AAAI Spring Symposia
May 18, 2026
Katrina Schleisman, Michael Levin
The goal of detecting, measuring, and engineering machine consciousness depends on making explicit key metaphysical assumptions about the nature of consciousness that may be lying dormant in the minds of AI researchers. In this position paper, we lay out a small set of arguments that call into question a particular family of these assumptions. These assumptions all arise from the dominant...
Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences
May 14, 2026
Nicolas Rouleau, Michael Levin
It is assumed that a useful theory of consciousness (ToC) will explain why consciousness is associated with brains. However, the findings of evolutionary biology, developmental bioelectricity and synthetic bioengineering reveal ancient pre-neural roots of many mechanisms and algorithms occurring in brains: minds may have preceded brains. Most work in the emerging field of diverse intelligence...
Entropy
May 31, 2024
Michael Levin
31 citations
Many studies on memory emphasize the material substrate and mechanisms by which data can be stored and reliably read out. Here, I focus on complementary aspects: the need for agents to dynamically reinterpret and modify memories to suit their ever-changing selves and environment. Using examples from developmental biology, evolution, and synthetic bioengineering, in addition to neuroscience, I...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Michael Levin
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose...
arXiv Preprint Archive
December 24, 2021
Michael Levin
8 citations
Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
May 1, 2021
C. Fields, J. Glazebrook, Michael Levin
Abstract Theories of consciousness and cognition that assume a neural substrate automatically regard phylogenetically basal, nonneural systems as nonconscious and noncognitive. Here, we advance a scale-free characterization of consciousness and cognition that regards basal systems, including synthetic constructs, as not only informative about the structure and function of experience in more...
Frontiers in Psychology
December 13, 2019
Michael Levin
287 citations
All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own context. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan bodies...