Michael Levin

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Michael Levin

Michael Levin

@drmichaellevin

Scientist at Tufts University; my lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems.

Katılım Mayıs 2013
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
Wordpress site is up - thoughtforms.life. Register to be notified of book progress, specific events, news, and new posts with photography, essays, interviews, & more. Unlike at drmichaellevin.org, here I will post ideas not fully baked yet, & academic-adjacent content.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
ah yes, what determines the biological properties, with specificity, and what is the contribution of history vs. other things - absolutely key question. We're doing a lot of work on this now, especially in systems which have not existed before as such (Xenobots, Anthrobots, etc.).
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Brian Moon
Brian Moon@perigean·
Very helpful - thank you! It’s most useful for demonstrating a pervasive limitation -- the explanatory target remains what life is or how life works. A more fundamental question is largely absent: What determines the unique biological history that actually exists? Until our theories aim at explaining actuality -- not just characterizing living systems -- we may be asking remarkably sophisticated questions that stop one level short.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
New #paper. Tons of important conversations among knowledge workers never make it into the scientific record - all we get are sanitized final "papers", cut down to match a journal's max allowed length. Recordings (like youtube.com/playlist?list=…) help, but we can do better. Here's our attempt: @karina__kofman organized, many contributors in the discussion. rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa04/organis… The journal Organisms (rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa04/organis…) was brave enough to agree to this idea: they published a transcript, very minimally edited (i.e., mostly unaltered) of a conversation among some great people. It's the discussion thread accompanying our recent paper (link.springer.com/article/10.100…) on definitions of life. Check it out - all of this would normally have disappeared, buried in people's email databases and not available to the community. How many other amazing conversations could be mined by students, future AI's, etc.?
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
@BenjaminLy61243 I think it's both. There are certainly situations in which new problem-solving agents (and new problems) arise at the new scale. But I think there are also scenarios where systems offload the computations they already do, laterally.
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Benjamin Lyons
Benjamin Lyons@BenjaminLy61243·
@drmichaellevin Curious what you think about the value of the offloading metaphor. For many phenomena, the relevant competence belongs to the coupled system and was never available to one component alone. That's not offloading but the creation of a new problem-solving agent at a different scale.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
New #preprint with Chris Fields: preprints.org/manuscript/202… "Cognitive Offloading Is a Cognitive Universal" Humans routinely offload cognitive tasks to their environments. Here we show, employing just basic physics and the Free Energy Principle, that all time-persistent information-processing systems offload information-processing tasks to their environments. Hence all cognitive systems engage in cognitive offloading. We show how ecological niche construction, kinematic replication, bioelectric signaling, the development of communication systems based on shared semantics, and the ability of LLMs to demonstrate fluent language use in the absence of extra-linguistic input all exemplify this offloading process. We conclude that both theoretical understanding of problem-solving abilities and the engineering of such abilities into artifacts will be improved by considering active computation by the environment as a ubiquitous adjunct to cognition in both living and artificial systems.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
@LeoBez7 @MacrinePhD I agree with you, I think almost anything can be over-ridden if we know the control structure. The question is, how much effort will it be. But I'm highly optimistic.
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Leo Bezhanishvili
Leo Bezhanishvili@LeoBez7·
Thank you very much for your reply, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer. One thing I’m still trying to understand is this: why would the fact that the limitation comes from deeper evolutionary dynamics make it any less modifiable? My intuition is that even if the germline–somatic stem cell competition was the deep evolutionary trade-off that led to the loss of whole-body regeneration, the underlying regenerative program might still be present but simply switched off or overridden.
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Sheila Macrine, Ph.D.
Sheila Macrine, Ph.D.@MacrinePhD·
What happens to your memories when your entire brain turns to liquid soup? Here is a quick editorial summary of Dr. Michael Levin’s mind-bending work: inside the chrysalis, a caterpillar’s brain completely dissolves and rebuilds from scratch to become a butterfly. Yet, tests show the butterfly still retains the memories it learned as a caterpillar. If a mind can survive its physical hardware being liquefied and entirely remolded, memory is clearly doing more than just sitting on a neural "hard drive." So, where is that data actually stored? #Neuroscience #Biology #MichaelLevin #Metamorphosis #CognitiveScience scienceandculture.com/2025/04/biolog… via @discoverycsc @drmichaellevin
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
It's a good question. The real answer is, we don't know. I suspect the terrestrial/aquatic distinction is a sort of "fine tuning" on top of deeper dynamics. Maybe whole-body regeneration is not really available to a lot of animals, but significant regenerative response (organs/appendages) nevertheless is, given the right conditions and stimuli to the cells. Deer antlers, human liver and fingertip regeneration, etc. - I don't expect us to be planaria exactly, but I think most of the limitations of the kind we care about are not very deep and can be tweaked in situ. Time will tell; key thing is to try, then we'll know.
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Leo Bezhanishvili
Leo Bezhanishvili@LeoBez7·
I’ve read the 2020 Fields & Levin paper “Why isn’t sex optional?” several times. It presents germline stem cell competition with somatic stem cells as the key developmental mechanism that destabilized vegetative reproduction and led to the loss of reliable whole-body regeneration in many lineages. In recent interviews and talks, however, you’ve emphasized ecological factors — specifically that robust regeneration is largely an aquatic phenomenon and that terrestrial environments strongly favor rapid scarring over regeneration due to risks like infection, desiccation, and physical damage. Could you clarify how these two explanations relate? Is the stem-cell competition the primary internal reason many lineages lost the capacity for WBR, while the aquatic/terrestrial distinction explains why regeneration is rarely maintained or favored in land animals? If the germline–somatic stem cell competition had never occurred, would terrestrial ecological pressures alone still have driven most land lineages toward scarring rather than regeneration? And conversely, if animals had remained in supportive aquatic environments, would the stem-cell competition mechanism still have led to widespread loss of reliable WBR? Thank you — I’d really appreciate your thoughts on how these levels fit together.
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Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal@TOEwithCurt·
Woah, wicked event happening at MIT. I will try to make it down @LupeFiasco and @ekkolapto will be there (and @drmichaellevin )
ekkolápto@ekkolapto

