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Thoughtforms Life

Michael Levin

141 episodes

3 weeks ago

A podcast by Professor Michael Levin exploring the frontiers of biology, cognition, and emergence. Engage in conversations about morphogenesis, bioelectricity, and synthetic life — and uncover how intelligence and agency emerge from the most fundamental levels of nature.

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All content for Thoughtforms Life is the property of Michael Levin and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

A podcast by Professor Michael Levin exploring the frontiers of biology, cognition, and emergence. Engage in conversations about morphogenesis, bioelectricity, and synthetic life — and uncover how intelligence and agency emerge from the most fundamental levels of nature.

Show more...

Episodes (20/141)

Thoughtforms Life

Bioelectricity: A Bridge Between Physics and Cognition, by Way of Biology

This is a ~54 minute talk I gave, titled ""Bioelectricity: a bridge between physics and cognition, by way of biology", at the National Institute of Health Interest Group "Quantum SIG" (https://oir.nih.gov/sigs/qis-quantum-sensing-biology-interest-group). My talk doesn't contain any quantum biology content per se, but I discuss the idea of top-down control and cognition all the way down, from abstract mental goals to molecular pathways, with bioelectricity as a tractable medium for the communicat...

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1 month ago

54 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Intrinsic Motivation in Evolved, Engineered, and Hybrid Systems

This is a ~1 hour talk I gave at the Oxford Robotics Institute called "Intrinsic motivation in evolved, engineered, and hybrid systems: the interface of biophysics, computer science, and behavioral science". It covers our work from the perspective of motivations - what are they (in various unconventional agents, spaces, and scales), how can we predict/change them, and where they "come from".

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1 month ago

57 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Against Mind-Blindness: Recognizing and Communicating with Agential Materials by Michael Levin

This is a 1 hour 11 minute talk by me called "Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with Agential Materials and Beyond". It is a slightly longer, updated version of this talk from last month, containing a bit of new material and a somewhat differently-ordered presentation.

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2 months ago

1 hour 11 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Biological and Technological Information Processing

This is a ~35 minute talk on commonalities and differences between biological and technological information processing, and the implications for AI (given at the AGI-25 conference in Iceland). The full program, including Hananel Hazan's talk (which is the 2nd half of mine), is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdftA37yZJw.

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2 months ago

35 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Unconventional Embodiments of Consciousness: A Diverse Intelligence Research Program - Michael Levin

This is a ~46 minute talk given at a conference on consciousness, presenting my lab's data on cognition in body organs outside the brain and then some speculations about the mind-body connection more generally (fleshing out my Platonic space model with symmetries between brain:mind relationships and mathematics:physics relationships).

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2 months ago

46 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Against Mind-blindness: Recognizing and Communicating with Agential Materials and Beyond - Michael Levin

This is a ~1 hour 7 minute talk I gave at the SEMF Interdisciplinary School (July 2025, https://semf.org.es/school2025/#speakers-container) on agency ways to think about expanding our ability to detect and communicate with unconventional minds. The same talk but with a lengthy Q&A will be up on the SEMF website.

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3 months ago

1 hour 7 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Beyond Complexity & Emergence: Taming Multiscale Competency in Agential Materials

This is a ~54 minute talk given at a workshop on complexity. Many of the examples are the same ones I often talk about but this talk is focused on explaining how biology deals with complexity, and ways to think about complex patterns of form and behavior beyond the conventional approach of emergence.

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3 months ago

54 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Engineering Agential Materials

This is a ~18 min talk plus ~10 min Q&A on a top-down approach to bioengineering and robotics that I gave at the Biohybrid Robotics Symposium in Switzerland in July 2025 (https://biohybrid-robotics.com/).

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3 months ago

27 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Discussion with Michael Johnson

This is a ~55 minute conversation with Michael Johnson (https://t.co/YxAOZif0V2) covering topics of spectrum of consciousness down to the cell (and below) level, implicit memory and cellular pixels of experience, Platonic space, symmetry breaking, and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in systems.

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3 months ago

55 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Unconventional Selves - a Diverse Intelligence Perspective on Consciousness by Michael Levin

"Unconventional selves in novel spaces, scales, and embodiments - a diverse intelligence perspective on a continuum of cognition and consciousness" is a ~1 hour 12 min talk I gave at a conference on consciousness (https://www.hardproblem.it/), as it relates to our work on diverse intelligence and unconventional cognition.

