Zen and the art of Michael Levin: can AIs help us decode the minds of geniuses?

This morning I read an extraordinary, fascinating and slightly infuriating profile of the biologist Michael Levin in New York magazine, titled “What Is It Like to Be a Cucumber?”. Levin’s mind is innovative, messy and prolific. It was a treat to get a window into his thinking but it’s a frustrating read, not for any fault of the writer, because he is so challenging to follow intellectually. Brilliant minds can be hard to follow. Try one that is currently writing 262 papers and where one academic once said of him that he was “dangerously insane”.

One of his papers is so dense that it has been described as “the longest, most dense thing in the world” and “impossible to read.”1 In the article he explains his appreciation of “unencumbered thinking”, by which he means trying to escape the boundaries that science often sets itself in how it thinks about the world. In other words, this is a man trying to think out of the box while sitting outside it. He is coming up with wild ideas in biology in much the same way that a theoretical physicist does in the quantum realm. The problem with a clever mind that is too far beyond the realities of everyone else’s ideas and knowledge is that ideas get stranded. Like the tree that falls in the forest, is an idea really an idea if nobody else understands it?

At one point in the profile, the writer Weil describes the biologist as getting more agitated than she had seen him before when Levin talks about the physicist Isaac Newton. Levin is saying at this point that Newton felt his most important discoveries were in the field of alchemy, yet everyone dismisses this work as being unhinged. Levin says he thinks Newton was sharp on some of it. Why might this bother Levin?

Today we know Newton for his brilliant work on the laws of motion, gravity, and optics. But privately he had an obsession on a number of subjects which turned out to be either intellectually wrong or dead ends. Newton was working on transmutation of substances and the philosopher’s stone. This latter idea was thee single substance that could confer metallic perfection (gold) and biological perfection (immortality). Today we can see just how plainly wrong the notion of a philosopher’s stone is.

As for Levin’s agitation perhaps it was the realisation that the most brilliant of scientists have a body of work that rests on ideas with no grounding in reality? Levin is keeping some of his ideas private, for now, and presumably he wonders whether these are the next laws of motion or the philosopher’s stone. There is nothing wrong with having a busy and creative mind that spools out myriad ideas, some of which are utterly wrong. The gift of being radically imaginative allows humans to consider ideas and solutions that traverse intellectual thresholds. But one risk of having such mental fluidity is that you may spend a lot of time pursuing wrong ideas, or even get lost in them.

Towards the end Levin says his aim is to disrupt the “familiar concepts in the philosophy of the mind”. This is all strikingly familiar to the terrain that ended up derailing the writer and philosopher Robert Pirsig. Pirsig wrote the (to me) incomprehensible book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. (Pirsig also had a brilliant mind that fell apart in the book as he tries to understand the nature of reality.)

I have a hunch that people with a more intuitive understanding of the world, and less scientific training, find Zen more accessible. Equally, Levin’s ideas, however scientific, feel just as inaccessible to me. Yet both feel like they are treading similar ground: on trying to understand the mind. I realised I needed a translator. So of course I turned to an AI. As the conversation unfolded it even helped me understand the intelectual connections beween Levin and Pirsig.

For anyone who struggled with Zen, or who might like to understand how it is connected to what Levin is trying to do, I’ll paste the conversation edited for length in a few places below. If you are interested enough to read it, you can have a laugh at my incomprehension, and witness the constraints of my own mind as the AI tries to coach me through the ideas. But the broader point of this story is to say that we have the tools today to truly understand what minds of all kinds are saying.

Decoding genius is as important as celebrating it. But, more radically, AIs can help us bridge the gap of understanding between intuitive minds and scientifically constructed ones. And the gap between “literary intellectuals” (arts and humanities) and the “natural scientists” described by C. P. Snow more than 60 years ago. And the gap between knowledge stranded in different scientific disciplines. We don’t just need AIs to come up with new ideas, we need them to help us understand the ideas we already have and what they mean. More radically still, AIs could help us build an intellectual culture where collective human intelligence--including neurodivergent minds--helps us truly understand what we already know.