Excited to announce the first Rap Theory Salon and Hackathon at MIT! Featuring incredible speakers: Professors @ebarenholtz, @drmichaellevin, Nick Montfort, and Wasalu “@LupeFiasco” Jaco. A deep dive into the mathematical nature of patterns, rhythms, language, and cognition—all perspectives geared toward developing a Theory of Everything for Rap. Starting July 17. Very limited spots. Links down below ⬇️

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Michael Addyman
Michael Addyman@addyman_michael·
@drmichaellevin @TOEwithCurt @LupeFiasco @ekkolapto When ya did Lex or likewise, do they come to you? Lex always looks like he is in some Holiday Inn or something. And the other stuff is normally in parks. The amount of work you could get done instead of flying and checking in to do in-person stuff....good choice.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
There's some of that, in that responsibility goes in a spectrum (i.e., doesn't have to me "max" responsibility) but I don't think uncertainty absolves of responsibility entirely. That's our lot as finite beings - important decisions with limited knowledge, and we're responsible (to a degree) for things we do, and don't do, even if we didn't have all the facts (in fact we *can't* have all the relevant facts, ever).
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Rik Lubking
Rik Lubking@RupertG87170562·
@drmichaellevin My point is that while you're responsible for your own viability and success, you're not responsible for the potential greater/wider consequences, because you can claim that "we couldn't be sure of that" and "we meant well". Oppenheimer could've said the same about cancer.
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Fawn Miller Coaching
Fawn Miller Coaching@CoachFawn·
@drmichaellevin I just shouted “YAY!” so loudly I startled all 3 of my napping doggos;) A new paper of this caliber by Levin & Fields is my Christmas morning! Infinite gratitude to both of you for your synergy and brilliance.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
As a scientist, you can (must) wait before feeling relatively confident of something, but you *can't wait before deciding anything*, because you need to decide what experiments to do next, right now. More importantly, the immense suffering out there (medical and otherwise) can't wait for certainty (which never comes anyway) - you've got to take your best shot, as far as you know, every day. Which means, you're constantly making important and impactful decisions with very limited information, with resources that are always on the verge of running out, and a constant feeling of uncertainty.
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Rik Lubking
Rik Lubking@RupertG87170562·
@drmichaellevin x.com/i/status/20754… The nice thing about being a scientist is that you can wait until you have certainty before deciding anything. The nice thing about being a philosopher is that you can go out on a limb and explore possibilities. Leadership is somewhere in between.
Rik Lubking@RupertG87170562

Constantly updating to the latest version will keep breaking all of your shit. Not updating until your version is no longer supported will eventually force you to buy all new shit. Ideally, you update after the newest version is stable, and before the old version is defunct.

