← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Tufts Biologist: AI Breakthroughs In Cancer & Limb Regeneration — And What They Reveal About Alien Intelligence & Human Biology | Dr. Michael Levin
00:51:40
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My Nbialix breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.
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a vacation rental shouldn't come with surprises. It should come with verbo Care and 24. 7 Life Support. If the hot tub's broken, that's a verbo care thing.
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If my teenager starts calling me Leslie,
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that's a family thing.
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Leslie Verbo Care and 24. 7 Live Support. If you know you Verbo terms apply. See verbo.comtrust for details on your phone. Forget hey Siri, it's going to be hey liver. Why do I feel like crap today? And the answer might be I've talked to your fridge and I know what you've been eating. I'm stressed out. That's the future here.
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It isn't far off within our lifetime.
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Yes, I think so.
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That's nuts.
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Cancer. It's a dissociative identity disorder of the body instead of the mind. You don't have to kill the cells. You don't have to use toxic chemotherapy. In many cases you can't simply force the cell to reconnect electrically. After being able to handle bird defects, traumatic injury, cancer, degenerative disease, after that it's like of organs.
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Would you like does this mean that we are on the path to understanding how humans can regrow fingers, limbs, organs?
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The answer is yes. Future children are going to read about us and they're going to say, wait A minute. You're telling me that those people, they were born in just whatever kind of body they happen to have been in, with all its limitations, susceptibilities, birth defects, they would have to stay in that body their whole life. No one was on top of making sure that everybody was able to have the embodiment that they wanted. Like, how could we live like this?
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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
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And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
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And welcome to our breakdown. What if you were able to speak an entirely different language that you don't have to learn because it's encoded in your cells?
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Mime.
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What do you mean?
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We're going to be speaking today to a computer scientist and biologist who. Who helps us understand how there are so many different kinds of intelligence right in our own bodies that we already know how to speak to. But it really will involve an expansion of our ability to open up our understanding of ourselves, our conscious experience, and the way we communicate. And this can apply to cancer, this can apply to longevity, and it can even apply to communication with intelligence outside of the world that we're living in.
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This is an episode that merges science and spirituality with very practical implications. For example, looking at how cancer can be removed from the body by changing the bioelectrical signals of the body, can we reverse aging? Can we even regrow limbs? It challenges what we believe is possible through a totally new approach and technology that our guest is developing.
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Dr. Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished professor of Biology at Tufts University and he's the director of the Allen Discovery Center. As we said, his background is in computer science and biology, but his lab studies things as diverse as the concepts of care in Buddhism and how they can apply to our concept of mind and basal cognition. What his lab does grow two headed worms where there used to be one head. He can grow limbs on other parts of animals bodies as a way to understand signaling mechanisms and in particular, electrophysiology.
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Later in the episode, we get into one of the most fascinating looks at what the future of humanity may actually be like as technology that he is developing right now scales and gets rolled out to everyday people.
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And you will not be disappointed at Dr. Levin's understanding of experiences outside of the physical realm, which he's happy to talk to us about. And he's going to explain from an electrophysiological perspective what trauma actually is and how the body literally keeps the score. Dr. Michael Levin, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down.
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Thanks so much. Good to see you.
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We're eager to talk to you about many things and all things that relate to not just ourselves, but who we are and how we can understand who we are based in many cases, from the way our bodies behave.
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You approach and think about reprogramming cancer, growing limbs, defying aging, as well as many other things. How can you start to explain to people how you think about these very significant problems differently than most people do?
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Let's start all the way back. Each of us takes a journey. We start life as an unfertilized oocyte, little blob of chemistry and physics, or at least we think it's well described by chemistry and physics. And then eventually we end up being the subjects of psychology, psychoanalysis, friendship, love, all of these kinds of things. And so one of the things that I'm very interested in is how did we get there? Because a lot of people like binary categories. They like to think that, okay, this is a mechanism and then this is a cognitive being. But actually we traverse all of those disciplines, so to speak, in our journey. And the developmental biology tells you it's a smooth, continuous kind of process. There is no magic lightning flash at which you suddenly become cognitive. And so what I'm very interested in is for us, with our ability to learn and goal directed problem sol and hopes and dreams and all of these things, where do they come from? What's the basis of them? Right. Both, I mean, for me, in terms of information and mechanism. And so then that allows you to do one very powerful thing. It allows you to take the tools of, for example, behavioral science or cognitive and neuroscience and apply them to other things, to cells, to organs, to tissues, and see how well you do. It's a, you know, it's a research program. So that's how we think about this. So, long story short, it turns out that if you apply those tools outside the brain, you get a lot of interesting new discoveries. And then you can, instead of, for example, micromanaging the molecular properties of cancer cells or embryonic cells for regeneration and things like that, it turns out you can communicate with them because they are information processing agents that have memory and problem solving and so on. And that opens up all kinds of biomedical opportunities as well as many others.
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Can you explain to people what it is about the body that works like a kind of system where you can break it down into parts that also are necessary to understand as systems and how something like cancer interferes with our basic understanding of the organism?
