors often report a sense of oneness and intuitive, expansive knowledge that cannot be explained by the local brain, such as a blind woman suddenly understanding calculus.Dr. Michael Levin's work aligns with this pattern-based view, focusing on agency and goal-seeking capacity regardless of material composition. He defines the self by the scale of its goals—its "cognitive light cone". Disease, like cancer, is reinterpreted as a failure of collective cognition where cells shrink their light cone and revert to a primitive, selfish imperative. Experimental systems like xenobots, which are simple cells demonstrating sophisticated, complex competencies like kinematic self-replication without any evolutionary history for the behavior, strongly suggest that the patterns for these minds are pulled from a pre-existing latent space, the Platonic field.Ultimately, the sources conclude that reality is a participatory universe, where observation shapes outcomes and the distinction between the observer and the observed is dissolved. The UAP phenomenon exemplifies this by its "highly reflexive" nature, mirroring the witness's culture, trauma, or expectation. This deliberate ambiguity—the phenomenon persistently staying "just out of reach"—is crucial, as it forces humanity to constantly upgrade its understanding of reality, ensuring that the game of discovery and developmental growth continues. #NonLocal #cancercure #PlatonicBlueprint,.#ConsciousnessIsFundamental #ParticipatoryUniverse #PostMaterialism #MichaelLevin #CognitiveAgency #Brain #UAPPhenomenon #Xenobots #REALITY #HighStrangeness #BigBang

reality local universe disease blueprint consciousness mapping experimental abstract uap platonic relativity fibonacci ndes quantum mechanics antenna participatory michael levin

The Atheist Experience 29.49 with Forrest Valkai and Jim Barrows

The Atheist Experience

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2025 102:59 Transcription Available

In today's episode of The Atheist Experience, hosts Forrest Valkai and Jim Barrows tackle the dangerous rise of Christian nationalism and its alignment with fascism, explore the limits of biblical morality, and examine the overwhelming evidence for evolution and geology.Lucy Spina in TX, ACA chair, details the Rainbow Rights Roadshow drive with Equality Texas, aiding LGBTQ+ resource deserts. Hosts stress "no strings attached" secular community support needed against current political threats. Is this grassroots outreach vital?G-Man (nudibranchs jumping sea slugs) argues atheists lack objective morality, asserting God is the source of all good. Hosts challenge this as Divine Command Theory, making God the subjective arbiter. They critique God's immorality, citing the Flood and slavery. Does God's omnipotence and omniscience make him culpable for all sin?Ujay in SD, a deconstructing agnostic, asks for a scientific explanation of evolution and dating methods. Forrest refutes the creationist claim that evolution begets racism, explaining it is Social Darwinism. He details radioisotope half-lives and Hubble's constant for dating the Earth and Universe. Can overwhelming evidence cure religious skepticism?Hannah argues research on morphogenesis (Michael Levin) suggests evidence against materialism, supporting a platonic space of information. The hosts warn against using this gap as evidence for the supernatural. They challenge the assertion as an Argument From Ignorance, noting that complexity does not equal magic. Is Platonism a justifiable conclusion from current unknowns?Thank you all so much for tuning in. Please support your local atheist and civil rights organizations, as they are needed now more than ever.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-atheist-experience--3254896/support.

god earth lgbtq universe tx hosts flood atheists sd aca hubble g man barrows michael levin social darwinism atheist experience equality texas divine command theory

Episode #512: From Deep Space to Bioelectric Life: Wandering the New Frontier of Understanding

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2025 87:25

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop talks with Aaron Lowry about the shifting landscape of attention, technology, and meaning—moving through themes like treasure-hunt metaphors for human cognition, relevance realization, the evolution of observational tools, decentralization, blockchain architectures such as Cardano, sovereignty in computation, the tension between scarcity and abundance, bioelectric patterning inspired by Michael Levin's research, and the broader cultural and theological currents shaping how we interpret reality. You can follow Aaron's work and ongoing reflections on X at aaron_lowry.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversationTimestamps00:00:00 Stewart and Aaron open with the treasure-hunt metaphor, salience landscapes, and how curiosity shapes perception. 00:05:00 They explore shifting observational tools, Hubble vs James Webb, and how data reframes what we think is real. 00:10:00 The conversation moves to relevance realization, missing “Easter eggs,” and the posture of openness. 00:15:00 Stewart reflects on AI, productivity, and feeling pulled deeper into computers instead of freed from them. 00:20:00 Aaron connects this to monetary policy, scarcity, and technological pressure. 00:25:00 They examine voice interfaces, edge computing, and trust vs convenience. 00:30:00 Stewart shares experiments with Raspberry Pi, self-hosting, and escaping SaaS dependence. 00:35:00 They discuss open-source, China's strategy, and the economics of free models. 00:40:00 Aaron describes building hardware–software systems and sensor-driven projects. 00:45:00 They turn to blockchain, UTXO vs account-based, node sovereignty, and Cardano. 00:50:00 Discussion of decentralized governance, incentives, and transparency. 00:55:00 Geopolitics enters: BRICS, dollar reserve, private credit, and institutional fragility. 01:00:00 They reflect on the meaning crisis, gnosticism, reductionism, and shattered cohesion. 01:05:00 Michael Levin, bioelectric patterning, and vertical causation open new biological and theological frames. 01:10:00 They explore consciousness as fundamental, Stephen Wolfram, and the limits of engineered solutions. 01:15:00 Closing thoughts on good-faith orientation, societal transformation, and the pull toward wilderness.Key InsightsCuriosity restructures perception. Aaron frames reality as something we navigate more like a treasure hunt than a fixed map. Our “salience landscape” determines what we notice, and curiosity—not rigid frameworks—keeps us open to signals we would otherwise miss. This openness becomes a kind of existential skill, especially in a world where data rarely aligns cleanly with our expectations.Our tools reshape our worldview. Each technological leap—from Hubble to James Webb—doesn't just increase resolution; it changes what we believe is possible. Old models fail to integrate new observations, revealing how deeply our understanding depends on the precision and scope of our instruments.Technology increases pressure rather than reducing it. Even as AI boosts productivity, Stewart notices it pulling him deeper into computers. Aaron argues this is systemic: productivity gains don't free us; they raise expectations, driven by monetary policy and a scarcity-based economic frame.Digital sovereignty is becoming essential. The conversation highlights the tension between convenience and vulnerability. Cloud-based AI creates exposure vectors into personal life, while running local hardware—Raspberry Pis, custom Linux systems—restores autonomy but requires effort and skill.Blockchain architecture determines decentralization. Aaron emphasizes the distinction between UTXO and account-based systems, arguing that UTXO architectures (Bitcoin, Cardano) support verifiable edge participation, while account-based chains accumulate unwieldy state and centralize validation over time.Institutional trust is eroding globally. From BRICS currency moves to private credit schemes, both note how geopolitical maneuvers signal institutional fragility. The “few men in a room” dynamic persists, but now under greater stress, driving more people toward decentralization and self-reliance.Biology may operate on deeper principles than genes. Michael Levin's work on bioelectric patterning opens the door to “vertical causation”—higher-level goals shaping lower-level processes. This challenges reductionism and hints at a worldview where consciousness, meaning, and biological organization may be intertwined in ways neither materialism nor traditional theology fully capture.

