Levin
Article
Levin is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2022 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Levin on the Effective Altruist Forum rephrases this thought experiment”; “Blackiston, Shomrat, and Levin discuss more examples like this in a 2015 article”; “Blackiston, Shomrat, and Levin discuss more examples like this in a 2015 article titled “ The stability of memories during brain remodeling: A perspective ”“. It most often appears alongside 80,000 Hours, A Change of Heart, abolitionist literature.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 23, 2022
- Last seen: September 12, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- A Change of Heart (1 shared issues)
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- abolitionist literature (1 shared issues)
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- Abraham (1 shared issues)
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- Adams (1 shared issues)
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- Adams and Garrison (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
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- AI risk (1 shared issues)
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- Ajeya Cotra (1 shared issues)
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- al-Qaeda (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander Forbes (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Levin on the Effective Altruist Forum rephrases this thought experiment to be about our obligations to people who aren’t born yet:
Blackiston, Shomrat, and Levin discuss more examples like this in a 2015 article titled “The stability of memories during brain remodeling: A perspective”:
… if repeatedly shocked after presentation of a light, a planarian will learn to avoid the light (Thompson and McConnell, 1955). Now suppose you cut off a planarian’s head after it has learned to avoid light. Within a week, the head will have regrown. The critical question is: will the new head remember to avoid light? Remarkably, a number of experiments, using light-shock conditioning and other learning tasks, suggested (albeit controversially) that the answer is yes (McConnell et al., 1959; Corning and John, 1961; Shomrat and Levin, 2013). What kind of memory storage mechanism can withstand utter destruction of brain tissue?