Levin’s Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin introduces “a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates,” which he calls ‘TAME—Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere.’ He asserts that creating “novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software”—via synthetic biology and bioengineering—“are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species.”

TAME, Levin says, “formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency,” and it “provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that manifest in similar ways in numerous other substrates” (Levin, 2022). The facts of developmental biology and evolutionary biology, in which we all start our lives as a small set of chemical networks, tell us that what we seek are models of scaling and transformation of minds from the subjects of chemistry to the subjects of psychoanalysis. The facts of bioengineering, in which any degree of combination of evolved and engineered material results in a viable being, likewise confirm that ancient categories of “life” vs. “machine” have outlived their usefulness.

Degrees and Continuity of Consciousness

By focusing on cognitive function, not on phenomenal or access consciousness, Levin takes “TAME's view of sentience as fundamentally tied to goal-directed activity,” noting carefully that “only some aspects of which can be studied via third-person approaches.” Provisionally, Levin suggests that consciousness “comes in degrees and kinds (is not binary),” for the same reasons he argues for continuity of cognition: “if consciousness is fundamentally embodied, the plasticity and gradual malleability of bodies suggest that it is a strong requirement for proponents of phase transitions to specify what kind of ‘atomic’ (not further divisible) bodily change makes for a qualitative shift in capacity consciousness” (Levin, 2022).

Although Levin takes the null or default hypothesis to be the relatively smooth continuity of consciousness across species and phylogenetically, he hedges that “the TAME framework is not incompatible with potential novel discoveries about sharp phase transitions.” He points to future, radical brain-computer interfaces in human patients as “perhaps one avenue where a subject undergoing such a change can convince themselves, and perhaps others, that a qualitative, not continuous, change in their consciousness had occurred.”

Yet, Levin states that his TAME model is not fundamentally evolutionary because it goes all the way down to minimal matter and includes synthetic systems (engineered), etc. It's also anti-computationalist.

Embodiment and Radical Implications of TAME

In a radical implication of TAME, Levin argues that “while ‘embodiment’ is critical for consciousness, it is not restricted to physical bodies acting in 3D space, but also includes perception-action systems working in all sorts of spaces.” This implies, he says, “counter to many people's intuitions, that systems that operate in morphogenetic, transcriptional, and other spaces should also have some (if very minimal) degree of consciousness.

This in turn suggests that an agent, such as a typical modern human, is really a patchwork of many diverse consciousnesses, only one of which is usually capable of verbally reporting its states (and, not surprisingly, given its limited access and self-boundary, believes itself to be a unitary, sole owner of the body).” All embodiments of intelligence are collective intelligences; we are all made of parts, and especially biological systems are made of agential materials in which each level contains subsystems with agendas, goals, and competencies in other spaces like metabolic, physiological, anatomical, and others.

Levin remains “skeptical about being able to say anything definitive about consciousness per se (as distinct from correlates of consciousness) from a 3rd-person, objective perspective.” Yet, he muses, “The developmental approach to the emergence of consciousness on short, ontogenetic timescales complements the related question on phylogenetic timescales, and is likely to be a key component of mature theories in this field” (Levin, 2022).

Ingressing Minds

In his most recent thinking, Levin is developing his “Ingressing Minds from Platonic Space” theory—compatible with TAME—in which patterns of physiology, anatomy, behavior, etc.， have their origin in a non-physical space, but are functional drivers (causal) for outcomes in the domains of physics, computer science, biology, and cognitive science. Levin says that this space is akin to Platonic Space for mathematical objects, but mathematical truths are only a small fraction of its contents, many of which are highly dynamic—not eternally unchanging—patterns that encode behavioral propensities we can recognize as kinds of minds, including our own. In other words, we are not physical beings occasionally impinged upon by these patterns as thoughts and goal states – we are fundamentally patterns projecting through bodies/robots/whatever as front-end interfaces. Thus, Consciousness may exist in cellular, bioengineered, or even non-physical "spaces of action, because Consciousness is what we call the perspective of a pattern as it projects through an interface into the physical world.

Implications

Levin challenges the binary view of consciousness and redefines agency across biological and synthetic life. We do not make conscious minds, either in embryogenesis or in AI engineering; we facilitate their ingression through the interfaces we make. The framework has many empirical implications for the results of autopoietic synthetic morphology (i.e., cognitive competencies and goals of novel beings that were neither evolved nor designed) and for the computational properties of minimal (non-biological) systems. These are currently being tested in experimental platforms, both biological and computational.

Open Issues

Levin asks the perennial question: Can first-person experience ever be meaningfully assessed in radically unfamiliar cognitive systems? Of course, it’s not even clear that first-person experience can ever be meaningfully assessed in other humans (such as the rare neurodivergent) humans. A good theory of consciousness would bridge the gap between “is” and “ought”: in other words, a theory of consciousness should take a third person scientific description of some system as input, and provide, as output, specific second person moral imperatives as to how personally committed we ought to be to showing compassion to that system (as well as what moral expectations we can have of it). This is what we seek for theories of consciousness—something that can look at a system, no matter its composition and origin story, and tell us how hard we should work to make sure it has a good life.

Note that Levin's Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere theory articulates well with his Ingressing Minds from Platonic Space theory.

References

Levin, Michael (2022). Technological approach to mind everywhere: an experimentally grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds. Front. Syst. Neurosci., 16 https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201

Rouleau, N. and M. Levin, Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci, 2026. 384(2320).

Rouleau, N. and M. Levin, Discussions of machine versus living intelligence need more clarity. Nature Machine Intelligence, 2024. 6(12): p. 1424-1426.

Rouleau, N. and M. Levin, The Multiple Realizability of Sentience in Living Systems and Beyond. eNeuro, 2023. 10(11).

Levin, M., Artificial Intelligences: A Bridge Toward Diverse Intelligence and Humanity's Future. Advanced Intelligent Systems, 2025. n/a(n/a): p. 2401034.

Fields, C. and M. Levin, Thoughts and thinkers: On the complementarity between objects and processes. Physics of Life Reviews, 2025.

Fields, C. and M. Levin, Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments. Entropy (Basel), 2022. 24(6).

Levin, M., Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments. preprint, 2025.