Michael Levin, a developmental and synthetic biologist, writes about bioelectricity, cognition, regeneration, and what he calls Platonic space.
Commenters recommend his Q&A posts as the most accessible way into his views, and point to the Platonic space symposium page.
Interesting - I wonder if this ties into the Platonic Space Hypothesis recently being championed by computational biologist Mike Levin
E.g
https://youtu.be/Qp0rCU49lMs?si=UXbSBD3Xxpy9e3uY
https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/
e.g see this paper on Universal Embeddings https://arxiv.org/html/2505.12540v2
"The Platonic Representation Hypothesis [17] conjectures that all image models of sufficient size have the same latent representation. We propose a stronger, constructive version of this hypothesis for text models: the universal latent structure of text representations can be learned and, furthermore, harnessed to translate representations from one space to another without any paired data or encoders.
In this work, we show that the Strong Platonic Representation Hypothesis holds in practice. Given unpaired examples of embeddings from two models with different architectures and training data, our method learns a latent representation in which the embeddings are almost identical"
Also from the OP's Paper we see this on statement:
"Why do these universal subspaces emerge? While the precise mechanisms driving this phenomenon remain an open area of investigation, several theoretical factors likely contribute to the emergence of these shared structures.
First, neural networks are known to exhibit a spectral bias toward low frequency functions, creating a polynomial decay in eigenvalues that concentrates learning dynamics into a small number of dominant…
The cool body mods are coming!
The work at the Levin Lab ( https://drmichaellevin.org/ ) is making great progress in the basic science that supports this. They can make two-headed planaria, regenerate frog limbs, cure cancer in tadpoles; all via bioelectric communication with cellular networks. No gene editing.
Levin believes this stuff will be very available to humans within the next 10 years, and has talked about how widespread body-modding is something we're going to have to wrestle with societally. He is of course very close to the work, but his cautious nature and the lab's astounding results give that 10-year prediction some weight. From his blog:
> We were all born into physical and mental limitations that were set at arbitrary levels by chance and genetics. Even those who have “perfect” standard human health and capabilities are limited by anatomical decisions that were not made with anyone’s well-being or fulfillment in mind. I consider it to be a core right of sentient beings to (if they wish) move beyond the involuntary vagaries of their birth and alter their form and function in whatever way suits their personal goals and potential.- Copied from https://thoughtforms.life/faqs-from-my-academic-work/
This podcast will be a shocking experience for anyone who still holds reductionist views on life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s
Michael Levin's channel: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+levin+academic+content
His blog: https://thoughtforms.life/
Associated blogpost from co-author and leading researcher in this area, Michael Levin:
https://thoughtforms.life/meet-the-anthrobots-a-new-living-entity-with-much-to-teach-us/
I find the Q&As on his personal blog the most accessible way to grasp his views: https://thoughtforms.life/qa-from-the-internet-and-recent-presentations-4/
Here is a page that collects material related to the Platonic space:
https://thoughtforms.life/symposium-on-the-platonic-space/