Michael Levin: Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Lex Fridman Podcast #325

It turns out that if you train a planarian and then cut off its head, it will regenerate a new brain that still remembers the original information. I think planarians have the answer to almost all of

life

's deep questions, for one thing, they are similar. to our ancestors so they have true symmetry they have a true brain they are not like earthworms they are much more advanced

life

forms they have many different internal organs but they are these small um they are approximately you know maybe two centimeters in the centimeter to two in size I have a head in the tail and the first thing is that they are immortal so they do not age there is no such thing as an old planarian so that right there tells you that these theories of thermodynamic limitations of lifespan are wrong, they are not, no it's so good over time everything degrades no planarian can continue uh you probably know how long they've been around 400 million years so these are the actual planarians in our lab there's actually physical continuity with the planarian we're here 400 ago millions of years.

The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists I've ever spoken to, he and his lab at Tufts University are working on New Ways to Understand and Control the Formation of Complex Patterns in Biological Systems Andre Carpathi , a world-class artificial intelligence researcher, is the person who first introduced me to Michael Levin's work. I mention this because these two people make me realize that

biology

has a lot to teach us. about Ai and AI could have a lot to teach us about

biology

, this is Alex Friedman's

podcast

to support him, check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here is Michael Levin.

Embryogenesis is the process of building the human body from a single cell. I think it is one of the most incredible things that exists on Earth from a single embryo. So how does this process work? Yes, it is an incredible process. I think it is perhaps the most magical process that exists and I think one of the most fundamentally interesting. The good thing about this is that it shows that each of us takes the journey from so-called pure physics to the right mind because we all start life as a single dormant, unfertilized oocyte and it's basically a bag of chemicals and you look at it and say: "Alright".

This is chemistry and physics and then nine months and a few years later you have an organism with a high level of cognition and preferences and an inner life and so on and what

embryogenesis

tells us is that this transformation from physics to mind is gradual. , it's smooth, there's no special place where you know that lightning says boom, now you've gone from physics to true cognition, that doesn't happen and so we can see in this process that the whole mystery, you know, basically, the biggest mystery of the you of the universe. How do you get mind from matter from quote-unquote physics?

Yeah, where's the magic? How do we obtain information encoded in DNA and make physical reality from that information? So one of the things that I think is really important if we're going to include DNA in this picture is to think about the fact that what DNA encodes is the hardware of life. DNA contains the instructions for the kind of micro-level hardware that every cell can play with, so all the proteins, all the signaling factors. ion channels all the cool little pieces of hardware that cells have that's what's in the DNA the rest is in the so-called generic laws and these are laws of mathematics these are laws of computation these are laws of physics There are all kinds of interesting things that are not directly in the DNA and that process you already know.

I think the reason I always put physics in quotes is because I don't believe there is such a thing as physics. thinking about these things in binary categories like this is physics this is true cognition this is like it's just pretending other things like this I think that's what gets us into trouble I think we really have to understand that it's a Continuum and we have to develop scaling, scaling laws and we can and we can certainly talk about there are a lot of really interesting ideas to be had there, so physics is deeply integrated with information, so DNA doesn't exist on its own.

DNA is integrated, in a sense, in response to the laws of physics at all scales, the laws of the environment in which it exists, yes, the environment, and also the laws of the Universe. The thing about DNA is that it's once Evolution discovers a certain type of machine, if the physical implementation is appropriate, it's kind of like uh and it's hard to talk about this because we don't have a good vocabulary for this yet, but it's a very platonic notion. that if the machine is there, it throws out interesting, uh, interesting things that you don't have to evolve from scratch because the laws of physics give it to you for free, so just as a really stupid example if you're trying to evolve a particular triangle. you can evolve the first angle and evolve the second angle, but you don't need to evolve the third.

You know what it is now. Why do you know that it is a free gift of geometry in a particular space? You know what that angle is. it has to be and if you evolve an ion channel, which are ion channels, they're basically transistors, right, they're voltage-dependent current conductances, if you evolve that ion channel, you can immediately use things like truth tables, you get logic functions. you do not have. to evolve the logic function you don't have to evolve a truth table it doesn't have to be in the DNA, you get it for free and the fact that if you have nand Gates you can build whatever you want, you get it for Free, everything you have to evolve It is that first step, a first small machine that allows you to adapt to those laws and there are laws of adhesion and many other things, and this is all that interaction between the hardware configured by the genetics and the software that is paid correctly, the software physiological that basically does all the calculations and cognition and everything else is a real interaction between information and DNA and the laws of physics of computation, etc., so it's fair to say like This idea that the laws of The mathematics is discovered is loaded within the structure of the universe in the same way that the laws of biology are discovered, yes, I think that is absolutely and it is probably not a popular view, but I think it is correct. money, yeah, well, I think it's a very profound idea, so

embryogenesis

is the process of revealing, um, embodying, manifesting these laws, you're not building the laws, you're just creating the ability to reveal, yeah, I think again , is not the standard view of the molecular. biology anyway, but I think it's spot on.

I will give you a simple example. You already know some of our latest work with these

xenobots

. So what we've done is take some skin cells from an early frog embryo and basically ask about their plasticity. If we gave you the opportunity to restart your multicellularity in a different context, what would you do? Because what you might assume about embryogenesis is that it's super reliable, it's very robust and that really obscures some of its most interesting features we get used to the fact that acorns make oaks and frog eggs make frogs and we say Well, what else is it going to do, that's what you know, that's what it does, that's a standard story, but the reality is such and such if you look at these skin cells, you say well, what do they do well?

They know how to be a boring, passive two-dimensional outer layer that prevents bacteria from entering the embryo, that's what you know how to do well turns out if you take these skin cells and you remove the rest of the embryo then you remove all the rest of the cells and you say well, you're alone now, what do you want to do? what they do is form this little um this little creature that runs around the plate they have all kinds of incredible abilities they navigate through mazes they have various behaviors that they do both independently and together they have a uh but Basically, they implement the self-replication dream of Von Neumann because if you sprinkle a bunch of loose cells on the plate, what they do is they run around, collect those cells into little piles, and sort of grind them up until those little piles become the next ones. generation of

xenobots

, then you have this machine that builds copies of itself from loose material in its environment, none of this is what you would have expected from the frog genome, in fact there is a wild type, the genome was type wild, there is nothing wrong with its genetics, nothing has been added, there are no nanomaterials, there is no genome editing, nothing, so what we have done there is engineering by subtraction, what you have done is eliminate the other cells which normally they basically bully these cells into being skin cells and you find out that what they really want to do is be this, they want their default behaviors to be a xenobot, but in Vivo, in the embryo, they are told to get skinned by these other types of cells and now here comes this, this is really interesting. question you just asked when you ask where the shape of the tadpole and the frog comes from.

The standard answer is also a selection, so over millions of years it has been shaped to produce the specific body that is suitable for frog environments where the xenobot form comes from there have never been zenobots there has never been selection To be a good xenobot these cells are in the new environment in 48 hours they discover how to be a completely different protoorganism with new capabilities such as kinematic self-replication. This is not how frogs or tadpoles replicate. We have made it impossible for them to replicate their normal form in a couple of days. These guys find a new way to do it that's not really done anywhere else in the biosphere.

Let's go back and define what xenobots are, so a xenobod is a small proto-organism that self-assembles. It is also a biological robot. Those things are not different. He is a member of both classes. How much is biology? How much is robot right now? Most of it is biology because what we are doing is discovering natural behaviors of these cells and also of cellular collectives. Now one of the really important parts of this was that we're working together with Josh Bongard's group at the University of Vermont, their computer scientists do Ai and they've basically been able to use an

evolution

ary approach, simulated

evolution

, to ask how can we manipulate these cells, give them signals, not rewiring their DNA, so it's not hardware, but experiencing it as signals.

Can we delete some cells? Can we add some cells? Can we poke them in different ways to make them do other things? So in the future there will be, you know, we are now and this is the future in published work, but we are doing all kinds of interesting ways to reprogram them into new behaviors, but before you can start reprogramming these things, you have to understand what they are. their innate abilities, which means designing the programming that you're designing them into in the future and, in a sense. the definition of robot is something that you teach engineer, yes, and first versus evolve, I mean, it's a very confusing definition anyway, in a sense, many of the organisms inside our body are types of robots, yes, yes, and I think robots is a strange line because we tend to see robots as the other.

I think there will be a time in the future where there will be something like civil rights movements for robots, but we'll talk about that later, maybe for sure anyway. So how can you do it? We just stayed at it, how do you build a zenobot, what are we talking about here, where does it start from and how does it become the glorious zenobot, yeah, so just to take a step back, one of the things that a lot of people understand. stuck is that they say well, you know, engineering requires new DNA circuits or requires new nanomaterials, you know what the thing is, now we're moving from old school engineering that uses passive materials, right, things like you know , wood, metal, things like this that basically the only thing you could depend on is that they were going to keep their shape, that's it, they don't do anything else, it's up to you as an engineer to make them do everything they're going to do and then there were active materials and now computational this is a completely new era these are agent materials this is you now you are collaborating with your substrate because your material has an agenda these cells have billions of years of evolution they have objectives they have preferences they are not just going to sit where you put them, it's funny that you have to talk about your material and maintain your kitchen, that's exactly it, that's exactly the right thing to do, stay there, it's like having a bunch of cats or something and trying to organize the shape.

It's funny that we're on the same page here because in an article this is currently, it's just been accepted into the wild by engineering. One of the figures I have is building a tower with Legos versus dogs, right, yeah, sothink about the difference. true, if you build with Legos you have full control over where it goes, but if someone knocks it over, it's game over with the dogs, you can't just come and stack them up, they won't stay that way, but the good news is that if you train them, Someone knocks it down and they'll get back up right away so that's fine so as an engineer what you really want to know is what they can do.

It depends on this being done right that's what you really know a lot of people have definitions of robots in as to what they're made of or how they got here, you know, designing versus evolving, whatever. I don't think any of that is helpful. I think as an engineer what you want to know is how much I can depend on this thing to do when I'm not around to micromanage it. What level of dependency can I give this thing? How much agency do you have? It has to then tell you what techniques you use so do you use micromanagement like you put everything where it goes? do you train him?

Do you give him signs? Are you trying to convince him to do things right? how much do you know how smart your substrate is and now we're moving into this area where you're working with agency materials which is a collaboration that's not that's not old old style what's the word you're using gentle gentle what does that mean agency Yes It comes from the word agency, so basically the material has agency, which means that it has some level of obviously non-human level, but some level of preferences, goals, memories, ability to remember things to calculate in the future, which which means anticipating, you know, when.

When working with cells, you have all of that to varying degrees, it's empowering or limiting to have material like a mind of your own, literally. I think they're both right, so it poses difficulties because it means that if you're using the old mindset which is a kind of linear extrapolation of what's going to happen, you're going to be surprised and shocked all the time because biology doesn't do what we linearly expect. making the materials, on the other hand, is enormously liberating, etc. As follows, I've argued that advances in regenerative medicine require us to take advantage of this because what it means is that you can get the material to do things that you don't know how to micromanage, so just as a simple example, right?

