Developmental biologist Michael Levin and cognitive scientist Anna Ciaunica challenge foundational assumptions about consciousness, memory, and the self, arguing that intelligence is not confined to brains but extends to single cells, and that the self cannot be understood in isolation from others and the body.
The Biggest Myths in Their Fields
Levin argues the biggest myth in biology is that neurons and neural information processing are unique to brains.
Ion channels, gap junctions, and neurotransmitters predate multicellularity; even bacterial biofilms have them.
The capacity to learn from experience and navigate problem spaces (metabolic, gene expression, anatomical) long predates the invention of nerve and muscle.
These cognitive-like capacities are widespread across life, not limited to brainy organisms.
Ciaunica argues the biggest myth in philosophy of mind and cognitive science is that the self can be understood by studying the individual alone.
The field takes an adult-centric, static perspective, as if the self is a fully formed given.
Instead, the self must be understood developmentally, starting from the very beginning, where “the other” is already present.
She provocatively claims the second-person perspective comes before the first-person: you cannot be yourself by yourself.
Dropping Old Conceptual “Epicycles”
Ciaunica compares current models in philosophy of mind to Ptolemaic epicycles: people cling to a framework (the individual self as the unit of analysis) and add complexity to force data to fit, rather than dropping the framework entirely.
Her earlier work on physicalism and consciousness was based on an outdated “layer cake” model of science (physics at the bottom, subjectivity at the top).
Her realization: what matters is not how layers connect but the interconnectedness between them.
Relatedness is fundamental; change the “bricks” but keep the relatedness, and you get very similar systems.
Levin notes that disciplinary silos create incompatible assumptions: what is obvious in neuroscience (memory stored in electrophysiological circuits, not genes) is heresy in molecular genetics, and vice versa.
He deliberately works across disciplines, applying tools from computer science, behavioral neuroscience, and cybernetics to non-neural biological systems.
Continuity from Single Cells to Human Minds
Levin emphasizes that there is no “magic moment” in development where physics and chemistry give way to cognition.
A human begins as a single cell, which most would describe as a biochemical machine, yet develops into a minded being with no clear phase transition.
The null hypothesis should be continuity between physical systems and minds; the burden of proof lies with those claiming a sharp boundary.
Ciaunica adds that neuroscientists are overly brain-centric because they ignore development: neurons exist in the body before they exist in the brain, and their function in the body must be understood first.
The Spectrum of Persuadability and Goal-Directedness
Levin proposes a “spectrum of persuadability” as an engineering framework for relating to systems at different levels of intelligence.
Mechanical clock: only tool is physical hardware rewiring.
Thermostat: tools from cybernetics; you can rewrite the goal without understanding internal mechanics.
Dog: tools from behavioral science (rewards, punishments); a thin interface allows effective communication without micromanagement.
Human: tools from psychoanalysis, rhetoric; a whisper of a convincing argument can reshape a life.
The key empirical question is: which set of tools works? If tools from cognitive science work on cells, then those cells are cognitive systems, regardless of philosophical preconceptions.
This is an instrumentalist view: cognitive terms are interaction protocols, not objective facts about a system in isolation.
Goals, the Self, and Depression
Ciaunica distinguishes between an implicit, ever-present biological goal (stay alive, keep going) and explicit, conscious goals (becoming an artist, planning a trip).
The embodied goal is shared with all living systems, from viruses to cats, and operates even during sleep or coma.
Disruptions in bodily signals (e.g., from trauma) can sever the connection between these two layers, leading to depression: the system retreats to a safe, low-energy state and resists exploration.
Mental health and flexibility of adaptation are more important than precision of information processing; the key is being able to adapt to constant unpredictability and ignore irrelevant information.
Therapeutic interventions should focus on training flexible, safe interaction rather than fixing something “wrong in the head.”
Aging as a Crisis of Goal-Directedness
Levin’s lab studies aging through the lens of morphogenesis: tissues have inherent memories (bioelectrical, biochemical, biomechanical) that maintain large-scale body shape as individual cells come and go.
These memories are goal states of a cellular collective intelligence, constantly working to reduce error.
New (pre-print) work suggests aging may not be caused solely by accumulated damage or an evolutionary program, but by the intrinsic tendency of goal-directed systems to degrade once their goal is met and no new challenge or reinforcement is present.
Analogy: a snake or dog might be fine in an eternal, unchanging paradise, but a human cognitive system would likely lose coherence over vast timescales without new challenges.