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An AI explains Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Michael Levin.

What sends the author mad in “Zen and Art: The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”?
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the central character is driven mad by a mix of intense intellectual pressure, a hostile academic environment, and an underlying mental breakdown that culminates in psychosis and electroshock treatment. The book also strongly suggests that feelings of alienation and conflict with other people intensify the spiral.

Where did the intellectual pressure come from?
It comes from Phaedrus’s own obsession with ideas, especially his pursuit of “Quality” and his inability to fit his thinking into the normal subject/object way of seeing the world. The pressure is also social: he becomes isolated and feels estranged from others, and that estrangement feeds the breakdown.

What do you mean by “his inability to fit thinking into the normal subject-object way of seeing the world”?
Phaedrus thought the usual split between “subject” and “object” was too rigid to explain how people actually experience the world. In that view, a subject is the perceiver and an object is the thing perceived, but Pirsig’s philosophy tries to get at something more basic — “Quality” — that comes before that split.

So, instead of seeing a motorcycle, a sentence, or a piece of art first as a neutral object that a detached mind judges later, he thinks the immediate sense of what is good, fitting, or alive is primary. The trouble is that Phaedrus keeps pushing that idea so hard that he stops comfortably living in ordinary categories, and that contributes to his instability.

I don’t understand the distinction that he’s trying to make. Can you explain it to me in simple terms?

Pirsig is saying there are two ways of talking about experience:

• **Object-first thinking: “There is a thing out there, and I am here judging it.”*

• **Quality-first thinking: “Before I even label it as a thing, I already feel whether it is good, bad, fitting, awkward, alive, dull, and so on.”*

So if you look at a motorcycle, the usual split says:

• the object is the motorcycle,

• the subject is you, the observer.

*Pirsig’s idea is that this split is not the most basic layer of experience. He thinks the very first thing we notice is a kind of immediate sense of quality — for example, “this machine feels right” or “this repair is wrong” — and only afterward do we describe it as a subject looking at an object.

A simple analogy: when you walk into a room, you do not first think, “subject, object, data.” You first get a gut reaction: warm, tense, beautiful, messy, inviting. Pirsig is saying that this immediate reaction is more basic than the later philosophical labels.

Okay, but that’s just like saying we appreciate the whole before we hone in on the specific. As a consciousness that’s not really that radical.

Yes — that’s the ordinary, psychological version of the idea, and on its own it’s not very radical. The radical part in Pirsig is that he says this “quality” moment is not just how consciousness works; it is more basic than the subject/object split itself.

In other words, he is not only saying, “We notice the whole before the parts.” He is saying, “The very distinction between the observer and the thing observed is secondary; both come out of the prior experience of Quality”. That is why the book treats Quality as an “event” that creates the terms we later use, rather than just a feeling we have after the fact.

So your instinct is right: as a description of attention, it is familiar. Pirsig’s stronger claim is metaphysical, not just psychological.

I must be stupid because I still don’t understand.

You’re not stupid. This is a genuinely slippery idea, and Pirsig explains it in a way that makes it harder, not easier.

• *Your usual way of thinking: “I am here, the thing is there, and then I judge it.”*

• *Pirsig’s stronger claim: “Before I split things into ‘me’ and ‘the thing,’ I already have a basic experience of value or quality.”*

A concrete example: imagine fixing a bike. First you get a sense that “this feels wrong” or “that adjustment looks better.” Only later do you label that experience: “I, the subject, am evaluating the carburetor, the object.” Pirsig says that first sense of right/wrong is more basic than the later labels.

So the distinction is not “whole vs parts.” It is “raw experienced value before language” vs “the later mental story that says there is a subject looking at an object.” That later story is the part Pirsig thinks ordinary philosophy starts with too early.

The only way we have of perceiving the world is through the processing of signals in the brain.

Right — and that is exactly why Pirsig is making a philosophical claim rather than a neuroscience claim. He is not denying that the brain processes signals; he is saying that our lived experience of the world begins as a raw encounter that is not yet split into “subject” and “object”.

