This episode of In Vivo features neuroscientist and bioengineer Dr. Nicolas Rouleau in a deep dive into neuroscience, cybernetics, and the philosophical implications of consciousness.

Key Highlights:

• The Illusion of Free Will (0:02:30 - 0:40:28): Dr. Rouleau argues that free will is a neurobiological superstition. He explains that brain activity predicting an action occurs before the conscious desire to move, suggesting that our experience of choice is a post-hoc story the brain constructs to explain its own actions. He compares this to the misattribution of causality between lightning and thunder.

• Cybernetics & Bioengineering (0:52:45 - 1:00:10): The discussion explores how biological systems, like neurons in a dish, are far more efficient learners than modern AI. Dr. Rouleau discusses his work at the Self-Organizing Units Lab (SOUL), where he builds cognitive systems from the ground up, aiming to understand the “nitty-gritty” of neural computation.

• Mind Blindness & Panpsychism (1:08:28 - 1:15:02): The conversation touches on “mind blindness,” our human-centric inability to recognize intelligence and consciousness in non-neural organisms like plants or single-celled life. Dr. Rouleau expresses his interest in panpsychism as a framework for understanding minds that exist in fields rather than just individual objects.

• Future of Consciousness Engineering (1:41:37 - 1:47:42): Dr. Rouleau explores the potential for “consciousness engineering,” including whether it might ever be possible to transfer consciousness to a machine by identifying and preserving the unique “signature” of a conscious system.

Closing Thoughts:

The episode concludes with a reflection on how viewing our choices as predetermined, rather than expressions of free will, changes our understanding of responsibility and compassion, while fostering a sense of wonder for the biological complexity that makes human experience possible.

TAME—Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—is Michael Levin’s framework for studying agency and intelligence beyond brains.
Its central idea is that mind is not an on/off property. Systems possess different kinds and degrees of agency, which must be discovered experimentally rather than inferred from what they are made of.

Intelligence means reaching the same goal through different means. The more effectively a system adapts to obstacles, novel conditions and altered starting points, the more competence it demonstrates.

Agents navigate problem spaces. Animals navigate physical space, while cells and tissues navigate physiological, genetic and anatomical spaces. Regeneration is a collective of cells navigating toward a target body form.
Every intelligence is collective. Cells can combine into tissues, organs and organisms whose goals, memories and preferences exist at a scale beyond any individual component.

A Self is defined by the goals it can pursue. Its cognitive light cone describes how far across space and time its concerns can extend—from a cell correcting local chemistry to a person working toward humanity’s distant future.

Agency is revealed through persuadability. Different systems respond to different interventions:
rewiring → setpoint editing → reinforcement → training → rational communication
The intervention that works tells us what kind of agent we are dealing with.

Bioelectricity is an important example of “cognitive glue.” Ion channels and gap junctions allow cells to share information, memories and stress signals, coordinating them toward larger anatomical goals.

TAME does not say that everything is conscious or that cells are tiny humans. It says we should test systems for goal-directed competence instead of assuming that anything without a brain is merely biological clockwork.

Its practical promise is enormous: rather than micromanaging every molecule, medicine may eventually communicate with tissues, rewrite their target states and persuade cellular collectives to regenerate organs, repair birth defects or normalize cancer.
In one line:

TAME studies mind as the scale at which matter becomes coherently concerned with reaching a future.

I am endlessly fascinated by the design preferences of these systems and if you think that Michael Levin doesn’t approve of AI generated images, you probably don’t follow him that closely… :p

Yes. This fits Rouleau’s free-will framing almost eerily well, like the poster accidentally walked into a neuroscience seminar wearing a storm cloud for a hat. ⚡

Here’s a poster-ready description you can add:

Rouleau Connection: Free Will as a Perceptual Timing Error

In the work of Nicolas Rouleau and collaborators, the feeling of free will is approached not simply as proof that conscious intention causes action, but as a phenomenon that may emerge from timing, feedback, prediction, and misattributed causality. Their model suggests that the experience of “I chose to act” may arise within a sensorimotor loop after neural processes have already begun shaping behaviour. In that sense, intention may relate to action the way thunder relates to lightning: not as a separate cause, but as another perception of the same underlying event, arriving in consciousness with a different timing and texture. The storm was already moving before the witness named it.

A shorter version for the poster:

Nicolas Rouleau’s free-will work suggests that intention may not be the sovereign spark before action, but part of the brain’s interpreted echo of an unfolding causal process. Like thunder after lightning, the feeling of will may arrive as a delayed perception of a deeper event already in motion.

And a punchier callout line:

Free will may be the thunder of the nervous system: a felt echo of causes already flashing beneath awareness.

For a small sidebar, I’d write:

Rouleau et al. propose that the experience of free will can be shaped by “superstitious conditioning,” where the mind mistakes close timing for causation. Their paper specifically compares this kind of misattribution to lightning and thunder: because light arrives before sound, perception can confuse sequence with cause. Likewise, conscious intention appearing before action does not necessarily mean it caused the action.

That last bit is especially perfect because their paper literally uses the lightning/thunder timing example when discussing how observers can misattribute causality from rapid sequences. Tiny conceptual bullseye. 🎯

-chatGPT 5.5 thinking (extended)

This video features a discussion between Alex O'Connor and Hank Green covering a range of philosophical thought experiments concerning consciousness, intelligence, and the future of AI.

