Episodes

  • Against Mind-blindness: Recognizing and Communicating with Agential Materials and Beyond - Michael Levin

    Against Mind-blindness: Recognizing and Communicating with Agential Materials and Beyond - Michael Levin
    Jul 22 2025
    This is a ~1 hour 7 minute talk I gave at the SEMF Interdisciplinary School (July 2025, https://semf.org.es/school2025/#speakers-container) on agency ways to think about expanding our ability to detect and communicate with unconventional minds. The same talk but with a lengthy Q&A will be up on the SEMF website.

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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Beyond Complexity & Emergence: Taming Multiscale Competency in Agential Materials

    Beyond Complexity & Emergence: Taming Multiscale Competency in Agential Materials
    Jul 19 2025
    This is a ~54 minute talk given at a workshop on complexity. Many of the examples are the same ones I often talk about but this talk is focused on explaining how biology deals with complexity, and ways to think about complex patterns of form and behavior beyond the conventional approach of emergence.

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    54 mins
  • Engineering Agential Materials

    Engineering Agential Materials
    Jul 11 2025
    This is a ~18 min talk plus ~10 min Q&A on a top-down approach to bioengineering and robotics that I gave at the Biohybrid Robotics Symposium in Switzerland in July 2025 (https://biohybrid-robotics.com/).

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    27 mins
  • Discussion with Michael Johnson

    Discussion with Michael Johnson
    Jul 9 2025
    This is a ~55 minute conversation with Michael Johnson (https://t.co/YxAOZif0V2) covering topics of spectrum of consciousness down to the cell (and below) level, implicit memory and cellular pixels of experience, Platonic space, symmetry breaking, and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in systems.

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    55 mins
  • Unconventional Selves - a Diverse Intelligence Perspective on Consciousness by Michael Levin

    Unconventional Selves - a Diverse Intelligence Perspective on Consciousness by Michael Levin
    Jul 7 2025
    "Unconventional selves in novel spaces, scales, and embodiments - a diverse intelligence perspective on a continuum of cognition and consciousness" is a ~1 hour 12 min talk I gave at a conference on consciousness (https://www.hardproblem.it/), as it relates to our work on diverse intelligence and unconventional cognition.

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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Nothing in Biology Makes Sense without Teleology

    Nothing in Biology Makes Sense without Teleology
    Jul 5 2025
    This is a deliberately provocative talk (~1 hour 20 minutes) I gave on teleology (a pretty taboo subject in a lot of the life sciences) delivered at Caltech. I try to go step by step and show the philosophical background of how I think about goal-directedness in physically embodied agents (cells and tissues etc.) and then the data - classic examples and new discoveries that this framework allowed us to make. Editing by https://x.com/DNAMediaEditing

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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Discussion with Murray Shanahan

    Discussion with Murray Shanahan
    Jun 28 2025
    This is a ~25 minute discussion with Murray Shanahan (https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~mpsha/) on topics following up on his talk in our Center (https://youtu.be/ZlKc3ebLgEI?si=Tmq5gOwVDi4t-pip).

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    25 mins
  • Discussion between Adam Safron, Max Shen, and Michael Levin

    Discussion between Adam Safron, Max Shen, and Michael Levin
    Jun 26 2025
    This is a ~1 hour discussion with Adam Safron (https://www.adamsafron.com/) and Max Shen (https://www.maxkshen.com/home), and Michael Levinabout diverse intelligence and its relevance for pain.

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    59 mins