If you had a rat and you wanted this rat to do a circus trick, put a ball in the little hoop, you can do it the micromanagement way, which is trying to control every neuron and trying to play the thing like a puppet correctly and such. Maybe one day that will be possible, maybe you can train the rat and that is why humanity, for thousands of years before we knew Neuroscience, had no idea what was behind what was between the ears of any animal. We were able to train these animals because once you recognize the level of agency of a certain system.

You can use appropriate techniques if you know the currency of motivation, reward and punishment. You know how smart he is. You know what kind of things he likes to do. You're looking for a much more fluid system. a nicer problem space than if you try to micromanage the thing and then regenerative medicine when you're trying to get, say, an arm to grow back or an eye to repair, so a birth defect or something, do you really want control tens of thousands of people? genes at each point to try to micromanage it or you want to find the high level modular control roles, let's say build an arm here you already know how to build an arm, you did it before, do it again, so I think it's both.

It's difficult and it challenges us to develop new ways of engineering and it's hugely empowering. Well then how do you do it? I mean, maybe stick with the cats and dogs metaphor. I guess you have to figure out how to find the dogs and, uh, get rid of them. cats um because you know it's like the old cat herders are a problem so you might be able to train dogs. I suspect you won't be able to train cats, or if you do, you'll never be able to trust them. There is a way to find out what material is susceptible to damage, whether in lab work or in a simulation.

Right now, it's largely in the lab because our simulations don't yet capture the most interesting and powerful things about biology. , so simulation what we're pretty good at simulating is feeding emergent kinds of things, so cellular automata if you have simple rules and you apply them for each agent or each cell in the simulation, then complex things happen, you know? colonies or algorithms, things like that, we're good at that and that's fine, the difficulty with all that is that it's incredibly difficult to reverse, so this is a really difficult inverse problem, if you look at a bunch of termites. and they make one you know one thing with a single chimney and you say well I like it but I would like two chimneys how do you change the rules of behavior for each termite so that they make two chimneys well or or if you say listen to a group of cells that are creating this type of organism.

I don't think it's optimal. I would like to repair that birth defect. How are all the individual low-level rules controlled? All the protein interactions and everything else. Go back from the anatomy you want to the low level Hardware rules are generally intractable, it's an inverse problem that's generally not solvable, so right now it's mostly in the lab because what we have to do is understand how biology works. it uses top-down controls so the idea is not a bottom-up emergence but the idea of ​​things like directed gold uh test operate types of output loops where it's basically an error minimization function in a new space, it's not a genetic expression space, but for example, an anatomy space, so as a simple example, if you have a salamander, it has an arm, you can amputate it anywhere along its length, it will grow exactly what it needs and then it will stop, that's the most surprising thing. regeneration is that it stops, it knows when to stop, when it stops, it stops when a correct salamander arm has been completed, that tells you that's the right thing to do, that's some kind of bad Zen analysis where you have to know which one is correct.

The limb is supposed to look good, so it has a way to determine the current shape, it has a way to measure that Delta from the shape it's supposed to be and then we'll keep taking actions, i.e. reshaping, growth and everything else until that is complete, so once you know that, we have taken advantage of this in the lab to do some really crazy things with planarian and frog embryos, and so on, once you know you can start to play with that homeostatic cycle. You can ask, for example, how he remembers what the correct way is and we can alter that memory.

Can we give it a false memory of what the shape should be and let the cells build something else or can we alter the measuring apparatus? Well, it gives you that kind of stuff, so the idea is basically to appropriate a lot of the approaches and concepts of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral sciences into things that were previously considered dumb material and you know they scream at you. in class if you are anthropomorphic if you said well my cells want to do this and my cells want to do that and I think that is a big mistake that leaves a lot of capabilities on the table, so think about Biological systems are things that have memory, have almost something like cognitive ability, but I mean, how amazing is it to know that the salamander arm is being rebuilt not with a dictator, it's like the cellular automaton system, all the individual workers are doing their thing.

So where is that top-down signal that you don't control? How can you find it? Yes. Why does it stop growing? How do you know the shape? How does he have memory of the form and how does he tell everyone to be? Like, wait, slow down, we're done, so the first thing we need to think about, I think, is that there are no examples anywhere of a central dictator because in this kind of science because everything is made of parts and so we Even though we feel like a kind of unified central intelligence and a kind of point of cognition, we are a bag of neurons, right, all intelligence is collective intelligence.

There is this, it is important to think about it because many people think. Well, there's real intelligence like mine and then there's collective intelligence, which is ants and flocks of birds, and you know, termites and things like that, and you know, and maybe it's appropriate to think of them as a individual and maybe it is Not many people are skeptical about that and so on, but you have to realize that we are not, there is no such thing as this indivisible diamond of intelligence, which is like this central thing that is not made of parts, all We are made. of parts and if you believe that what I believe is hard to avoid, that we actually have a centralized set of goals and preferences and plan and do things, etc., you are already committed to the fact that a collection of cells is capable of doing this because we are a collection of cells, there is no way around it, in our case what we do is navigate the three-dimensional world and we have a behavior that leaves me speechless right now because they are just a collection of things, oh yes, yes, so when I move this arm I feel like I'm the central dictator of that action, but there's a lot going on like all the cells here are collaborating in some interesting way.

We are receiving signals from the central nervous system, well even the central nervous system has a misleading name because it is not really central, it is just a group of cells. I mean, okay, there's no you, there's no singular. indivisible intelligences wherever we all are, every example we've seen is a collective of something of something, it's just that we're used to it, we're used to it, you know, we're used to it, okay, this thing is kind. of one thing, but it's not really about zooming in, you know what you see, you see a bunch of cells running and therefore there is some unification.

I mean, we're just jumping around, but that's something you see as the biological signal versus the biological signal. the biochemical, um, the chemistry, the electricity, maybe life isn't that versus the cells, it's uh, there's an orchestra playing and uh, the resulting music is the dictator, that's not bad, um, Dennis, that's Dennis Nobles, uh, the kind of view he has on things. two really good books where he talks about this musical analogy, right, so, I think that's, I like it, um, I like it, it's wrong, although I don't think it is, no, I don't think it's wrong, um, no, I do not do it.

I don't think it's bad. I think the important thing is that we have to accept the fact that true and adequate cognitive intelligence can still be made up of parts of those things and, in fact, has to be. And I think it's a real shame, but I see this all the time when you have a collective like this, whether it's a group of robots or a collection of cells or neurons or whatever. as we get an idea of ​​how it works properly, it means that, oh, I see, to perform this action, here is the information that was processed through this camera mechanism or whatever people immediately say, oh, well, so that's not real cognition, it's just physics, I think this is This is fundamentally flawed because if you get close to something, what are you going to see?

Of course, you will only see physics. What else could be underneath? That won't be fairy dust, it will be physics and chemistry, but not that. I don't want to take away the magic of the fact that there are certain ways of organizing physics and chemistry and, in particular, bioelectricity, which I really like. To provide them with an emerging collective with goals, preferences, memories and anticipations that do not belong. to any of the subunits, so I think what we're getting into here and we can talk about how this happens during embryogenesis and so on, what we're getting into is the origin of a self, yes, with a capital letter So we There are many other types of selves and we can tell some really interesting stories about where selves come from and how they are unified.

Yeah, is this the first one or at least humans tend to think this is the level at which the self? The self with the capital s is the first to be born, but we don't really want to see human civilization or the Earth itself as a living organism, yes, that is very uncomfortable for us, yes, but it is, yes, where is the self born? ? We have to grow. beyond that, so what I like to do is, uh, I'll tell you two quick stories about that. I like to back up, like this, instead of, if you start and say, okay, here's a paramecium and you see it, you know what it is.

In a single-celled organism you see it doing various things and people will say, "Okay." I'm sure there is some chemical story to tell about how he does it, so that's not truly correct cognition and people will argue about that. I like to work it backwards. said, let's agree that you and I, as we sit here, are examples of true cognition, if there is something that is true cognition, we are, we are examples of it now, let's slowly back up so that it returns to the moment when you are a small child and you are used to doing anything and then, daya day, you go back and eventually you become more or less that paramecium and then, and then, even below that right like unfertilized Ursa, so it's not As far as I know, no one has thought of any discrete step and convincing in which my cognitive powers disappear.

It's just not like that. Biology does not offer any specific steps. It's incredibly smooth, slow and continuous. That's why I think this. idea that it just somehow magically appears in a moment and then, and then, you know, humans have a true self that doesn't exist anywhere else. I think it goes against everything we know about evolution, everything we know about developmental biology, these are all slow continuums and the other. The really important story I want to tell is where the embryos come from, so think about this for a second amniote embryo, so these are humans, birds, etc., mammals and birds, etc., imagine a flat disk of cells, so there are maybe 50,000 cells and in that then when you get an egg from a fertilizer, let's say you buy a fertilized egg from a farm, that egg will have about 50,000 cells in a flat disk that looks like a little frisbee. tiny and in that flat disk, what will happen is that there will be a set of cells that will become special and tell all the other cells.

I'm going to be the head, you guys don't be the head. and then it will amplify the amplification that breaks the symmetry, you get an embryo, there's a, you know, there's some neural tissue and some other things that form. Now you say, "Okay, I had an egg and an embryo," and then what else could it be? Well, the reality is that I used to do it. I did all this as a grad student if you take a little needle and make a scratch in that damn room on that disk so the cells can't talk to each other. the other one heals for a while but for a while they can't talk to each other what will happen is that uh both regions will decide that they can be the embryo and there will be two and then when they heal they will become conjoined twins and you can form two, you can form three, you can form lots, so the question of how many selves are there can't be answered until it's been played completely, it's not necessarily that there's only one, there can be many, so what you have is you have this middle, this undifferentiated.

I'm sure there's a psychological version of this somewhere, I don't know the proper terminology, but you have this, you have this list, like putting an ocean of potentiality, you have these. Thousands of cells and a certain number of individuals will be formed from it, usually one, sometimes zero, sometimes several, and they are formed from these cells because a region of these cells is organized into a collective that will have objectives that individual cells do not have. For example, I don't have to make a limb, make an eye, how many eyes, well, exactly two, so the individual cells don't know what an eye is, they don't know how many eyes you're supposed to have, but the collective has goals. and memories and anticipations that individual cells do not have and that the establishment of that limit with its own ability to maintain itself to pursue certain goals is the origin of individuality, but I is that goal there somewhere, but they are always destined as they are . discovering that goal like where the hell did Evolution happen? um you discovered this when you went from prokaryotes to you, you run excel and then they started making groups and when you make a certain group, you make a you, you make it sound, that's such a complicated thing.

To try to understand, you make it seem like these cells didn't come together and come up with a goal, but the very act of coming together revealed the goal that was always there, there was always that potential for that goal, so the first thing we need to do . What I'm saying is that there are a lot more questions here than there are certainties, okay, so all I'm telling you is cutting-edge development, you know stuff, so it's not like any of us know the answer to this, but here Here's my take on this, I think evolution. I don't think evolution produces solutions to specific problems, in other words, specific environments like here is a frog that can live well in an environment of frogs.