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Sure, yeah. I'll give you the overall story and we can drill down into any, any Part of it that you want. Fundamentally, we are all collective intelligences in the sense that we are not some sort of indivisible monad. We are, we are composed of parts, our bod are composed of parts. And you have to ask yourself, how do I know things that my individual neurons don't know? And what is, I mean, I call those policies and mechanisms, I call them a kind of cognitive glue. It's the way that these things come together to form a system that knows more than the parts know. And so of course, as you well know, we have lots of advances on that front in neuroscience. But it turns out that evolution discovered this long ago and the long before we had brains or neurons or anything like that. And that the reason that our brain and body do these amazing tricks in terms of having goals and storing memories and so on is because all of those kind of capacities existed long ago. They started actually around the time of bacterial biofilms. And in fact all the same mechanisms, so ion channels, neurotransmitters, the electrical synapses, all of these things were evolved very long ago. And they served exactly the same function. That is, they form networks that thought about bigger things than the individual parts. And we all used to be single cells once. We were cells in development, we were cells in evolution. So something has to keep those cells together and working towards a higher level goal. Turns out that's bioelectricity or electrophysiology, as the neuroscientists like to say.
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So the notion being, you know, this is something I say a lot. Nature's very redundant. You know, she has a phenomenal set of designs. And to get this conversation that we're having with satellites and signals and tables and this sort of level of, of conscious interaction, what's, what's involved is a complexity factor, but it doesn't necessarily change the, the core. And so our understanding can be on a cellular level. Talk a little bit about cancer and how that interrupts the, the kind of normal process of the organism.
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Yeah, I'll describe cancer as a dissociative identity disorder, but it's a dissociative identity disorder of the body instead of the mind. So what happens during development is a scale up of the cognitive light cone. So the cognitive light cone is defined as the size of the biggest goal that any system can pursue. And so you can imagine little, little, little tiny goals of bacterial cells. In any case, a cell will be trying to manage things like ph, you know, metabolic state things, things like that. So little, little tiny goals, but morphogenesis or the ability to create a body out of cells. The ability of groups of cells to self assemble into a body has large, grandiose goals. And here's what I mean by that. If you have a salamander or an axolotl, it will have a complex limb. And they do this all the time. They bite each other's legs off. If they bite the leg off anywhere along the axis, the cells will spring into action. They regrow the exact same limb, and then they stop. That's the most amazing part of regeneration. They know when to stop. Well, when do they stop? They stop when they have achieved the correct goal in anatomical space. They've restored the same pattern. If you look at the size of the thing that drives them and the thing that once they reach it, they stop, AKA a goal. It's enormous. It's huge. It's more than any single cell. No individual cell knows what a finger is or how many fingers you're supposed to have, but the collective absolutely does. And so what's happened during development is that, and specifically, it's implemented by electrical networks. The scale of the goals that the system can pursue has grown radically, and then it grows yet again when we have brains. And, and so what happens in cancer is that any kind of a system like that, that uses some mechanism to scale its cognitive light cone is going to have a failure mode. The failure mode is for some reason, and that can be stress, it can be a mutation in some cases, it can be many, many other things. Individual cells, or subunits, doesn't have to be cells, but the individual subunits will disconnect from that electrical network. When they disconnect, their cognitive glycone shrinks back down to their ancient, tiny, unicellular self. Right? So that cone is also the border between self and world. And as soon as it shrinks, as far as that individual cell is concerned, the rest of the body is just outside environment. We're back to being a unicellular organism. The rest of the body is just environment. And that means that we do what we used to do in the environment. You go where life is good, you proliferate as much as you can, and you eat whatever you want. This is metastasis. And so cancer is this breakdown of the memory system that allowed them to remember that, hey, I'm not just a single cell. I'm part of this thing that's working on this goal. And that really weird way of thinking about it actually led us to a new kind of therapeutic, because what we've been able to show in model systems first and now going on our way to humans. What it allowed us to show is that when that happens, you don't have to kill the cells. So you don't have to use toxic chemotherapy. You don't have to try to fix if there even is a genetic lesion. You don't have to try to fix it. What you can do in many cases is simply force the cell to reconnect electrically, to reconnect to its neighbors, to acquire the proper bioelectric state. And then it goes on as part of the group to do whatever it is that they were doing.
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I think it's really, you know, it's one of these fractal moments, right, where you get to see how much the micro mimics the macro. I don't mean to be flippant, but you know, a lot of times people will accuse someone of being like a cancer, right? Someone that's invading their space and territory. But it's kind of interest to think about that. We're, we're these complicated organisms and we, we think that we have obviously a lot more resources available, but we're really operating as a conglomerate, you know, of, of these much smaller units that obey very, very simple rules.
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This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews, an open door media brand.
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If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Bittone and Noam Weissman, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new and probably shout in disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackle the tough topics like anti Semitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion with guests like Bret Stephens, Michael Rapoport and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions of that have shaped American life. From food to music and comedy. Thoughtful, joyful and always honest. That's Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam, a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at Unpacked Bio nmx.
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My imbialics breakdown is supported by bioptimizers.
