Thoughtforms Life

This is a ~1 hour conversation on topics of consciousness, affect, evolution, and philosophy between Gunnar Babcock (https://cals.cornell.edu/gunnar-babcock), Daniel McShea (https://scholars.duke.edu/person/dmcshea), Mark Solms (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vD4p8rQAAAAJ&hl=en), and I. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a ~1.5 hour conversation with Richard Watson (https://www.richardawatson.com/) and Leo Caves (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leo-Caves, https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=Oov_zsoAAAAJ&hl=en) about issues of resonance, unconventional cognition, observers, process philosophy, etc. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a ~2-hour Q&A with Mark Solms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Solms) at the "Public conversation about their work and its implications for psychoanalysis" series of the Annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a ~1 hour conversation between Alexey Tolchinsky (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/alexey-tolchinsky-psyd ), a clinical psychologist and Adjunct Professor at The George Washington University, Center for Professional Psychology, and Thomas Pollak (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6171-0810), a neuropsychiatrist and researcher working at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and...

This is a ~1 hour 10 minute discussion with Robert Prentner (https://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=ZYcFVxoAAAAJ&hl=en) and Timothy Jackson (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vOnot8oAAAAJ&hl=en) about Platonism and related concepts. The paper of mine that they reference at some point is: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g2xj_v3; also an interesting email exchange between them o...

This is a ~1 hour conversation with Buck Trible (https://triblelab.fas.harvard.edu/people/waring-buck-trible, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JLN0AT0AAAAJ&hl=en) about his fascinating work on the genetics, morphology, behavior, and sociality in ants. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a 1 hour 10 minute presentation of ideas around the architecture of biology (and how it differs from today's computational systems). Focusing on morphogenesis as a model of collective intelligence, I talk about the intelligence ratchet that results from life's need to creatively interpret information on the cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary scale. I end with some speculative ideas...

This is a ~1 hr10min talk I gave at a conference on modeling aspects of neuroscience. The talk is about the inverse idea - how tools and concepts from neuroscience apply far beyond neurons and brains, and can help understand a lot of biology across development, evolution, and diverse intelligence. I talked about what the symmetry between cognitive science and the study of morphogenesis means for b...

This is a ~1 hour conversation on topics of consciousness, AI, causation, affect, evolution, and philosophy between Gunnar Babcock (https://cals.cornell.edu/gunnar-babcock), Daniel McShea (https://scholars.duke.edu/person/dmcshea), Mark Solms (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vD4p8rQAAAAJ&hl=en), and I. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The L...

This is a ~1 hour talk with Aaron Sloman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sloman), Anthony Leggett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_James_Leggett), and Chris Fields (https://chrisfieldsresearch.com/). The links to which Aaron refers are: https://cogaffarchive.org/misc/whatlife.html https://cogaffarchive.org/evol-devol.html CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify T...

This is a ~55 minute talk titled "Novel Bodies, Unconventional Minds: a diverse intelligence perspective on a continuum of cognition (and consciousness)" by Michael Levin given at the CIFAR (https://cifar.ca/next-generation/cifar-neuroscience-of-consciousness-winter-school/) Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, + about 20 min of Q&A. My lab doesn't normally work on consciousness per se...

This is a ~1 hour 20 minutes conversation between Bernardo Kastrup (https://www.bernardokastrup.com/), Richatrd Watson (https://www.richardawatson.com/), and me on topics at the intersection of physics, cognition, consciousness, etc. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a ~55 minute talk on the topic of the "Multiscale Human" (https://humanatlas.io/events/2024-24h/). I cover the topics of "what are we", "implications for biomedicine", and "future beyond human repair" from the perspectives of diverse intelligence at different scales of our bodies and at scales of evolution, development, and cognition. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts...

This is a 1 hour 12 minute talk presented at the 2nd Symposium on the Philosophy of Computing at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. It covers the ways in which biological computation is different from most of today's computer architectures, and concludes with a different way to think about emergence of cognition (not just complexity or unpredictability) in a way that informs how we think...

This is a ~50 minute working meeting between Martin Hanczyc (https://www.martinhanczyc.com/) and Michael Levin, discussing work on autonomous droplets and more generally the field of active and agential matter (physical intelligence, somatic computation, etc.) and conceptual approaches in the field of diverse intelligence. Examples of Martin's work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37166609 htt...

This is a ~1 hour talk by Michael Levin, given to the bioengineering department at Northeastern University, on the topic of using bioelectricity as an interface for engineering agential materials. Companion papers are: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-022-00001-9 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33826908 CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin La...

This is a ~45 minute talk given at the Imagining Summit (https://www.artificiality.world/the-imagining-summit/) on Diverse Intelligence and synthbiosis, approaching those topics via communication with cellular collectives in the context of regenerative medicine. The newer material is at the end. CHAPTERS: (00:00) Diverse Intelligence and Goals (02:30) Beyond Discrete Natural Kinds (06:00) Framewor...

This is a ~1 hour interview with the great Denis Noble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Noble), who made seminal contributions to understanding the heartbeat and went on to contribute exciting and counter-paradigm ideas in physiology, evolutionary theory, causation, and other aspects of biology. Some of classic Denis Noble writing: https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/book/the-music-of-life-biology-beyon...

This is ~1 hour conversation with Daniel McShea (https://scholars.duke.edu/person/dmcshea) and Gunnar Babcock (https://gunnarbabcock.com/) on topics of biology, evolution, information, causation, and ethics in the philosophy of mind. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a 1 hour 8 minute talk covering topics of collective intelligence in morphogenesis as a model system for thinking about the origin and scaling of cognition in diverse embodiments. CHAPTERS: (00:00) Diverse Intelligence Framework (12:00) Morphogenesis Problem Solving (22:00) Bioelectric Pattern Memory (34:30) Exploring Latent Space CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spo...

This is a ~40 minute talk on the future of medicine from my perspective given remotely to students at the University of Bologna, Italy. CONNECT WITH ME: Podcast Website YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Blog The Levin Lab

This is a ~45 minute keynote talk at the Bioelectricity and Cancer conference (https://cam.cancer.gov/research/bioelectricity_and_cancer_conference.htm) held at NIH in September 2024. CHAPTERS: (00:00) What is Cancer? (13:00) Cognitive Light Cone & Cancer (18:00) Bioelectric Layer: Cognitive Glue (23:00) Bioelectricity in Cancer (28:00) Tools: Imaging & Control (32:00) Bioelectric Diagnost...

This is a ~1 hour talk on morphogenesis as a collective intelligence and some specifics about cognitive glue. CHAPTERS: (00:00) Intro: Diverse Intelligence Overview (01:40) Discrete Kinds vs Continuum (03:50) Intelligence in Novel Spaces (06:00) Cells as Collective Intelligence (09:30) Morphogenesis and Agential Material (12:30) Defining Intelligence: Perturbations (17:00) Tadpole Metamorphosis In...

This is a ~1 hour discussion with Kevin Mitchell (https://www.kjmitchell.com/), Nick Cheney (https://www.uvm.edu/cems/cs/profiles/nick-cheney), and Ben Hartl (https://allencenter.tufts.edu/benedikt-hartl-ph-d/) on the application of connectionist generative models in understanding the role of the genome in evolution and the control of form and function. Links to relevant materials mentioned in the...

This is another episode in our series on the great figures in developmental bioelectricity. We interview (~1 hour) Mustafa Djamgoz, who has made pivotal discoveries about the role of bioelectricity in the problem of cancer and its eventual solution. Mustafa's book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17612801-beat-cancer Mustafa's papers: https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/m.djamgoz/publications Must...