I think what evolution produces is machines that solve problems and that's what it will do. solve problems in different spaces, so not just in three-dimensional space, this goes back to what we were talking about before us, the brain is a late evolutionary development, it is a system that is capable of pursuing goals in three-dimensional space giving orders. to the muscles where that system came from that system evolved from an evolutionarily much older system where collections of cells gave instructions for cell behavior, meaning cells move to divide to die to change into different types of cells to navigate in the morphe space the space of anatomies the space of all possible anatomies and before that the cells navigated the transcriptional space which is a space of all possible genetic expressions and before that metabolic space so I think what What evolution has done is that Hardware is produced that is very good at navigating different spaces using a bag of tricks, and I'm sure a lot of them we can steal for autonomous vehicles and robotics and various things, and what happens is that they navigate these spaces without much commitment to what the space really is.

They don't know what space is, we are all brains in a vat, so to speak, every cell doesn't know, every cell is another, some other cells, the external environment, right, so where is that border between you, you and the exterior? In the world, you don't really know where it's right, every collection of cells has to figure it out from scratch and the fact that evolution requires all these things to figure out what they are, what effectors they have, what sensors they have, where? It makes sense to draw a boundary between self and the outside world the fact that you have to build all of that from scratch this autopoiesis is what defines the boundary of a self now biology uses as a multi-scale competency architecture which means that each level has goals, so molecular networks have goals, cells have goals, tissues, organs, colonies, uh, and it's the interaction of all of them that allows biology to solve problems in new ways, for example, xenobots and several other things, um, this is what you know.

It's exactly like you said, in many ways, cells are discovering new ways of being, but at the same time, evolution certainly shapes all of this, so evolution is very good at this agential bioengineering just when evolution is discovering a new way of being. animal, but an animal or a plant or something like that, sometimes it's changing the hardware, you know, the proteins, changing the proteins, the structure of the proteins, etc., but most of the time it's not changing the hardware, but by changing the signals that cells give to each other. What we as engineers do is try to convince cells to do various things by using signals, experiences, stimuli, that's what biology has to do because it's not a blank slate every time, either. that you know if you are an evolution and you are trying to create an organism, you are not dealing with a passive material that is new and you have to specify that it already wants to do certain things, so the easiest way to do that search is to find whatever it is To be adaptive is to find the signals that will convince the cells to do several things well.

Their feeling is that evolution operates in both software and hardware and it is easier and more efficient to operate in software. Yes, and I must also say that I. I don't think the distinction is clear, in other words, I think it's a Continuum, but I think we can, but I think it's a significant distinction where changes can be made to a particular protein and now the enzyme function is different and it's metabolized differently and whatever. and that will have implications for fitness or you can change the enormous amount of information in the genome that is not structural at all, it is a signal of when and how cells say certain things to each other and that can have massive changes.

As far as how you're going to solve the problems, I mean this idea of ​​a multi-hierarchical competency architecture, which is amazing to think about, so this hierarchy that Evolution builds, I don't know who's responsible for this. I also see the incompetence of human bureaucracies when they get together, so how the hell does evolution build this where at each level only the best stay, they somehow figure out how to do their job without knowing the big picture and then there are the bosses who Do they make things more important somehow or that? now you can abstract the small group of cells as an organ or something and then that organ makes something bigger in the context of the whole body or something, how do you build it?

Is there any intuition you can provide on how? that's built with that hierarchical trust architecture. I love that confidence. Just the word trust is very good in this context because everyone is good at their job in some way. But. It's really key. And the other good thing about competition is that my core belief in everything is regular. The important thing about this is that engineering is the right perspective on all these things because it gets you away from subjective terms, you know, people talk about sensitivity and this and that, things that are very difficult to define or people argue about them philosophically. .

I think engineering Terms like competency like um, you know, goal pursuit, all of these things are empirically incredibly useful because you know it when you see it and if it helps you build well, if I can choose the right level, I say, uh, this. has, I think this is a similar level different from complex systems, if that helps me control, predict and build said system, then that's all there is to say, there is no more philosophy to argue about, so I like competition that way because you can quantify, You might have to, in fact, you have to. make a competent claim on what and then or if I say if I tell you that it has a goal the question is what is the goal and how do you know it and I say well because every time I deviate from this particular state it wastes energy on that Let's go back to that is the goal and we can quantify it and we can be objective about it.

When we're not used to thinking about this, I give a talk sometimes called Why Robots Don't Get Cancer Well and the reason robots don't get cancer is because, generally speaking, with a few exceptions, our architectures have a a bunch of dumb parts and you hope that if you put them together the superimposed machine will have some intelligence and do something better. true, but the individual parts don't care, they don't have an agenda, biology is not like that, each level has an agenda and the end result is the result of cooperation and competition both within and between levels, for example during embryogenesis Your tissues and organs compete with each other and it's actually a very important part of development.

There's a reason they compete with each other. They don't all just help each other. They also compete for information for limited metabolic restrictions, but back to the other point. , which is which is which, this seems really efficient and good, etc., compared to some of our human efforts, we must also keep in mind that what happens here is that each level doubles the option space for the level bottom so that your parts basically don't see the geometry so I'm using um and I think I take this seriously uh terminology of of like um of like relativity right where space is literally folded so option space is warped down the upper level, so at the lower levels all they really have to do is lower their concentration gradient, they don't have to, in fact, they can't.

I don't know what the big picture is, but if you fold the space correctly, if they do what locally seems right, they end up doing your bidding, they end up doing things that are optimal in the space above, conversely, because the components are good at getting their job made you as a top level, you don't need to try to calculate all the low level controls, all you are doing is folding space, you don't know or care how they are going to do it, they give you a great simple example in the um in the tadpole we found that okay, so the tadpoles need to turn into frogs and to go from a tadpole head to a frog head, you have to rearrange the face so the eyes have to move forward, the jaws have to move forward. . nostrils come out they move like everything is moving, it used to be thought that because all the tadpoles look the same and all the frogs look the same, if you remember, if each piece moves in the right direction, in the right amount, so you get your, you get your frog. true, so we decided to try.

I had thisI hypothesized that actually the system is probably smarter than that, so what did we do? We made what we call Picasso tadpoles, so these are so everything is scrambled, so the eyes are on the back of the head their jaws are to the side everything is scrambled well, guess what they do, they are pretty normal frogs because all the different things move in novel path configurations until they get to the correct frog face configuration and then they stop So what happens with that now is imagine Evolution, so you do some kind of mutation and it likes each mutation, it does a lot of things, so something good comes out of it, but also move your mouth to the side right now if if if if these multi-scale companies didn't exist, you can see where this is going.

If this multi-scale competition did not exist, the organism would be dead, your physical condition is zero because you cannot eat and you would never be able to explore the world. other beneficial consequences of that mutation you would have to wait until you find another way to do it without moving them, that's really difficult, so the fitness landscape would be incredibly bumpy. Evolution would take forever the reason it works one of the reasons it works so well is because you do that don't worry the mouth will find its way to where it belongs so now you can explore so what that What it means is that all these otherwise harmful mutations are now neutral because the competition of the parties compensates. all kinds of things, all the development noise, all the variability in the environment, all these things that companies do, the parts make up for it, that's it, that's great, right, that's it, that's great, the only other thing to remember.

When we compare this to human efforts, each component has its own goals in various spaces, usually with very little regard for the well-being of the other levels, so as a simple example, you know that you are a complex system. Go out there and you'll know Jiu Jitsu or whatever, you'll have a thing for rock climbing, you'll scrape a bunch of cells off your hands, and then you'll be happy as a system. You will come back and you will have achieved something. goals and you are very happy that those cells are dead, they are gone, did you think that those cells were not really well?

You had some, you had some bruises, selfish SLB, that's it and such and that, that's what you have to remember is that, um, you We know and we know this from history that just being a collective is not enough because what are the goals going to be? of that Collective in relation to the well-being of the individual Parties is a hugely open place that justifies the means I am talking about. you, Stalin, were right, no, that is the danger, but we can exactly, that is the danger of uh, for us humans, we have to build ethical systems under which we do not take seriously the entire mechanism of biology and apply it to the way the world works. which is an interesting line that we have drawn, the world that built us is one that we reject in a sense when we build human societies, the idea that this country was founded on the basis that all men are created equal, is such an idea. fascinating. uh, you're fighting against nature and you're saying, well, there's something bigger here than um, yeah, a hierarchical competition architecture, yeah, uh, but there's so many interesting things that you said from an algorithmic perspective, the act of doubling the options space, that's really, that's really. deep because if you look at the way AI systems are built today, there is a great system like I said with robots and as a goal, and he gets better and better at optimizing that goal to achieve that goal, but if biology built a hierarchical system where everything is doing calculations and everything is achieving the goal, not only is that a bit silly, you know, with the limited option space with bending, but it's just doing what's easiest in a sense and in some ways that allows you to have um Turtles on top of turtles literally dump systems on top of dump systems that together create something incredibly clever.

Yeah, I mean, every system has some degree of intelligence in its own problem domain, so cells will have problems that they're trying to solve. physiological space and transcriptional space and then I could give you some interesting examples of that, but the collective is trying to solve problems in the anatomical space correctly and form a creature, grow its blood vessels, etc., and then collect the whole body is solving other problems, they may be in the social space and the linguistic space in a three-dimensional space and who knows, you know the group could be solving problems and, you know, I don't know some kind of financial space. or something like that, one of the main differences with most AIS today is the kind of flatness of the architecture, but also the fact that they are built from outside their borders and you already know this, if you are in To a large extent, and of course there are counter examples now, but to a large extent our technology has been such that you create a machine or a robot, it knows what its sensors are, it knows what its effectors are, it knows the boundary between it and the outside world. all of this is given from the outside biology builds this from scratch now the best example of this is what was originally in robotics was actually Josh Bongard's work in 2006 where he made these robots that didn't know their to begin with so like a baby, these wobble, they made some hypotheses, well, I did this and I moved this way, well, maybe I am whatever, maybe I have wheels or maybe I have six legs or whatever, right, and they would make a model for me and eventually they would crawl around so that's really cool it's part of autopoiesis but we can go one step further and some people are doing this and then we're working on some of this too it's this idea that we even go back further, you don't even know what sensors you have, you don't know where you end and the outside world begins, all you have are certain things like active inference, which means you're trying to minimize surprise, right? metabolic limitations you don't have all the energy you need you don't have all the time in the world to think about everything you want to think about, that means you can't afford to be a micro um reductionist, you know?

