Josh Bongard, Atoosa Parsa, Richard Watson and Michael Levin discuss agency without free will, oscillatory computation, polycomputing, and evolving notions of selfhood, including fluid, cyclic, and relational models of the self and their links to perception and sensory plasticity.
Conversations and working meetings
Tim Jackson, Karl Friston, Chris Fields and Michael Levin discuss the free energy principle, realism and metaphysics, evolution and exaptation, and how generative noise and time scales relate to novelty and construction in complex systems.
Conversations and working meetings
Researchers Rafael Kaufman, Pranav Gupta, and Jacob Taylor outline an active inference model of collective intelligence and discuss its implications for organizational behavior and large-scale coordination.
Conversations and working meetings
Daniel McShea and Gunnar Babcock join Michael Levin for a wide-ranging discussion of evolution, bioelectric aging, goal-directed behavior, death genes and multicellularity, and how machine metaphors and physicalism shape explanations in biology and mind.
Conversations and working meetings
Benjamin Lyons joins Michael Levin for a 50-minute conversation on prices as cognitive glue, linking economic theory with collective intelligence in biology, from minimal rational agents to information flow, learning, and pathological dynamics.
Conversations and working meetings
Stuart Kauffman and Katherine Peil Kauffman discuss evolution, bioelectric minds, machines, and how biology reinterprets itself, touching on xenobots, microbial communities, emotion, memory, and cosmology.
Conversations and working meetings
A 45-minute conversation with synthetic biologist Ricard Solé exploring morphospace, bioelectricity, synthetic collectives, limits of bottom-up engineering, major transitions in machines, and the evolution of language, communication, patterns, and memory.
Conversations and working meetings
Benjamin Lyons and David Bloomin join a 45-minute discussion on how economics, basal cognition, and deep learning intersect, covering markets and pluralistic institutions, collective intelligence, alignment, multi-agent learning, and neural agent architectures.
Conversations and working meetings
Aastha Jain Simes and Michael Levin talk with developmental bioelectricity pioneer Ken Robinson about electric fields in cell migration, electrogenic epithelia in embryogenesis, his career path, and his work in Lionel Jaffe's lab.
Conversations and working meetings
Joscha Bach, Chris Fields and Michael Levin discuss links between computation, cognition and consciousness, covering error-correcting codes, sense-making, memory, agency, time and minimal minds across species.
Conversations and working meetings
Donald Hoffman, Richard Watson, and Michael Levin discuss how scientific theories model reality, exploring virtual reality metaphors, time as a Markovian present, fractal structures, amplituhedra, limits of science, and the physics of cognition and agency.
Conversations and working meetings
A working meeting with Alexander Ororbia and Karl Friston examines their Mortal Computations paper, discussing morphology, gene networks as learners, dynamics and memory, and how these ideas bear on reprogramming biology and cognition.
Conversations and working meetings
