One day when Michael Levin was a boy in Moscow, he didn’t want to eat his vegetables. “You need to eat your cucumber because it’s going to be sad,” his mother said. “You’re not letting it do its role.”

Levin scoffed. “My cucumber is not going to be sad.”

His mother asked, “How would you know?”

Levin is now a distinguished professor of biology at Tufts with a joint appointment at Harvard, but he prefers the title “natural philosopher.” He has pale-green eyes and a thick mop of brown hair that looks like a tea cozy for his brain. Since age 10, he has lived within a ten-mile radius of his current home in Beverly, Massachusetts. People come to him with unusual requests: Can you help my friend regrow the severed nerves in her hand? Can you cure my child’s birth defect? Please help “ensure a maximal sentience facilitation into the Singularity and beyond.” He tries to be nice. He is very nice. But his mother’s question — how can we recognize other kinds of minds — led him to try to topple the way we’ve understood the universe, so he is also very busy.

He refuses to wear shirts with buttons. He eats like a picky 6-year-old. He plays absurdist games with himself: “Imagine gene-expression space, 20,000 dimensions … You can taste ten parameters of your own blood chemistry.” The legendary theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston describes Levin, still full of wonder at age 57, as “a child in a senior scientist’s body.”

Levin sits in his home for ten, sometimes 12 hours a day, talking to experts in math, psychoanalysis, Buddhism, robotics, biology, AI. He thinks all day about minds: what they are, what they need to stay healthy, all the forms they take, whether senescence is a kind of boredom. (He thinks maybe yes.) In his library is almost every book he has ever read (Asimov, Darwin, Freud, Hume) and bongo drums he used to play with his kids. The room is not Levin’s brain, but it’s a decent approximation. He believes that like a library, all intelligence is collective and multi-scalar: Your cells are intelligent; your liver is intelligent, as a collection of cells; you are intelligent, as a collection of organs. If the collective breaks down, cancer, death, and stupidity ensue.

On walks with his friends, Levin just keeps talking about “diverse intelligence” or “kinds of minds” or “mind blindness” in his sci-fi Hamiltonian way, as though he’s running out of time, which he increasingly feels he is. What if your tumors talked to the rest of your body and you just didn’t understand what they were saying? What if some very dense aliens emerged from the center of the earth and they saw us as flimsy patterns in gas?

Levin did not expect to reach middle age and still be making a living as a biology professor. He had read the histories of people with ideas ahead of their time. He figured his life trajectory would likely involve getting kicked out of the academy, as the academy is fond of people asking narrow questions, not boundary-crashing, precariously close-to-woo-sounding paradigmatic thinkers whose ideas strain the limits of language. Yet the opposite has happened: Levin runs a lab with around 40 scientists. His H-index (a metric of how many papers you publish and how often those papers are cited) is an astounding 110. Several people told me they think he’ll win a Nobel Prize.

He is also a cult hero. Fans make knockoffs of blingy Jesus-pendant necklaces with Levin’s face instead of Christ’s. A man recently showed up at his lab seeking Levin’s help in compiling a dictionary of Levinese terms. The optimizing-podcast bros are smitten. Lex Fridman seemed so besotted when speaking with Levin that he forgot the word melt. (“What’s that called when you put the cheese on the toast?”)

A quick Levin primer (and don’t be disheartened if you don’t understand this now. James Monaghan, the chair of the Northeastern University biology department who collaborates with Levin, often listens to him and says, “I can’t. Maybe I’m not deep enough?”): (1) Intelligence exists in many more forms, and at many more scales, than humans are good at seeing. (2) How cells cooperate in the body expresses intelligence. A pigeon or a zebra fish or your hand knows what shape it’s supposed to be. If injured, cells work together to return the body to its target shape. (3) Bioelectricity is a language of the body. Or, as Levin puts it, “the cognitive glue.” (4) Those wonderful, brainy things neurons do, talking in electrical signals? All your cells can do that. (Neurons are just very excitable cells.)

Levin has been releasing his ideas slowly his entire adult life — “turning the knob,” as he puts it. Five years ago, he was at 50 percent. Now he’s at 80 percent. A big jump came last year when Levin published a preprint paper called “Ingressing Minds.”“To put all the metaphysical cards on the table,” he writes in the introduction. Then in rhetoric that’s nearly impossible to follow (“Emphasizing the principles of continuity and pragmatism, and using morphogenesis as a tractable model system in which to develop these ideas”), he argues that intelligence comes from a nonphysical realm and flows (“ingresses”) into bodies. That nonphysical realm, he says, is where mathematical ideas like pi and e reside. We already accept there is some stuff in that realm. Why would we assume there is not more?