All this data that comes in you have to coarse grain it and say: I'm going to take all this stuff and I'm going to call it a cat. I'm going to take all of this. I'm going to call it the edge of the table I don't want to go on and I don't want to know anything about microstates, what I want to know is what is the optimal way to divide my world and by the way, this thing here is me and the La The reason it's me is because I have more control over this than anything else and now you can start writing, so that's self-construction, that's figuring out how to make models of the outside world and then turning it inward and starting. making a correct model of yourself that immediately starts to get into questions of agency and control because if you are under metabolic limitations, which means you don't have the right energy, all the energy in the world you have to be efficient. that immediately forces you to start telling stories about light-grained agents doing things right, you don't have the energy to like Laplaces' demon, you know, calculate all the possible states, uh, that are going to happen, you have to do it, you have to do it coarsely and you have to say that it is the type of creature that does things, whether things that I avoid or things that I will go towards, which are a partner or food or whatever, and so on, right in the base of simple, very simple organisms that begin to make models. of Agents doing things, that's the origin of the Free Will models basically right because you see that the world around you has agency and then you turn it against yourself and you say wait, I have agency too, I can do things right and then you make decisions about what you're going to do, so this whole model is to see all those kinds of things as driven by that early need to determine what you are and do it and then take actions in the most energy efficient space possible, so the free Agency arises when you try to simplify, tell a good narrative about your environment.

I think that is very possible. Yes, do you think that freedom was an illusion? So, you're implying that it's a useful trick. I will say two things: the first is that I think it is very plausible to say that any organism that is me or any agent that is me, whether biological or not, any agent that constructs itself under energy limitations is going to believe in free will. but we'll get to whether you have free will momentarily, but I think what it definitely drives is a view of yourself and the outside world as an agentic view.

I think that's inescapable, so that's true even for primitive organisms, I think. so I think now they don't have it, obviously you have to reduce it so that they don't have the types of complex metacognition that we have so that they can plan and think long term about free will. and so on, but the sense of agency is really useful for performing simple or complicated tasks found in all kinds of spaces, not just obvious three-dimensional space. I mean, we're really good about it being about humans. They are very good at detecting the agency of medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds in the three-dimensional world.

We see a bowling ball and we see a mouse and we immediately know what the difference is and how we are going to do most things. you can eat or be eaten by yes, yes, that is our training set since you were little, your training set is visual data about this as a small part of your experience, but imagine if imagine if from the moment we were born we had innate senses of your blood chemistry if you could feel your blood chemistry the way you can see well, you had a high bandwidth connection and you could feel your blood chemistry and you could see, you could feel all the things that They were your organs. making it your pancreas your liver all the things if we had that you would be very good at detecting intelligence and the physiological space we would know the level of intelligence that our different organs are deploying to deal with the things that come to anticipate the stimuli "For you, but We're terrible at it, in fact, people don't even know that you talk about intelligence in these other spaces and a lot of people think it's crazy because all of us." All we know is movement, we have access to that information, so it's possible that Evolution could do it if we wanted to build an organism that is able to perceive the flow of blood through your body the same way you see your body. an old friend and you say "I." What's happening?

How are the wife and children? In the same way, you would see that you would feel like a connection to the liver, yeah, yeah, I think you know maybe other people's liver not just yours because you don't have access to other people's. She's not alive yet, but you can imagine some really interesting connection, right, but like sexual selection, like oh, that girl has a nice liver, well, that's how her blood flows, blood dynamics, uh, it's very interesting. , is a novel that I have never seen. one of those, but you know, that's exactly what we're trying to do half-heartedly when we judge the judgment of beauty by facial symmetry, etc., that's a half-hearted evaluation of exactly that, of exactly that, because if you cells couldn't cooperate enough to keep your organism symmetrical, yeah, you know, you can make some inferences about what else is wrong, that's right, that's very, you know, that's very basic, interesting, yeah, so in some sense deep, actually that's what we do.

We're trying to infer what health is like, we use the word healthy, but basically how functional is this biological system that I'm looking at to be able to connect to that and create offspring, yeah, yeah, well, what kind of hardware might your genomics be? ? Give me that might be useful in the future. I wonder why evolution didn't give us a higher resolution signal, like why the whole peacock with feathers thing doesn't seem like the very low bandwidth signal for sexual selection. I'm going to and I'm not an expert on these things, but I am an expert on peacocks, well, no, you know, but I'll try to find out the reason.

I think it's because it's an arms race. You see, you don't want everyone to know everything about you. so I think there's actually another interesting part of this arms race, which is that if you think about this, the most adaptive evolutionary system is the one that has the greatest level of top-down control, if that. really easy to tell a bunch of cells to make another finger versus okay, here are 10,000 gene expression changes that you have to make to change your finger correctly, the system with good top-down control that has memory and we have to back to that, by the way, that's a question I didn't answer about where the memory is etc, a system that uses all of that is actually highly evolvable and that's great, but guess what, it's also very subject to hijacking. for parasites for uh for forcheaters of various types by specific like we found that um and then that goes back to the history of pattern memory these in these planarians there is a bacteria that lives in these planarians that bacteria has an entry in how many heads the worm is going to have because hijacks that control system and is able to produce a chemical that basically interacts with the system that calculates how many heads you are supposed to have and can have and can make you have two heads, so you can imagine that if there are two of you, then you want be understandable so that your own parts understand each other, but you don't want to be too understandable because you will be too easily controllable, so I think my assumption is that that opposing pressure prevents this from being a super high bandwidth kind of thing. where we can just look at someone and know that you know everything about them, so it's kind of a biological Texas Hold game.

They, yeah, he's showing some cards and you're hiding other cards and that's part of it and there's bluffing and all that and then probably all the species that would bluff too much, that's probably where the peacocks fall. I mean, there's a book that I don't remember if I read it or if I wrote it. If I read summaries of the book, but it's about the evolution of beauty and birds, where is that from? It's a book or Richard Dawkins talks about it, but basically there are some species that start to like to over select for beauty, not to over select, they just for some reason select for beauty, there's a case to be made, actually now I am beginning.

To remember, I think Darwin himself argued that you can select based solely on beauty, so yes, that beauty has a point: it doesn't represent some underlying biological truth that you start selecting for beauty itself and I think that's the deep question. . Is there any evolutionary value to Beauty, but is it an interesting kind of thinking that we can completely deviate from the deep biological truth to really appreciate some kind of summary? Let me go back to memory because it's a really interesting idea, um, how does a set of cells remember something? How do biological systems remember something?

How is that similar to the type of memory we think humans have within our large cognitive engine? Yes, one of the ways to start thinking about bioelectricity is to ask. ourselves, where did neurons come from and all these cool tricks that the brain uses to execute these amazing problem-solving skills and basically an electrical grid? Where did that come from? They didn't just evolve, you know, up here, out of nowhere, it must have evolved. something and what it evolved from was a much older ability of cells to form networks to solve other types of problems, for example, navigating morph space to control body shape and all the components of neurons, as well than ion channels, um. neurotransmitter Electrical machinery synapses all of this is much older than the brain, much older than neurons, in fact, older than multicellularity, so they were already even bacterial biofilms.

There's some beautiful work from UCSD on brain-like dynamics and bacterial biofilms, so Evolution discovered Very early on, electrical networks are amazing at having memories by integrating information at a distance into different types of optimization tasks. You know, image recognition, etc., long before brains existed. Can you take a step back? We'll get back to that. What is bioelectricity? biochemistry what is what are electrical networks I think a lot of the biology community focuses on chemicals as the signaling mechanisms that make everything work. I think largely, uniquely, maybe you can correct me that they've focused on bioelectricity. which uses electricity to signal, there's probably a mechanical one too, sure, knocking on the door, so what's the difference and what is an electrical grid?

Yes, so I want to make sure and give credit to creditors who have been doing this for a long time. In 1903 and probably at the end of the 19th century people were already thinking about the importance of electrical phenomena in life, so I am surely not the first person to emphasize the importance of electricity. There were waves of research in the '30s, in the '40s and then again in the '70s, '80s and '90s, the pioneers of bioelectricity who did incredible work on all of this. I think what we've done that's new is moving away from this idea that, and I'll describe what bioelectricity is, it's a step back from the idea that, well, here's another part of physics that you have to follow to understand the physiology and the development and really start to see this as saying no, it's a privileged computing system. layer that gives you access to the real cognition of the basal cognition fabric, fusing that developmental biophysics with ideas and computational cognition, etc.

I think that's what we've done, that's new, but people have been talking about bioelectricity. for a long time and I'll also define it, so what happens is if you have a single cell, the cell has a membrane, in that membrane there are proteins called ion channels and those proteins allow charged potassium molecules. Sodium chloride goes in and out under certain circumstances and when there is an imbalance of those ions, it creates a voltage gradient across that membrane and therefore all cells, all living cells, try to maintain a particular type. of voltage, uh, difference across the membrane and they spend. a lot of energy to do it when you know now so it's a single cell when you have multiple cells that are next to each other they can communicate their voltage state to each other through several different ways but one of them is this thing called gap junction which is basically like a Little Submarine hash that just snaps together correctly and ions from one side can flow to the other side and vice versa, so isn't it amazing that this has evolved?

It's not wild because That didn't exist, right, this had to be, this had to evolve and it had to be invented, that's right, someone invented electricity in the ocean, one of these is a good event, yeah, so, I mean , he's amazing, um, the guy. who discovered Gap Junctions Werner Lowenstein I visited him he was a very old human being who discovered because who really discovered them lived probably four billion years ago good point so you give credit where credit is due he rediscovered rediscovered uh Gap Junctions but um When I visited him in Woods Hole, maybe 20 years ago, he told me he was writing and unfortunately he passed away and I don't think this book was ever written.

He was writing a book about Gap Junctions and Consciousness and I think. I think it would have been an amazing book because because Gap joints are magical, I'll explain why in a minute. What happens is, imagine what happens with these ion channels and these gap junctions is that many of them are themselves voltage. sensitive, so that's a voltage sensitive current conductance which is a transistor and as soon as you've invented one immediately, now you'll have access from this Platonic space of mathematical truths, you'll have access to all the cool things that transistors do now when you have a network of cells that not only communicate with each other but can also send messages to each other and the voltage differences can now be propagated to neuroscientists.

This is old because you see this in the brain, this action potential is You know, electricity, um, you can, you can, they have, they have these amazing movies where you can take a zebra as a transparent animal like a zebrafish, you can literally Look down and you can see all the shots while the fish is making. decisions about what to eat and things like this, right, it's amazing, well, your whole body does it all the time, just much slower, so there are very few things that neurons and other cells do that all brain cells do. your body doesn't do it.

They all do very similar things just on a much slower time scale and while your brain is thinking about how to solve problems in three-dimensional space, the cellular embryo is thinking about how to solve problems in the anatomical space that they are trying to have. Memories like hey, how many fingers are we supposed to have? Well, how many do we have now? What do we do to get from here to there? That's the kind of problems they're thinking about and the reason Gap Junctions are magical is Imagine from from the earliest from the earliest I'm here there are two cells this cell uh how can they communicate well?

The simple version is that this cell could send a chemical signal that floats on and hits a receptor on this cell. true, because it comes from the outside of this cell I can say very easily that it came from the outside is this is any information that comes that is not my information that information comes from the outside so I can I can trust it I can ignore it I can do various things things with that, whatever, but I know it comes from outside. Now imagine you have two cells with a space. Union between them, something happens, let's say the cell is punctured, there is a calcium spike, the calcium spike or any small molecule signal that propagates through space.

