Dr. Michael Levin on Embodied Minds and Cognitive Agents

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Michael Levin** (0:45)
Everything we do is around this notion of embodied minds and what it means to be a cognitive agent in this physical universe.
We think about things like the collective intelligence of cells during embryonic development, during regeneration, and so on. We've had projects in cancer where we can detect and normalize cancer by controlling its bioelectrical connections between the cells and the large-scale network.
All of these terms, machine, human, robot, alive, emergent, I think what gets us in trouble is assumptions that these are binary categories. Think about the whole spectrum of diverse intelligence, cells, organs, tissues, chimeras, cyborgs, hybrids, and every other kind of combination. That's only going to continue. What are the things that matter to a bacterium? What are the things that matter to a dog? What are the things that can matter to a human? And could we have at some point a being that literally is in the linear range can care about all the living beings on earth? I think that any improvements that we can make to enlarge our cognitive light bones, to improve on our cognition, to have better embodiments, we can certainly do better than we do now.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:52)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution. Hello, and welcome back trabalho t, we interview visionary researchers entrepreneurs and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas. And together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today's episode is a special one. My guest is Mike Levin, Professor of Biology at Tufts University, and one of the most distinctively accomplished experimental scientists, and one of the most fascinating philosophers of intelligence that I've encountered in my life. We cover a ton of ground over the next hour and 15 minutes, and this is not an easy conversation to summarize. If you're like me and usually listen to podcasts at 2x speed, I might suggest slowing this one down just a bit, because unless you are already familiar with Professor Levin's work, there are simply so many strange results and deeply thought provoking ideas in this conversation, that I found my brain at least needed a little extra time to process it all.
It might also help to watch some of the short videos that Levin and his team have released over the years, both on his YouTube channel and their academic group website. After listening back to this conversation myself, a few major themes do stand out.
First, AI defies all binaries. I say that all the time, but Levin's work takes that sentiment to the next level by showing that even the most familiar binary distinctions, the ones that we take most for granted, such as that between a living thing and a machine, are in fact rapidly collapsing from both directions, as we simultaneously see remarkably sophisticated behavior from even very simple computer systems on the one hand, and at the same time on the other, groups like Professor Levin's devising striking ways to program biology itself. Second, we have a lot of surprising latent capabilities left to discover. Just as GPT-4 can do far more now than we knew about at the beginning, so it is with biological systems, particularly when we place them way out of distribution, as Levin has done in his famous Xenobot and Anthrobot projects.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, we must always favor epistemic modesty and open-minded experimentation over our philosophical commitments. Many of the capabilities that Levin has discovered in biological systems would have been laughed off as impossible, if not crazy, right up until the moment that he demonstrated them. Reflecting broadly on how little we know about even the simplest systems with which we've co-evolved should be enough to keep anyone humble, particularly in the presence of new systems that don't share our evolutionary history. In Levin's view, the hot-button topic of emergence in AI systems, a subject that I plan to cover in depth with a dedicated episode soon, is inherently a subjective question and ultimately boils down to the element of surprise. I agree with this framing and I was struck to hear that Levin, a world-class biohacker by any measure, who is obviously willing to conduct experiments that some might consider playing God, still has consciously avoided working on ideas that could make AI systems significantly more lifelike than they are today. At least until he has a better understanding of what that might imply for their subjective experience and our collective future. As always, if you're enjoying the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with your friends. Considering how it brings such critical themes to the fore, I think this episode would be a great introduction to the cognitive revolution as a whole. And if I could be so bold, I think it is worth sharing widely.