Reed Bender

Research

Applied and theoretical research into intelligence across biology and computation.

Featured
arXiv preprint · 2025 · first author
What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life
Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Michael Levin
68 expert definitions of life from 14 countries, analyzed by 3 LLMs using pairwise correlation, agglomerative clustering, and t-SNE projection. What most consider a taxonomy, we turned into a topology.

A decade of systems engineering and applied ML on cancer genomics teaches you exactly where computation runs out of biology to explain.

Give me a perfect dataset. Single-cell resolution, full temporal coverage, spatially coordinated. Let me model every transport, every signaling cascade, every transcription, every voltage gradient. That total description is a formal system. I could prove exactly what is happening in a cell and still not tell you why. Because whatever impresses upon the mechanisms from the outside to fight against entropy doesn’t live at the scale of the parts.

The boundary is Gödelian. Any formal system rich enough to describe what’s happening in a cell will generate true statements it can’t prove from within itself. The organizing principle is visible everywhere in the data and derivable from none of it.

The same questions keep surfacing in my applied work… what is a living system actually computing, where does the software come from, and how are bugs introduced (e.g. cancer)? The data can point at these things. It can circle them, even trace their edges. But the answers live somewhere the instruments can’t reach, and getting closer requires a different kind of inquiry.

"It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order, and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order."

— Douglas Hofstadter

Peer-Reviewed Publications