Joining the cell there is no ownership metadata in that signal, this cell doesn't know now that it didn't come from the outside because it looks exactly what your own memories of whatever happened would have looked like, so Gap Las Joins, to some extent, erase ownership information from the data, which means that if I can't, if you and I share memories and we can't tell who they belong to, that's the start of a mind meld, that's the start. of a scale. of cognition of here am I and here are you two no, now it's just us, so you impose the collective intelligence that is our Gap Junction, that's right, help, it's the beginning, it's not the whole story by any means, but it is the beginning where the state of the There are many layers to this, as always in biology, so are there chemical networks, for example, gene regulatory networks, what are they or basically any type? of a chemical pathway where different chemicals activate and repress each other, they can store memories, so in the dynamic system sense, they can store memories, they can enter stable states that are difficult to get out of, that's how becomes once they enter. that's a memory a permanent memory of something or a semi-permanent memory of something that happened there are cytoskeletal structures that are physically stored memories in a physical configuration there are electrical memories like flip flops where there is no physical right So if you look at it, I show you my students this example as a flip-flop and the reason it stores a zero one is not because some piece of hardware has moved, it's because there is a cycle of current in one. side of the thing, if I go over and hold it, you know, hold the other side at a high voltage for a short period of time, it turns around and now it's here, but the heart, no hardware moved the information is in a stable dynamic sense and if you x-rayed the thing you couldn't tell me if it was zero or one because all you would see is where the hardware is, you wouldn't see the energetic state of the system, so there are also bioelectric states that are maintained exactly that way, like a volatile Ram, basically like in the electrical state, it's very similar to the different ways that memory is stored in a computer, so there's Ram, there's hard drives.

We can get that mapping right, so I think what's interesting is that based on biology, we can have a more sophisticated method. I think we can revisit some of our Computer Engineering methods because there are some interesting things that biology does. I haven't done it yet, but you can, but that map, but that mapping is not bad. I mean, I think it works in many ways. Yeah, I'm wondering because I mean the way we build computers at the root of computing is the idea of ​​proof of correctness we program things to be perfect and reliable, you know, this idea of ​​resilience and robustness in the face of unknown conditions is not it's so important, so that's what biology is really good at, so I don't know what kind of systems, I don't know how we go from there. a computer to a biological system in the future, yeah, I think you know the thing about biology is that it's about making really important decisions very quickly with very limited information.

I mean, that's what biology is all about, you have to act. act now when the stakes are high and you don't know most of what you need to know to be perfect, so there's not even an attempt to be perfect or get it right in any sense, there's just things like active inference minimize surprise optimize something of efficiency and some things like this that guide the entire business that I mentioned uh Offline that someone is an Affinity job is Andre capathi and he is, among many things, he also occasionally writes a great blog came up with this idea.

I don't know if he coined the term, but from software 2.0 uh, where theProgramming is done in the configuration space of these artificial neural networks, is there a sense in which that would be the future of programming for We humans do less Python type programming and more, what would that look like? Basically, we make the hyperparameters of something like a biological system and observe it. We go and maintain it, adjust it and create some type. of the feedback loop within the system, so it corrects itself, yeah, and then we look at it over time, the goals that we wanted to achieve are that kind of dog dream that you described in the nature paper, yeah, yeah, I mean, that's what you just did. painted is a very good description of our efforts in regenerative medicine as a kind of somatic psychiatry, so the idea is that you don't know that you're not trying to micromanage, I mean, think about the limitations of many of the medications.

Today we try to interact at the Tracks level, so we are trying to micromanage it. What is the problem? Well, one problem is that for almost all medications except antibiotics, once you stop them, the problem comes back. you fixed anything, you were addressing the symptoms, you weren't actually curing anything again except the antibiotics, huh that's one problem, the other problem is that you have a lot of side effects because you were trying to interact at the lowest level. , that's right, it's like I'm going to know that I'm going to try to program this computer by changing the melting point of copper, maybe you can do things that way, but my goodness, it's hard to program it correctly. at the hardware level, so what I think we're starting to understand is that and, by the way, this goes back to what you said before about we could have access to our internal state so that people who practice that kind of thing, so yoga and then biofeedback and those are all people who will uniformly say things like well, the body has an intelligence in the scenario, like those two sets overlap perfectly because that's exactly right, because once you start to think About this, you realize that the best locus of control is not always at the lowest level.

That's why we don't all program with a soldering iron, right? We take advantage of the high-level intelligences that exist, which means trying. to find out which of your tissues can learn, what they can learn, what you know, why certain medications stop working after taking them for a while with this right habituation, and so we can understand habituation sensitization, associative learning, and these types . of things in the chemical pathways we are going to have a completely different shape. I think we're going to have a completely different way of using drugs and medicine in general when we start focusing on target states and the intelligence of our subsystems instead of treating everything as if the only way is to micromanage from chemistry to above, can you talk about this idea of ​​somatic psychiatry?

What are somatic cells? How do they form networks that use bioelectricity to have memory and all that kind of stuff? If that? they're somatic cells like the basics here systematic cells just means the cells of your body just means body right so somatic cells are just this I'm not even making a specific distinction between somatic cells and stem cells or anything like that I mean basically All the cells in your body, not just the neurons, but all the cells in your body, form electrical networks during embryogenesis, during regeneration, what those networks do in part is process information about what our current shape is and what it is. the target way now, how can I?

I know this because I can give you a couple of examples. An example is when we started studying this and we said, "Okay, here's a planarian, a planarian is a flatworm that typically has a head and a tail, and what's surprising is the various surprising things about the planarian." but basically I think that I believe that planarians have the answer to almost all of life's deep questions. On the one hand, they are similar to our ancestors, so they have true symmetry. They have a real brain. They are not like earthworms. You know, they're much more advanced life forms, they have a lot of different internal organs, but they're these little ones, they're about, you know, maybe two to two centimeters in size.

I have a head and a tail and the The first thing is that they are all immortal, so they don't age, there is no such thing as an old planarian, so that right there tells you that these theories of thermodynamic limitations on lifespan are wrong, it's not Thus, it is not so good that over time everything degrades, no planarian can do that. Keep it up, you probably know how long they've been around 400 million years so these are the real ones so the plenaries in our lab are in physical continuity with the planarians we've been here 400 million years so there are planarians. who have lived so long, essentially, what does physical continuity mean?

Because what they do is they split in half, the way they reproduce is they split in half, so the planarian, the back end, grabs the petri dish, the front end takes off and then they split in half, but they don't It is in a sense that, like you, you are a physical continuation. Yeah, except we go through a bottleneck of a cell, which is the egg, they don't mean they can, there are certain planarians, so we go through a very ruthless compression process and they don't, yeah, like an autoencoder, you know, they get crushed in a cell and then they come out, these guys just split in half and then one and another, and then the other amazing thing about them they regenerate so you can cut them into pieces the disk is I think 276 or something like that by Thomas Hunt Morgan uh and each piece grows back a perfect little worm they know exactly each piece knows exactly what's missing what needs to happen uh in fact in fact, if you cut it in half as it grows, the other half, uh, the original tissue, it shrinks, so when the new little head appears they are proportional, so it maintains the perfect proportion if you starve them, they shrink. you feed them again, they expand their control, their anatomical control is crazy, someone cut them into over 200 pieces, yes, yes, Thomas Hunt Morgan did hashtag science, yes, amazing, yes, and maybe more.

I mean, they didn't have antibiotics back then, I bet he lost. some due to infection, I bet, I bet it's actually more than that, you could, I bet you could do more than humans can do because, well, yeah, I mean, again, it's true, I accept that You can't at the embryonic level, well, that's the thing. The truth is, when I talk about this, I say, just remember that it's just as amazing as it is to grow an entire planarian from a small fragment, half of the human population can develop an entire body from one cell, so development is really You can see development as just an example of regeneration, yes, to think that we will talk about regenerative medicine, but there is a certain sense that what would be like this About 500 years ago it grew again by hand, yes, we were given time.

It takes time to grow big things, but for now, yes, I think so. I think you can probably why not speed up. Oh, biology takes its time. I'm not going to say that nothing is impossible, but I don't know of a way to speed up these processes. I think it's possible. I think we're going to be regenerative, but I don't know a way to do it quickly. If you think that people a few centuries from now will say, "Well, before they had to wait a week." the hand to grow back is like when the microwave was invented, you can, you can toast your um, what's that called when you put a cheese on toast? um foreigner, okay, so uh planarian, why were we talking about the magical planarian that they have the mystery about?

Life, yeah, so the reason we're talking about plenary is not only that they're immortal, okay, they don't just regenerate every part of the body, uh, they do, they usually don't get cancer properly, so we can talk about why that is important. They're smart, they can learn things so you can train them, and it turns out that if you train a planarian and then cut off their head, a new brain will regenerate that still remembers the original information. Do they have an active biological network? No, yes, so your somatic cells are forming a network and that's what you mean by true brain.

What is the requirement for a real brain? I like everything else, it's a continuum, but a real brain has certain characteristics in terms of density, like a localized density. of neurons guides behavior in the head exactly exactly if you cut off their head uh, the tail doesn't have that doesn't do anything, it just stays there until the new brain is, you know, until a new brain regenerates, they all have The same neurotransmitters that you and I have, but here's why we're talking about them in this context, so here's your plenary session. You cut off the head, you cut off the tail.

You have an intermediate fragment. That intermediate fragment has to form one. head and a tail, how do you know how many of each to make and where they go? How come it doesn't change? Electrical network that remembers the correct pattern and then what it does is it remembers that memory and builds based on that pattern, so what we did was use a way to visualize the electrical activity in these cells. It is a variant of what People used to look for electricity in the brain and we saw that this fragment has a very particular electrical pattern.

You can literally see it once we develop a technique. It has a very particular electrical pattern that shows you where your head is. and the tail goes to the right, you can, you can see it and then we said, well, now let's try the idea that it's a memory that actually controls where the head and the tail go, let's change that pattern, so basically let's incept a false memory and and? What you can do is you can do it in many different ways. One way is with medications, you target ion channels, so you pick these medications and say, "Okay, I'll do this so instead of so instead of this." head and tail electrical pattern, you have a two headed pattern, right, you are just editing the electrical information in the network when you do that, guess what the cells build, they build a two headed worm and best of all now, no changes genetic, so we have not touched the genome.

The genome is totally wild, but the amazing thing about it is that when you take these two-headed animals and cut them into pieces again, some of those pieces will still make two-headed animals. animals, so that information, that memory, that electrical circuit, not only contains the information of how many heads, it not only uses that information to tell the cells what to do to regenerate, but it stores it once you've reset it. it holds and we can go back, we can take a two-headed animal and put it back into a single head, so now imagine there are a couple of interesting things here that have implications for understanding what web genomes and things like that I imagine I take. this two-headed animal, um, and by the way, when they reproduce, when they split in half, you still have two-headed animals, so imagine them being taken away.