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I don't mean to make you uncomfortable with what I'm about to say next because it fears and segues into the esoteric or mystical. But people, you know, they try to describe the body as an energetic frequency and that if you are somehow disassociated or disconnected, then, you know, parts of yourself will splinter off. You're not achieving the purpose of the soul, they'll say, and that each one of us has come here with a purpose and a reason for being and that all of our bodies are functioning to that end. And so if you go off path, we've spoken to people, for example, who have said, you know, when I felt like my life was really off course, I kept falling back into the hospital. I kept getting sick. Now, that's an oversimplification for what you're talking about, but I'm just trying to see a through line between that. If we fall off of the bioenergetic network, you know, how do we ensure that we're continuing to maintain our, our connection in that way?
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If you have a system, let's say a mechanical clock or something like this, that is at the very far sort of low end of the cognitive spectrum. It's not zero, by the way, but I don't think it is. But let's just, you know, it's at the, it's at the far end. Then those kinds of things are typically only susceptible to physical damage. So organic disease. But as you sort of crawl upwards along that spectrum, you end up in the kinds of systems that have more and more cognitive competency. We can talk about what that really means, but those kinds of systems are susceptible to a whole new kind of disruption. Disruption which is not underlied by any organic disease. There's nothing physically wrong with them. There's nothing physically to rewire. But there are patterns, specifically, either physiological patterns or patterns of thought. And when I say thought, I mean the kinds of memories and preferences and things that even bacteria and things like this can have. I don't mean these are, you know, sort of complex, necessarily human level thoughts, but this notion of the thought that breaks the thinker, right? There really is no input you can give to a regular calculator that will, you know, sort of crash the thing and cause damage. But there absolutely are inputs, meaning sensory inputs that don't, that don't break organisms, but will permeate permanently or at least very sort of strongly change the cognitive aspects. And those of course filter down all the way down to the molecular components of the body. And I should also mention this because a lot of people think that mind body connection is some sort of weird sort of woo. Esoteric thing. But let's be clear, Regular, everyday voluntary motion, where you get up in the morning, you have these incredibly abstract, high level goals, financial goals, social goals, whatever. In order for you to do any of those things, ions have to move across your muscle membrane. So the chemistry has to dance in accordance to ultimately to extremely abstract kinds of things. So all of this is, I mean these kinds of things, patterns of experience, memories, priors, these things that are formed by your cells and tissues. And we now have ways of reading some of those out and affecting them and so on. All of that will matter. So I think, you know, looking forward to a sort of almost like, you might call it almost like a somatic psychiatry, right? The, the study of. It's not, it's not the physical hardware that's gone wrong. It's. There are patterns of information processing that need to Be corrected for health.
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We hear a lot of people in holistic circles and alternative health circles talk about raising your vibration. Right, I need to raise my vibration. And this is something that, that, you know, I have a little more difficulty with, especially because I think of vibration in terms of frequency. And I want to explain the wavelength to everybody. And we've also spoken to many practitioners who bridge these worlds very nicely, and many are trained in biology or in physics and have some sort of explanation for. For what that means. Can you. And I'm going to ask, like, the simplest and silliest way of talking about this. Can we tell when cells are happy? Can we tell when systems are content beyond holding steady where they are? Right. Is there a way for you to look and say, this is a system in resonance? This is a system that one might describe as vibrating, as a higher. At a higher frequency?
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Yeah. Interesting. There are two. Two pieces to this. One which I think we have a reasonable handle on, and one which we're just beginning to look at. The one thing we can say is that. And so going back to the basics, if I say that a group of cells has a goal, for example, the goal might be to create some sort of morphogenetic structure. The standard way of thinking about it that we all learned in our classes is that, look, at that level, nothing knows anything. It's a bunch of chemistry that follows local chemical. Okay, so that's a very particular. But let's be clear, that's not a result, that's an assumption. And the assumption is that those kind of phenomena are going to be amenable to models that are like that, like open loop models where you turn the crank, follow rules, and then emergence happens, and then the complexity takes over. And then, look, I have an axolotl or an elephant or something. Okay, that's one set of models. But another set of models asks the following question. How do we know it's open loop? What if we put a barrier between it and its goals? What happens? And it turns out that actually those kind of open loop models are a terrible fit to the data, because most of the time, if you try to prevent the system from reaching its goal, it will not only keep trying, Right. Telling you that there's a set point that it's trying to reach homeostatically, but it often is incredibly clever in doing it in new ways. So when you prevent it from it without, you know, I could give you all kinds of crazy examples.
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The example is you're not allowed to date him. And you say, I will find A way.
