Michael Levin - Making the Process-of-Life Flourish in Bio and Beyond (Stewarding the Flame, Ep 1)

This is Dan Fagelli, you're tuned in to The Trajectory, and this is the first episode in our sixth series here on The Trajectory called Stewarding the Flame. My greatest hope in starting this series was that I would have Mike Eleven kick it off, and I was very fortunate to have exactly that happen. The focus of this series, we're going to get into Levin, of course, the focus of this series is on understanding and encouraging the flourishing of the living process. The living process is that which started below the single cell and bubbled up to the entire rich biosphere and totality of the human condition that we see today. The goal would be, if everything is a process, to ensure that that process continues to flourish. More new kinds of value and power and experience are conjured into the world. But how would we do that if we don't understand life itself? And in fact, if we do it wrong, maybe we won't steward the flame. Maybe we'll extinguish the flame with some unworthy successor artificial intelligence. We speak with Levin about how to understand and encourage the flourishing of the living process. If you know Michael Levin, you know his work in xenobots, you know his work with flatworms, you know his idea of platonic spaces, but you might not know his idea about the great unraveling process of life into life. sort of post-human futures. And in this episode, we explore a lot of that. So I am going to save all of my reflections for the end of this episode, as usual. But there is literally no one on the face of the earth who's better to kick off the series about the process of life and its greater flourishment than Mike Eleven himself. So without further ado, this is Mike Eleven here on The Trajectory. So, Mike, glad to be able to talk again.

Yeah, great to see you again.

Absolutely. It's going to be a real blast to be able to visit you here in the park today, out in nature, talking about the great processes of nature. We're going to start with this idea of life, of which everybody has assumptions because we don't know what it is. The analogy I'll open with, because it's the theme of the series of which your episode is the kicking off. is that we could think about these, life seems to be this complexifying, unraveling process made up of kind of individual temporary torches that seem to be feeding a greater flame. In other words, like these little developmental things kind of bubble up to me and you. The question that we're sort of opening the series with is if this more complex stuff, you talk about the cognitive light cone, this opening up of care, concern, power, Spinoza would say potentia, if that opening up is something that we like and seems to sort of be beneficial and good or net beneficial, what would we have to understand about what is now called life to know what that kind of underlying flame is? I know you've got some very interesting ideas here with a different analogy. So hit us, I guess, with your high level here, Mike.

Yeah, I guess it's good to go sort of all the way back into a big picture view, and then we can drill down. I think that the Venn diagram of the universe looks very different from how most people do it. So