Leo Bezhanishvili

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin Outstanding 📸

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

Thank you very much for your reply, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer.

One thing I’m still trying to understand is this: why would the fact that the limitation comes from deeper evolutionary dynamics make it any less modifiable?

My intuition is that even if the germline–somatic stem cell competition was the deep evolutionary trade-off that led to the loss of whole-body regeneration, the underlying regenerative program might still be present but simply switched off or overridden.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

I’ve read the 2020 Fields & Levin paper “Why isn’t sex optional?” several times. It presents germline stem cell competition with somatic stem cells as the key developmental mechanism that destabilized vegetative reproduction and led to the loss of reliable whole-body regeneration in many lineages.
In recent interviews and talks, however, you’ve emphasized ecological factors — specifically that robust regeneration is largely an aquatic phenomenon and that terrestrial environments strongly favor rapid scarring over regeneration due to risks like infection, desiccation, and physical damage.
Could you clarify how these two explanations relate? Is the stem-cell competition the primary internal reason many lineages lost the capacity for WBR, while the aquatic/terrestrial distinction explains why regeneration is rarely maintained or favored in land animals?

If the germline–somatic stem cell competition had never occurred, would terrestrial ecological pressures alone still have driven most land lineages toward scarring rather than regeneration?
And conversely, if animals had remained in supportive aquatic environments, would the stem-cell competition mechanism still have led to widespread loss of reliable WBR?
Thank you — I’d really appreciate your thoughts on how these levels fit together.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin @GrantHBrennerMD Thank you so much, I'm truly grateful. Your work means the world to me.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

Thank you Michael, I’ve read “Who’s the data?” many times (practically by heart at this point) and it’s one of my absolute favorites for precisely these reasons.

Looking forward to the quantification work and how it connects to maintaining coherent goal-directed patterns across scales. Legend!

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

Mike, not related here, but, in the Ingressing Minds work and TAME framework you’ve described patterns (including high-agency “kinds of minds”) ingressing via physical pointers/interfaces, with bodies/hardware as critical but non-primary scratchpads. You’ve also emphasized dissolving the thoughts/thinkers binary — all agents are patterns in excitable media that can spawn others, on a true continuum with no bright lines.

Any recent updates or new experiments/papers on how this Platonic/latent space + scratchpad view is playing out in practice (e.g., with biobots, anthrobots, aging/morphostasis work, or synthetic systems)? Thoughts are thinkers and especially interested in how the hardware/software flip and pattern-as-agent idea is informing new interventions or scaling of diverse intelligence.

I am particularly interested if it Is a loss of stability or persistence of the higher-level pattern itself, where the organism-level goal state gradually loses its ability to maintain order and entropy takes over?

Or could the pattern/virtual governor remain largely intact, while accumulated changes at the cellular level make the “hardware” less able to interpret and execute those instructions?

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

Brilliant preprint, Michael, Leo.
Figure 3’s pivot is profound and raises a massive cybernetic question about the maintenance phase. You note the Virtual Governor (VG) maintains alignment by translating global constraint violations (error/stress) into local incentives.

If aging is the loss of this virtual governing direction, does the relational architecture evaporate precisely because the morphogenetic computation is "finished"? i.e., Once the target morphology of adulthood is reached, the global error drops to near-zero, starving the VG of the informational flow needed to keep the cellular collective aligned.

If true, does thermodynamic stability in adulthood require us to synthetically induce a "perpetual morphogenetic delta"—a harmless, artificial bioelectric error—just to keep the Virtual Governor permanently engaged?

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

Relatedly, in some interviews you’ve noted that terrestrial environments may favor rapid wound sealing over full regeneration for survival reasons, while aquatic settings are more permissive of regeneration.

How do these ecological/evolutionary trade-offs relate to the internal stem-cell competition mechanism as explanations for why most complex land mammals largely lost reliable WBR? I understand the stem-cell competition is a fundamental evolutionary phenomenon rather than a mechanism we would target directly for intervention, but I’m still curious which level feels more fundamental.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin @danfaggella @p_m_peterson You look great 😎

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin Just adore all of them 🧡

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@MacrinePhD @drmichaellevin @mitpress More than outstanding, thank you Sheila, Mike 💙

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin Found the natural-light, macroscopic version of your infrared Godzilla out in the wild. I call him Treezilla.)