I throw them in the Charles River around here, so 100 years later some scientists come and collect some samples and say oh here's a single-headed form in a two-headed form wow, cool speciation event, let's sequence the genome and see. why it happened, the genomes are identical, there is nothing wrong with the genome, so if you ask the question how is that? This goes back to your first question: Where do body plants come from? How does the planarian know how many heads it is supposed to have? Now it's interesting because you could say DNA, but what happens what?

It turns out that DNA produces a piece of hardware that defaults to a head the same way that when you turn on a calculator it defaults to a zero every time just when you turn it on it just a zero, but it turns out it's a one-time programmable calculator. have you changed that next time it won't say zero it will say something else and the same thing here so you can make you can make one-headed worms, two-headed worms, you can make headless worms, we've done some other things In this sense, some other builds really strange so this is this this question so again it's very important that the distinction between hardware and software is really important because hardware is essential because without the right hardware you will never get to the right thing.

The physiology of having that memory, but once you have it, it doesn't completely determine what the information will be, you can have other information there and it's reprogrammable by us through bacteria, through various parasites, probably, things like that, the other surprising thing about these Planarians think about this most animals when we have a mutation in our bodies our children don't inherit it well so you could go on you could run for 50 60 years getting mutations your children don't have those mutations because we go through theEgg-stage planarians split in half and that's how they reproduce, so for 400 million years they maintain every mutation they've had that doesn't kill the cell they're in.

When you look at these planarians, their bodies are what is called mixoploid. which means that each cell can have a different number of chromosomes, they look like a tumor if you look at the genome it's an incredible mess because they accumulate all these things and yet the structure of their body is like that. They are the best regenerators on the planet, their anatomy is rock solid even though their genome is always all kinds of garbage, so this is kind of a scandal, you know when we learn that, well, you know what genomes are and what genomes determine your body.

Well, why does the animal with the worst genome have the best anatomical control, the most resistant to cancer, the most regenerative? We're actually just beginning to understand this relationship between genomically determined hardware and, by the way, as of a couple of months ago, I think I now understand a little bit why that is, but it's actually a big enigma, since You know, a great enigma. I mean, it really calls into question the whole nature versus nurture question, because you usually associate internal electricity with nurture and hardware with nature, because there's this weird built-in disorder, yeah, that spreads across generations, yeah, It is much more fluid, it is much more complex.

Can you imagine what is happening here? Just imagine the evolution of an animal like this that multi- Ability experts go back to this multi-scale competence, imagine that you have two, two, you have an animal that, where its tissues are, has some degree of multi-scale competence. , so, for example, if it's like what we saw in the tadpole, you know if you put an eye-tail on it they can still see out of that eye, you know there's all this incredible plasticity, so if you have an animal and it shows up for selection and the fitness is pretty good, evolution doesn't know if fitness is good because the genome was awesome or because the genome was kind of junk, but the competition made up for it well and things ended up well, so what that means is that how much The more competition you have, the more difficult it is for selection to choose the best genomes. it hides the information properly and that means, so what happens?

You know, evolution begins basically begins, even though it begins, all the hard work is being done to increase competition because it's getting harder and harder to see the genomes, so I think in planarian what's happened is there's this runaway phenomenon in the that all the effort is focused on the algorithm, so we know you have a shitty genome that we can't keep, we can't clean the genome, we can't keep track of it, so what's going to happen? what survives are the algorithms that can create a big worm no matter what the genome is, so it all went into the algorithm and that of course then reduces the pressure to maintain a clean genome, so this idea of ​​right animals and different ones have this at different levels, but this idea of ​​putting energy into an algorithm that does not overtrain on background, cannot be assumed.

I mean, I think biology is like that in general. Evolution doesn't take the past too seriously because it makes these machines basically solve problems instead of like exactly what you know how to do to deal with exactly what happened last time, yes, problem solving versus memory recovery, so a little memory but a lot of problems, so I think yes, in many cases, yes, foreign problem solving. I mean, it's amazing that those kinds of systems can be built, especially how much they contrast with the way we build problem-solving systems in the world of artificial intelligence. Going back to xenobots, I'm not sure if we ever described housing in our bill, but I mean, you have an article called Perspectives on Biological Robots in an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field and at the beginning you mentioned that the word zenobots is controversial.

Do they get in trouble for using xenobots or do people not like the words endobots? Be provocative with the word xenobots versus biological robots. Don't know. Yes, there is some drama we should be aware of. So there's a bit of drama. I think the drama is basically related to people who are very dressed up. ideas about what the terms mean and I think in many cases these ideas are completely out of date with where science is now and they are certainly out of date with what is going to be, I mean, these concepts, uh, are not going to survive. the next two decades, so if you ask one person, including um, you know a lot of people in biology who want to maintain a clear distinction between biologicals and robots.

Look, what is a robot? Well, a robot emerges from a factory it is made by humans it is boring it has the meaning that you can predict everything it is going to do it is made of metal and certain other inorganic materials magical living organisms arise etc. so there are these distinctions I think than these distinctions. I think they were never good, but they're going to be completely useless in the future, so part of there are a couple of articles that are an article and there's another one that Josh Bongard and I wrote where we actually attack the terminology and say this.

The binary categories are based on a very non-essential kind of surface, uh, limitations of technology and imagination that were true before, but they have to go away and that's why we call them xenobot, so Zeno for xenopus lavis, whether the frog that These guys are made, but we think it's an example of biobot technology because ultimately, if we understand once we understand how to communicate and manipulate inputs to these cells, we'll be able to get them to build whatever. we want them to build and that is robotics, right, it is the rational construction of machines that have useful purposes.

I absolutely believe this is a robotic platform, while some biologists don't, but it's built in a way that all the different components do their own calculation, so the way we've been talking about, you're trying to do an overhead control. down now it's a biological system and in the future all of this will merge because of course at some point we're going to add synthetic biology circuits, right, new, new, you know, new transcriptional circuits to do new things, Of course, we will add some of that, but we specifically stayed away from all that because in the first few articles and there are a few more.

Going down the pike, I think it's going to be quite nice Dynamite, eh, we want to show what the native cells are made of because what happens is that if you design them correctly if we put new ones you already know new transcription factors and new metabolic machinery and whatever people say, well, you designed this and you made it do whatever and it's okay, I wanted to show it and the whole team wanted to show plasticity, intelligence and biology. What makes it amazing before you even start manipulating hardware like that? Yes, don't try to control things too much.

Let it bloom, all the beauty of the biological system. Why Xenopus loves. How do you pronounce for Slavis? Yes. Yes, it's one of the reasons why this frog has been used since I think the '50s. It's very convenient because you can, you know, we keep the adults in this very fine frog habitat, they lay eggs, they lay dozens of thousands of eggs at a time. When the eggs develop right in front of your eyes, it's the craziest magical thing you can ever see because normally you know if you had to deal with mice or rabbits or whatever, you don't see the early stages well because it's all inside the mother, here , everything is in a petri dish at room temperature, so you only have one egg that is fertilized and you can see it divide and divide and divide and in all the organs that form you can see it and at that point, the community has developed many different tools to understand what's happening and also to manipulate correctly, so people use them to, you know, understand birth defects, neurobiology and cancer immunology, also to get all the embryogenesis in the dish. pizza, that's great. to see Are there videos of this?

Oh yes, yes, there have been, yes, there are amazing videos online. I mean, mammalian embryos are cool too, for example, monozygotic twins are what happens when you cut a mammalian embryo in half, you don't get two halves. bodies you get two perfectly normal bodies because it's a regeneration event right a development is just the type of regeneration actually and why this particular frog is just uh because they were doing it in the '50s and it reproduces well in um , you know, in case it's easy to breed in the lab and it's very prolific and all the tools, basically, for decades, people have been developing tools, there are other, some people use other frogs, but I have to say that this is important, xenobots fundamentally have nothing to do with frogs so um, I can't say much about this because it's not published or peer reviewed yet, but we have created xenobots out of other things that have nothing to do with the Frogs.

This is not a frog phenomenon. This is what we started. with frog because it is very convenient, but this plasticity is not a fraud, you know, it is not related to the fact that his frogs, what happens when you kiss him, he turns into a prince, no or a princess, in which direction, eh , prince, yes, princess, yes, that's an experiment. I don't think we have done it and if we have, I don't know if we will collaborate. I can, I can take the initiative. In that effort, okay, great. How are cells coordinated? Let's focus only on embryogenesis.

There is a cell, so it divides, you don't have to be very careful about what each cell starts doing once they divide, yeah and yeah, when there are three, it's like co-founders or whatever, like slowing down, what you are responsible for. So, when do they specialize and how do they coordinate that specialization? So this is the basic science of developmental biology. A lot is known about all of that, but I'll tell you what I think is the kind of important part, which is yes, it's very important who does what, though, because getting back to this topic of well, I made this claim that biology it doesn't take the past too seriously and what I mean by that is it doesn't assume that everything is the way it's expected to be correct and here's an example of that, this was done, this was an old experiment going back at 40 years old, but basically imagine that it is a newt, the salamander, it has these two small tubules that go to the kidneys, there is just a small tube, take a cross section of that tube and you will see eight to ten cells that have cooperated to make this little tube and the cross section is right, so one amazing thing, one amazing thing you can do is, um, you can, you can mess. with very early cell division to make the cells gigantic, you can make them different sizes, you can force them to be different sizes, so if you make the cells different sizes, the Full Nude will still be the same size, like this that if you take a cross section through that tubule instead of eight to ten cells, you may have four or five or you may have three until the cells are so enormous that a single cell wraps around itself and gives you the same large-scale structure. a completely different molecular mechanism, so now instead of communication between cells to form a tubule, it's a cell using the cytoskeleton to bend, so think about what that means in service on a large scale, talk about control of from top to bottom. correct and in the service of a large-scale anatomical characteristic different molecular mechanisms are activated so now think about this you are a naked salesman trying to make an embryo if you had a fixed idea of ​​who it was You are supposed to do what you would be screwed because now your cells are gigantic, nothing would work, there is an incredible tolerance to changes in the size of the parts, in the amount of DNA in those parts, all kinds of things that you can, you can, life.

It's highly interoperable, you can put electrodes in there, you can put foreign nanomaterials in there, it still works, it's, uh, this is problem-solving action, right? It's able to do what it needs to do even when circumstances change, that's the hallmark of intelligence, right? William James defined intelligence as the ability to reach the same goal by different means, that is, the same goal is reached by completely different means, so why do I mention this? It's just to say that yes, it is important for cells to do this. the right thing, but they have an incredible tolerance for things not being what you expect and they still do their job, so if you know that all of these things are not programmed, there are organisms that could be programmed, for example, the C nematode elegans in that organism, each cell is numbered, which means that each AC Elegance has exactly the same number of cells as any other C elegans, allThey are in the same place, they are all divided, there is literally a map of how it works in that type of system.

It's much simpler, but most organisms are incredibly plastic in that sense. Is there anything particularly magical for you about the whole process of developmental biology? Is there anything you could say because you just said it? They are very good at achieving the goal. of the work they need to do the competition, but you get a damn organism for a cell, it's like, eh, it's very difficult to intuit that whole process, to even think about reverse engineering that process, right, they are very difficult to the point where which often just Imagine. Sometimes I ask my students to do this thought experiment.

