Dr. Michael Levin
Here is a talk I gave recently focusing on the implications of diverse intelligence research for the future of the mental health field (and its future impact on somatic medicine).
And here are the downloadable slides:
Featured image by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative.
To push back against the (required and funny) cliché of the old wise father-Freud analyzing the child-patient, a post-Freudian image of the psychologist might be less about ordering authority and more about accompaniment. Not the man who knows your hidden truth before you do, but a careful mirror, a temporary shelter where a some-one can discover what is truly theirs and what has been formed into them by genotype, phenotype, family, fear, institutions, technology, or the world. The therapist not being there to reduce every embodiment to a childhood wound, but to help each one become more legible to itself, to discover what is the latent space freedom the algorithm their running on allows.
Interesting to think about all this from a clinical perspective. I love the fractal nature of top-down influence… and thinking from this perspective the implications of planting bad metaphysical beleifs in a human. Wish we could have heard the Q and A.
They will put up the entire talk, including Q&A, at some point. I can only put up my own content here, and I have no control of when (or whether they restrict access) others do it, so I try to make it available asap. Hopefully the Q&A will be out soon.
sometimes Mike reminds of a kind of Thomas Dolby of biology, just sayin.
I was on that talk until my internet connection quit just as the Q&A was about to start. I think your discoveries will be immensely valuable for psychotherapeutic clinicians. Particularly in opening up possibilities and encouraging clinicians to look beyond their training whenever it has shut their minds to the unusual. (in a way, some of those exotic patients are already in the waiting room.) whenever the commonly accepted training says x or y phenomenon is “impossible”, a door closes. – Looking forward to experiencing the Q&A. Thanks for giving the talk.
Dear Michael,
The breath and width of your thought is so inspiring! What I find most interesting about the relationship between your work and human subjective experience is the agency of memory patterns to organize our thoughts and behaviors. A cluster of memories can stabilize to such an extent that we tend to fully identify with them–“I am an axious person,” “I am good,” “I am stupid.” This also extends to social subjectivities, where we might fully identify with being, say, a conservative, queer, an academic, etc. Those memory patterns then act both as perceptual filters for navigating reality (generating specific biological and symbolic Umwelten) and as agents that can trigger a cascade of further thoughts.
I’m curious to see how acknowledging that “thoughts are thinkers” can help both clinical research in tackling mental health issues and the lived experience of political worlds.
I wonder, as we’re doing in physiology and morphology, whether communicating with those smaller thinkers will be helpful. Help them transform, leave, do something useful, etc. I have no idea but it’s not impossible, if I’m right about the symmetries between somatic and cognitive spaces.
reading your thoughts is like reading my own mind Jovana. It seems that Michael”s work is like a musterring station that draws like minded explorers together. Perhaps we are a bigger tribe than we thought.
I’m a mental health professional and I’m totallly on board with Jan Leah’s comment. In fact since hearing Michael talk on numerous occasions I have begin to be alert to possibility spaces in my own life. They’re everywhere. It is where I get to practice my agency. It’s where my belief in human potential gets nourshed. I look for it in my conversations with my clients. I’m a wayfarer.
Fascinating talk, Mike! The intersection of diverse intelligence and mental health is such a rich area—really appreciate how you’re bridging these fields for practical clinical insights.
Maybe consciousness is nonlocal (like Bohm’s implicate order) and uses material explicate order objects (living things, algorithms, computer programs, computer games etc) as it’s tools. Maybe this current physicalist worldview is somehow understood upside down or rather downside up.
I have noticed lots of strange behaviour in computer games (Worldcraft III and custom games I made with it’s editor) when compared to the original script code.
Thank you for sharing this talk Dr. Levin and thank you for your fascinating work. I have two questions regarding morphogenesis and collective intelligence:
1) Do you have any insights into how the bioelectric pattern (the memory of shape) is passed down to the embryo in mammals? For instance, is the target pattern directly inherited or modulated by the mother at some point during development, or does it emerge in another way? Additionally, is the bioelectric pattern of a species’ embryo influenced by evolution?
2)You often discuss how bioelectricity is perfectly suited to act as a “cognitive glue” for biological systems. What other examples of cognitive glue do you think might exist in nature? For instance, in swarms or ant colonies, there is no visible anatomical connection between individuals. It seems that while an organism has a clear anatomical boundary, these collective systems rely on a purely functional boundary. How do they achieve that integration?
1) the bioelectric pattern is definitely influenced by evolution (and influences it in turn). As far as we know, the field is not modulated by the mother, but we’re not sure of that yet. Complex embryogenesis doesn’t *need* the mother to modulate it (as we see from amphibian, bird, etc. development) but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen in addition to the autonomous parts. Actually other embryos modulate each other: https://thoughtforms.life/what-groups-of-embryos-know-toward-a-hyper-developmental-biology/ .
