Scientist at Tufts University; my lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems.
Joined May 2013
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Wordpress site is up - thoughtforms.life/. Register to be notified of book progress, specific events, news, and new posts with photography, essays, interviews, & more. Unlike at drmichaellevin.org, here I will post ideas not fully baked yet, & academic-adjacent content.
The details for our (@DrPatrickE) cell trainer platform are up!
drmichaellevin.org/resources…
Michael Levin retweeted
1/ There are a ton of cool papers coming out on evolutionary transitions in individuality right now! Here are five recent ones I've really enjoyed, spanning Snowball Earth, volvocine algae, plasmids that fuse into a new individual, the relatives of animals, and... water kefir
Michael Levin retweeted
🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at @BBSJournal have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" completely #OpenAccess for a limited period. This include the target article, all 50 commentaries (many of which disagree with me), and my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': DOI.org/10.1017/S0140525X250…
For easier ways into the debate, try my @NoemaMag essay on "The Mythology of Conscious AI" (winner of the 2025 @berggruenInst Essay Prize), and this 2026 main-stage @TEDTalks:
noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…
ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_…
Michael Levin retweeted
Hey all! I interviewed Dr. Chris Fields yesterday!
Chris joins me for a second time on the podcast (first was June 2024) to discuss his soon-to-be published paper concerning the use of the Free Energy Principle as a top-down approach to physics, overturning traditional reductivism in his pursuit of a unifying, scale-agnostic description of reality - that can apply to all "classes" of phenomena - billiard balls, minds and ecosystems.
Yours,
Matt
youtube.com/watch?v=32HKg-qH…
#physics #biology #philosophy #metaphysics #science
Michael Levin retweeted
Out today in @nature.com: our review on how single cells evolve into multicellular organisms, with Ozan Bozdag, @kai_tong_mc25, Peter Yunker, and Matt Herron.
rdcu.be/9ZuiKow9twKa
For an overview, check out the video below.
Michael Levin retweeted
GuestStream #131.1 ~ 10/2/2026 at 14 UTC
Federico Pigozzi, Mike Levin @drmichaellevin
Causal Architecture Dynamics Prior to Arrival of Self-replicators in a Model of Catalytic Networks Relevant to Origin-of-Life
youtube.com/live/onxrJkX5xrY
Michael Levin retweeted
The intuitive way to align AI agents is to make them "want" the right things.
In a new piece, @BenjaminLy61243 argues this is insufficient. A soccer player may want to win the game, but actions that contribute to that goal come from subgoals, such as "defending the left side".
Building on the work of @drmichaellevin, an "alignment compiler" is a system that translates high-order goals into behavior for individual parts. Markets, organisms and soccer teams are all examples of this.
Reasoning about collectives of AI agents through this lens points to new solutions to multi-agent alignment failures.
Michael Levin retweeted
Funders, journals and universities must reward the creation of new scientific terrain, not just the efficient mining of old ground. 👏
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Michael Levin retweeted
Biochemist Timothy Jackson argues that contrary to our assumptions that reality is governed by fixed laws, fundamental reality is in fact a lawless flux, a chaos of unpredictable change. | bit.ly/4d3rAZ9
The “laws” of physics are not eternal truths but descriptions of patterns that have persisted long enough to look permanent.
Here it is - the official, revised, peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. mdpi.com/2409-9287/11/5/161 Of all the many unpopular positions I’ve taken over the decades - bitter controversies around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc., this one has by far generated the most pushback: serious (grateful for those!) and energetic attempts to move me to other views, pleas to just drop it and not talk about it (for several different reasons), nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say... Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel! Time will tell if this pans out or not; I've placed my bets. And btw, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait… There’s much more on the way. The knob turns slowly but as long as the data keep coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up!
I'm so sad that @danieldennett isn't around for this. He would have really, really disliked the dualist conclusion - I can just see him shaking his head with that "oh no, no...". But I know he'd have read it carefully, steel-manned the viewpoint, and then critiqued all the right spots. Would have been delightful to argue to him about this. I wanted to polish it before showing it to him, but it wasn't in time. Funny enough, and he'd not have remembered this I'm sure, but it's an echo of 1991, when I was an undergrad in his philosophy of mind course and did my final paper on pretty much this topic (mostly focused on the ingressing minds idea and math, we didn't have the biology or computational results then of course). He hated the conclusion (as I knew he would) but was an absolute gentleman in giving it a fair shake and engaging with the arguments, especially the few he couldn't shoot down.