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

100% agree. Many longevity researchers assume that if you just fix the "meat" (cellular aging, inflammation), the mind will naturally default to perfect happiness.

But as your recent psychiatry slides highlight, if the brain is a pointer, a rejuvenated 25-year-old body is simply a flawless antenna. And a flawless antenna can still tune into chaotic frequencies or suffer from dissociation and FND.

These are geometric frustrations of the software itself. Even with flawless, immortal hardware, the mental health field will still be necessary to provide the bespoke "bioprompting" needed to repair the cognitive glue and keep the collective self integrated.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin Thank you 🩶

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

I think this is only a problem for theories that locate the organism's information content primarily in the genome and epigenome.

From a bioelectric and multiscale perspective, serial cloning tells us that resetting local cellular states does not restore the higher-level control architecture of the organism. That's not surprising.

Entropy accumulates in every system. The interesting question is not whether damage exists, but why some living systems can maintain, regenerate, and recover anatomical order despite it. The existence of robust pattern homeostasis already suggests that biological information is not reducible to molecular state alone.

@drmichaellevin

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@examachine Calling a legendary person an idiot is nothing but shameful. I’m not even going to read your posts. I already noticed that you claimed aging is the result of a genetic program. You are wrong about that as well, just as you are wrong about courtesy, ethics, and morality.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

When he talks about germline sequestration and boredom: He is speaking as a radical systems biologist. He is explaining his core, true thesis: that aging is a software limitation born from evolutionary trade-offs, and that biology is not dictated by hardcoded DNA.

When he talks about cosmic rays in mainstream interviews: He is defaulting back to standard evolutionary biology text to make a point about limitations.

Mainstream science teaches that random mutations from radiation are what drove evolution and gave us our current biology.

Levin invokes this traditional view strictly to highlight how miserable our "natural" state is—trapped with lower back pain, astigmatism, and low IQ because we were shaped by random space particles rather than intelligent design.

[Leo Bezhanishvili @LeoBez7]

@drmichaellevin He’s not saying mutations cause aging in his framework. In the same interview he explains aging as loss of goal-directed commitment after development/reproduction — cells gradually lose collective alignment to the shared pattern. Cosmic rays serve as one concrete example of ancient constraints on the starting set points.
I’m still confused by the mutational framing though. If the deeper reason we lost whole-body regeneration and immortality is germline stem cells winning the competition against non-germline stem cells (as argued in Fields et al. 2020: https://t.co/nvxj7yvtNA…), then why emphasize cosmic rays and mutational trajectories instead of that stem-cell competition mechanism?
My current read is that he’s using it rhetorically for mass accessibility: even something as seemingly uncontrollable as cosmic-ray mutations doesn’t have to trap us in this attractor. We can reset the higher-level bioelectric goals and escape historical limits.

[Stuart Sims @SimsYStuart]

Great interview with @drmichaellevin and @mike_lustgarten where they discuss the biophysics of aging. I want to give Lustgarten credit for asking Levin great questions that took the conversation in new directions.

My Response:

Levin frames biological aging set points as a consequence of cosmic rays and random mutation. Which strikes me as an odd framing since Levin’s own research provides evidence that’s not true.

Biological telos exist within a nested hierarchy of competency that extend from the scale of bacteria to the scale of the global organism. In natural ecosystems, the species specific lifespan is determined not be the competency of the organism itself but by the homeostatic needs at the scale of the ecological niche (ecosystem).

In that context, individual human aging cannot be understood in isolation from the hierarchy of holons (holarchy) which assigns each species a rate of regeneration (reproductive lifespan) at nested morphological/temporal scales.

How do we understand the significance of human aging outside natural ecosystems. We’ve constructed artificial human ecosystems which will give us the power to determine our own rate of aging. In my view, these ideas/concepts need to be more fully understood before we start monkeying around with human aging, which represents (among other things) a fundamental characteristic of the human reproductive lifecycle. 🙈🙉🙊🙏🏻👇🏻

Source:%20YouTube https://t.co/JMAgIByn8z