Episode #511: From New Age Psychedelic Spirituality to Ancient Orthodoxy: Finding a Reliable Path

The Voice of Reason with Andy Hooser

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2025 79:39

In this conversation, Stewart Alsop sits down with Ken Lowry to explore a wide sweep of themes running through Christianity, Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox traditions, the nature of spirits and telos, theosis and enlightenment, information technology, identity, privacy, sexuality, the New Age “Rainbow Bridge,” paganism, Buddhism, Vedanta, and the unfolding meaning crisis; listeners who want to follow more of Ken's work can find him on his YouTube channel Climbing Mount Sophia and on Twitter under KenLowry8.Check out this GPT we trained on the conversationTimestamps00:00 Christianity's tangled history surfaces as Stewart Alsop and Ken Lowry unpack Luther, indulgences, mediation, and the printing-press information shift.05:00 Luther's encounters with the devil lead into talk of perception, hallucination, and spiritual influence on “main-character” lives.10:00 Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox worship styles highlight telos, Eucharist, liturgy, embodiment, and teaching as information.15:00 The Church as a living spirit emerges, tied to hierarchy, purpose, and Michael Levin's bioelectric patterns shaping form.20:00 Spirits, goals, Dodgers-as-spirit, and Christ as the highest ordering spirit frame meaning and participation.25:00 Identity, self, soul, privacy, intimacy, and the internet's collapse of boundaries reshape inner life.30:00 New Age, Rainbow Bridge, Hawkins' calibration, truth-testing, and spiritual discernment enter the story.35:00 Stewart's path back to Christianity opens discussion of enlightenment, Protestant legalism, Orthodox theosis, and healing.40:00 Emptiness, relationality, Trinity, and personhood bridge Buddhism and mystical Christianity.45:00 Suffering, desire, higher spirits, and orientation toward the real sharpen the contrast between simulation and reality.50:00 Technology, bodies, AI, and simulated worlds raise questions of telos, meaning, and modern escape.55:00 Neo-paganism, Hindu hierarchy of gods, Vedanta, and the need for a personal God lead toward Jesus as historical revelation.01:00:00 Buddha, enlightenment, theosis, the post-1945 world, Hitler as negative pole, and goodness as purpose close the inquiry.Key InsightsMediation and information shape the Church. Ken Lowry highlights how the printing press didn't just spread ideas—it restructured Christian life by shifting mediation. Once information became accessible, individuals became the “interface” with Christ, fundamentally changing Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox trajectories and the modern crisis of religious choice.The Protestant–Catholic–Orthodox split hinges on telos. Protestantism orients the service around teaching and information, while Catholic and Orthodox traditions culminate in the Eucharist, embodiment, and liturgy. This difference expresses two visions of what humans are doing in church: receiving ideas or participating in a transformative ritual that shapes the whole person.Spirits, telos, and hierarchy offer a map of reality. Ken frames spirits as real intelligible goals that pull people into coordinated action—seen as clearly in a baseball team as in a nation. Christ is the highest spirit because aiming toward Him properly orders all lower goals, giving a coherent vertical structure to meaning.Identity, privacy, and intimacy have transformed under the internet. The shift from soul → self → identity tracks changes in information technology. The internet collapses boundaries, creating unprecedented exposure while weakening the inherent privacy of intimate realities such as genuine lovemaking, which Ken argues can't be made public without destroying its nature.New Age influences and Hawkins' calibration reflect a search for truth. Stewart's encounters with the Rainbow Bridge world, David Hawkins' muscle-testing epistemology, and the escape from scientistic secularism reveal a cultural hunger for spiritual discernment in the absence of shared metaphysical grounding.Enlightenment and theosis may be the same mountain. Ken suggests that Buddhist enlightenment and Orthodox theosis aim at the same transformative reality: full communion with what is most real. The difference lies in Jesus as the concrete, personal revelation of God, offering a relational path rather than pure negation or emptiness.Secularism is shaped by powerfully negative telos. Ken argues that the modern world orients itself not toward the Good revealed in Christ but away from the Evil revealed in Hitler. Moving away from evil as a primary aim produces confusion, because only a positive vision of the Good can order desires, technology, suffering, and the overwhelming power of modern simulations.

Michael Levin: Joe Biden Appearances, Mental Health with the Next Gen, and Building Entrepreneurs

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 5, 2025 36:50

Guest Michael Levin, best selling author, speaker, and business creator, joins to discuss the end of DEI within the business world. How do "victims" of society survive in the business world without government DEI? Discussion of small business owners, business environment, and becoming an entrepreneur. Latest survey shows young parents are mentally distraught with "bad thoughts" of something happening to their newborns. Are we becoming too sensitive and weak with mental health issues in today's society? Discussion of how to become a leader if an average day triggers you so badly.

mental health entrepreneur joe biden dei next gen appearances michael levin

THE QUEST FOR CONSCIOUSNESS - Christof Koch PhD #84

Chasing Consciousness

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2025 94:00

What are the best competing theories of consciousness? Can we isolate where it arises and measure how complex it is? How do 5meo DMT mystical or non-separation experiences shift worldviews on consciousness?In this episode we have the very theme of the podcast's title to delve into, the quest to understand the nature of consciousness. So we discuss mind and self, and what kind of substrate you need to allow for subjective experience; we look at the various philosophical positions on the nature of consciousness and ways to move beyond the unwinnable argument around the hard problem; we talk about extended cognition and cellular cognition; how integrated information theory attempts to quantify consciousness; the origin of meaning; psychedelics and the implications of mystical experiences of non-separation; whether AI will ever become conscious; and the implications of plant intelligence and memory.There's only one person who can speak about such a wide range of topics this well, one of the most passionate consciousness researchers in the world for over 40 years, physicist and neuroscientist, Christof Koch. He's Chief Scientist at the BlueDot Foundation, and has authored and co-authored over 1000 scientific papers and 6 books, including “The Quest for Consciousness”, “Confessions of a Romantic Reductionst” and “Then I am myself the World”, which we'll be focussing on today. What we discuss:00:00 His migration from physics to neuroscience.06:10 “Take no one's word for it”.07:50 His long-term Francis Crick collaboration.10:00 The signatures, footprints and correlates of consciousness.17:50 The empirical approach to the philosophical ‘Hard problem'.21:00 Metaphysics isn't empirical.21:40 The issues along the spectrum from materialism to idealism.29:00 “The great divide of being” - quotidian vs dissociated states.33:15 Is the self an illusion?34:15 The difference between self consciousness and subjective experience.38:00 “Confessions of a romantic reductionist”.41:00 Meaning is not an empirical subject.44:30 Integrated information theory explained - existence as casual power.52:50 The placebo effect is consciousness causally influencing the world.01:00:00 Computational theories of consciousness.01:03:10 The connectome: an exact brain replica in a simulation.01:05:10 Extended cognition & the blurred boundaries between selves.01:09:30 Michael Levin: the hierarchy from cellular to collective cognition.01:13:50 ‘Then I am myself the world' Book.01:14:40 5meoDMT: His mystical & NDE experiences.01:21:40 Lowering of the DMN in non-self like experiences like flow, meditation, day-dreaming, or psychedelics.01:24:00 To be real, experiences must have causal power.01:27:25 Perspective shift after psychedelics.01:30:50 Plant consciousness, intelligence, communication & memory.References: www.christofkoch.comScientific PapersChristof Koch, “Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It the world”.Christof Koch, “Consciousness: Confessions of a romantic reductionist.”