This frames aging as a fundamental feature of being a cognitive system in morphogenetic space, not merely a result of external damage.
Birth, Death, and the Necessity of Contrast
Ciaunica challenges the philosophical obsession with death while ignoring birth.
The opposite of death is birth, not life; life is what stands between the two.
Awareness requires contrast: Dostoevsky’s insight that you cannot be aware of light without some darkness; an infinite, flat eternity would not sustain awareness.
Aging presupposes a beginning; both birth and death are interconnected and necessary.
She notes that the entire conceptual toolbox of philosophy has been shaped by male-dominated traditions, which have historically ignored female embodiment and the experience of birth.
Pregnancy as a Universal State of Interconnectedness
Ciaunica reframes pregnancy not as a special state of some bodies but as a universal condition: every human began by sharing a body with another person.
This makes the “pregnant state” the fundamental unit of analysis: an individual within another individual within a society.
At the cellular level, the immune system is the mechanism that distinguishes self from non-self.
Pregnancy involves a negotiation between two immune systems (mother and fetus) mediated by the placenta, which has its own immune system—creating a hybrid immune system within one organism.
The three stages of pregnancy mirror an inflammatory negotiation, a blissful agreement, and a final inflammatory push for childbirth.
The first lesson of life is negotiation with another organism; from this negotiation comes healthy life, unhealthy life, or death.
Defining the Self
Levin defines a self as a process with several interlocked features:
Goal-directedness: the ability to pursue goals in the cybernetic sense, which can be mapped as a “cognitive light cone” showing the scale of the largest goals a system can pursue (from local sugar concentration for a bacterium to world peace for a human).
A computational boundary between self and world.
The ongoing reinterpretation of one’s own memories: at every moment, the self must tell a coherent story about what it is, how it got here, and what to do next, based on engrams left by past selves.
The self is fundamentally a forward-looking, self-constructive storytelling process; it is plastic, not fixed.
Ciaunica defines the self as an attractor state:
Amid constant change, the self is a state the system works to maintain (e.g., body temperature, blood sugar levels).
It is a desirable attractor between two catastrophes: birth and death.
The self does not choose to be this attractor; it is part of a chain, connected to other systems that came before.
Without environmental resistance (“pushing back”), there would be no attractor state; the two define each other.
Memory, Agency, and the Paradox of Change
Levin challenges the standard model of memory as passive data processed by an active machine.
He proposes that memories and thought patterns have agency of their own, along a continuum: fleeting thoughts (little agency), persistent repetitive thoughts (they reshape the brain via niche construction), personality fragments or alters (with goal-directedness), and full human personalities.
The caterpillar-to-butterfly transition illustrates this: the brain is largely destroyed and rebuilt, yet memories persist—not as literal details (which are useless to the butterfly) but as deep lessons that must be reinterpreted for a new body and world.
This reveals a paradox: if you don’t change, you die; if you do change, you are no longer yourself. Survival requires creative reinterpretation.
The same dynamic applies to embryogenesis: the genome is not a literal blueprint but a set of affordances that cells creatively reshuffle to achieve goals under new conditions.
At every level, the self is not tied to the story told by its past self; it is always free to reinterpret and tell a better story.
The Body Never Forgets
Ciaunica pushes back against the concept of infantile amnesia.
While explicit, verbal recollection may be absent, the body stores powerful memories through movement patterns and sensory encoding.
Non-verbal children with abusive parents carry memories in how they move; adults may unconsciously repeat gestures linked to pre-verbal experiences.
Proust’s madeleine illustrates how sensory states can trigger retrieval without language.
There is a continuum between implicit and implicit memory, not a sharp divide; experience is continuous from the fetal stage onward.
Parting Messages
Levin emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary collaboration: the most interesting connections happen across fields (psychiatry, trauma studies, computer science, machine learning, deep history), and the era of rigid disciplinary boundaries is ending.
Ciaunica’s message to researchers and students:
Be aware that the tools you use (especially language and adult-centric conceptualization) shape the reality you see.
Reject the naive linear progression from “dumb” to “smart”; nature provides the right intelligence at the right moment.
The body is not a mechanical vehicle for the mind; the mind exists to keep the body safe and surviving. Intelligence at the cellular and bodily level is what makes high-level cognition possible.
Restore the “humble roots”—cellular and bodily intelligence—to their proper importance.