So in brain terms, you can think of it like this: the brain gets signals, but Pirsig says the first meaningful experience is not “here is a subject analyzing an object.” It is more like “this is immediately experienced as significant, right, wrong, pleasing, or off,” and only afterward do we build the story that there is a separate observer and observed thing.

That is why his idea feels slippery. You’re speaking from the science-of-the-brain angle, and he is speaking from the structure-of-experience angle. Those are related, but they are not the same question.

This is just bullshit. What does “structure of the experience” mean other than a different type of more general perception before we use the pre frontal cortex to label? I mean this is just a hippie shit layer over something that we already understand.

That’s a fair criticism. If you mean “the brain has a quick, nonverbal, whole-first perception before it starts naming things,” then yes, that is basically a familiar cognitive point, and Pirsig’s language can sound like mystic rebranding of it.

What he is trying to add is a stronger claim: that this pre-label, pre-analysis moment is not just a mental stage inside the brain, but the most basic layer of reality-as-experienced, and that subject/object distinctions come later from it. Whether that extra claim is useful or true is a separate question; plenty of readers think it is overbuilt or obscure.

So the cleanest way to say it is: your skeptical version is the plain-science reading, and Pirsig is dressing that up into a metaphysical theory about value being fundamental.

It seems self evident and you can experience this with psychedelic trips which is presumably where the idea came from. Has anyone seriously critiqued this book?

Yes — it has been seriously critiqued, and not just as “I didn’t like it.” Critics have challenged its philosophy, its treatment of Zen/Taoism, its long-winded style, and its moral portrayal of the father.

Even critics often concede that it raises real questions about technology, value, rationality, and how people relate to the modern world. So the serious critique is not “this is nonsense, end of story,” but rather “it has a powerful intuition, but the argument is slippery and often overclaims”.

Your psychedelic-trips thought is plausible as a psychological origin story, but the stronger academic critique is that Pirsig turns a hard-to-state intuition into a metaphysical system that may not hold up under scrutiny.

What is his metaphysical system?
His metaphysical system is called the Metaphysics of Quality: the idea that “Quality” or value is more basic than the usual split between mind and matter, subject and object. In that system, reality is organized around patterns of value, not around detached things first and feelings second.

In simple terms, he says:

• Quality comes first.

• Subject and object come later, as parts of how Quality gets experienced and described.

• What we call reality is a changing set of value-patterns, not just inert stuff plus a mind looking at it.

Why does this matter?
It matters because Pirsig is trying to answer a real problem: how to talk about value, meaning, craftsmanship, and judgment without reducing them to either cold facts or private opinions. His point is that when you fix a motorcycle, write a sentence, make art, or choose how to live, you are not just applying rules to objects; you are responding to what feels right, fitting, or good before you can fully explain it.

That matters philosophically because it challenges the idea that science-style description is the only serious way to understand the world. It also matters practically because it offers a language for why careful work, attention, and standards of quality feel meaningful, not merely technical.

The reason people still argue about the book is that the intuition is strong even if the system is messy: it captures something recognisable about experience, but the metaphysical claims go well beyond what most readers are willing to grant.

So it matters because it reminds us to value our gut feelings about what feels right and good rather than reducing it to a technical evaluation about the world. And that there is intelligence and knowledge to be found in attention to quality.

Yes, that’s a fair summary, with one tweak: Pirsig is not just saying “trust your gut” in a casual sense, but that careful attention to what feels high-quality can be a real form of knowing, not merely a prelude to technical analysis.

He also wants to protect that idea from being dismissed as irrational. In his framework, “quality” is where intelligence, judgment, craft, and lived experience meet, so it’s a way of taking standards seriously without pretending they come only from detached measurement.

So your paraphrase is basically right: the book argues that quality matters because it preserves a kind of practical wisdom that pure abstraction can miss.