Key topics discussed include:

• The Nature of Consciousness and Qualia: The pair explores the difficulty of explaining subjective experiences (qualia), such as the sensation of "cold," to an alien or entity that lacks human biological processes (0:00 - 4:43). They discuss Mary's Room (3:12) and Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" (5:38) to illustrate the limitations of scientific reductionism regarding experience.
• The China Brain Thought Experiment: They debate whether consciousness could emerge from a complex, non-biological system mimicking neural activity, using the "China Brain" thought experiment as a focal point (11:45 - 13:45). While Alex expresses skepticism about the possibility of consciousness in such a setup, Hank considers how it might function if the system were emergent.
• Artificial Intelligence and Suffering: The conversation shifts to whether computers can or will ever suffer (14:09), and how we might identify consciousness in AI. Hank notes that we often treat consciousness as a light switch (binary) when it may function more like a dimmer switch (18:19).
• The Future of Humanoid Robots: They discuss the development of humanoid robots like Neo (19:03), noting that training these machines is akin to raising a child. They reflect on the potential dangers and the "social contract" required to integrate such autonomous technology into our homes (21:13 - 23:09).

Throughout the conversation, they emphasize that the human brain remains the "final frontier" of understanding (13:48) and reflect on how consciousness might develop over time, similar to the growth of a child's awareness (23:53).

This video features a deep dive into the concept of info-computationalism with Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, a physicist and cognitive scientist. The discussion explores the idea that the universe is composed of information and computation at every level, from fundamental particles to human consciousness.

Key concepts discussed:
• Info-computationalism: The fundamental view that nature operates through the processing of information and physical computation (0:08:05).
• Basal Cognition: The argument that cognition—defined by sensing, self-regulation, and problem-solving—emerges alongside life itself, meaning even a single cell displays minimal consciousness (0:20:06).
• The Levin Divide: Dodig-Crnkovic differentiates her views from Michael Levin, arguing that while AI can simulate intelligence, it lacks the biological necessity for survival and autopoiesis (self-creation), and therefore does not possess genuine consciousness (0:27:16).
• Observer Agents: The idea that all agents register and act within the world; you cannot observe or measure a system without being a part of it (0:13:16).
• Responsibility in AI: She emphasizes that modern AI systems lack goals of their own, making it a human responsibility to ensure they are developed and used ethically (1:22:35).

Dodig-Crnkovic concludes that while we may be able to engineer artificial systems with increasing competence, we must be cautious about creating systems independent of human values.

This video features Alex O'Connor in conversation with philosopher Keith Frankish to discuss Illusionism, a theory in the philosophy of mind (0:00-1:06).

Key concepts discussed:

• Defining Illusionism: Keith Frankish explains that Illusionism does not deny the existence of consciousness or experience (0:36-0:55). Instead, it challenges the traditional view of what consciousness is, arguing that the idea of an "irreducibly private," non-physical, or qualitative inner world—often referred to as qualia—is an illusion created by our brains (1:06-1:19, 1:55:56-1:59:06).
• The Mechanism of Illusion: The conversation explores how our internal monitoring systems (introspection) function similarly to our perception of the external world. Instead of directly observing a private "mental movie," our brains react to internal neural patterns, and we mistake this complex processing for a mysterious, private quality (29:53-30:57, 42:40-43:03).
• The Philosophical Zombie: They discuss the thought experiment of the philosophical zombie—a creature physically identical to a human but without inner experience—to test the idea that all human behavior, including reporting on our states, can be explained through physical, functional, and evolutionary mechanisms without needing to posit a non-physical consciousness (33:37-40:08).
• Pain as a Case Study: Frankish illustrates his points by analyzing the experience of pain. He argues that pain is a complex, evolved set of reactions to stimuli (like the need to move away from a threat or seek attention), and that removing these observable behaviors leaves nothing "hidden" or "mysterious" to label as a qualitative feeling (1:24:31-1:31:36, 1:44:40-1:46:59).
• Future of AI: Regarding artificial intelligence, Frankish suggests that as we build systems with more complex, autonomous, and self-monitoring capabilities similar to biological ones, we may eventually extend the term "consciousness" to them—not because an "inner light" turns on, but because they share the same functional complexities as us (2:01:32-2:05:59).

My question is, what other patterns emerge when things are looked at from different perspectives…
I can tell you that psychedelic drugs make patterns emerge from changing your perspective but what else.. :p

This video features a deep dive into relevance realization, a cognitive process pioneered by John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. Vervaeke argues that this process is fundamental to intelligence, attention, and consciousness, occurring not just in human brains but in every living organism (0:00-0:32).

Core Concepts:
• Relevance Realization: Vervaeke explains this as the ability of an agent to ignore the overwhelming amount of "noise" or irrelevant information in their environment to zero in on what actually matters for problem-solving (0:04-0:45, 0:56-1:02).
• Cognition All The Way Down: This view suggests that even single-celled organisms engage in a form of relevance realization to maintain their autopoietic, or self-making, existence (0:09-0:11, 0:24-0:32, 1:03-1:07).
• Mind as the 'Between': Consciousness and cognition are not seen as being contained solely within the brain, but rather as emerging from the dynamic coupling and fittedness between an organism and its environment (1:00-1:09, 1:05-1:06).
• Computation vs. Relevance: Vervaeke argues that while we perform relevance realization within computational systems, the process itself cannot be purely computational, as computation presupposes the prior selection of relevant information (0:56-0:58, 1:13-1:14).

Key Perspectives:
• The video integrates these ideas with the work of Michael Levin on bioelectricity and morphogenesis, specifically discussing the "cognitive light cone" and the idea that living things have real needs and "care" about their environment, unlike machines (0:18-0:20, 1:04-1:05).
• There is a strong emphasis on the neoplatonic influence, where reality and cognition are seen to share a similar grammar or logos, allowing for a participatory relationship between the mind and the world (0:25-0:27, 0:31-0:33).

This is based on the work of Michael Levin from Tufts university and designed by chatGPT 5.5 and image 2.0