#486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life

Lex Fridman Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2025

Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts University working on novel ways to understand and control complex pattern formation in biological systems. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep486-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/michael-levin-2-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Michael Levin’s X: https://x.com/drmichaellevin Michael Levin’s Website: https://drmichaellevin.org Michael Levin’s Papers: https://drmichaellevin.org/publications/ – Biological Robots: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00880 – Classical Sorting Algorithms: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05375 – Aging as a Morphostasis Defect: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38636560/ – TAME: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 – Synthetic Living Machines: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abf1571 SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex CodeRabbit: AI-powered code reviews. Go to https://coderabbit.ai/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex UPLIFT Desk: Standing desks and office ergonomics. Go to https://upliftdesk.com/lex Miro: Online collaborative whiteboard platform. Go to https://miro.com/ MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (00:29) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (10:09) – Biological intelligence (18:42) – Living vs non-living organisms (23:55) – Origin of life (27:40) – The search for alien life (on Earth) (1:00:44) – Creating life in the lab – Xenobots and Anthrobots (1:13:46) – Memories and ideas are living organisms (1:27:26) – Reality is an illusion: The brain is an interface to a hidden reality (2:13:13) – Unexpected Intelligence in sorting algorithms (2:38:51) – Can aging be reversed? (2:42:41) – Mind uploading (3:01:22) – Alien intelligence (3:16:17) – Advice for young people (3:22:46) – Questions for AGI

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157. (Thanksgiving Replay) Meat the Future: How Paul Shapiro is Brewing Superfoods at Better Meat Co.

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 28, 2025 69:12

In this Thanksgiving replay, we revisit our conversation with Paul Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Better Meat Co, who's pioneering the use of mycelium-based proteins as a sustainable alternative to animal meat. Paul shares his remarkable journey from starting an animal welfare organization in high school to becoming a biotech entrepreneur. He explains how fungi fermentation creates protein-rich, meat-like textures in less than 24 hours without the environmental toll of traditional agriculture. The episode explores the science behind mycoprotein, the challenges facing the alternative protein industry, the need for government investment in biomanufacturing, and why fungi may be the key to feeding both Earth and future space travelers. Paul also discusses Better Meat Co's recent $31 million Series A funding and their mission to make sustainable protein accessible at scale.Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing?Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.messaginglab.com/groweverything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters:(00:00:00) - Could Fungi Replace Factory Farms Forever?(00:01:00) - Welcome: TEDx MIT, Planetary Action & What's Growing(00:03:00) - Intelligence Beyond Brains: Reflecting on Michael Levin(00:06:00) - Thanksgiving Special: Gratitude for the Biotech Community(00:10:00) - Meet Paul Shapiro: From Activist to Mycoprotein Pioneer(00:13:00) - Origin Story: Fighting for Animals Led to Building Better Meat(00:19:00) - Alt Protein 2.0: What's Changed Since the 2018 Hype Cycle(00:24:00) - The Subsidy Problem: Why Meat Gets Billions & Clean Protein Gets Nothing(00:31:00) - Mycoprotein 101: Why Fungi Beat Plants for Meat Texture(00:38:00) - Engineering Neurospora: 24-Hour Fermentation at Scale(00:43:00) - Designing Super Strains: Breeding Microbes for Performance(00:48:00) - Creating Craveable Protein: Flavor Science & B2B Strategy(00:51:00) - Space Food Systems: Why Astronauts Will Farm Fungi, Not Cows(00:56:00) - Biomanufacturing Infrastructure: The $31M Series A Story(01:00:00) - Industry Reality Check: Cultivated Meat's Path Forward(01:03:00) - Beyond Food: Mycoremediation & Paul's Business for Good Podcast(01:05:00) - Closing Thoughts: Solving the Flavor Challenge & Scaling ImpactLinks and Resources:Better Meat Co.Time's Best Inventions of 2025Paul ShapiroClean Meat Novel by Paul ShapiroHomeworld Collective Cascade Bio33. Purple Reign, A Purple Tomato with a Genetic Twist, Nathan Pumplin of Norfolk Healthy Produce83. Bottoms Up: Microbe Mixology with Zbiotics' Zack Abbott156. When Matter Makes Decisions: Michael Levin on the Intelligence of FormJohn Werner - TEDxThe Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Topics Covered: developmental biology, morphology, morphospace, planarians, electroceuticals, bioelectricity, tissue regeneration, biomedical applications, Have a question or comment? Message us here:Text or Call (804) 505-5553 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Grow Everything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: groweverything@messaginglab.com