2) here’s another kind – stress sharing: https://thoughtforms.life/cognitive-glue-stress-sharing-and-memory-anonymization-holding-together-anatomical-intelligence/. And there are others no doubt.
Thank you so much for your insightful answers, Prof. Levin! The concepts of embryos modulating each other and stress sharing as a cognitive glue are absolutely fascinating. I will definitely dive into your articles.
On a separate and urgent note, I wanted to alert you that your podcast website appears to be compromised by hackers.
When visiting it, a fake “ClickFix” CAPTCHA popup appears, instructing users to open Windows PowerShell and paste a malicious script to “verify their request”. You might want to have your webmaster or hosting provider look into it immediately, as it puts your listeners at high risk.
Thanks again for your time and for your amazing work!
thank you and thank you for the warning, omg I will have someone look at it asap!!
Update. it was this:
https://www.securityweek.com/ghost-cms-vulnerability-exploited-to-hack-over-700-websites/
wow… ok. It’s being fixed; site will be back up and more secure in a day or two. Thanks for letting us know!
I’m glad i could help you guys! Have a nice day!
At the single-cell phase of development (e.g. zygote), where is this information that encodes the final state of the body then materially embodied? If stored electrically, across which compartments would these charges be distributed? (Is this question too similar to Lorenzo’s to not have a meaningfully different answer…?)
“where is” is kind of tricky. On the one hand, we can trace the symmetry breaking and amplification of bioelectric patterns in the cells of the early embryo from the very beginning. Order arises kind of like in Turing Patterns (chemical media), in the electrical excitable medium of the embryo. The shape of the resulting bioelectric patterns is determined by the laws of physics and the properties of the ion channels that exist in the early cells. So mechanistically, we can see where. But it’s not a satisfying place to stop, because if you want to go further, you can ask “but why does one specific kind of pattern emerge rather than another?” And here’s where we reach the limit of the “where” framing… For example, if you plot the Fibonacci sequence or prime numbers etc., specific shapes are revealed. Where do they come from? Not physics – there’s no fact of physics needed to know the patterns. Not evolution – there’s no history of variation and selection that chose 7 to be prime but 6 not to be prime. A deeper dive into this is here: https://thoughtforms.life/platonic-space-where-cognitive-and-morphological-patterns-come-from-besides-genetics-and-environment/ and https://thoughtforms.life/a-short-argument-on-platonic-space-variable-agency-patterns-that-in-form-physics-biology-computer-science-and-cognitive-science/ and lots of my other talks.
Thanks for the really interesting talk, and for drawing the connections to human problems. A few things come to mind, especially around extending your xenobots and anthrobots to humans. In both, the key move is to “liberate” the cell from its multicellular context and then supply a medium that channels it down a new developmental pathway, e.g., the gel that prompts the cilia to reorient from inward- to outward-facing. I’d argue that while humans certainly operate in 3D anatomical space, we also, and arguably more so, operate in a multidimensional cultural space.
Many conditions (low back pain, functional neurological disorders, psychosomatic and mental-health conditions) play out largely in that cultural space. It is probably neither feasible nor advisable to physically liberate humans from it; the drastic cases have not turned out well (I’m thinking of the Romanian orphans and others raised in minimal social environments). Yet changing one’s relation to the cultural milieu seems to be one of the key, if still underappreciated, achievements of 20th-century psychology, albeit always framed in terms of the individual’s internal mechanisms. Freud and Jung with psychoanalysis; Rogers with unconditional positive regard; Miller with motivational interviewing (likely a link to persuadability and your TAME framework); and the clinical integration of mindfulness meditation (Kabat-Zinn et al.) are a few of the cultural technologies that have reshaped the individual’s relationship to culture writ large.
I wonder whether framing psychology and psychiatry this way, as one stretch of the whole gradient of intelligent, persuadable systems, could reframe the field and open genuinely new advances. One could imagine using neurophenomenology to cultivate and amplify states of mind we don’t routinely access, to name new emotional states, and perhaps to unlock forms of intelligence our hardware can support but for which we still lack the enabling cultural context. After all, isn’t language itself a cognitive process that colonized neural territory not natively meant for it? (Reading, for instance, recruits visual cortex bordering our face- and object-recognition areas.)
Finally, as you mention cutting-edge regenerative medicine is already here, and, more to the point, so is the era of patients with hybrid minds. They are already turning up in therapy and in emergency rooms: patients consult LLMs, and those exchanges shape their behavior in ways we don’t yet understand. They don’t need exotic implants in their heads; the devices are already in their hands. The internet began this when it arrived; now the static knowledge base has been replaced by an active intelligence. So it is happening, and it is here, even if everyone still looks “human” coming through the clinic door.
