Research Library
9 papers, newest first
2026 · Biosemiotics, Special Issue "What is Life?", Vol. 9 No. 1
Defining Life: A Conversation
Karina Kofman, Christoph Adami, Frantisek Baluska et al.
A minimally-edited, largely-verbatim transcript of an email conversation among ~30 leading biologists, physicists, and philosophers (including Levin, Kauffman, Nick Lane, James Shapiro) as they each proposed a definition of "life" in three sentences or less and then argued, agreed, and disagreed over each other's answers — a proof-of-concept for preserving informal scientific discourse rather than only single-author manuscripts. Companion piece to Bender et al. 2025's AI analysis of the same set of definitions.
- definition of life
- biosemiotics
- origin of life
- basal cognition
- philosophy of biology
- roundtable
2026
Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains—Part One
Michael Levin, David B. Resnik
Argues for a mentalistic (not just mechanistic) framework for goal-directedness across biology and beyond, grounded in bioelectric-network experiments (planaria regeneration, Xenobots, cancer as bioelectric "dissociative" cell disconnection). Part One covers the historical/philosophical debate over teleology and the experimental evidence; Part Two (not yet in the library) argues for the practical necessity of mentalistic language.
- goal-directedness
- teleology
- diverse intelligence
- bioelectricity
- morphogenesis
- cognition
2026
Alignment Is to a Virtual Governor: A Theory of Coordination in Diverse Intelligence
Benjamin Lyons, Léo Pio-Lopez, Michael Levin
Argues that alignment in any decentralized system (cells, motor behavior, economies, power grids, AI) is necessarily alignment to a "virtual governor" — an abstract, non-physical governing entity embodied in the coordinating/signaling relationships among components (e.g. bioelectric networks, price systems, grid frequency) rather than to any individual agent's goals. Shows these governors are constructed by their own components, can be redirected by reshaping the signaling architecture (not by controlling components directly), and can compete or be exited (e.g. cancer defecting from the body's governor) — with direct implications for how AI/human/diverse-intelligence coordination should be approached.
- diverse intelligence
- basal cognition
- agency
- alignment
- bioelectricity
- collective intelligence
- economics
- cybernetics
2026 · Philosophies, Vol. 11, Article 161
Ingressing Minds: Causal, Non-Physical Patterns In-Form Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments
Michael Levin
Argues that synthetic morphology and diverse-intelligence science point toward non-physicalist models of mind: minds and mathematical truths sit on the same spectrum of "patterns" in a structured latent space, ranging from static (mathematical facts) to active (behavior), and physical systems — natural or engineered — are "in-formed" by these patterns rather than generating mind from matter alone. Erases the organism/machine distinction and sketches a research program with implications for regenerative medicine, AI, and the ethics of synthetic/hybrid beings. Complements [[levin-2019-computational-boundary-of-a-self]] and [[levin-resnik-2026-mind-everywhere-part-one]] as Levin's most explicitly philosophical entry in the library.
- basal cognition
- diverse intelligence
- philosophy of mind
- non-physicalism
- synthetic morphology
- mathematical platonism
2026
Open Questions About Time and Self-Reference in Living Systems
Samson Abramsky, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Leo S. D. Caves et al.
Outgrowth of a 2023 workshop arguing that living systems are irreducibly self-referential and self-modifying, and that apparent logical paradoxes of self-reference (Russell, the Liar) dissolve once a distinction is drawn between "natural time" (the physical world's continuing present) and "representational time" (the past/present/future framework that memory, learning, and prediction require, and that co-originates with life). Walks through evolution, embryogenesis, and metamorphosis as iterative, self-referential processes, then surveys mathematical/computational tools — domain theory, coalgebra, genetic programming, self-modifying code, dynamic categorical frameworks (MES, WLIMES) — for modelling systems that change their own rules, concluding that no current formalism can yet model rules-for-changing-the-rules of the kind social and biological systems exhibit. Levin co-author; complements [[levin-2019-computational-boundary-of-a-self]] and [[lyons-pio-lopez-levin-2026-virtual-governor]] on self-reference and multi-scale agency.
- self-reference
- time
- paradox
- evolution
- embryogenesis
- metamorphosis
- open-endedness
- coalgebra
- autopoiesis
- basal cognition
2022
Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds
Michael Levin
Lays out the "TAME" (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) framework for empirically assessing degrees of intelligence/agency in any system, biological or synthetic — the direct conceptual predecessor to the 2026 Mind Everywhere paper (same title lineage).
- diverse intelligence
- cognition
- goal-directedness
- bioengineering
- basal cognition
2022 · MIT Press Direct, open access monograph, ISBN 9780262369978
Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior
Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo, Karl J. Friston
Full-length textbook treatment of Active Inference — the theory that perception, planning, and action can all be cast as approximate Bayesian inference driven by minimizing (expected) variational free energy under a generative model. Part I builds the formal apparatus (generative models, message passing, policy selection); Part II applies it to concrete process theories of brain function.
- active inference
- free energy principle
- bayesian brain
- generative models
- computational neuroscience
- predictive processing
2019
The Computational Boundary of a Self: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition
Michael Levin
Proposes that a "self" is defined by the boundary of a computational/bioelectric network solving problems in some space, and that this framework scales from single cells to full organisms — the theoretical basis cited directly in the 2026 Mind Everywhere paper.
- bioelectricity
- cognition
- selfhood
- multicellularity
- basal cognition
2019
Multi-Scale Detection of Hierarchical Community Architecture in Structural and Functional Brain Networks
Arian Ashourvan, Qawi K. Telesford, Timothy Verstynen et al.
Introduces a multi-scale community detection method (built on multilayer modularity maximization) that links a brain graph to copies of itself across neighboring resolution scales, solving the "correspondence problem" of tracking communities across scales. Applied to diffusion (structural) and resting-state fMRI (functional) data from 60 subjects, it finds structural networks have a more pronounced, spatially localized hierarchical organization than functional networks, and that the two modalities align most closely at medium-to-coarse topological scales.
- connectomics
- network neuroscience
- community detection
- structural connectivity
- functional connectivity
- hierarchical organization
- graph theory