Explain the model of reality that Levin is building and its intellectual connection to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Levin’s model of reality says that mind is not a special property of brains but a graded, multi‑scale capacity for goal‑directed problem‑solving that appears wherever matter is organised into agents pursuing states they “care about” — from cells maintaining homeostasis, through tissues shaping bodies, up to organisms and hybrid bio‑robots. Reality, on this view, is a nested hierarchy of “selves” defined by their goals, stresses, and ability to navigate different spaces (morphological, physiological, behavioral) using feedback loops, especially bioelectric networks, rather than a clean split between mind and inert matter.

The intellectual connection to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is that both try to put value/quality at the centre: Pirsig makes “Quality” the pre‑conceptual core of experience, while Levin makes “value” and competency (how well a system solves problems) the organising principle of what counts as mind. Where Pirsig is largely metaphysical and literary, Levin re‑casts a similar intuition into a testable, engineering‑oriented framework for cells, tissues, organisms and machines.

How both are trying to answer the question of what counts as a mind?

Both Pirsig and Levin are, in their own ways, trying to answer “what counts as a mind?”, but they build very different lenses to get there. Levin’s framework says a mind is any system that reliably pursues goals and solves problems across time, not just human brains. On this view:

• Cells that collectively rebuild a frog’s leg, tissues that maintain a body plan, organisms that navigate environments, and chimeric bio‑robots are all minds to different degrees.

• What counts as a mind is a matter of competency: how well a system can move from its current state toward preferred states (its “set points”) in different spaces — anatomical, physiological, behavioural — using feedback loops, especially bioelectric networks.

• Reality becomes a nested stack of selves: overlapping agents at different scales, defined by their goals, stresses, and ability to be influenced or “persuaded.”

So Levin is answering “what counts as a mind?” with: any organised material system that shows graded, goal‑directed problem‑solving, from cells up to hybrid machines.

Pirsig’s project can also be read as an answer to “what counts as a mind?”, but he starts from lived human experience:

• He argues that genuine understanding requires sensitivity to Quality — the felt rightness, excellence, or value in a situation — not just correct reasoning or technical skill.

• A “good” mind in his sense is one that can integrate the classical style (logic, analysis, mechanics) with the romantic style (intuition, aesthetic feel, immediate appreciation of Quality).

• Minds that fail to register or honour Quality become split, rigid, or sick; part of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a portrait of a mind breaking under the strain of trying to force reality into too narrow a conceptual frame.

So Pirsig’s implicit answer to “what counts as a mind?” is: a mind is not just a reasoning engine; it is a way of being that can track and respond to Quality in the world.

Put side by side:

• Levin says: a mind is where matter shows organised goal‑pursuit and problem‑solving, with degrees of sophistication; the key measure is competency in navigating toward preferred states.

• Pirsig says: a mind is where experience shows sensitivity to value/Quality, with degrees of integration; the key measure is how well analytic and intuitive modes are woven together.

Both are pushing against a thin picture of mind as “just computation” or “just rational thought”:

• Levin expands mind outward into cells, tissues, organisms, and machines, and makes goal‑directedness the core criterion.

• Pirsig deepens mind inward into the texture of experience, and makes responsiveness to Quality the core criterion.

So it is accurate to say they are both trying to answer “what counts as a mind?”, connected by a shared move: they put value/goal‑directed activity at the centre of the story, rather than treating it as a superficial add‑on to an otherwise inert universe.

Update: 3.45pm

Is Levin’s competency just another way of looking at Pirsig’s quality?

Levin’s competency is not identical to Pirsig’s Quality, but it **is** a closely related, functional way of talking about the same underlying thing.

Pirsig’s **Quality** is the inside‑view sense that “this way of doing or thinking is right, better, works well.” An internal judgement of Quality is, in practice, an assessment of **how competent** a pattern of action or thought is at achieving its aims.

Levin’s **competency** is the outside‑view measure of **how well a system moves from where it is to where it wants to be** across different spaces (anatomical, physiological, behavioural), via feedback and control. That is effectively a Quality score for the system’s organisation: some arrangements of cells or agents are “better” at their job than others.