"Neuroscience Beyond Neurons: communicating with unconventional minds" by Michael Levin

October 9, 2026 · 1 h 1 min

Show notes

This is a ~1 hour talk given at a conference on the philosophy and future of neuroscience, so I oriented it around extending the concept of neuroscience: not the study of neural phenomena, but more broadly around how neuroscience of neural and non-neural cells shows a model system for understanding collective intelligence, and using morphogenesis as a stepping stone model system to show us how to do behavioral experiments in unconventional cognitive agents. I didn't have time for any of the biomedical applications of these ideas (lots of other talks about that) but alluded at the end to some deep questions around the properties of novel cognitive beings and our framework for addressing it. There was a really good Q&A after which will be put up by the original conference organization when they post their version. I'll link it here when it's up.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Defining unconventional minds

(10:05) Scaling cognitive light cones

(15:59) Morphogenesis as collective intelligence

(25:46) Bioelectricity as cognitive glue

(36:56) Reprogramming biological pattern memories

(48:59) Xenobots and synthetic life

(55:15) Platonic origins of order

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