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And you find a way. Right, and, and, and absolutely right. Starting from the fact of, from the bare facts of regulative development where you, you, you divide an embryo in half and you don't get two half bodies, you get monozygotic twins. Example 1. We could go on and on. The point is that you try to deviate these things. They will try to solve the problem as best as they can. And by the way, if they can't, they often find new goals to take on. We could talk about that. And so in all of these cases, then one thing you can do is you can measure. So this is. Now how do we tell if they're happy? First of all, we can measure to what extent are they still attempting to recreate a state they can't get to? Oftentimes we can see it. And we can. Also there's one other thing we can do, which is we can measure stress. So one of the lucky things for us, and there may be other things that we don't know for sure, but the one thing we have been seeing is that evolution has repurposed the kinds of early molecules that were used for molecular stress, meaning your proteins are misfolded, your DNA is damaged, those kinds of things. Evolution has repurposed them for really high level, abstract kinds of stresses, like, like, hey, your eyes in the wrong place, that kind of thing. And so that means that by watching the level of these stress markers, we can kind of tell to what extent does this system settle down into a low. You know, happy is a whole other thing. But to what extent does the system settle down? So that's the part that we have a reasonable hold on. The part that we don't yet have any hold on is that problem solving, which is mainly what we study in terms of intelligence, because it's a nice, nice third person observable thing that everybody can see. That's only part of the story of intelligence. The other part is creative play, which is not to solve any particular problem, but it's some sort of, I don't even know what it is, but exploration and play and things like that. And then you can start to think about really weird things, like, for example, the Maslow hierarchy. So you look at the cells and you say, okay, so metabolically you're fine, so you got that taken care of. Nothing is injured, nothing is damaged. But you still seem to be working on building a limb or an eye. So something is not satisfied. What is that? And how far can we climb? And so this question of, I don't Know about happy per se, but the question of what are you trying to achieve? How far are you from achieving it? How stressed are you about not being there? These are all very tractable, good scientific questions that we can actually address now.
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I think it's interesting to recircle back to cancer and explain what it means to reconnect a cancer cluster or cells to the larger system and what you observed, because I think this kind of breaks people's minds a little bit to think, oh, we don't have to go down chemotherapy potentially one day. If this is, you know, more fully fleshed out. Can you explain to people the research that you've done and the implications?
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This might be a good time for you to sort of talk about bioelectricity or as we call it, electrophysiology, Because I think that that's a good framework also for understanding what are some ways to approach cancer kind of from the inside out or from the bottom up, as it were. So we'll let you. We'll let you cover both of those things in this answer, if you don't mind.
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Sure. And I want to sort of preface it by saying, a, I'm not a medical doctor. B, I'm not telling anybody not to go get their chemo. Okay. If your doctor says that, that's the thing for you. We are not yet treating patients, so this is all sort science, but we're moving in that direction. So the interesting thing about cancer is that I think one way to approach it is to ask the question, why is there ever anything but cancer? In other words, why would individual cells that were amoebas, once they were sort of independent organisms, why would they suddenly get together and spend their time building this incredibly large, complex structure? So when we look at an embryo, what you actually are seeing is millions of cells, and inside of that, you're seeing millions of molecular networks. What is there one of? When you see an embryo, you say there's one embryo. What is there one of? What there's one of is alignment. What's happening here is that this is a system where all of the individual components are aligned towards a particular trip they're going to take. In the space of anatomical possibilities, they're all in agreement that this is how we reduce error from where we are now. We are a blastula. We need to be a gastrula, and then we need to be something el cells, they're taking this trip along in that. In that space. So in order for all the cells to be on the same page about what it is that they're going to build. They have to share a memory. They have to have a mind meld, so to speak. And the way the mind. And one way that evolution has chosen, and there could be. There could be many others, but one way that evolution has chosen to do it is with these things called gap junctions. These gap junctions are basically electrical synapses. And there's something very interesting about. Something very interesting and special about, about them. Imagine two cells sitting here side by side, and they're going to send each other a classic chemical signal. So something happens to cell A, it sends a chemical signal to cell B. Cell B gets it now because it comes from the outside. Cell B can tell. That is not. That didn't happen to me. That's a signal from somebody else. I can ignore it. I can do something about it, whatever, but I know that's not my information. Gap junctions are different. Gap junctions are when you have two cells and there are literally, it's a little proteinaceous. Think of like a submarine hatch, basically. It's like a little thing that docks with the ones on the neighboring cell. And if you do that, small molecules, like very small molecules. So certainly ions and current and things like that, but also calcium and some other stuff can get across from one cell to another. So now think of what happens when you have two cells that are connected with these gap junctions. This cell gets poked by something, right? So there's a little bit of damage image. There's a calcium spike. The calcium spike propagates directly from the inside of one cell into the inside of the other cell, that other cell. If that calcium signal is a sign of the image, that other cell has no way to know that, hey, that didn't happen to me. In other words, that memory of damage is the same here as it is here. And so instead of your thoughts and my thoughts, this is now our thoughts. In other words, we have had this experience because I can no longer, as cell B, I can no longer tell which are my thoughts and which are your thoughts partially. It's not a complet. Not a complete. But. But the, but the point is that you can. And there's lots of other, you know, tricks involved here. But the point is that by making electrical connections, you end up with a collective that has a kind of mind meld of its parts where the thoughts that they all have are, are a larger and B, they integrate bigger, bigger areas of, of space and time. So the cognitive light cone grows. They have more computational capacity and they're all sort of aligned towards the same Goals because, because they all do share the same vision of what the correct state is. Right. It's the shape of a limb or whatever it's going to be. That is the thing that breaks down in cancer. So think about what might happen if. So there's a bunch of cells, they're all connected, they're all working on building some sort of nice organ. Suppose that there, just an example, suppose that there's a bunch of chronic stress. This can also happen from certain kinds of mutations. Oncogenes do this as well. First, first thing they do is shut down the gap junctions. And it works like this. Once, once a certain cell has been experienced consistently, consistently experiencing stress, you know, they still have pathways left over from their unicellular past, their long ancient evolutionary past that says if I'm in a bad environment, I got to get out of here. Right? I'm going to, I'm going to go. And so at some point, so at some point what happens is that electrical connection starts to weaken. But the more it weakens, the more that cell can entertain goal states that are quite different from everybody else. And the more it does that, the more it's able to regulate and close the gap junctions further and so on. So you get this positive feedback loop where it becomes easier and easier for it to have, I'm going to say, thoughts of leaving. What that really means is different set points for the things it's going to try to achieve. And by the time it completely disconnects from the rest of the collection, all it can remember is the tiny goals of a unicellular organism. And so, and so we're back to this, this, this shrinkage of the border between the self and the world, right? The self are the things you try to manage. And. Yeah, and then, and then it can go off and, and do whatever. And so, and so all of this is a breakdown of an amazing electrical, electric, electrically based system that allows the groove group to have an identity above any of its parts.
