Claim OwnershipThoughtforms Life
Subscribed: 7Played: 104
Subscribe
© 2025 Michael Levin / Thoughtforms Life
Description
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.
135 Episodes
Reverse
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...
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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".
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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).
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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/).
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
"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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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).
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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.
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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).
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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. CONNECT WITH ME:Podcast WebsiteYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyTwitterBlogThe Levin Lab
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. CONNECT WITH ME:Podcast WebsiteYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyTwitterBlogThe Levin Lab
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. CONNECT WITH ME:Podcast WebsiteYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyTwitterBlogThe Levin Lab
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. CONNECT WITH ME:Podcast WebsiteYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyTwitterBlogThe Levin Lab
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. ...
CONNECT WITH ME:
Podcast Website
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Twitter
Blog
The Levin Lab
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 ThanksCONNECT WITH ME:Podcast WebsiteYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyTwitterBlogThe Levin Lab
Comments
Download from Google Play
Download from App Store
United States