Michael Levin | Bernardo Kastrup: On the intelligence pervading life and the Platonic Realm

Rupert Sheldrake has said that Michael Levin is "one of the most creative biologists working today" and Bernardo Kastrup that he is “perhaps the most important person alive.”

So I'm beyond excited to have him returning for a dialogue with Bernardo Kastrup to question and inspire each other's ideas on how intelligence and consciousness may pervade reality.

Michael Levin's pioneering research has already challenged mainstream assumptions about life. His work at Harvard and Tufts University shows how even a single cell can display memory and problem-solving abilities once thought exclusive to brains.

He contends that intelligence is a fundamental property of living systems, and that your body is a hierarchy of intelligent entities nested within each other, from your organs down to your cells, molecules and maybe even subatomic particles.

Michael aims to empirically demonstrate how these systems cooperate and combine, and his experiments with flatworms and tadpoles indicate that bioelectric fields may play a role. These could explain how a planaria can regenerate its dissected brain and reconstruct memories of things it had learnt. Or how the cells on the back of a tadpole can be directed to spontaneously form a working eye.

What's new?

This last year, Michael Levin has become increasingly open about core philosophical ideas that drive his team's research. This includes a platonic realm that contains not just mathematical truths (like triangles and prime numbers), but types of minds; dynamic patterns which ingress into physical form and can be explored through evolution, bioengineering and maybe even AI.

He has also initiated some fascinating explorations into the elusive definition of life, identifying conceptual archetypes that span a range of cross-disciplinary experts.

Michael and Bernardo will update each other on their respective work, share their most recent ideas, and no doubt continue their debate as to where the boundaries of conscious entities might be.

(Spoiler alert - Michael does not think there are any "boundaries" at all.)

We will be pressing Michael for his thoughts on:

• The definition of life
• How to demonstrate intelligence in systems
• How the platonic realm can be harnessed and explored

You can see previous dialogues we have hosted here.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Amir

About Michael Levin
 

"One of the most creative biologists working today" - Rupert Sheldrake

“Perhaps the most important person alive” - Bernardo Kastrup

Michael Levin, a Distinguished Professor in the Biology department at Tufts (https://drmichaellevin.org/), holds the Vannevar Bush endowed Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts (https://allencenter.tufts.edu/). He is also an associate member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard (https://wyss.harvard.edu/team/associate-faculty/michael-levin-ph-d/). 

His group works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. Seeking general principles of life-as-it-can-be, they use a wide range of natural animal models and also create novel synthetic and chimeric life forms. 

Their goal is to develop conceptual frameworks and practical tools that help detect, understand, predict, and communicate with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots, and software-based AIs.  His mission is to develop fundamental understanding of how minds of all kinds arise, scale, persist, and change, and to use that knowledge to benefit the embodied experience of sentient beings, through biomedicine and beyond.

About Bernardo Kastrup

Photo by Pedro Henrique Casarin

Bernardo Kastrup's work has been leading the modern renaissance of the philosophical position, ‘metaphysical idealism’ that reality is essentially mental, an appearance in ‘mind.’  Bernardo has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. Bernardo's most recent book is The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.

Background image from the series 'Ezekiels vision' Annett and Pope in dialogue with AI 2025 www.atelierdemelusine.com
 

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