Vince Buyssens

Michael Levin did not expect to reach middle age and still be making a living as a biology professor. He figured his life trajectory would likely involve getting kicked out of the academy, as the academy is fond of people asking narrow questions, not boundary-crashing, precariously close-to-woo-sounding paradigmatic thinkers whose ideas strain the limits of language. Yet the opposite has happened — he’s become a foremost expert in his field, and to many, a cult hero. Levin has been releasing his ideas slowly his entire adult life. Five years ago, he was at 50 percent. Now he’s at 80 percent. A big jump came last year when Levin published a preprint paper called “Ingressing Minds.” In it, he argues that intelligence comes from a nonphysical realm and flows (“ingresses”) into bodies. That nonphysical realm, he says, is where mathematical ideas like pi and e reside. We already accept there is some stuff in that realm. Why would we assume there is not more? Critics accuse Levin of all kinds of teleological crimes — making unfalsifiable claims, using words in ways that render those words meaningless. Levin is unfazed. His true retort is his wet lab. There, at the bench, he’s working to prove his metaphysics by running old-school (in a way) biological experiments. He studies flatworms with two heads. Frogs with eyes on their stomachs. Little round creatures called xenobots, synthesized from frog skin cells. They swim like tiny Pac-Men. They do not exist in nature. Elizabeth Weil spends time with the biologist who argues that your body has many minds: nymag.visitlink.me/A76MhV