156. When Matter Makes Decisions: Michael Levin on the Intelligence of Form

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2025 78:08

Join us for a mind-bending conversation with Professor Michael Levin, director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, as he reveals how cells make decisions without brains, store memories without DNA, and navigate anatomical space like we navigate physical space. Discover how his team created two-headed immortal worms whose memory persists across regeneration cycles, how bioelectrical patterns control body shape independently of genetics, and why the future of medicine lies in communicating with the collective intelligence of our cells rather than micromanaging their molecular machinery. From xenobots made of frog cells to the anatomical compiler that will revolutionize regenerative medicine, this episode explores the frontier where developmental biology, cognition, and robotics converge to redefine what it means to be alive.Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing?Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.messaginglab.com/groweverything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters:(00:00:00) – Welcome! Birthday Surprises and Setting the Stage(00:03:05) - Upcoming TEDx Talk and iGEM Competition Winners(00:05:14) - AI Book Recommendations and Octopus Intelligence(00:06:20) - Introducing Xenobots and Professor Michael Levin(00:09:43) - What Does Michael Levin Study? Developmental Biology Meets Cognition(00:13:42) - Cells as Decision-Making Networks: Cognition Without Neurons(00:19:43) - Inside the Lab: What Experiments Look Like(00:22:03) - The Two-Headed Worm Experiment: Rewriting Bioelectric Memory(00:38:15) - Xenobots and Mombot: Building Synthetic Living Machines(00:47:35) - Ethics of Creating Life and Human Augmentation(00:58:12) - The Future of Medicine: The Anatomical Compiler(01:03:48) - Quick Fire Questions with Michael Levin(01:09:20) - Wrap-Up and Reflections on Collective IntelligenceLinks and Resources:Michael Levin at Tufts UniversityWyss Institute at HarvardThe Levin LabThoughts on Science and The MindFauna SystemsWorkshop on Computationally Designed OrganismsInternational Genetically Engineered Machine Competition90. Flipping the Light Switch on Cells: Deniz Kent of Prolific Machines94. Gaming the System: NVIDIA's Vega Shah on Accelerating Biotech Breakthroughs28. Genetic Dreams to Underground Regimes: Andrew Hessel Takes on Digital and Physical Biology⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Topics Covered: developmental biology, morphology, morphospace, planarians, electroceuticals, bioelectricity, tissue regeneration, biomedical applicationsHave a question or comment? Message us here:Text or Call (804) 505-5553 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Grow Everything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: groweverything@messaginglab.com

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Could Biological Robots Heal Us from the Inside? | Michael Levin

Into the Impossible

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2025 51:14

Get started with 1 month free of Superhuman today, using my link: https://try.sprh.mn/briankeating What if cells from your own trachea sitting in a petri dish right now, could spontaneously organize into swimming robots that heal brain tissue? What if frog skin cells with no genetic modification whatsoever, could build copies of themselves from spare parts lying around? This isn't science fiction. This is the work of Michael Levin at Tufts University and is completely rewriting the rules of biology. Michael Levin's research challenges our fundamental understanding of what life is and where biological properties emerge from. Michael Levin is a distinguished biologist at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center, whose groundbreaking research on bio electricity and regenerative biology is reshaping our understanding of how biological systems process information and pursue goals. His Xenobots, living robots built from frog cells, swim around, work together, and reproduce in ways that have never existed on Earth. What does this tell us about consciousness, intelligence, and the nature of life itself? KEY TAKEAWAYS 00:00 "Bioelectricity: Nature's Cognitive Glue" 04:57 Neuronal Voltage Gradients Enable Computation 08:17 Magnetic Fields and Living Systems 11:43 "Voltage, Membranes, and Injury Signals" 14:51 "Bioelectric Properties in Cells" 15:59 Cell Circuits and Networks 19:31 "Ion Drugs Overcome Electrode Limits" 22:53 Asymmetric Features in Living Creatures 26:00 Embryo Symmetry Breaking Mechanism 30:11 "Space-Time Effort and Goal Scope" 33:19 "Origins: Universe and Life" 36:29 Causal Integration and Emergence Insights 42:02 Cell Liberation Enables Autonomous Behavior 43:53 "Xenobots: Self-Replicating Robots" 47:04 "Consciousness, Life, and Intelligence" - Additional resources: Levin Lab https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ Follow Michael on X https://x.com/drmichaellevin?s=21 Michael Levin's book: https://a.co/d/dzl9wPQ Please join my mailing list here

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Annie Crawford - The Ghost in Darwin's Machine: Finding Purpose in Evolution

Transfigured

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2025 101:37

Philosopher and cultural apologist Annie Crawford joins the channel to discuss the unavoidable problem of purpose (teleology) in evolutionary biology. We explore why the modern scientific attempt to reduce life to mindless, mechanistic processes ultimately fails, forcing biologists to use the language of agency and design to describe what they observe. The conversation delves into the history of science, the philosophy of language, and whether life requires a "ghost in the machine" to make sense.Annie Crawford on twitter - https://x.com/annielcrawfordPeople & Concepts Discussed:Annie Crawford, John Vervaeke ( @johnvervaeke ), C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Darwin, Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Thomas Aquinas, Michael Levin, Brett Weinstein, Teleology, Vitalism, Teleonomy, Philosophy of Language, Abiogenesis, Information Theory and more.

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Where Biology Goes Off the Rails - Dr. Michael Levin, DemystifySci #369

Demystifying Science

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2025 66:19

Michael Levin is a synthetic biologist at Tufts University who believes that asking questions about “life” is a fruitless project. Instead, he argues that we ought to be trying to understand the emergence of cognition - a feature that he believes appears long before cells emerge. As part of this project, Levin has started to pull on a series of threads woven through the origin of life debate that seem to show basic elements of thinking systems - habituation, sensitization, conditioning - can be found in simple physical networks. We dig into how these systems work, what they reveal about life, and how his approach to understanding nature resolves a lot of biological paradoxes.PATREON https://www.patreon.com/c/demystifysciPARADIGM DRIFThttps://demystifysci.com/paradigm-drift-showHOMEBREW MUSIC - Check out our new album!Hard Copies (Vinyl): FREE SHIPPING https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/products/vinyl-lp-secretary-of-nature-everything-is-so-good-hereStreaming:https://secretaryofnature.bandcamp.com/album/everything-is-so-good-here00:00 Go! 00:05:11 Exploring the Origins and Definitions of Life00:11:30 The Complexity of Defining Life00:14:30 The Limitations of Scientific Categories00:17:58 Re-evaluating Life and Cognition00:19:40 Theoretical Perspectives on Life00:20:08 The Spectrum of Cognition and the Re-enchantment of Nature00:24:09 Experimental Approaches to Understanding Cognition in Networks00:30:14 Feedback Loops in Learning and Causal Emergence00:35:34 The Role of Chemical Interactions in the Origins of Life00:39:27 Discussion on Learning and Molecular Networks00:41:35 The Nature of Complexity and Consciousness00:45:04 Science and the Crisis of Meaning00:49:34 Expanding Compassion in Understanding Life00:54:13 Methodology of Chemical Experimentation00:58:53 Analysis at Different System Levels01:01:56 Causal Powers of Networks01:04:31 Collective Intelligence in Biological Systems#cognition, #bioelectric, #emergent , #complexsystems, #neuroscience, #regenerativemedicine , #origins, #philosophypodcast , #sciencepodcast, #longformpodcastMERCH: Rock some DemystifySci gear : https://demystifysci-shop.fourthwall.com/AMAZON: Do your shopping through this link: https://amzn.to/3YyoT98DONATE: https://bit.ly/3wkPqaDSUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@UCqV4_7i9h1_V7hY48eZZSLw@demystifysci RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/2be66934/podcast/rssMAILING LIST: https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S SOCIAL: - Discord: https://discord.gg/MJzKT8CQub- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DemystifySci- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DemystifySci/- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DemystifySciMUSIC: -Shilo Delay: https://g.co/kgs/oty671