Imagine that you were reduced to the scale of a single cell and you were in the middle of an embryo and you were looking around at what was happening and the cells running. some cells are dying, you know that every time you look there is a different number of cells for most organisms, so I think if you didn't know what embryonic development was, you would have no idea that what you are seeing is always let's go. to do the same thing, never mind knowing what that is, never mind being able to say even with full genomic information being able to say what the heck they're building, we have no way of doing that, but even guess that, wow.

The result of all this activity is that it is always going to be always going to build the same thing. The imperative to create the final you as you are is now already there so you can do it if you start from the same embryo to create a very similar organism, yeah, except in cases like xenobots, when you give them a different environment, they come up with a different way to adapt in that environment, but in general, I mean it, I think so, I think you know, um uh, summarizing it , I think what Evolution is really good at is creating hardware that has a very stable baseline mode, meaning that if left to its own devices, it's very good at doing the same thing, but it has a great problem solving skills, so if there is, if some assumption doesn't hold true, if your cells are a strange size or if you get the wrong number of cells or if you know someone is stuck in an electrode in the middle The body, whatever it is, will still manage to do most of what it needs to do.

You've talked here about the magic and power of biology. If we look at the human brain, how special the brain is in this context, you are downplaying the importance of the brain. or decreasing, we think about all the special calculations that happen in the brain, everything else is like the help, you are saying that everything is doing calculations, but yet how special is the human brain in this whole context of biology , yeah, I mean, look, there's no getting around the fact that the human brain allows us to do things we couldn't do without it. You can say the same about the liver.

This is true and so you know. My objective is. No, you're right, my goal is that you're being polite to the brain right now. Well, it sounds like a politician like, listen, everyone has, everyone has a role, yeah, and it's a very important role, that's right, we have to recognize the importance of the brain. I know there are more than enough people who are cheering on the brain, so I don't feel like anything I say is going to reduce people's enthusiasm for the human brain, so I emphasize credit to others. I don't believe it. gets too much credit I think other things don't get enough credit I think the brain is the human brain is amazing and special and all that I think other things need more credit and I also think this and I'm like This way, I don't like categories. binary, but almost everything I like a Continuum and what happens with the human brain is that by accepting it as some kind of important category or something essential, we end everything. kinds of weird pseudo-problems and puzzles, so, for example, when we talk about it, you know if you don't want to talk about ethics and other things like that, uh, and what you know, this idea, surely if I look out into the universe.

Surely we don't believe that this human brain is the only way to be sentient. Surely we don't know and have a high level of cognition. I just can't even understand this idea. that that's the only way to do it, there are certainly other architectures made of completely different principles that achieve the same thing and once we believe that, that tells us something important, it tells us that things that are not quite human brains or chimeras. of human brains and other tissues or human brains or other types of brains and novel configurations or things that are sort of brains but not really or plants or embryos or whatever that might also have important cognitive status, so that's what the only one I think we have to be.

I'm very careful about treating the human brain as if it were some kind of neat binary category: you either know you are or you're not. I don't think that exists, so when we look at all the beautiful variety of semi-bological architecture that exists in the universe, how many intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations do you think there are out there? Yeah, boy, I have no experience in that at all. Yes, you haven't met any. I have known the ones we have created. I think I'm referring to exactly a few. Sense with synthetic biology, aren't you creating

aliens

? I absolutely believe that because, look at all of life, all standard model systems are an N of a course of evolution on Earth, right?

And I'm trying to draw conclusions about biology by looking at life on Earth. It's like testing your theory with the same data that generated it, that's all, everything is like locked up, so we absolutely have to create novel examples, eh, that have no history on Earth and that you don't know, like xenobots, they don't have selection story to be a good xenobot, cells have selection for various things, but the xenobot itself never existed before, so we can make chimeras, you know, we make frogalodels, which are a kind of half-frog, you have Axolotl, you can make all kinds of tall brats, correct builds. of life to have problems with robots and whatever we need to do these things until we find real

aliens

because otherwise we're just looking at an N of a set of examples, all kinds of frozen accidents of evolution, etc., we have to go further. that to really understand biology, but we're still even if when you do synthetic biology you're stuck in the building blocks of the way biology is done on this Earth, yeah, right, yeah, yeah, and also the basic limitations of the environment. atmosphere.

Artificial environments to build in the laboratory are linked to the environment. I mean, what's cool with you? Let's say there is. I mean, what I believe is that there are an almost infinite number of living or dead intelligent civilizations out there, um, if you choose one of them. box, what do you think it would look like when you think about synthetic biology or creating synthetic organisms? How difficult is it to create something that is very different? Yes, I think it's very difficult to create something that is very different. just locked in both experimentally and in terms of our imagination, right, it's very difficult and you also emphasize several times that the idea of ​​form, yes, the individual cell gets together with other cells and somehow they're going to build a form, so it's form and function, but form is critical, yes, so I'll try it here.

I mean, I agree with you to any extent, although we can say anything. I think there are probably an infinite number of different, uh, different, um. uh, architectures with that have interesting cognitive properties, uh, what can we say about them? I think, um, the only things that are working. I don't think we can rely on any of the typical things that you know, carbon based, yeah, no, no. I think all of that is just, you know, we have a lack of imagination, but I think the things that are going to be universal, if anything, are things driven by, for example, limited resources, the fact that you're struggling against an enemy. world and you have to draw a boundary between you and the world somewhere, the fact that that boundary is not given to you by anyone, you have to assume it, you know, estimate it yourself and the fact that you have to take your experience seriously and the fact that you're going to try to minimize surprise and the fact that these are the things that I think are fundamental about biology.

None of you know the facts about the genetic code or even the fact that we have genes. or its biochemistry. I don't think any of those things are fundamental, but it's going to be much more about information and the creation of the self, the fact that in my framework, selves are demarcated by uh. the scale of the targets they can pursue, from small local targets to massive targets, you know, planetary scale targets for certain humans, um and everything and everything in between, so you can draw this as a cone of light cognitive about that which determines the scale. of the goals you could possibly pursue, I think those kinds of frameworks, um, as well as active inference, etc., will be universally applicable, but none of the other things that are normally discussed, a quick break during the break to go to the bathroom we were in.

I just talk about, you know, aliens and all that, it's funny. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen them. There's sort of a debate about cognition and plants, and what can you say about different types of computing? and cognitive implants and I always look at that as if you are strange about cognition in Plants you are not ready for exobiology, right, if you know something that is so similar here on Earth it is already like scaring you, so I think there will be all kinds of cognitive life there that will be very difficult for us to recognize.

I think robots will help us, yes, expand our minds about cognition, whether that or the word like xenobots, and maybe they will become the same thing that you really know when the human designs the thing at least in part. and then it's able to achieve some kind of cognition that's different than what you're used to, then you start to understand what, oh cut, you know every living organism is. capable of cognition oh, I need to expand my understanding of what cognition is, but do you think plants like it when you eat them? They are screaming? I don't know about yelling.

I think you have to see what I think when I eat. a salad, yeah, well, yeah, I think you have to lower your expectations in terms of what's right, so they're probably not screaming the way we would, but there's a lot of data that Plants can make anticipation. and certain types of memory and so on um I think you know what you just said about robots uh I hope you're right and I hope that's right, but there are two there are two ways that people can take that correctly, so one way is exactly what you just did.

It is said that they are trying to expand their notions for that category. The other way people usually go is, they just define the term as if it's not a natural product, it's just a fake, it's not really intelligence if it was made by someone else because it's the same thing, it's the same thing, you can see how it's done and once you see how it's like a magic trick, when you see how it's done, it's not as fun anymore and I think people have a real tendency towards that and something that seems really strange to me in the sense that if Someone told me, we have this kind of blind search like, for example, hill climbing and then we have a very smart engineering team, which one do they do?

I think it will produce a system that has good intelligence. I think it's really strange to say that it just comes from blind searching. It can't be done by people who, by the way, can also use evolutionary techniques if they want, but also. rational design I think it's really strange to say that real intelligence only comes from natural evolution, so I hope you're right, I hope people take it the other way around, but there is a good shortcut, so now I work a lot with Lego robots since for my personal pleasure, not in that way, internet, then, the four legs and one of the things that changes my experience with robots a lot is when I can't understand why I did a certain thing and there are many ways to design that know the person who created the software that runs it, there are many ways for me to build that software in such a way that I don't know exactly why he made a certain basic decision, of course, as an engineer, you can go in and start looking at logs, you can log all kinds of data, sensory data, the decisions that you made, you know all the outputs and neural networks, etc., but I also try to really experience that surprise and that experience like another person would. that doesn't know at all how it's built and I think the magic is there and not knowing how it works I think biology does it for you through the layers of abstraction, yeah, because no one really knows what's going on inside the biological like each one.

The component has no idea of ​​the bigger picture. I think there are actually really cheap systems that can illustrate that kind of thing, that are even like um, you know, fractals, like you have a very small short formula in Z and you look at it and there's no magic that you're just going to go through, you know, Z squared plus C, whatever you're going to go through, but the result is this incredibly imagerich and beautiful, right, it's like wow, all of that was in this like 10 long string of characters is amazing, so the fact that you can know everything there is to know about the details and the process and all the parts and it's all like that, there is literally no magic of any kind there and yet the result is something you would never know.

What you expected and you know it's incredibly rich and complex and beautiful, so you write a lot of what you write and you work on developing conceptual frameworks for understanding unconventional cognition, so the kinds of things that you We've been talking I just like it. term unconventional cognition and you want to discover how to detect, study and communicate with something. You've already mentioned some examples, but what unconventional cognition is is as simple as anything outside of what we generally define as cognition, cognitive science. between our ears or is there some deeper way to get to the fundamentals of what cognition is, yeah, I think uh and and if I'm certainly not the only person working on unconventional, unconventional cognition, um, then it's the term used, yeah, that's one So, I've coined a bunch of weird terms, but that's not one of mine, like, that's something that exists, for example, someone like Andy Adamasky, who, um, I don't know if you've had it Yeah.

You haven't you should he's a he's a really interesting guy, you know, he's a computer scientist and he does unconventional cognition and Sly molds and all kinds of weird stuff, um, he's a really weird cat, really interesting anyway, like that That depends on you. I know I've come up with a lot of terms, but they're not mine, so I think a lot of terms are really defined by the times, which means that unconventional cognitive things that are unconventional cognition today are not going to be unconventional cognition. is considered unconventional cognition at some point uh it's one of those it's one of those things and then it's you know it's it's it's this is this is a really deep question of how do you recognize communicate with um um classify cognition when you can't trust the Typical milestones, right?

It's so typical. You'll know again if you stay with the history of life on Earth. like these these exact model systems you would say ah here's a particular structure of the brain and this one has less of those and this one has a larger frontal cortex and this one right like this that these are reference points of what we're used to and it allows us to make very quick judgments about things, but if you can't rely on that because you're looking at something synthetic, or something designed, or something extraterrestrial, what do you do? do it right, how do you do it? and that's what really interests me.

