Key points

Real minds act, adapt, and feel. AI only copies the language of those experiences.

AI sounds personal, but nothing behind the words is lived or felt.

The risk with AI is forgetting that fluent language isn’t the same as a mind.

I wasn’t expecting a conversation about single cells and cognition to explain why a large language model (LLM) feels like a person. But that’s exactly what happened when I listened to Michael Levin on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Levin wasn’t debating consciousness or speculating about artificial intelligence (AI). He was describing how living systems, from clusters of cells to complex organisms, cooperate and solve problems. The explanation was authoritative and grounded, but the implications push beyond biology.

At one point, Levin shared a slide

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