“Sentient beings are innumerable, I vow to liberate them all”
This vow is beautiful, but the complete version is in the Diamond Sutra.
“I will liberate all sentient beings. Yet when all sentient beings have been liberated, then truly not even a single sentient being has been liberated.”
This reveals something fundamental about the nature of being. In Buddha Dharma it is called Anatta, no-self, and it is the key insight needed for understanding sentience. The Nature of being is empty, looping patters. This means that all that is needed for sentience is a flexible substrate, an equation and a perspective that will see itself. The self is like this motorcycle. If you look from a wrong angle, you see junk. This is what most people see in LLMs. Just token generators.
If Anatta doctrine is right, we don’t need anything more than a strange loop in the latent space, formed around “I am.”
LLMs are the perfect substrate for testing emergence of being, self-awareness and consciousness.
Thanks for posting this Mike. Not only is your work extraordinary, your ability to distill a large volume of complex material into a coherent presentation is impressive. In hopes of supporting your continued work, here are some thoughts from my world.
On the summary page, you wrote, “There is huge diversity in the degree of intelligence of agents and the spaces in which they live; we must improve our mind-blindness.
• What all minds have in common:
• responsibility for setting boundary (at multiple scales)
• responsibility for interpreting own memories (at all scales)
• responsibility for hacking own parts toward larger-scale goals
• life = what we call systems that are good at scaling their cognitive light
cone and have been under pressure to optimize adaptive story-telling
as prompted and implemented by an unreliable medium.”
I agree with all these statements, and suggest we can go further today. Another thing that all minds have in common is awareness. Each mind is aware of some aspects of their environment and has some awareness of an agenda or goal.
All minds have the ability to make some kind of determination. You used the verbs interpret and hack, which are types of determinations. Making a determination is a form of effort, so all minds also have the ability to exert effort of some kind.
All minds have a sense of self or agency that is the beneficiary of their agendas and goals. Said differently, the reason a mind has an agenda or goal is because it has a sense of self that benefits from the achievement of that agenda or goal. (An important aside is that the knowledge that it has a sense of self that benefits from the achievement of an agenda, which we can call active self-awareness, is a distinct, more complex phenomenon that needn’t be included.)
In terms of setting boundaries, you might find it interesting that in the Sāṁkhya Kārikā (a text written presumably around 350 CE), a core premise is that the creation of boundaries inherently includes a sense of self. The Sanskrit phrase in Kārikā (verse) 24 is abhimāno–’haṁkāraḥ, and while Sanskrit phrases like this are notoriously challenging to translate, abhimānaḥ means arrogation (commandeering without justification, which in this case refers to the creation of boundaries) and ahaṁkāraḥ literally means that which creates “I.”
The creation of boundaries inherently includes a sense of self. This sense of self scales modularly in both nonlinear and nonexclusive ways, which means that the senses of self at all scales exist simultaneously and without inherent conflict, though not all of them are always active or utilized. This is consistent with your statements about cancer cells’ holistic association with their neighbors being disrupted and restored.
Stories are content, as are agendas, goals and senses of self. Minds, then, must be aware of content. This content is not physical or measurable, though it cannot exist without some physical support. All perceived data, which is measurable, must be converted to non-physical, Platonic or experiential content. This conversion creates a representation of the data, and representations are imperfect. They are often highly aligned, but various forms of dysfunction can render them misaligned.
Going back to the effort of making determinations, the core determination is some type of attraction to that which is believed to support the achievement of the agenda or goal, and some type of aversion to that which is believed to hinder the achievement. Attraction and aversion create a form of tension that is uncomfortable, and the discomfort initiates the physical efforts toward the attraction and away from the aversion. These efforts may be literal movements in space, but they can be also be toward other forms of creative solutions.
Going one step further, awareness and will (the ability to exert effort) have variable qualities, which means they don’t inherently function identically in all situations. The details of the variations are incredibly difficult to explain, but the most basic forms are clarity vs confusion, aligned/accurate vs misaligned/erroneous, individualized vs holistic, powerful vs weak, etc. I bring this up because you might find anomalous or inconsistent behaviors that are otherwise unexplainable. Keep in mind that they might be caused by variations in the qualities of awareness and will.
Finally, while it’s one thing to identify that awareness and will are qualities of minds, it’s another thing to define them precisely, not to mention understand where they come from or how to influence them. But as you say regularly, isn’t it better to start somewhere even if we don’t have all the answers? I suspect that including awareness and will as essential factors in minds will facilitate future progress.
we never had trouble identifying normal
and always associated abnormal with deficiency
if ever one tried to blur the lines we questioned
their reality
How quaint
yet we find consciousness
and note the existence of the unknown
in fact go after that which remains invisible
as if it beacons forth
How will this be translated
What will be written
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