I, scientist with Balazs Kegl Michael Levin part 1
Mar 24, 2025
Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, dives into groundbreaking ideas about cellular cognition and agency. He explores how cells act as decision-makers and shape their environments through electrical patterns. Levin discusses the competition between biological patterns and how this impacts development and regeneration. They also tackle the concepts of nested agencies, the interplay of memory and identity, and even propose a psychological theory of aging—framing it as a decline tied to the loss of goals. A thought-provoking conversation that challenges our understanding of life!
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Agency Requires The System's Perspective
- Agency is the ability of a system to meaningfully navigate a space, requiring us to adopt its inner perspective to predict behavior.
- Higher-level agents demand we ask what they know, want, and where their borders lie to relate to them meaningfully.
Mesoscale Patterns Enable Creation
- Mesoscale patterns (like gliders) are causally real and enable creation, not just prediction from microstates.
- Dismissing higher-level patterns prevents engineering emergent functions, like building a Turing machine in Conway's Game of Life.
Building Eyes With Electrical Prompts
- Michael Levin describes injecting an 'electric face' pattern and inducing eyes to form in novel body locations like gut or tail.
- Minimal prompts recruit neighbors and scale resources; the collective builds complex anatomy without explicit gene-level instructions.
