#1033 Michael Levin: Self, Collective Intelligence, Cognition, Life after Death, & More

Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Decenter. I'm your host, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Michael Levin. He is a distinguished professor in the biology department and Vannevar Busch chair as well as director of the Tuft Center for Generative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University. And today we're going to talk about topics like living systems, the self, morphology, collective intelligence, sentience.

regenerative medicine and more so Dr. Levin welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you one. Yeah thanks for having me yeah nice to meet you so let me first ask you what is a living system well uh to be honest and and this may be strange for a biologist to say uh I don't spend much time thinking about the definition of life actually um I'm much more interested in a spectrum of cognition, which I think is actually is a broader category than uh than the set of living things. But if we wanted to define it, I think what we would focus on are uh those cognitive systems that, first of all, self-assemble, and in particular, they self-assemble under metabolic constraints of scarcity of time and energy and things like that.

uh which demands uh coarse graining and uh agential models of the outside world and itself and so on. We would talk about uh systems that need to uh interpret their own memories where their own uh the the engrams or the uh the traces of past experience uh at any one moment need to be need to be interpreted to decide what what to do next. I think we would focus on the ability of life to um scale up the agency of its components and project them into new problem spaces. may basically enlarge their their cognitive life cognitive light cone. I think that life is fundamentally a kind of uh vulnerable system that is fundamentally oriented forward in time in terms of decision making and uh doing the best it can under the circumstances that it have.

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