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3 months ago

1 hour 11 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense without Teleology

This is a deliberately provocative talk (~1 hour 20 minutes) I gave on teleology (a pretty taboo subject in a lot of the life sciences) delivered at Caltech. I try to go step by step and show the philosophical background of how I think about goal-directedness in physically embodied agents (cells and tissues etc.) and then the data - classic examples and new discoveries that this framework allowed us to make. Editing by https://x.com/DNAMediaEditing

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4 months ago

1 hour 18 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Discussion with Murray Shanahan

This is a ~25 minute discussion with Murray Shanahan (https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/) on topics following up on his talk in our Center (https://youtu.be/ZlKc3ebLgEI?si=Tmq5gOwVDi4t-pip).

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4 months ago

25 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Discussion between Adam Safron, Max Shen, and Michael Levin

This is a ~1 hour discussion with Adam Safron (https://www.adamsafron.com/) and Max Shen (https://www.maxkshen.com/home), and Michael Levinabout diverse intelligence and its relevance for pain.

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4 months ago

59 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Discussion with David Spivak

This is a ~1 hour discussion with mathematician David Spivak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spivak) about issues related to goal-directedness and some puzzles around mathematical vs. physical constants (see https://thoughtforms.life/why-the-tight-clustering-of-mathematical-constants/ for more details on that question).

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4 months ago

57 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Endogenous Bioelectrical Networks: An Interface to Somatic Intelligence

This is a ~55 min talk by Michael Levin "Endogenous Bioelectrical Networks: an interface to somatic intelligence for regenerative medicine", going over the state of the art in developmental bioelectricity in the context of collaborating with the cellular collective intelligence for applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer. It has some new material beyond what my recent talks on this topic have covered.

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4 months ago

51 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Against Mind-Blindness

This is a new ~1 hour talk by me on the concept of diverse intelligence, and morphogenesis as a model system with which to practice identifying and communicating with unconventional minds. This is a bit different than previous ones because I explicitly go over examples of how some of our various data on bioelectrics addresses each of several key properties of cellular collectives as *cognitive agents* navigating anatomical morphospace.

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4 months ago

56 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Chemical AI: An Unconventional Strategy for Mimicking Biological Intelligence - Pier Luigi Gentili

This is a ~1 hour total presentation by Pier Luigi Gentili (https://www.pierluigigentili.com/) and brainstorming session about chemical intelligence and its relationship to the broader field of diverse intelligence.

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4 months ago

58 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Bioelectric Networks as the Interface to Somatic Intelligence: Toward a New Regenerative Medicine

This is a ~50 minute talk by me (given at IIT Mandi yesterday) on bioelectricity from the perspective of both, a path to regenerative medicine of birth defects, injury repair, and cancer, and a model system for learning to communicate with unconventional collective intelligences.

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5 months ago

50 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Conversation with Benjamin Lyons, Mark Blumberg, and Karen Adolph: Motor Development and Cognition

This is a ~30 minute conversation with Benjamin Lyons (https://benjaminflyons.com/), Mark Blumberg (https://blumberg.lab.uiowa.edu), and Karen Adolph (https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/karen-adolph.html) on the field of motor development and behavior in humans and other animals, and the ties between that field and the morphogenetic intelligence of embryogenesis and regeneration. Suggested reading: Adolph, K. E. (2020). Oh, behave! Presidential address. Infancy, 25, 347-392. Adolph, K. E., Hoch, J. ...

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5 months ago

36 minutes

Thoughtforms Life

Against Mind-Blindness: Recognizing and Communicating With Diverse Intelligences

This is a ~35 minute talk about diverse intelligence and our efforts to establish formalisms and methods for communicating with unconventional biological intelligences.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Expanding Mind Blindness
(02:50) Recognizing Diverse Minds
(05:00) Embodied Agent Origins
(08:40) Anatomical Intelligence Spaces
(12:40) Bioelectricity: Body's Glue
(15:50) Communicating Cell Intelligence
(22:30) Patterns Beyond Physics
(25:00) Anthrobots: Novel Life Forms
(27:30) Future Beings, Pattern Space
(32:30) Conclusion and Thanks

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5 months ago

35 minutes