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I mean it's fascinating to think about it in that way. How do you reconnect it to its parts or to the larger whole, I should say.
- [31:12]
C
Yeah. Okay. So somewhere around between 2000 and 2002, we developed the first technology to read and write the non invasively read and write the bioelectric patterns of the body. So prior to that people used electrophysiology. So you poke things with little electrodes one at a time. We started using voltage sensitive fluorescent dyes. So this is a chemical. You wash your animal organ, whatever. In this Thing and it fluoresces, it emits light depending on the local voltage. So you can look down and at once you can see the voltage map of the whole thing. So that's one thing we developed. The other thing we developed is molecular biology level tools to read revise those patterns. So if you see a pattern that you don't like, I'll explain how that works momentarily, then you can revise it. So what we found is that in a model system and we started with tadpoles, so this started with frog embryos because it's much easier to do this kind of thing. They're transparent and you can see everything that you're doing. What we found is that when we put oncogenes and human, we use human oncogenes, put in these tadpoles, they form two moons tumors. Okay. And if you do a voltage map of the animal, once it has that oncoprotein expressed, what you start to see are locations where the bioelectric state of the cells differ from the rest of the rest of the pattern. So there are specific patterns that say, here's what an eye should look like, here's what a face should look like. These bioelectrical states are pretty literally memories. They encode the pre patterns that then guide gene expression and morphogenesis of all the different organs of the body. And you can see cells departing from that. So that's already a kind of diagnostic modality by this kind of non invasive imaging. And at some point we're all going to have some kind of cream and on your phone there'll be some kind of a thing where you can sort of scan it and you can do that. And also in surgery when the surgeon's trying to figure out how much to remove, he'll be wearing augmented reality goggles or the robot will that actually show the border of where the cells have an aberrant electrical state? Right. So this is all a diagnostic model reality. So the first thing is you need to be able to see it and we can see it before the cells actually become fully transformed. And then the question is, well, if you see what the pattern is supposed to be and you see the cells leaving it, can you force them back into the correct pattern? And one way of doing that. So one of the things we developed is first let's just ask where does the voltage come from in the first place? So you have your cell. On the outside of the cell is a membrane, it's a lipid plasma membrane that covers the CE thing are stuck a bunch of Little proteins called ion channels. And these are little gates that let things like potassium, sodium, chloride, let them in and out of the cell. Okay, so neuroscientists, of course, study these things all day long, but every cell in your body has this, right? So this is not a new innovation for ions for neurons. Every cell in your body does this. So what you can do when you see the aberrant voltage potential is you can do one of two things. You can either use drugs to open and close the channels that are already there, there, or you can introduce new ones. And that's how we started. We started by introducing new ion channels that were dominant that would just grab control of the voltage and set them to whatever you want them, whatever you want to set them to. And that's what we did. We basically, we injected the oncogene and at the same time, we injected an RNA encoding an ion channel that we knew would control the voltage and push it back to where it needs to be. And sure enough, what we saw was that these cells, cells, they didn't die, they didn't disappear. The oncoprotein was not gone. In fact, it's blazingly expressed. It keeps. The cell, keeps making the thing. But the cell, but, but, but the genetics is not what drives. It's the physiology that drives. And so the cell would simply continue being part of that electrical network working on making nice skin, nice muscle, whatever, whatever it was making. So that's the, that's the basic, the basic strategy.
- [35:12]
A
Obviously, mind my imbalance breakdown is supported by bioptimizers.
- [35:16]
B
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- [36:40]
A
Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again.
