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
Cognitive scientist Tom Froese joins Michael Levin to discuss Froese's Irruption theory, exploring embodied minds, agency, mind–body interaction, computational emergence, and implications for experiments, clinical applications, seizures, entropy, and free will.
Conversations and working meetings
Michael Levin and Michael Pollan discuss ideas from a recent paper on polycomputing in biology, metamorphosis, flexible repair, and how selves, memory, agency, ethics, and consciousness may span multiple scales and relate to AI.
Conversations and working meetings
Aastha Jain Simes and Michael Levin interview Min Zhao about his path from trauma surgery to pioneering research on ion currents, electric guidance of cell migration, and the role of bioelectricity in wound healing and developmental repair.
Conversations and working meetings
Neurobiologist Ali Hanson discusses her path into neuroscience and presents research on neural activity and self-organizing behavior in Hydra, touching on molecules vs bioelectricity and the challenges of studying complex biological systems.
Conversations and working meetings
Michael Levin and Aastha Jain Simes talk with developmental bioelectricity pioneer Richard Nuccitelli about inventing the vibrating probe, how cells use electric cues, and the evolution of bioelectric approaches to cancer therapy and development.
Conversations and working meetings
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and evolutionary biologist/computer scientist Richard Watson discuss cognition-first evolution, resonant agency, Markov kernels, trace logic, and how these ideas relate to physics, time, and consciousness.
Conversations and working meetings
