Michael Levin and Anil Seth: Your Brain Is Not a Computer
episodePreviously titled “Your Brain Isn’t a Computer and That Changes Everything” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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How do Anil Seth and Michael Levin challenge the brain‑as‑computer metaphor?
I make the additional really weird claim that I don't think algorithms capture everything we need to know about life. We've forgotten that the idea of the
brain is a computer is a metaphor and not the thing itself. There's no bright line between what it doesn't and what it is. That would not be what I would have predicted.
This is a monumental theolocution. For the first time ever, Professor Anil Seth and Professor Michael Levin are conversing and performing research in real time, and we get to be the flies on the wall. Anil says that the brain as a computer metaphor has blinded us for decades. You can't extract the software from the substrate. This means that silicone consciousness may be impossible. Not because machines lack dualistic souls, though. But wait, Michael disagrees. He thinks that machines may be able to access the same platonic space that biological systems tap into. The magic isn't restricted to carbon. Both professors are now building and studying xenobots together. These are living robots made from skin cells that self-organize, exhibiting behaviors evolution never programmed.
Do they dream? Do they have preferences? Are they conscious? On this episode of Theories of Everything, we explore their radical collaboration, including questions like how split-brain patients may prove consciousness fragments and multiplies, and the terrifying possibility that large language models are doing something entirely different from what their output suggests. Tasks no programmer asked for, no steps in the code demand for. But perhaps where that quote-unquote magic lies. Remember to hit that subscribe button if you like videos exploring fundamental reality. All right. We're going to talk about aliens. We're going to talk about cyborgs, modules in the brain, split hemisphere patients, if I'm not mistaken, at unconscious processing.
We're going to get to all of that. To set the stage, I'd like to know what's exciting you both research wise currently, something you're pursuing. So Anil, why don't we start with you, please?
Well thanks Chair. Um two things, I guess. Well one thing, Toby that seems to be exciting a lot of people these days, which is the possibility of AI uh being conscious. Um whether it's something that AI systems can have, or whether, as I tend to think, that it's something more bound up with our nature as living creatures. And the other thing that's exciting me actually just just came to mind in you a little uh list the topics there is the question of islands of consciousness. So you know, we there's a lot of work on things like split brain patients, patients with brain downries and so on. But a question that me and a couple of colleagues, Tim Main, Marcello, Massamini, have been wondering is Can are there isolated neural systems that may have conscious experiences?
And one candidate for this is called hemisphereotomy, which is kind of neurosurgical operation where you have bits of the brain um detached, disconnected from all other parts of the brain. But you still have neural activity, is these parts of the brain is still part of a living organism. Are they islands of a web? So we've been exploring that theoretically and very recently with some evidence from uh brain imaging of people following this neurosurgical operation.
Michael. Yeah. So so a couple of things uh on the experimental front. Um really excited about uh some novel systems that we're setting up as uh compositional agents. So so putting together different uh living and non-living components using AI and other interfaces to allow them to uh to to not not not just communicate with each other, but we hope uh form a kind of uh competition. collective intelligence and then we can ask some interesting questions about what kind of inner perspective this new intelligence might be. Uh just in general, you know, um Complimenting the work we've done before around uh distributing and let's say separating out the different pieces, like like Anil was just saying, of the brain and so on.
The flip side of that, which is putting together new kinds of beings that haven't existed before and asking what their behavioral compliments are, what their uh uh what their capacities are, what their goals are, their preferences, what do they pay attention to, these these kinds of things.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How do Anil Seth and Michael Levin challenge the brain‑as‑computer metaphor?
0:00–10:09
2
Why is substrate dependence crucial for understanding consciousness?
10:09–19:16
3
Can machines access the same ‘platonic space’ that biology does?
19:16–28:16
4
What emergent agency arises from a simple bubble‑sort algorithm?
28:16–36:52
5
How does biological degeneracy differ from engineered redundancy?
36:52–45:13
6
Do cells, tissues, and societies each possess their own agency?
45:13–53:42
7
Are split‑brain patients evidence of isolated islands of consciousness?
53:42–1:00:52
8
What is the ultimate experiment proposed to decode consciousness?
1:00:52–1:08:32
Speakers
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