Critics accuse Levin of all kinds of teleological crimes — making unfalsifiable claims, using words in ways that render those words meaningless. Levin is unfazed. In his talks, he tries to disarm his detractors by preempting the accusation that he’s nuts: “I have some unusual things to say and then I have some crazy things to say”; “So this is a kind of crazy claim I’m making.” His true retort is his wet lab. There, at the bench, he’s working to prove his metaphysics by running old-school (in a way) biological experiments. He studies flatworms with two heads. Frogs with eyes on their stomachs. Little round creatures called xenobots, synthesized from frog skin cells. They swim like tiny Pac-Men. They do not exist in nature.

“The only thing that ever settles arguments is technology,” Levin tells me, a line he borrowed from biophysicist Chris Fields. “People have been saying for thousands of years what they think” about minds, consciousness, souls, energy fields. “What I can contribute is ways to test some of those things.”

Levin defines himself as a pragmatist, meaning he believes you should judge an idea by its consequences. In a lab, this means by the questions an idea pushes you to ask, the results of the experiments a hypothesis spawns. If he’s right when he turns the knob up to 100 percent, his metaphysics will help transform not just how we think about minds throughout the universe but how we understand intelligence in our bodies — and, more important to the practical among us, our ability to use that intelligence to engineer and repair our physical forms. How can we communicate, intelligence-to-intelligence, with our organs? Our cells? Other kinds of minds (his phrase)? If we learn to do this, Levin believes, we can unlock the secrets of regeneration. We can forestall aging. We can holistically treat cancer. We can achieve what he calls “freedom of embodiment.”

“I don’t say anything unless it’s actionable — unless I either have evidence for it or I think there’s a research program that might produce the evidence,” he claims.

That is a big promise for a man who also says your mind and the mind of a cucumber come from the same realm as math.

When Levin was 4, he swallowed one end of a piece of thread to see what was inside his stomach. The thread was digested a bit. He had asthma, and to calm him during attacks, his father, an engineer, took the back off the TV and showed Levin the parts inside. Levin collected insects and looked at them like an engineer, too — why was the inside assembled that way? It was a terrible time to be Jewish in the Soviet Union; the Levins applied for and finally got a visa. En route to the U.S., they lived above a rundown brothel in Austria, which was “tremendously lovely and clean and beautiful.” Then a little apartment in a refugee camp in Italy, which seemed like luxury: “They had food. Bananas!” Outside Boston, they fell in with a group of Russian émigrés.

Levin’s father was a polymath (he spent ten years writing a narrative history of 17th-century Russian tsars). He oversaw Levin’s scientific education, asking about every rock they saw on a walk, every piece of furniture in the house: “How do you suppose that got that way? Why isn’t it some other way? What would it take for this to be different?” His mother was a concert pianist who also designed knitwear but spent most of her life’s energy as a holistic healer. The entire neighborhood came to her, “knocking down the door in the middle of the night. She had this incredible skill of seeing the world from other people’s perspectives, anything’s perspective,” Levin says. “The whole idea that there’s more mind out there was obvious to her.”

Levin read all the time — H. G. Wells, philosophy, Russian books on particle physics. He had two best friends, St. Petersburger twins, who fought over who could ask him questions about the world and marveled at his commitment to fishing out pond scum from the water trap at the Swampscott, Massachusetts, golf course. After discussing the gore index of the Friday the 13th movies, Levin would spin mini-lectures about cybernetics, cell division, and electric fields. “And then,” one of the twins told me, “I would not understand.”

School was boring, “absolutely harmful.” Nothing there addressed anything he cared about. After he got some bar mitzvah money, Levin started calling Fisher Scientific and ordering supplies. This required making up a fake school, Saint Augustine School of Science. He ordered chloroform, “weird protozoa, little water creatures.” He put magnets in his fish tanks to see if the creatures cared about that. How did we go from collections of cells “consistent with the dumb laws of chemistry” to having inspiration and thought? Why did humans see themselves as unique in the universe? He didn’t think it........

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