Michael Levin

Professor of Biology at Tufts University and Director of the Allen Discovery Center; one of the leading figures in bioelectricity, regenerative medicine, and what he calls the science of diverse intelligence.

Background

Levin trained originally as a computer scientist before moving into developmental biology, a sequence that left him permanently sceptical of the standard categories biologists use to separate mechanism from mind. His lab at Tufts works across an unusually wide range: bioelectric imaging and manipulation in regenerating tissues, the construction of novel organisms (xenobots, anthrobots) from living cells with no evolutionary history, the application of cognitive and behavioural science tools to gene regulatory networks and sorting algorithms, and a theoretical programme that attempts to map what he calls the ‘Platonic space’ — a latent space of patterns from which physical systems, including minds, draw their capacities.

Known for: the cognitive light cone; the spectrum of persuadability; the TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) framework; xenobots and anthrobots; bioelectric reprogramming of cancer and regeneration; the Platonic space / ingressing minds hypothesis; and the empirical demonstration that sorting algorithms have unexpected behavioural competencies.

Core positions

Levin’s foundational claim is that the categories dividing living from non-living, cognitive from mechanical, and biological from engineered are obstacles to science rather than discoveries of it. Mind, agency, and goal-directed behaviour are a spectrum — the ‘spectrum of persuadability’ — that runs from molecules up through organisms and collectives, and perhaps into algorithms and other physical systems. The tools used to study cognition in humans and animals can be applied, with appropriate adaptations, much further down that spectrum, and when they are, novel capacities appear.

Practically, this programme has yielded bioelectric reprogramming of cancer (reconnecting tumour cells to their collective bioelectric memory restores normal behaviour without chemotherapy), reversal of developmental defects by resetting bioelectric goal states, and the discovery that adult human cells can self-organise into anthrobots that are measurably younger than the cells they are made from.

Theoretically, Levin is developing the hypothesis that physical objects — cells, brains, algorithms — are interfaces to a Platonic space of patterns that includes both mathematical structures and what we recognise as kinds of minds. Nobody creates consciousness; an interface is built, and a pattern ingresses through it. The programme is empirical: map which patterns come through which interfaces and whether the map has structure.

In the wiki