Media

podcasts & video interviews

  • Symmetry, beauty, and the shape of consciousness

    The Trajectory / Worthy Successor

    Episode 17 · December 12, 2025 · 2 hr 5 min

    A wide-ranging conversation on posthuman sentience, physicalism, beauty, symmetry, and the future of consciousness.

  • Michael Levin x Michael Johnson #2: QPT

    Thoughtforms Life Podcast / Michael Levin

    July 9, 2025 · 55 min

    A conversation on consciousness at and below the cellular level, cells as qualia pixels, Platonic spaces, bioelectric symmetry breaking, structured water, and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

  • The vasculature that thinks

    Friends of Analogue

    Episode 1 · May 8, 2025 · 2 hr 34 min

    A long-form conversation introducing vasocomputation and the possibility that the vascular system plays an active computational role.

  • Michael Levin x Michael Johnson #1: Vasocomputation

    Thoughtforms Life Podcast / Michael Levin

    April 17, 2025 · 51 min

    A focused conversation on vasocomputation, vascular tension as priors, trauma, fascia, and bodywide bioelectric field architecture.

  • Reimagining trauma and neuroscience

    The Inner Frontier with Jonny Miller / Nervous System Mastery

    Episode 67 · December 17, 2024 · 1 hr 57 min

    A conversation on trauma, meditation, and the latch hypothesis: a proposed vascular mechanism for persistent embodied patterns.

  • Episode 26 · August 5, 2024 · 1 hr 33 min

    A conversation on jhanas, awakening, trauma release, self-generated bliss, and the role of the vascular system in contemplative transformation.

  • Season 1, Episode 5 · April 15, 2024 · 30 min

    A compact interview on tanha, inner experience, autism, stress, tension, and vasocomputation.

  • Episode 24 · February 6, 2024 · 1 hr 9 min

    A conversation on formalizing consciousness, Principia Qualia, and the Symmetry Theory of Valence.

  • July 12, 2019 · transcript posted February 4, 2021 · 1 hr 26 min

    Transcript and audio of a conversation with meditation teacher Shinzen Young on stress, equanimity, sensory clarity, and mindfulness practice.

  • Conscious black holes and the qualia of infinity

    Waking Cosmos / Origins of Consciousness

    July 24, 2018 · 1 hr 6 min

    An interview on mapping the landscape of mind, qualia formalism, consciousness in cosmological systems, and the future of minds in the universe.

text interviews

  • What is more real, beauty or my shoes?

    Thoughts on Evolutions / Beata Grobenski

    February 5, 2025

    A long-form text interview on beauty, vasocomputation, consciousness, symmetry, memory, and phenomenology.

press coverage

  • June 11, 2025

    Coverage of the Worthy Successor symposium, including Michael Edward Johnson’s argument that consciousness is the home of value and that building AI without understanding it risks either creating suffering or trusting systems without experience.

talks & presentations

  • Branchial Space Ecology - Mike Johnson

    California Institute for Machine Consciousness / MC0001

    May 29–31, 2026 · posted August 3, 2026 · 20 min

    A talk proposing branchial space as a container for knowledge about consciousness, with brains, computers, and other physical systems classified by their branching structure.

  • @Edge City Lanna: The games of life (Vasocomputation 1.5)

    Triplicate / AI x Neuro: Mindful Alignment

    November 2, 2024 · posted November 26, 2024 · 48 min

    A presentation introducing vasocomputation and its implications for neuroscience, contemplative practice, and embodied cognition.

  • June 10–16, 2024 · posted July 29, 2024 · 34 min

    A LabWeek talk on neurotechnology as applied philosophy, pre-paradigmatic neuroscience, and bioelectric approaches to medicine.

  • @ZuConnect: Future neurotech

    ZuConnect Istanbul / StreamETH

    ZuConnect Istanbul · October 31, 2023 · posted January 30, 2024 · 6 min

    Neurotechnology’s relevance to AI safety and progress.

  • A talk on the limits of utility-function language in AI alignment and the need for a phenomenology-grounded science of consciousness.

  • The neuroscience of meditation

    Meditation & Science Jam 2019

    February 7–10, 2019 · posted February 19, 2019 · 1 hr

    A presentation connecting predictive coding, connectome-specific harmonic waves, and neural annealing to meditation.