Your Brain Isn't a Computer and That Changes Everything

Musical Theatre Radio presents "Be Our Guest"

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 22, 2025 72:33

The best way to cook just got better. Go to http://HelloFresh.com/THEORIESOFEVERYTHING10FM now to Get 10 Free Meals + a Free Item for Life! * One per box with active subscription. Free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. Get 50% off Claude Pro, including access to Claude Code, at http://claude.ai/theoriesofeverything For the first time on TOE, I sit down with professors Anil Seth and Michael Levin to test the brain-as-computer metaphor and whether algorithms can ever capture life/mind. Anil argues the “software vs. hardware” split is a blinding metaphor—consciousness may be bound to living substrate—while Michael counters that machines can tap the same platonic space biology does. We tour their radical lab work—xenobots, compositional agents, and interfaces that bind unlike parts—and probe psychophysics in strange new beings, “islands of awareness,” and what Levin's bubble-sort “side quests” imply for reading LLM outputs. Anil brings information theory and Granger causality into the mix to rethink emergence and scale—not just computation. Along the way: alignment, agency, and how to ask better scientific questions. If you're into AI/consciousness, evolution without programming, or whether silicon could ever feel—this one's for you. Timestamps: - 00:00 - Anil Seth & Michael Levin: Islands of Consciousness & Xenobots - 08:24 - Substrate Dependence: Why Biology Isn't Just 'Wetware' - 13:13 - Beyond Algorithms: Do Machines Tap Into a 'Platonic Space'? - 21:46 - The Ghost in the Algorithm: Emergent Agency in Bubble Sort - 29:26 - Degeneracy: The Biological Principle AI is Missing - 36:34 - The Multiplicity of Agency: Are Your Cells Conscious? - 43:24 - Unconscious Processing or Inaccessible Consciousness? The Split-Brain Problem - 49:32 - The Ultimate Experiment to Decode Consciousness - 57:31 - A Counter-Intuitive Discovery: Consciousness is *Less* Emergent - 1:03:39 - Psychedelics, LLMs, and the Frontiers of Surprise Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Discover A New Musical with Michael Levin (Sober Songs A Musical)

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 15, 2025 32:35

Set in the basement of a Brooklyn church, SOBER SONGS is a darkly comedic musical that follows six young adults in recovery at a local AA meeting founded by the gruff but loving “Cap.” Blending biting humor, emotional ballads, and sharp dialogue, the show evolves from light and charming to deeply emotional, offering a raw, character-driven, and emotionally authentic look at addiction, love, identity, and the complicated, messy road to sobriety. With heart, heartbreak, and cathartic honesty, SOBER SONGS offers a deeply human—and at times hilarious—glimpse into recovery culture.

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Cognition, Form, Regeneration & Metaphysics: Does Biology Arise From Math? | Michael Levin | 250

Mind & Matter

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2025 68:34

Send us a textSupport the showAffiliates: Seed Oil Scout: Find restaurants with seed oil-free options, scan food products to see what they're hiding, with this easy-to-use mobile app. KetoCitra—Ketone body BHB + electrolytes formulated for kidney health. Use code MIND20 for 20% off any subscription (cancel anytime) Lumen device to optimize your metabolism for weight loss or athletic performance. Code MIND for 10% off SiPhox Health—Affordable at-home blood testing. Key health markers, visualized & explained. Code TRIKOMES for a 20% discount. For all the ways you can support my efforts

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Whispe rin the Wings Episdoe 1150

Stage Whisper

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2025 25:58

Join us on the latest Whisper in the Wings from Stage Whisper, as we welcomed on the composer/lyricist/playwright Michael Levin, to talk about his upcoming production, Sober Songs. This is a powerful and timely new work, that just like this conversation, should not be missed. So be sure to hit play and get your tickets today!Sober SongsAugust 30th- September 21st@ Theatre RowTickets and more information are available at bfany.orgAnd be sure to follow Michael to stay up to date on all his upcoming projects and productions:sobersongsthemusical.commeaningbooks.com

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From the archive: Of molecules and memories

Many Minds

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2025 75:10

Hi friends! We're taking a much-needed August pause—we'll have new episodes for you in September. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired February 8, 2024] Where do memories live in the brain? If you've ever taken a neuroscience class, you probably learned that they're stored in our synapses, in the connections between our neurons. The basic idea is that, whenever we have an experience, the neurons involved fire together in time, and the synaptic connections between them get stronger. In this way, our memories for those experiences become minutely etched into our brains. This is what might be called the synaptic view of memory—it's the story you'll find in textbooks, and it's often treated as settled fact. But some reject this account entirely. The real storehouses of memory, they argue, lie elsewhere. My guest today is Dr. Sam Gershman. Sam is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the director of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab there. In a recent paper, he marshals a wide-ranging critique of the synaptic view. He makes a compelling case that synapses can't be the whole story—that we also have to look inside the neurons themselves. Here, Sam and I first discuss the synaptic view and the evidence that seems to support it. We then talk about some of the problems with this classic picture. We consider, for example, cases where memories survive the radical destruction of synapses; and, more provocatively, cases where memories are formed in single-celled organisms that lack synapses altogether. We talk about the dissenting view, long lurking in the margins, that intracellular molecules like RNA could be the real storage sites of memory. Finally, we talk about Sam's new account—a synthesis that posits a role for both synapses and molecules. Along the way we touch on planaria and paramecia; spike-timing dependent plasticity; the patient H.M.; metamorphosis, hibernation, and memory transfer; the pioneering work of Beatrice Gelber; unfairly maligned ideas; and much, much more. Before we get to it, one important announcement: Applications are now open for the 2024 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (or DISI)! The event will be held in beautiful, seaside St Andrews, Scotland, from June 30 to July 20. If you like this show—if you like the conversations we have and the questions we ask—it's a safe bet that you'd like DISI. You can find more info at disi.org—that's disi.org. Review of applications will begin on Mar 1, so don't delay. Alright friends, on to my conversation about the biological basis of memory with Dr. Sam Gershman. Enjoy! Notes and links 4:00 - A general audience article on planarian memory transfer experiments and the scientist who conducted them, James V. McConnell. 8:00 - For more on Dr. Gershman's research and general approach, see his recent book and the publications on his lab website. 9:30 - A brief video explaining long-term potentiation. An overview of “Hebbian Learning.” The phrase “neurons that fire together wire together” was, contrary to widespread misattribution, coined by Dr. Carla Shatz here. 12:30 - The webpage of Dr. Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University. A recent paper from Dr. Gunawardena's lab on the avoidance behaviors exhibited by the single-celled organism Stentor (which vindicates some disputed, century-old findings). 14:00 - A recent paper by C. R. Gallistel describing some of his views on the biological basis of memory. 19:00 - The term “engram” refers to the physical trace of a memory. See recent reviews about the so-called search for the engram here, here, and here. 20:00 - An article on the importance of H.M. in neuroscience. 28:00 - A review about the phenomenon of spike-timing dependent plasticity. 33:00 - An article, co-authored by former guest Dr. Michael Levin, on the evidence for memory persistence despite radical remodeling of brain structures. See our episode with Dr. Levin here. 35:00 - A study reporting the persistence of memories in decapitated planarians. A popular article about these findings. 36:30 - An article reviewing one chapter in the memory transfer history. Another article reviewing evidence for “vertical” memory transfer (between generations). 39:00 - For more recent demonstrations of memory transfer, see here and here. 40:00 - A paper by Dr. Gershman, Dr. Gunawardena, and colleagues reconsidering the evidence for learning in single cells and describing the contributions of Dr. Beatrice Gelber. A general audience article about Gelber following the publication of the paper by Dr. Gershman and colleagues. 45:00 – A recent article arguing for the need to understand computation in single-celled organisms to understand how computation evolved more generally. 46:30 – Another study of classical conditioning in paramecia, led by Dr. Todd Hennessey. 49:00 – For more on plant signaling, see our recent episode with Dr. Paco Calvo and Dr. Natalie Lawrence. 56:00 – A recent article on “serial reversal learning” and its neuroscientific basis. 1:07:00 – A 2010 paper demonstrating a role for methylation in memory. Recommendations The Behavior of the Lower Organisms, by Herbert Spencer Jennings Memory and the Computational Brain, by C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King Wetware, by Dennis Bray Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