- [36:45]
B
So you do, you do work that has really, really enormous consequences and implications in the best way. But also I do want to circle back to this notion of how does what you do help us understand, right, what we're doing here and what we live like. And a lot of people would look at your fields of study and say like oh, he can grow, you know, eighth legs of a creature on their forehead and you know, all the incredible things that you get to explore. But you know, I asked you about can we tell if a cell is happy? Can we tell if a system is happy? And I was asking it somewhat tongue in cheek, but you did, you know, do a very interesting study about some of the concepts of Buddhism and what they might be able to help us understand on a cellular level. And what you talk about is that care, and you call it care with a capital C. The notion of care is a robust, practical and dynamic linchpin that formalizes the concepts of goal, directedness, stress and the scaling of intelligence to. So I'd love for you to explain where your research and your understanding of the framework of let's say the smallest ionic information transfer among cells, how that can apply to what it means, let's say, to be cared for. Which in some traditions, you know, like Buddhism, they do claim, you know, to kind of, you know, put their flag in contentment, mindfulness, you know, all these things. Can you explain where those two worlds can actually meet?
- [38:22]
C
Sure, yeah. Just to, just to take a step back about our work. I mean, one way. Okay, so, so as you said, some, some people look, look at our lab and they say ah, they make applications for birth defects, regeneration, cancer, those kinds of things. This, this is true, but another way to look at it and, and this is the way, the way that I look at it, it is that all of those things are, I mean they're crucially important but on a deep level they are applications that Basically test some of our philosophical approaches to things. In other words, we have some ways to think about what it means to be an embodied mind in the physical world, what it means to make decisions, to have goals, to scale your cognition, how we got here, all these kinds of questions. If you're going to have theories about those things, things, it's not enough to just sort of philosophize. We've been doing that for thousands of years. But if we can make contact with empirical experiment and say we have this medical treatment that didn't exist before, precisely because we have a way of thinking about collective intelligence, about what it means to have a border between a self and its environment and so on, then now you can tell whether you've made any progress. Right? So in some way all of these practical biomedical things and some of the bioengineering that we do are really just an empirical test of some deep ideas. And the deep idea that I would like to bring up here, which I think really is very tightly connected to the question of what we are and what we're doing here and all this kind of thing is a notion of mind blindness. What I mean by mind blindness is the idea that we as humans, because of our own evolutionary patterns past, really are very narrow in our ability to detect other minds. We are okay at noticing medium sized objects moving at medium speeds through the three dimensional world. You know, so if it's a, it's a bird or a mammal or maybe an octopus, we can sort of sometimes wrap our heads around that, doing interesting things in 3D space. Then we say, ah, there's, you know, there's a, there's another cognitive being and, and, and so on. But evolution has been, and I think evolution even broader than even beyond that, has been doing intelligence in all kinds of other weird spaces and at weird scales that are really hard for us to imagine. So our attempts to tame morphogenesis, meaning the, the, the ability of cells to work together to build certain kind of bodies, I view morphogenesis as a semi, as, as the behavior of a semi alien intelligence operating in a weird problem space, an anatomical space. So when we say, you know, people will ask, hey, how does it know how many fingers to make? And then molecular biologists say, bad. That's a bad. It doesn't know anything. No, no, actually it literally does because it uses some of the same mechanisms and algorithms as animals that have memories and pursue goal directed behavior and so on. And if we can't even wrap our heads around the fact that cells and tissues have Goals and store memories and have preferences and things like this. We've recently found that molecular networks, so never mind a cell, even a small mole, like a pathway or a gene regulatory network, can have several different kinds of learning, including Pavlovian conditioning. I mean, it's crazy. Nobody had ever tested them. But this stuff, I say it goes basically all the way down. And the reason it's important is that once we shed some of our basically ancient pre scientific categories that have been weighing us down, okay, and we can talk about what those are, but ways of thinking that neatly define the world into. Well, there's real cognitive things like us know, these, these wet, squishy, brainy things, and then there's everything else and then there's machines and they're stupid and they, you know, they don't really have whatever. Once we drop these binary categories, we then can, can start to develop a principled way to detect and ethically relate to all kinds of other unconventional beings that are all around us. And if we can't wrap our heads around our cells and tissues having some of these properties, we're certainly not going to be able to recognize any aliens. Some people are into, you know, sort of exobiological life. You can forget it. If we can't even come to understand why the tools of cognitive science work on molecular networks, we're going to have a real problem with life that doesn't look like this at all. And these things are really, I think, very crucial for the species going forward because. And so this gets to your point of care and compassion and all that, not just because of AI. I mean, that's an obvious one. But AI in many ways is the easier test case. The much more difficult, difficult test case for all these kinds of things are cyborgs, right? So already we have people with all kinds of implants. Some of these implants are modifying brain function. Some of these things have onboard intelligence of its own.
- [43:14]
B
Jonathan has a hip implant. Does that count?
- [43:17]
C
I don't know what's in it that
- [43:19]
B
maybe it's just I got so much
- [43:21]
A
smarter after I got the hip implant. They stuck a little computer chip in there.
