Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #486

The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, his second time on the podcast. He is one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists and scientists I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. He and his labs at Tufts University study and build biological systems that help us understand the nature of intelligence, agency, memory, consciousness, and life in all of its forms here on Earth, and beyond. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Levin. You write that the central question at the heart of your work from, uh, biological systems to computational ones is, how do embodied minds arise in the physical world, and what determines the capabilities and properties of those minds? Can you unpack that question for us and maybe, uh, begin to answer it?

Well, the fundamental tension is in both the first-person, the second-person, and third-person descriptions of mind. So, so in third-person, we want to understand, how do we recognize them, and how do we know looking out into the world what degree of agency there is and how best to relate to the different systems that we find, and, uh, are our intuitions any good when we look at something and it looks really stupid and mechanical versus, uh, it really looks like there's something, uh, cognitive going on there? How do we get good at recognizing them? Then there's the second-person, which is the control, and that's both for engineering but also for regenerative medicine, when you want to tell the system to do something, right? What kind of tools are you going to use? And this is a major part of my framework is that all of these kinds of things are operational claims. Are you going to use the tools of hardware rewiring, of control theory and cybernetics, of behavior science, of psychoanalysis and love and friendship? Like, what are the interaction protocols that you bring, right? And then in first-person, it's this notion of having an inner perspective and being a system that has valence and cares about the outcome of things, makes decisions and has memories and tells a story about itself and the outside world, and how can all of that exist and still be consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry and various other things that, uh, that we see around us? So that, that I find to be maybe the most interesting and the most important, uh, mystery for all of us to, uh, well, on the science and also on the personal level. So that's, that's what I'm interested in.

So your work is focused on starting at the physics, going all the way to friendship and love and psychoanalysis.

Yeah, although, although actually I would turn that upside down. I, I think that pyramid is backwards, and I think it's behavior science at the bottom. I think it's behavior science all the way. I think in certain ways even math is the behavior of a certain kind of being that lives in a latent space, and physics is what we call systems that at least look to be amenable to a very, uh, simple, low-agency kinda model and so on. But, uh, but that's what I'm interested in, is understanding that and developing applications, because it's very important to me that, uh, what we do is transition deep ideas and philosophy into actual practical applications that not only make it clear whether we're making any progress or not, but also allow us to relieve suffering and make life better for all sentient beings and, and enable to, uh, you know, enable us and others to reach their full potential. So these are, these are very practical things, I think.