Michael Levin retweeted
New preprint: "On Growth and Form, and Function" with @miltonllera, @MarcelloBarylli, @risi1979, @drmichaellevin
Inspired by D'Arcy Thompson's grid transformations, we find that "reusable regulatory handles control phenotypic variation" in NCAs. 🧵
arxiv.org/abs/2609.29755
New #preprint - @HananelHazan
"Computational Framework for Identifying Ion Channel Mutation-Compensating Interventions"
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
How to fix hardware problems (an ion channel mutation), in software (without fixing the mutation)? We took a computational approach to this question in neural tissues - a system that helps discover what other channels could be opened/closed via pharmacological agents (electroceutical drugs) to compensate for the mutation's effects on neural firing patterns.
Abstract: "We present an automated pipeline for finding therapeutic interventions in channelopathies. It starts from patch clamp recordings of the variant channel, searches over the pharmacologically accessible conductances, and says which currents must change and by how much. The intervention never touches the mutated channel: it compensates by modulating others. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated through two computational strategies, each addressing a specific capability gap. First, we employ high-fidelity NEURON simulations combined with exploratory search algorithms to model two clinically described variants, and identify "stability windows" in which channel modulations restore the reference firing pattern. The compensating configurations are degenerate: 37 conductance triples fire the same number of action potentials at every one of the 35 injected-current levels, and the 10,780 triples reaching the best intervention value produce only six distinct firing patterns. Second, to address the computational cost of such detailed modeling, we implement a differentiable Hodgkin-Huxley model in PyTorch. Applied here to theoretical mutation screening, this approach trades granular detail for speed, treating the search as a continuous optimization problem that makes very large, non-local searches of the conductance parameter space affordable: the differentiable forward model evaluates 34,000-64,000 candidate parameter sets per second on a single consumer graphics card, against 11.9-16.9 per second for the non-differentiable pipeline on a 72-core node. The gain arises from forward-model throughput feeding a search rather than from the gradient itself, and it is what makes the 32,000,000-point survey of the solution topology reported here affordable. These computational predictions can inform practical drug development and high-throughput screening by naming the currents that must change and by how much."
Michael Levin retweeted
Meet The Scientist Redefining Intelligence With Michael Levin
"There's a FALSE assumption that Intelligence and cognition is rare in the tree of life and late in the evolutionary story. This is very wrong".
"Many of the characteristics, morphology, behaviour, phenotypes of organisms are not determined by their genes."
"Learning only needs a dynamical system made out of interactions that give way under stress. No genes necessary"
The remarkable @RichardWatson90, a coauthor on many papers with @drmichaellevin is live now! ⬇️
Lots of interesting stuff here!
1/3 Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A veeery loooong time in the making, but I'm happy to say that the full collection is now out in @BBSJournal 🔥 I deeply thank all commentators - of fifty commentaries! - for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic. I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽
I remain highly skeptical about the prospects for conscious AI (for silicon digital systems), but I've learned an enormous amount from the privilege of engaging with these commentaries. Hands down one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life.
My hope is that - whether you agree with me or not - having such a diversity of views collected in one place will serve a useful resource for discussions about consciousness and AI.
The original target article is available here: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
And the set of 50 commentaries are collected here: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Unfortunately these are not open access. I will try to remedy that, at least for the target & response.
FWIW there's a more accessible version of my view on the topic here in @NoemaMag noemamag.com/the-mythology-o… and also a short @TEDTalks from earlier this year ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_…
oh and if anyone wants to see the main steps leading up to this paper, a (needs to be updated) map is here:
drmichaellevin.org/research/…
Michael Levin retweeted
Can self-interested, self-improving, self-replicating agents learn to cooperate?
Our new paper, Tapes Together Strong, shows they can: when social behavior, computation, and reproduction share one energy budget, cooperation evolves from scratch.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817 🧵