- [43:26]
C
Listen pretty soon. And I get extremely nervous when people talk about we are real, these are just machines. And the reason I get nervous is that A, no one actually has a definition of what that distinction is supposed to be, and B, the real issue is going to be when your neighbor comes home and has been modified in some way for some reason. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to Say, well, was that 51% of your brain or 49? Because if it's 51, then you are not like me. And you know, as, as much as people, right, worry about like we anthropomorphize and all this, I think it's actually the, the real danger is in the opposite direction. We love humans, love drawing in group out, group distinctions. Everybody's going to say, okay, you're not a real human like us. You have too many, you know, other different parts.
- [44:14]
B
You've read too many X Men comics.
- [44:16]
C
It sounds like, well, sci fi anyway, you know, lots of science fiction. But, but look, you know, science fiction is, is just a faster table than most people realize. All of that stuff is going to be and some of it not that far off. And I think that in order to properly deploy compassion towards beings who are not like us, we have to have a really wider understanding of what's actually important. When you say something is a human or something is a cognitive being. And so the final, I think I'll just point out is about what you asked about the paper, which is the cognitive light cone of compassion. So let's start with this. Let's go back to the idea of the cognitive light cone as the biggest goal you can pursue, meaning in space time or in some other space, what is the size of the thing you actually care about? So if you tell me that what you're, the only thing you actually care about is a little 10 micron region of space time with maybe 5 minutes predictive capacity forward 5 minutes going back, and all you care about is the sugar concentration in that little tiny. I'm going to say, well, you're probably a bacterium, okay? If you tell me that, okay, I care about what happens in an area that's several hundred yards, but I really don't have any capacity to care what happens three weeks from now. Three towns are over, I'm going to say you might be a dog. Okay.
- [45:49]
B
Or my boyfriend.
- [45:50]
C
Well, that, okay, I don't know about that. I'm not going to comment on that one. But you could find out. I mean, these are measurable, luckily these are measurable things. So you could, you could test them. You know, if you tell me that you're, you are capable of pursuing goals, let's say the state of the financial markets all over the earth, the hundreds of years from now beyond your lifespan, I'm going to say you're, you're, you're a human. You're probably human now. If you tell me that, and I believe you that you can deploy active compassion for all of the living beings on Earth or maybe even just all the humans in the linear range the way that we normally do with our family members. Right. Everybody knows that, okay. You know, we have some ability to care for some number of people and then somebody, you know, if it's a much larger number of people that something happens to you. We can't really scale that linearly. Right. If you tell me that you actually actively can maintain active, active working compassion for all these, I'm going to say you are something beyond a human. I don't know what you are yet, you know, some sort of body sat or something, but this is beyond. Right? So, so what we're talking about here, that's not about classifying anybody per se. It's about, it's about pointing out that the kinds of things we care about as, as goals when we were bacteria and whatever eventually end up being the amount of active care and compassion that we can muster as humans and, and beyond. And so who included in that cone is a critical question. And so this is, you know, when I, I'm just finishing up a thing with, with a postdoc in the lab about a longevity, longevity research and this idea that longevity, we have to think about it beyond as simply taking this current human body and sort of dragging it out as long as it'll go. No, we're talking about the longevity of the species. We're talking about the fact that we're all going to change, right. And, and how you change into the future and when are you still the same? There are many interesting questions, but that's the, but that's the deal with this, with this business. It comes right from scaling the tiny goals of even molecular systems.
- [47:52]
B
I love that. I mean, that's such a beautiful, it's such a beautiful, really start to finish explanation of this. And of course, Jonathan and I get to talk to all sorts of people who may not be at the level of a bodhisattva, they may not be at the level of an active compassion. But we have spoken to some Buddhist monks, some real masters who have dedicated their lives, lives to this kind of practice. And it's kind of interesting to think of them when you, when you describe it. But we do, we, we talk to a lot of people who have experienced things that are outside of the realm, you know, of, let's say, the material world. And that often leads them to have an increased sense of connection, purpose, you know, divine love. Right. And I even think about, about, you know, people who We've spoken to who have either had a near death experience or you know, sometimes there's, there's different circumstances, but many of them have a renewed sense of the ability to heal. And this is what's interesting to me in terms of the work you do, right? What is it? And this is largely rhetorical, right. What is it about us as this level of human having these levels of experience that seem to have an ability, right. To take us from one state into another, really by a set of intention. Meaning. I am now intending something like what is actually going on? And it's funny, cause when I started studying neuroscience at the time, most people didn't know what that was. And the notion that there's a fusion of the mind and the body, there's a place where you can electrophysiologically explain an emotional experience. Right. I was the person who's like, guess what? I can explain love. Happy to do it. It will ruin the party, but you know, it can be done, right. But this notion that there are people who are accessing things that most of us will never interact with, but it is changing them, right. Fundamentally, when you hear of people who have spontaneous healings and you know, things like that, something is different and I'm so fascinated. Where this realm that we can't even touch, right. The divine realm, the spiritual realm, whatever it is. Because in many cases it could be a quantum field of happy electrons, right. That can have such a tremendous impact on a cellular level. That's what I'm kind of hearing through all of this.
