Morphospace / New Bodies, Unconventional Minds: a continuum of cognition (& consciousness)

New Bodies, Unconventional Minds: a continuum of cognition (& consciousness)

In one paragraph

A short conference talk where Levin makes three claims: the focus on neurons is too narrow, the same reasons we credit other people with consciousness apply to many structures in the body, and physicalism is false "all the way down". He walks through learning in small molecular networks, xenobots and anthrobots, and his Platonic-space proposal, then closes with personal views on consciousness that he says he can't prove.

Main ideas (plain words)

  • Development is continuous, so the starting assumption should be continuity, not sharp lines between chemistry and mind.
  • Small molecular networks (sets of ordinary differential equations) can learn: habituation, sensitization, Pavlovian conditioning, counting, probabilistic inference. In a large class of them, learning raises causal emergence (how integrated the system is), and forcing them to forget does not undo that gain. Random networks already do this, which he calls "a free gift from math".
  • Xenobots (frog skin cells) and anthrobots (adult human airway cells) show behaviors nobody designed, selected or trained: kinematic self-replication, response to sound, memories, and anthrobots helping close a scratch in a layer of human neurons.
  • His proposal: bodies, robots and embryos are "front-end thin clients" for patterns drawn from a structured non-physical space; math is the behavioral science of the simplest layer of that space.
  • On consciousness (stated as his view, without strong data): it is a property of patterns, not of physical objects; a good theory should output protocols for sharing another system's state and should turn facts about a system into ethical obligations.
  • He ends with a disclosure that four companies have licensed discoveries from the lab's work.

Key quotes (word for word from YouTube's auto-generated captions)

"I don't normally um say much about consciousness because I think it's very hard to do actual experiments on consciousness."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=120s

"the null hypothesis is continuity."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=240s

"So, this is this is wild because it means that that property is a free gift from math. It does not require evolution."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=630s

"everything we make, bodies, cells, robots, organisms, embryos, all of it, are basically front-end thin clients."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=1770s

"I think we are the patterns. I think the distinction between thoughts and thinkers is is is not real."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=2100s

"I suspect that consciousness is a property of patterns. It isn't a property of of physical objects."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=2190s

"There are four companies that have uh licensed some of the discoveries that have come from our work."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmSCElKdm0&t=2370s

Source: YouTube auto-generated captions, speakers not labeled; wording is provisional. Timestamps point to the start of the 30-second stretch that holds the quote.