Forms of life, forms of mind

Dr. Michael Levin

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Starter Pack: introductory materials to my lab’s academic work

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Mike Levin

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People sometimes ask for a kind of introductory starter pack of information to get into the things that my lab and I work on. Here are some ways to begin to get acquainted with the research. Black is reading material, green are videos.


First, more generally-accessible material:

Levin, M., and Dennett, D. C. (2020), How to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas, Aeon Essays

Levin, M., and Yuste, R. (2022), Modular cognition, Aeon Essays

Finkelstein J., McLaughlin K., and Levin M. (2019), Interdisciplinary Approach Needed to Crack Morphogenesis, The Scientist, December 2019

Levin, M. (2020), How Groups of Cells Cooperate to Build Organs and Organisms, The Scientist, 34(9): 38-45

TED Talk: Michael Levin: The electrical blueprints that orchestrate life

For the more detailed academic work, I broke it up into a few categories depending on what your main interest is:

(1) Diverse intelligence, philosophy of mind, unconventional cognition, artificial life, robotics

Levin, M. (2019), The Computational Boundary of a ‘Self’: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition, Frontiers in Psychology, 10: 2688

Levin, M. (2022), Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 16: 768201

Baluška, F., and Levin, M. (2016), On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems, Frontiers in Psychology, 7: 902

The collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis as a model for cognition beyond the brain (1 hour 7 minutes) (Mind, Technology, and Society (MTS) talk series, University of California Merced | Jan. 23, 2023)

(2) Biomedicine, bioelectricity, regeneration, cancer

Lagasse, E., and Levin, M. (2023), Future Medicine: from molecular pathways to the collective intelligence of the body, Trends in Molecular Medicine, 29(9): 687-710

Levin, M. (2021), Bioelectric Signaling: Reprogrammable Circuits Underlying Embryogenesis, Regeneration, and Cancer, Cell, 184(8): 1971-1989

Levin, M. (2023), Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind, Animal Cognition, doi:10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3

Levin, M. (2021), Bioelectrical approaches to cancer as a problem of the scaling of the cellular self, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 165: 102-113

Bioelectric Networks as the Interface to Somatic Intelligence for Regenerative Medicine (1 hour 1 minute) (Lowell General Hospital, Presenting Grand Rounds, Lowell, MA | September 27, 2023)

(3) Evolution, developmental biology, biophysics, synthetic biology

Levin, M. (2023), Darwin’s agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 80: 142

Bongard, J., and Levin, M. (2023), There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-Scale Machines, Biomimetics, 8(1): 110

Davies, J., and Levin, M. (2023), Synthetic morphology with agential materials, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, 1(1): 46-59

Engineering with agential materials: from evolution to biological robotics (1 hour) (Engineering Life Initiative Seminar, Munich, Germany | Feb. 16, 2023)


More in-depth:

After that introductory material, you can see the entire thing here (dive in and don’t forget the links on the left side of each page, they lead to additional content).

Overview of the research; all peer-reviewed work: chronologically, but here it is by topic – start with whatever area interests you.

Talks I’ve given, and discussions with others and interviews, including a bunch of working meetings with really great people.

Then, check out some of my close collaborators: Richard Watson, Josh Bongard, Karl Friston, Mark Solms, Giovanni Pezzulo, David Kaplan, Alexis Pietak, and many others: (this is a frequency map of my co-authors over the last 10 years)

And coming soon, an ~8 episode set of 1-hour lectures going in depth on all the topics I normally fly through in the above talks.


Credits: featured image made for me by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative.

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5 responses to “Starter Pack: introductory materials to my lab’s academic work”

  1. Nick Ketter Avatar
    Nick Ketter

    Thank you for this!

    I’ve been following your work off-and-on for the last couple of years and while I’ve been able to make sense of some of it, other parts have left me thinking I was missing important context. I’m looking forward to diving into these articles. I’m especially enthusiastic about the series of 1-hour episodes!

    Thanks again!

    Reply
  2. Gary DeJong Avatar
    Gary DeJong

    Thank you for your generosity. Your thought should be ubiquitous! –As all cognition is…

    Reply
  3. Tiffany J Isbell Avatar
    Tiffany J Isbell

    Thank you for this. This is very much appreciated.

    Reply
  4. Pamela Lyon Avatar
    Pamela Lyon

    Wow! Thanks for the starter pack! Will eagerly await the Book-form roadmap.

    A note about my (rewatching over breakfast) experience with TED talk: ‘Imperialistic’ MailChimp ad would return video to beginning again every time it ran. Rescrolling was necessary multiple times. Got there in the end, but highly disjointed. Don’t remember this happening with initial viewing many moons ago. Is it just me? (Rhetorical, not demanding reply.)

    Reply
  5. Lio Hong Avatar
    Lio Hong

    Thank you for the guide, it’s a great launching point. Been listening through all the chats you’ve had with others so it’s good to see your overview of your own work so far.

    Reply

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