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Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA
Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA@GrantHBrennerMD·
It may be chauvinistic, but if a person tells me they are conscious and sentient I'm more likely to believe it than if my laptop does.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
@LeoBez7 @GrantHBrennerMD there are new data on this; preprints/papers coming - first some computational stuff in the next couple of months and then biology later in the year.
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Leo Bezhanishvili
Leo Bezhanishvili@LeoBez7·
Mike, not related here, but, in the Ingressing Minds work and TAME framework you’ve described patterns (including high-agency “kinds of minds”) ingressing via physical pointers/interfaces, with bodies/hardware as critical but non-primary scratchpads. You’ve also emphasized dissolving the thoughts/thinkers binary — all agents are patterns in excitable media that can spawn others, on a true continuum with no bright lines. Any recent updates or new experiments/papers on how this Platonic/latent space + scratchpad view is playing out in practice (e.g., with biobots, anthrobots, aging/morphostasis work, or synthetic systems)? Thoughts are thinkers and especially interested in how the hardware/software flip and pattern-as-agent idea is informing new interventions or scaling of diverse intelligence. I am particularly interested if it Is a loss of stability or persistence of the higher-level pattern itself, where the organism-level goal state gradually loses its ability to maintain order and entropy takes over? Or could the pattern/virtual governor remain largely intact, while accumulated changes at the cellular level make the “hardware” less able to interpret and execute those instructions?
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
@AdrianneMac That's a great question. We are checking. It's not a sharp threshold, it's a sigmoid curve, but yes I do think that embryos offload to the hyperembryo and vice versa. (here it is for those who don't know what we're referring to: thoughtforms.life/what-groups-of… )
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Adrianne Macdonald
Adrianne Macdonald@AdrianneMac·
@drmichaellevin Those embryos overcoming teratogens when there were more than (a certain number) of them? Do you think they hit some critical threshold and ‘offload cognition’ to a computation resource to guide them to express the best gene/s to resist the teratogen?
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Leo Bezhanishvili
Leo Bezhanishvili@LeoBez7·
Thank you and congratulations on the new preprint. It’s a beautiful and clarifying piece. You show that all time-persistent information-processing systems offload computation to their environments via active inference. How does this universal offloading relate to the loss of multi-scale goal-directedness and morphostasis that you describe in aging? In your framework, is the progressive impairment of effective offloading (for example through changes in bioelectric patterning or tissue-level competency) part of how goal-directedness and pattern maintenance decline, or does the loss of goal-directedness itself reduce the system’s ability to maintain productive offloading relationships with its environment? I’m especially curious how this perspective sits alongside the central role of bioelectric patterns in maintaining coherent, goal-directed states across scales.
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Michael Levin
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin·
@mlhaufe Well, planaria tear themselves in half every 2 weeks and regenerate :-) that makes them immortal. I don't know that we'll need that level of stress, but I do think that the road to unlimited lifespan is through regenerative therapies.
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Michael Haufe
Michael Haufe@mlhaufe·
@drmichaellevin with the Cybernetic theory of aging, do you think that implies some form of whole body hormetic effect is needed to re-establish the goal? We know that aerobic activity, saunas, fasting, etc fall in this category but we know that's insufficient
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Stuart Hameroff
Stuart Hameroff@StuartHameroff·
Dear Michael You decry the lack of evidence in consciousness studies and are disdainful of theories of consciousness. But you agree it seems that what selectively goes away with general anesthesia is what is responsible for consciousness. That turns out to be quantum interactions in microtubules which favors Orch OR. So why be disdainful of Orch OR, the only theory of consciousness with experimental support?
Michael Levin@drmichaellevin

> But you didn’t answer my question. Please, are there any other examples of significant experimental evidence for any theory of consciousness just to be clear, you're asking me to argue for some specific theory of consciousness? You've come to the wrong place :-) I will let each theory's proponents do that. I have not been championing any existing mainstream theory of consciousness, I pretty much don't like any of them for various reasons and I think "experimental evidence" is almost impossible to come by in this field (your emphasis on anesthesia is actually one of the only exceptions, I do agree that it's important). But, overall, everything is calibrated against human verbal reports. We wouldn't accept such an N=1 situation in any other science. I think we should be very very skeptical about most claims in this field. More generally, the study of consciousness can't, I think, be done in 3rd person - we can study physiology, behavior, verbal reports. But not consciousness itself, without being part of the experiment ourselves.

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@karina__kofman @BenjaminLy61243 @LeoBez7 @MacrinePhD @discoverycsc @TheApe_Theist @TOEwithCurt @LupeFiasco