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Ep111 "Might we be surrounded with undetected minds?" (with Michael Levin)

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 7, 2025 51:33 Transcription Available

What is intelligence? If we look hard, can we find it in unexpected places: not just in brains but in all kinds of structures? How should we recognize it? And what does any of this have to do with a bipedal dog born without front legs, or making small new organisms out of single cells, or how Wikipedia might be like an axolotl, or why we are so blind to the vast variety of minds that might surround us? Join Eagleman with guest Michael Levin, professor at Tufts, about how we might discover intelligence all around us in ways we don't typically intuit.

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Episode 220 - Michael Levin

The Ethics Experts

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2025 61:20

In this episode of The Ethics Experts, Nick welcomes Michael Levin.Michael Levin has a proven track-record of developing strategies and tactics for reducing compliance and ethics risks and has designed best-practice compliance programs for more than 100 companies.Michael spent 10+ years overseeing Compliance and Ethics at Freddie Mac, leading a team of compliance professionals and corporate investigators, and setting the strategy to manage and mitigate Ethics, Culture and Conduct risk across the enterprise. This includes the Compliance Helpline, the Code of Conduct, employee trading controls, corporate investigations, and enterprise risk and compliance training. Levin was the founder of and also served as Secretary of Freddie Mac's Conduct Risk Committee.Connect with Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-levin-0a958a1/

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Josh Bongard: What are Biological Robots? How AI is Reshaping Life, Consciousness & Matter!

Mind-Body Solution with Dr Tevin Naidu

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2025 80:55

Josh Bongard is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and director of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His work involves automated design and manufacture of soft-, evolved-, and crowdsourced robots, as well as computer-designed organisms. In 2007, he was awarded a prestigious Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and was named one of MIT Technology Review's top 35 young innovators under 35. In 2010 he was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by Barack Obama at a White House ceremony. He has received funding from NSF, NASA, DARPA, ARO and the Sloan Foundation. He is the co-author of the book How The Body Shapes the Way we Think, the co-author of "Designing Intelligence: Why Brains Aren't Enough", the instructor of a reddit-based evolutionary robotics MOOC, and director of the robotics outreach program Twitch Plays Robotics. TIMESTAMPS:(0:00) - Introduction (1:22) - Life, Consciousness & Intelligence(5:14) - How The Body Shapes The Way We Think(9:18) - Evolutionary Robotics & Consciousness(17:00) - Biological Robots ("Xenobots")(24:00) - Implications of Self-Replicating Living Machines(32:00) - The Role of AI in Shaping Biology(39:00) - What is Conscious, Really?(42:00) - AI Robotics(46:00) - The Advantage of Interdisciplinary Collaborating(49:00) - Escaping Cartesian Dualism(53:00) - Meta-Materials (Groundbreaking Work!)(56:00) - Cause & Effect(1:04:48) - Expanding Morphospace in its Entirety(1:12:00) - Blurring the Lines Between Living & Non-Living (Meta-Materials Are The Future!)(1:17:14) - Non-Embodiment vs Embodiment AI(1:20:00) - Conclusion EPISODE LINKS:- Josh's Website: https://jbongard.github.io/- Josh's Lab: https://www.meclab.org/- Josh's Channel: https://youtube.com/@joshbongard3314- Josh's X: https://x.com/DoctorJosh- Josh's Publications: https://tinyurl.com/3pd4t8ff- Josh's Book: https://tinyurl.com/4wd7hw3s- Michael Levin 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6gp-ORTBlU- Michael Levin 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMxTS7eKkNM- Michael Levin 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-tdscgxu4- Michael Levin Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQEX-twenkA- Michael Levin & Terrence Deacon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuWbHwPZd60- Keith Frankish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxDYG0K360E- Keith Frankish 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTO-A1lw4JM- Keith Frankish Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbjGRcqD96Q- Nicholas Humphrey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCTJb-uiQww- Nicholas Humphrey Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cWQLUbnKs- Mark Solms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqM76ZHIR-o- Mark Solms 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkbeaxjAZm4CONNECT:- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com - Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- YouTube: https://youtube.com/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

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Terrence Deacon & Michael Levin: What is Life? Complexity, Cognition & the Origin of Purpose

