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

ByAnnelize Potgieter July 3, 2026July 4, 2026 July 4, 2026

This interview launches The Trajectory’s newest series, Stewarding the Flame.

As increasingly powerful technologies such as AGI, brain-computer interfaces, and regenerative medicine transform both humanity and the wider world, we may soon create forms of intelligence that surpass us in important ways. If that future is approaching, then understanding the nature of life itself becomes an urgent project. Before we build successors more capable than ourselves, we should first ask what it is about the unfolding process of life that is worth carrying forward.

Across this series, we explore some of the deepest questions surrounding life, intelligence, and the future. What makes life, life? What qualities of living systems most need to be stewarded forward? What do we still need to discover in order to understand the underlying “flame” that distinguishes life from non-life? And what role might human augmentation play in carrying forward the greater process of life?

Few researchers are better suited to begin this exploration than Michael Levin.

Michael is a Distinguished Professor in the Biology Department and Vannevar Bush Chair at Tufts University, Director of the Allen Discovery Center, and one of the world’s leading researchers in developmental biology, regeneration, bioelectricity, and collective intelligence. Over the last several decades, his work has challenged conventional assumptions about cognition, agency, and the relationship between mind and matter.

In this conversation, Michael argues that cognition may be more fundamental than biology itself, explores what humanity still needs to discover in order to understand mind in all its forms, and discusses the coming era of freedom of embodiment and what it may mean for the future of the living process.

The interview is the first installment in The Trajectory’s Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask: What is intelligence, and what is the “flame” that life has which non-life does not?

This series references the article: Stewarding the Flame – How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Michael Levin:

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Below, we’ll explore the core takeaways from my conversation with Michael, focusing on three of the central questions that shape the Stewarding the Flame series: what makes life, life, what humanity still needs to discover in order to better understand the living process, and the role of human augmentation in carrying that process forward.

What Makes Life, Life?

Cognition is the broader category

The opening question of the Stewarding the Flame series asks what distinguishes life from non-life. For Michael, answering that question requires rethinking one of the most fundamental assumptions in modern science.

Rather than viewing cognition as something that emerges from increasingly complex biological systems, Michael argues that cognition may instead be the broader category within which both physical systems and living systems exist. In this view, life is not the origin of cognition. Rather, it is a set of biological architectures that are particularly effective at hosting and expressing certain kinds of cognitive patterns.

“I think cognition is the biggest circle, and I think the space of physical things is within that and the space of living things is within that.”

Michael goes on to describe biology as a remarkable interface capable of hosting many different kinds of patterns simultaneously. These patterns can exist at different scales, pursue different agendas, and operate across different problem spaces. While biology excels at this, Michael does not believe these capabilities are exclusive to living systems. Instead, he suggests that life represents one particularly sophisticated way that broader cognitive processes become embodied.

“I think our mind blindness is pretty severe for sure. I think we have a really hard time detecting these things.”

What Do We Still Need to Discover in Order to Understand the Flame?

When I asked Michael what humanity still needs to discover in order to better understand the “flame” of life, he identified two priorities.

1. Better tools to communicate with unconventional minds

The first is learning how to recognize and communicate with forms of intelligence that differ radically from ourselves. Michael argues that humanity remains surprisingly poor at recognizing minds in unconventional embodiments. If we hope to better understand cognition in its broader forms, he argues that developing better ways of recognizing and communicating with unconventional intelligences is a foundational challenge.

2. A better understanding of patterns and their interfaces

The second priority is developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between the patterns that inhabit physical systems and the interfaces that host them. Michael argues that humanity still lacks a taxonomy for these patterns and a better understanding of how different biological and non-biological architectures give rise to different forms of cognition.

Michael identifies these as two critical areas of research if humanity hopes to better understand how to bring “more creativity, more life” in what he describes as the “big non-biological sense.”

What Is the Role of Human Augmentation in Carrying Forward the Greater Process of Life?

Freedom of embodiment

Rather than discussing human augmentation in isolation, Michael places it within a broader discussion about regenerative medicine, biological patterning, and what he calls “freedom of embodiment.”

For Michael, the key insight is that the continuity of an organism does not depend on preserving its physical components. Rather, he argues that it depends on preserving the information and pattern that guide the continual replacement and organization of those components. He compares this to the Ship of Theseus, where the material changes over time, but the organizing pattern persists.

“Your actual target morphology is the pattern memory in the collective of cells. And the hardware comes and goes. Hopefully the memory structures stay.”

Michael believes that advances in regenerative medicine will naturally lead to increasingly flexible forms of embodiment. He argues that the same scientific progress needed to repair injury, cure disease, and eliminate birth defects will also make new forms of embodiment possible. As these capabilities become more commonplace, he expects future generations to think very differently about identity, biology, and what it means to inhabit a body.

“The path forward to solving birth defects, injury, cancer leads directly to freedom of embodiment. There’s no way to separate it.”

Concluding Notes

One of the most important themes in my conversation with Michael is that understanding life begins with questioning some of our deepest assumptions about it. Rather than treating cognition as something that emerges only within biological organisms, Michael argues that biology represents one particularly successful way of hosting a much broader landscape of cognitive patterns. Throughout the conversation, he repeatedly encourages us to look beyond familiar categories and develop a richer understanding of intelligence in all of its possible forms.

At the same time, Michael repeatedly returns to the limits of our current understanding. Whether discussing unconventional forms of mind, regenerative medicine, or future embodiments, he argues that humanity still has much to learn about the relationship between patterns, cognition, and the interfaces that host them. Expanding that understanding, he suggests, is essential if we hope to bring “more creativity, more life” into the universe.

This idea sits at the heart of the Stewarding the Flame series. Before we can responsibly build increasingly capable forms of intelligence, we must first deepen our understanding of the living process itself. We cannot steward what we do not more deeply understand. Michael’s work challenges us to ask not only what life is today, but what qualities of that living process are worth carrying forward as new forms of intelligence emerge.

I frame this tension using a distinction between the “flame” – life itself, and its underlying drive to persist and expand – and the “torch,” any single, temporary bearer of that flame, whether an individual, a species, or a civilization, as shown in the graphic below.

Although Michael remains careful not to overstate what we know, he closes the conversation with cautious optimism. He believes there may be a path that allows intelligence, creativity, and compassion to continue expanding together, even if that outcome is far from guaranteed. As the first conversation in the Stewarding the Flame series, Michael lays the foundation for many of the questions we’ll continue exploring with leading thinkers across biology, neuroscience, complexity science, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

I hope you’ll join us as we continue that exploration in the episodes ahead.

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