Philosopher Alex Kiefer explores how entropy might underlie motivation and agency in natural and artificial systems, touching on psychophysical identity, willpower, Buddhist views of purpose, emergent goals under uncertainty, and Platonic patterns.
Conversations and working meetings
Neuroscientists Ben Lyons, Eli Sennesh, and Jordan Theriault discuss allostasis, interoception, and predictive brain models, linking metabolism, evolution, and control theory to behavior and psychology, followed by a brief Q&A.
Conversations and working meetings
Alexey Tolchinsky, Patricia Silveira and Michael Levin discuss molecular markers of trauma, developmental stress, and how concepts from trauma psychology might be modeled in minimal cognitive systems like Xenobots and Anthrobots.
Conversations and working meetings
Neuroscientist Michael Levin and linguist Elliot Murphy discuss language, evolution, and neuroscience, covering intracranial syntax, grammar across systems, non-neural communication, analog computation, and implications for free will and AI language models.
Conversations and working meetings
Chris Fields and Julian Gough join Michael Levin to discuss evolutionary cosmology, exploring selection on the scale of universes, analogies to biological evolution, universe heredity and habitability, water chemistry, and the idea of a cosmic genome.
Conversations and working meetings
Michael Levin and philosopher Jordi Vallverdú discuss how information and cognitive patterns might be transferred from embodied human minds into large language models, drawing analogies from biology and considering implications for science and human limits.
Conversations and working meetings
Aastha Jain Simes and Michael Levin interview cancer researcher Robert Gatenby about evolutionary and physiological approaches to cancer, covering bioelectricity, information thermodynamics, aging, adaptive therapy, biomarkers, and habitat imaging.
Conversations and working meetings
Janet Wiles presents a talk on mapping diverse intelligence spaces through computational models of memory, language and xenobots, followed by a discussion with Michael Levin on development, plasticity, bioelectric signaling, and synthetic bioengineering.
Conversations and working meetings
Michael Johnson joins to explore consciousness from the cellular level, discussing cells as qualia pixels, Platonic spaces, bioelectric symmetry breaking, structured water, and intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation in biological systems.
Conversations and working meetings
Michael Levin and Murray Shanahan continue their conversation on consciousness, the ontology of mathematical patterns, morphogenesis, embodiment, and how to conceptualize diverse possible minds.
Conversations and working meetings
Adam Safron, Max Shen, and Michael Levin discuss diverse intelligences in the body, how pain may emerge from multi-scale goal-directed processes, and implications for prediction, therapy, placebo, and communication with bodily systems.
Conversations and working meetings
Mathematician David Spivak discusses goal-directedness, emergence, learning in dynamical systems, and conceptual links between mathematical and physical constants with host Michael Levin.
Conversations and working meetings