Mind-Body Solution with Dr Tevin Naidu

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2025 89:31

Professor Terrence Deacon & Professor Michael Levin have both shaped the fields of developmental evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and so much more. In this episode of Mind-Body Solution, these distinguished giants come together in conversation for the very first time: "A Biology Revolution". Terrence Deacon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.Michael Levin is Professor in the Biology department at Tufts University and associate faculty at the Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard University. TIMESTAMPS:(0:00) - Introduction(0:42) - Mike on Terry's work(1:32) - Terry on Mike's work (2:48) - Mike & Terry on Daniel Dennett's work(8:10) - Origin of Life & Purpose (Terry's perspective: complexity, thermodynamics, memory)(14:37) - Origin of Life & Purpose (Mike's perspective: models of scaling, polycomputing, spaces of reality)(20:08) - The Self, Beneficiaries & Causal Emergence(26:00) - Strange Loops & Semiotics (Metabolism precedes Neural activity)(29:00) - Causality: Constraints, Morphological Computing & Environmental Offloading (32:50) - Lazy Gene Hypothesis, Inverse Darwinism, Constraints & Energy(40:15) - Regeneration & Memory: Decompression Processes & Complexity(45:30) - Meta-Constraints: Problem Solving Agents & Bioengineering Surprises (beyond genes)(52:57) - Hypothesis Generation & Adaptive Nervous Systems (Competitions between Interpretations)(57:48) - Biologizing Cognition: Evolutionary & Developmental(1:02:40) - Terry's Critique of Mike's work (Preformationism)(1:06:00) - Mike's Response(1:15:22) - Mike's Critique of Terry's work (Teleonomy)(1:18:03) - Terry's Response(1:23:50) - Goal Directedness(1:26:22) - Final Thoughts(1:28:55) - Conclusion EPISODE LINKS:- Mike's Podcast 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6gp-ORTBlU- Mike's Podcast 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMxTS7eKkNM- Mike's Podcast 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-tdscgxu4- Mike's Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQEX-twenkA- Terry's Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kj2OgkxGa0- Terry's Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=refDeUzgdIg- Daniel Dennett Tribute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cWQLUbnKsCONNECT:- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com - Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- YouTube: https://youtube.com/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

How AI Healthcare Will Change the World

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2025 88:53

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe What if you had a thousand doctors working for you 24/7, at virtually no cost? In this episode of Theories of Everything, a panel of leading AI and medical experts explores how “medical swarms” of intelligent agents could revolutionize healthcare, making personalized, concierge-level treatment accessible to all. This isn't science fiction, it's the near future and it will change everyone's life. Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Links Mentioned: •⁠ ⁠Ekkolapto: https://www.ekkolapto.org/polymath •⁠ ⁠Ekkolapto's Longevity Hackathon: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy5dPSW_KkniuHpoLwlzkYcxhxn50Mn0T •⁠ ⁠William Hahn's lab: https://mpcrlab.com/ •⁠ ⁠Michael Levin's presentation at ekkolapto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exdz2HKP7u0 •⁠ ⁠Gil Blander's InsideTracker (website): https://blog.insidetracker.com/ •⁠ ⁠Dan Elton's website: https://www.moreisdifferent.com/ •⁠ ⁠FAU's Sandbox: https://www.fau.edu/sandbox/ •⁠ ⁠Will Hahn on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr4R7eh5f_M&t=1s •⁠ ⁠Will Hahn's in-person interview on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fkg0uTA3qU •⁠ ⁠Michael Levin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s •⁠ ⁠Stephen Wolfram on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YRlQQw0d-4 •⁠ ⁠Neil Turok's lecture on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwhqmPqRl4&list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlOYgTu7P4nfjYkv3mkikyBa&index=13 •⁠ ⁠Robin Hanson on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEomfUU4PDs •⁠ Tyler Goldstein (YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/@theoryofeveryone GO TO THIS MAN'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL. HE HELPED WITH THE CAMERA WORK IMPROMPTU AND ALSO HAS A FANTASTIC CHANNEL ANALYZING THEORIES. THANK YOU, TYLER! •⁠ ⁠Joscha Bach on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MNBxfrmfmI •⁠ ⁠Manolis Kellis on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g56lxZwnaqg •⁠ ⁠Geoffrey Hinton on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_DUft-BdIE Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 4:43 A New Approach to Healthcare 5:33 AI in Medical Imaging 7:40 Cognitive Models 11:09 Education in Medicine 23:02 Exploring the Boundaries of AI 32:04 The Future of AI in Medicine 37:20 Swarming Agents 41:49 The Ethics of AI in Healthcare 45:17 AI into Clinical Practice 55:58 Preparing for an AI-Driven Future 1:15:03 The Human Element in Medicine 1:17:19 Emotional Intelligence in AI 1:20:11 Unified Theory in Medicine 1:21:31 Conclusion Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Levin on Rethinking Biology, Regrowing Limbs with Bioelectricity w/ Dr Yu

David Gornoski

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2025 57:22

In this Science and U episode, David Gornoski and Dr Weiping Yu are joined by Professor Michael Levin for a conversation on bioelectricity, platonic space, stress sharing, regeneration of limbs, and more. Check out Michael Levin's website here. Follow David Gornoski on X here. Visit aneighborschoice.com for more

science rethinking biology limbs michael levin david gornoski bioelectricity

Is Earth Being Monitored By Aliens? | Robin Hanson

spotify earth fall system aliens fuel economists probability toe new customers huel tyler cowen rula michael levin robin hanson lue elizondo

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 26, 2025 102:00

Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/TOE #rulapod Try Huel with 15% OFF + Free Gift for New Customers today using my code theoriesofeverything at https://huel.com/theoriesofeverything . Fuel your best performance with Huel today! Is Earth being monitored by an advanced civilization one million years ahead of us? And does this alien civilization actually share an ancient past with humanity? Economist Robin Hanson explores a provocative theory suggesting that highly evolved extraterrestrials may be subtly observing us—either as caretakers or as part of a long-running experiment. From there, the conversation delves into the intricacies of academic funding and the peer review process. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Links Mentioned: - Robin's blog: https://www.overcomingbias.com/ - Robin's profile: https://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson - Robin's book: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/0198754620 - Tyler Cowen on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwieLd7Lyc8&ab_channel=CurtJaimungal - Gregory Chaitin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEuav8G6sY - Matthew Segal on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeTm4fSXpbM - Daniel Van Zant's article on incentive markets: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/breakthrough-incentive-markets - Michael Levin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s - Lue Elizondo on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAmFlLfsZKM - Ross Coulthart on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQnGcX7oxms Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:36 - The Great Filter 05:38 - Where Are The Aliens? 09:13 - UFOs 16:50 - Panspermia 23:05 - Alien Hierarchies 27:30 - Alien Culture & Motivations 33:18 - Probability of Aliens 39:18 - Truth 49:41 - Fall of Academia 01:11:27 - Peer Review 01:20:22 - Ranking Ideas 01:23:09 - The System is “Broken” Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #aliens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are there global food allergy hotspots?