- [50:21]
C
Yeah. And in some of the latest work that I've been doing, I can approach that whole question from a slightly different angle, but end up in a similar place. Place.
- [50:34]
B
That's, that's our favorite game. You just described our favorite game.
- [50:39]
C
Let's see if you like this, this, this version of it. The standard as, as, as, as you will know, the standard story of science for, you know, several hundred years has been physicalism or materialism. So the idea that, that look, all important facts are, are physical facts. And from this everything else somehow gets built up. Well, I, I think, I think that's, that's demonstrably and, and fundamentally wrong. And the, that I'm going to crawl into this area is by considering the facts of mathematics. So let's look at the specific value of the natural logarithm e, or the truths of number theory, or the facts of topology, or all these different kinds of things. First of all, I think it's not very controversial that you can't Simply fire the math department and hope that physicists discover why quaternions act differently than complex. That is not going to come from physics. These things are either discovered by physicists, they don't look like anything that physicists do. They're not going to change. If you tweak the constants at the beginning of the Big Bang, you are not going to change the way that you know what the natural logarithm is and all these kinds of things. So we already know there is a set of facts that are important facts that are not physical facts. So that already puts a big crack in this whole business. Because then you have to ask, well, where the heck do these things come from? But we know they're not facts of physics and they're not. The explanation is not something like selection. Well, we had many natural logarithms, but we stuck with this. Okay, that's, that doesn't happen.
- [52:12]
B
So what you're saying is that there are certain, let's say, mathematical truths in the universe that do not need us to agree with them or not understand them or not. They simply are. And we have a nomenclature by which to describe that, which is true, correct?
- [52:27]
C
Yeah, I think, I think that's, I think that's very fair. And also that these things, things. These things will not be discovered through experiments in physics and they will not be changed by anything you do in the physical universe. So we already know there's this sort of latent space or this set of things. But also there's something else that's very interesting, which is that if you play this game that five year olds like, which is they keep saying but why? And you say, well, this is the reason. Yeah, but why? If you keep playing that game, starting with almost anything in physics and biology, you eventually end in the math department. Like if you say, hey look, think about it. If you keep saying, why do the fermions do this or that? Oh, well, because the symmetry group is. Yeah. And then you say, hey, why do the cicadas come out at 13 and 17 years? Ah, because it's a, you know, they want to avoid the predators. And you say, yeah, but why those numbers in particular? Bingo. Now you're talking about the distribution of primes. You're no longer in biology, you're now in math again. Okay, so that means that these important other things, things are actually impacting the world of physics and the world of biology. Now I don't, you know, people say, people talk about. This is woo. And that's woo is if there's Anything more woo than this, that there is some, some latent space where the natural algorithm lives that actually interacts and changes or controls and explains in a functional way what happens in the physical world. Right? Talk about mind body interaction. So, so, so I've, so I've made this claim. I think that the way to think about mind body interaction is precisely the way we think about the interaction between math and physics. That we already know that there's this weird relation which is not captured by some sort of billiard ball model of causation. Right? That's where people freak out about interactionism, is that, oh my God, what about energy conservation? Both sides have to be physical. Okay? We already know from the time of Pythagoras and probably long before that, that that is not the only way things happen, that there is this other kind of causation where, where immaterial truths impact the physical world. We already know that. And so now there's only one more step to take. Why would we make the assumption that whatever we know, there's this Platonic space, or whatever you want to call it, of things that impact the physical world, if we already know that? Why would we make the assumption that the only things that are in that space are low agency things that mathematicians study? What if there are other things in that space, other patterns, patterns that have different kinds of properties, more active perhaps things that behavioral scientists would recognize that you might think of as kinds of minds. And so this is the sort of thing that we've been studying recently. Is this spectrum starting off from the truths of mathematics and building up and to ask what else might exist in that space and how could you functionally test that by building new interfaces for it? The way that you might say that physical bodies and robots and machines and everything else are physical interfaces for all sorts of things, ranging from simple facts of mathematics to facts of behavior science, AKA different kinds of cognitive systems. So that stuff is now again very actionable. I've got a bunch of people working on this now and doing experiments, so I think that's where we are now.
- [55:46]
B
We're going to hit pause on our conversation with Dr. Michael Levin, but the there is so much more coming. In part two of our conversation, Dr. Levin will explain how he reconciles his work with beliefs of ancient traditions stretching back thousands of years that claim to understand things about the body that he is exploring from a mathematical and biological perspective. He'll also talk about different forms of intelligence and what it would be like to interact with an alien that has a completely different intelligence system than we may even be used to do.
- [56:19]
A
We're also going to touch on how trauma actually affects the cell and our memory where memory is stored. And can we use the tools that he is developing to change the impact of trauma for our futures?
- [56:35]
B
And speaking of the future, we will also ask Dr. Levin to explain just how off into the future we are in, having a dashboard that can potentially tell you everything, everything about what your body's doing at any given time and maybe even your mind. Stay tuned for part two of our conversation. Join us over on substack. Don't forget Mayimbialik's breakdown on substack. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.
- [56:59]
C
It's Maya Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two and now she's gonna break down. So break down. She's gonna break it down.