"Nothing in biology makes sense without teleology" by Michael Levin

Michael Levin is a developmental biologist who builds living creatures that have never existed before, and Earl Miller is a neuroscientist who has spent thirty years arguing that your thoughts live in the brain's electric fields, not its wiring. In the same room together for the first time, they agree on something that sounds insane — that bioelectricity is the engine of mind at every scale of life, from a single cell deciding to grow an eye to a human deciding what to eat for lunch.

Expect to learn how cells use a bioelectric code you can read and rewrite to grow an eye on a tadpole's tail, why no single cell knows what an eye is but the collective does, how a flatworm regrows a whole new brain and keeps its old memories, why the brain is an orchestra of electric waves and not a telegraph of wires, how three different anaesthetics switch off consciousness through one mechanism reductionism can't explain, why consciousness may just be the story your brain tells about what it already did, whether memories can be transplanted between bodies, what the Platonic space of minds is and why Levin thinks physicalism died with Pythagoras, and much more…

This is a talk I gave, ~49 minutes long, titled "Free Lunches: Model Systems for Studying the Agential Gifts from the Platonic Space", to a philosophy audience. It covers some more ways I think about the latent space of patterns that in-forms biology and cognitive science.

What if intelligence doesn’t require a brain? Biologist Michael Levin argues that intelligence is not confined to neurons, but exists on a continuum of goal-directed behavior and problem-solving across a wide range of species and systems. Using a framework he calls the “cognitive light cone,” Levin explores diverse forms of intelligence extending all the way down to the cellular level. His research suggests that cells communicate through electrical networks, enabling them to make collective decisions and adapt to unexpected challenges, evidenced by engineered tadpoles capable of seeing through eyes located on their tails. Levin radically challenges the conventional wisdom even further, proposing that forms of intelligence may extend beyond biology to molecular systems and maybe even the weather.

=-=-=

What if memory isn't storage at all — but a message from your past self that has to be interpreted?

In this episode, biologist Michael Levin and cognitive neuroscientist Katrina Schleisman join me to take apart one of the most quietly broken ideas in science and AI: that memory works like a hard drive. It doesn't. And once you see why, a lot of assumptions about minds, machines, and what it means to "remember" start to fall apart.

We dive into:

– Why engineers build memory for fidelity and error correction, while biology runs on an unreliable medium that improvises, interprets, and even confabulates — and why that "flaw" is actually the source of biological robustness and creativity

– The difference between episodic memory (specific experiences) and semantic memory (general knowledge), and how mistaking biological memory for computational storage has confused the field for decades

– Levin's case that everything is a collective intelligence — you're a society of cells with emergent goals — and his concept of "polycomputing," where multiple observers can read the same physical events differently and none is uniquely "correct"

– The hard question of where goals actually come from: today's AI doesn't care whether it gets shut off, so is real agency possible in silicon? Katrina is skeptical; Michael argues even a bubble-sort algorithm shows more "behavior" than we give it credit for

– What this means for the next generation of AI: continual learning over static pre-trained models, episodic memory for agents, and the idea that the world can serve as its own model

If you care about AI agents, neuroscience, consciousness, or the future of intelligent systems, this one rewires how you think about the line between biology and computation.