CrowdScience

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2025 29:33

Are food allergies higher in the West than the East? UK-based listener Jude wants to know the answer. Her daughter-in-law Min didn't know anyone with food allergies when she was growing up in South Korea and thinks that they're not so common there. Host Alex Lathbridge investigates. Along the way, he finds out what makes us sensitive to food allergies and how much that depends on our environment. He volunteers to have an allergy test, learns what triggers food allergies and tries to discover what lies behind their increase around the world. Alex talks to some of the leading experts on food allergies in search for an answer to our listener's question: Paul Turner breaks down what happens in our bodies when we have an allergic reaction; Jennifer Koplin explains why Australia tops the league table for food allergies and Michael Levin reveals what he found out in his ground-breaking research in South Africa comparing urban and rural populations. We also hear from Hana Ayoob, who grew up in Singapore and the UK, who describes what it's like to suffer from multiple food allergies and describes the difference in cultural attitudes. Finally, we turn to Sooyoung Lee in South Korea to see if our listeners are right about the difference in rates for food allergies between East and West. Presenter: Alex Lathbridge Producer: Jo Glanville Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Studio Manager: Duncan Hannant(Image: Young Asian father with cute little daughter grocery shopping for dairy products in supermarket Credit: d3sign via Getty Images)

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Hacking Life's Code: The Future of Bioelectric Medicine | Michael Levin

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2025 50:27

Dr. Michael Levin is on the verge of revolutionizing medicine by unlocking the bioelectric code that governs how cells communicate, heal, and build complex structures. His work reveals that intelligence exists at every level of biology—allowing us to reprogram tissues, regenerate limbs, and even suppress cancer by restoring cellular memory and connection. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Links: - Michael Levin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s - The Levin Lab (website): https://drmichaellevin.org/ - Michael's blog: https://thoughtforms.life/ - Michael's presentations: https://drmichaellevin.org/presentations/ - Michael and colleagues discussing anthrobots and other groundbreaking research on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6GIzNM0aM - ekkólapto (website): https://www.ekkolapto.org/ - ekkólapto Events: https://lu.ma/calendar/cal-GqNtzHBC2j8ARjb - Curt Jaimungal's presentation at Polymath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCkMyjzQDeg - Will Hahn on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr4R7eh5f_M Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 02:45 The Role of Bioelectricity in Medicine 7:00 Multi-Scale Problem Solving 7:55 The Intelligence of Development 11:41 Decoding Electrical Memories 12:29 The Power of Bioelectric Signals 13:20 Rewiring Cellular Communication 15:29 Cancer and Cellular Networks 16:30 Birth Defects and Bioelectricity 18:28 Regeneration and Bioelectric Pathways 22:50 Inducing Novel Organs 25:35 The Future of Medicine 26:24 Audience Interaction and Questions 31:34 The Future of Bioelectricity 38:55 Integrating Bioelectricity with Evolution 44:17 Preventative Strategies in Medicine 45:45 Closing Remarks and Resources 46:30 Conclusion Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #biology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Emergence of the Super Point from Nothing

Business Leadership Series

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 20, 2025 170:39

I'm back, baby. I've been away traveling for podcasts and am excited to bring you new ones with Michael Levin, William Hahn, Robin Hanson, and Emily Riehl, coming up shortly. They're already recorded. I've been recovering from a terrible flu but pushed through it to bring you today's episode with Urs Schreiber. This one is quite mind-blowing. It's quite hairy mathematics, something called higher category theory, and how using this math (which examines the structure of structure) allows one manner of finding "something" from "nothing." Here, "nothing" means the empty set, and "something" is defined as fermions and even 11D supergravity. It's the first time this material has been presented in this manner. Enjoy. NOTE: Link to technical details are here from Urs Schreiber: https://ncatlab.org/schreiber/show/Peri+Pantheorias As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Links Mentioned: - nLab website: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/HomePage - Paper on category theory: https://people.math.osu.edu/cogdell.1/6112-Eilenberg&MacLane-www.pdf - “Higher Topos Theory for Physics” (Urs's talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD20W6vxMI4 - “Higher Topos Theory for Physics” (Urs's paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.11026 - Stephen Wolfram on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YRlQQw0d-4 - Feynman's thesis: https://faculty.washington.edu/seattle/physics541/2012-path-integrals/thesis.pdf - Differential cohomology in a cohesive ∞-topos (Urs's paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.7930 - M-Theory from the Superpoint (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01774 - Character Map in Non-Abelian Cohomology, The: Twisted, Differential, and Generalized (textbook): https://amzn.to/4bFuz7H - TOE's String Theory Iceberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4PdPnQuwjY Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 01:27 The Creation of nLab 04:36 Philosophy Meets Physics 07:55 The Role of Mathematical Language 09:32 Emergence from Nothing 16:25 Towards a Theory of Everything 22:21 The Problem with Modern Physics 25:31 Diving into Category Theory 35:30 Understanding Adjunctions 41:46 The Significance of Duality 52:54 Exploring Toposes 1:14:20 The UNEDA Lemma and Generalized Spaces 1:16:37 Charts in Physics 1:20:55 Introduction to Infinitesimal Disks 1:23:56 The Emergence of Supergeometry 1:27:33 Transitioning to Gauge Theories 1:28:11 Exploring Singularities in Physics 1:32:50 The Role of Superformal Spaces 1:36:44 Functors and Their Implications 1:40:51 From Nothing to Emergent Structures 1:43:04 Hegel's Influence on Modern Physics 1:54:07 Discovering Higher-Dimensional Structures 1:56:30 The Path to 11-Dimensional Supergravity 1:57:21 Universal Central Extensions 2:03:21 The Journey to M-Theory 2:11:19 Globalizing the Structure of Supergravity 2:15:36 Understanding Global Charges in Physics 2:23:31 Dirac's Insights into Gauge Potentials 2:30:21 The Quest for Non-Perturbative Physics 2:39:04 Conclusion Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #theoreticalphysics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episode 1407: ABC Shark Tank Veteran Michael Levin

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 16, 2025 31:51

We pulled one of our favorite interviews from the BLS interview archives where Derek Champagne interviews Michael Levin. This was a powerful interview and Michael overdelivered as our guest! As one of the most established writers in the nation, New York Times best-selling author Michael Levin has written or co-written more than 100 books, of which eleven are national best sellers.He appeared on ABC's Shark Tank on January 20th, 2012. In the past, Michael has published with Simon & Schuster, Random House, St. Martin's Press, Putnam/Berkley, and many other houses. His works have been optioned for film and TV by Steven Soderbergh/Paramount, HBO, Disney, ABC, and others. One of his own novels became Model Behavior, an ABC Sunday night Disney movie of the week. He has also made contributions to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Jerusalem Post, Writers Digest, CBS News. Michael has had the experience to teach writing classes at the University of California – Los Angeles and New York University. As an Amherst College and Columbia Law School graduate, Michael served for many years as a member of the prestigious Authors Guild Council and as Treasurer of the Authors Guild Foundation.Michael currently resides with his wife and four children in Boston, Massachusetts. Learn more about Michael at www.businessghost.com

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Hidden Consciousness & The Living Patterns That Shape Reality | Michael Levin & Matthew Segall | Mind Meld 424

THIRD EYE DROPS

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2025 121:05

reality hidden philosophy shape consciousness assistant professor patterns plato levin tufts university california institute whitehead cosmology platonic integral studies michael levin segall mind meld alfred north whitehead

How Free Energy Constructs Our Reality | Michael Levin and Karl Friston