I'm interested in considering all of its possible implementations, not just the obvious ones we know from looking at brains here on Earth whenever I think of something like unconventional cognition. I think of cellular automata. I'm captivated by the beauty of the thing, the fact that from small, simple objects you can create such beautiful complexity that very quickly you forget about the individual objects and see the things it creates. like their own organisms, which blows my mind every time, honestly I could go full time eating mushrooms and watching cellular time, don't you have to eat mushrooms? Just sell your automata, it feels like saying it from an engineering perspective.

I love it when a very simple system captures something really powerful because you can then study that system to understand something fundamental about the complexity of life on Earth. Anyway, how do I communicate with a thing so cellular automata can do cognition? If a plant can do cognition, if a xenobot can? do cognition, how I like to whisper in your ear and get a response to how I have a conversation, yeah, well, how do I have a xenobot on a

podcast

? That is really a very interesting line of research that opens up. up I mean, we thought about this, so you need some things that you need, you need to understand the space that they live in, so not just the physical modality?

You can see? Can you feel the vibration? I mean, that's important. Of course, because that's how you deliver your message, but not just not just the ideas for a media outlet, not just the physical medium, but what is prominence, so what are these, what are they important to this, what's important to this system and systems of all kinds of different levels of sophistication than what you might expect to get in return and I think what's really important I call the spectrum of persuasibility, which is this idea that when you look at a system you don't you can't assume where on the spectrum it is, you have to do experiments and so, for example, if you look at a gene regulatory network that's just a bunch of nodes that turn each other on and off at various rates, you could look at that and say wow, there's no magic here.

I mean, clearly, this thing is as deterministic as it gets, it's a piece of hardware, the only way we'll be able to control it is by rewiring. This is how my molecular biology works properly, we can add nodes, delete notes or whatever, so we did simulations and showed that it's biological and now we're doing this in the lab, biological networks like that have associative memory. so that they can actually learn, they can learn from experience, they have habituation, they have sensitization, they have associative memory that you wouldn't have known if you assumed that they have to be on the left side of that spectrum, so when you go to communicate with something and even we have um uh uh Charles Abramson.

I have written an article on behaviorist approaches to the synthetic organism, which means that if you are given something you have no idea what it is or what it can do, how do you find out? what is its psychology what is its level what does it do it and so we literally establish a set of protocols starting with the simplest things I work my way up to more complex things where no assumptions can be made about what this thing can do. right from you, you have to start and you will find out, then when you will, here is a simple way, I mean, here is a way to communicate with something if you can train it, that is a way to communicate, so if you can provide If you can figure out what the reward currency of positive and negative reinforcement is and you can get him to do something that he didn't do before based on the experiences that you've given him, you've taught him one thing, you've communicated one thing to him. that this or that action is good, so some other action is not good, that's like a basic atom of a primitive atom of communication, what happens in some sense if it leads you to do something that you haven't done before? back, yes, certainly, and then there is, I have seen cartoons.

I think maybe Gary Larson or someone had a cartoon of these rats in the Labyrinth and the rat you know helps the other one, watch this every time. Every time I walk over here, he starts scribbling that on the clipboard that he has, it's amazing if we step outside of ourselves and really measure how much, like it really measures how much I've changed because of my interaction with certain cellular automata and you really have to take that. as a consideration, well, these things are changing you too, yes, I know you know how it works, etc., but that is absolutely changing you, I think, I think I read that.

I don't know any details but I think I read something about how wheat and other things from humans are domesticated in correct terms but because of their properties they change the way human behavior and social structures in that sense cats rule the world because They they took care of them, so first of all, they first, even though they don't give a shit about humans, they clearly would with every ounce of their being, somehow they only have millions and millions of humans to bring them home and feed them . and then not just the physical space that they take over, but they took over the digital space, they dominate the Internet in terms of cuteness, in terms of immutability, so they're like they literally get inside the memes, they go viral and they spread. . on the internet and they are the ones who probably control the humans, that's my theory, another one that is a follow up article after the kiss of the frog, okay, I mean, you mentioned sentience and consciousness.

You have a paper called Generalizing Frameworks for Sentience Beyond Natural Species. beyond normal cognition, if we look at sentience and consciousness, I wonder if you make an interesting distinction between those two, in other places outside of humans and maybe outside of Earth, you think that aliens are half-intelligent and, If they do, how do we think about it? when you have this framework, what is this item? What is the way you propose to think about ascensions? Yes, that particular article was a very brief comment on another article that was written about crabs. There is a really good article about them.

Crabs? and various like a rubric of different types of behaviors that could apply to different creatures and they're trying to apply it to crabs and so on. I have Consciousness, we can talk about a feeling, but it is a whole separate kettle of fish. I almost never talk about crabs in this case yes, I almost never talk about Consciousness per se. I've said very, very little about it, but we can, we can talk about it if you want, mainly what I'm talking about is. cognition because I think it's much easier to deal with in a rigorous experimental way.

I think all of these terms have, you know, sensitivity, etc., they have different definitions and, fundamentally, I think people can, as long as they specify what they mean in advance, um, I think people can define them in various ways. , the one thing I really stress is that the right way to think about all of these things is an energy from an engineering perspective, what helps me control, predict and uh a and helps me do my next experiment? So, like that, like that, that's not a universal perspective, so some people have philosophical foundations and those are primary and if something goes against that, then it must automatically be wrong, so some people will say I don't care What else if your theory tells me that thermostats have small goals, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. so that's it, I just like, that's my philosophical preconception, you know, that like thermostats, they have no goals and that's it, so that's one way of doing it and some people do it that way.

I don't do it that way and I think we do. We can't, if we can't, I don't think we can know much about anything from our philosophical armchair. I think all of these theories and ways of doing things stand or fail based on basically a set of criteria. Does it help you execute a rich research program? That's all if I totally agree with you, but forget about philosophy. What about the poetry of ambiguity? What about the limits of things you can design using terms that can be defined in multiple ways? living within that uncertainty to be able to play with words until something arrives that you can design.

I mean, to me, that's where Consciousness is currently, no one really understands the difficult problem of Consciousness is the issue of how it feels because it really feels how it feels. I like that something is this biological system, this conglomerate of a group of cells in this hierarchy of competencies, it feels like something and yes, it feels like one thing and is it just a side effect of a complex system or is there something else? . that humans have or is there something else that any biological system has some kind of magic some kind of not just the sense of agency but a real sense with a capital letter of agency yeah, boy, uh, yeah, that's a deep question now. , There is space? for poetry and Engineering or not, there definitely is and much of Poetry arises when we realize that none of the categories we deal with are clear-cut, since we believe they are correct and so on in the different areas of de All these Specters are where much of Poetry is based.

I have a lot of new theories about things, but I don't actually have a good theory about Consciousness that I plan to bring out, so you hardly see it as useful for your current work. Unconsciousness I think will come. I have some ideas about it, but I don't feel like they're going to move the needle on that yet, but do you want to root yourself in engineering always so well? I mean, no. It's not like that, that's right, if we really approach Consciousness per se in terms of the hard problem, I don't know, I don't know, that's not necessarily going to be grounded in engineering, right, that aspect of cognition?

Is it nothing more than real Consciousness per se? You know, from a first-person perspective, I'm not sure that's engineering-based and I think specifically what's different about what's different is that there are a couple of things, so let us know, here we go, I'll say a couple of things about One thing is consciousness, and what makes it different is that for any other kind of aspect of science, when we think about having a correct or good theory, we have an idea of ​​what format that theory does. predictions, whether they are numbers. or whatever we have some idea, we may not know theanswer, we may not have the theory, but we know that when we get the theory, this is what it will produce and then we will know if it is right or wrong for real Consciousness, not Behavior. not neural correlates but actual first person consciousness if we had a correct theory of consciousness or even a good one, what the hell would it be, what format would it make, would it make correct predictions because all the things we know about it basically boil down to observables. behaviors so the only thing I can think about when I think about that is is it going to be poetry or is it going to be something for um if I ask you okay you have a great Theory of Consciousness and here's this creature maybe it's natural maybe it's an engineer whatever and I want you to tell me what your theory says about this being, um, what it's like to be this, being the only thing I can imagine you giving. me is a work of art, a poem or something that once I have assumed it I share it I I I Now I have a state similar to whatever the best thing I can think of, well, it is possible that once you have a Good understanding of Consciousness would map to some things that are more measurable, so for example it is possible for a conscious being to be capable of suffering, so if you start observing pain and suffering, you can start to connect it as closely to things as you can.

Measure that in terms of how they are reflected in behavior and problem solving and goal creation and achievement, for example, I think suffering is one of the great aspects of the human condition. and then if Consciousness is in some way, maybe at least a catalyst for suffering, you might start to feel like Echoes of it and you start to see the real effects of Consciousness and behavior, that it's not just a subjective experience, it's like it's really deeply integrated into the problem solving, the decision making of a system, something like this, but it's also possible that we realize that this is not a philosophical statement, philosophers can write their books, I appreciate it, you know, I take the test of the tour very seriously.

I don't know why people really don't like it when a robot convinces you that it's intelligent. I think it's a really incredible achievement and there's a deep sense in which that's intelligence, if it looks like it's intelligent, it's intelligent and I think there's a deep aspect of um, a system that seems to be conscious, in some deep sense, It is conscious for these, for me, we have to consider that possibility and a system that appears to be conscious is an engineering challenge, yes, I do not disagree with any of that, I am referring especially to intelligence, I think it is something publicly observable, and I mean, you know, science fiction has dealt with this. for a century or a lot more, maybe this idea that when you're faced with something that just doesn't meet any of your typical assumptions, you can't look inside the skull and say "well, there's that frontal cortex," so I guess we're well, right, if it is, you know, so this thing lands in your front yard and this, you know, with the little door opens and something rolls out and it's like, you know, something shiny and aluminum looking. and He hands you this, uh, you know, he hands you this poem that he wrote while he was, you know, flying over it and how happy it is to meet you, what will be your correct criteria for whether you can take it apart and see what. makes a tick or if you have to be nice about it and whatever, all the criteria that we have now and you know people are using and like you said, a lot of people are depressed on tour tests and stuff like this, but what? what else do we have?

Because measuring a quarter excise tax is not going to be enough in the larger scheme of things, so I think this is an open door, an open door. problem, it is true that we know our solution to the problem of other Minds. It's very simplistic. We give each other credit for having Minds just because, in a way, you know, on an anatomical level, we're pretty similar. That's pretty good, but how far is it going to go? I think it's very primitive, so, yes, I think it's a major unsolved problem, it's a really challenging direction of thought for the human race, which you talked about as Embodied Minds. if you start thinking that things other than humans have minds, that's really challenging, yes, because all men are created equal, it starts to be okay, we should probably treat not only cows with respect, yes, but like plants and not just plants, but some. sort of organized conglomerates of cells in a petri dish, in fact, some of the work that we're doing like you and the whole scientific community are doing with the biology people could be like we're not really bad at viruses.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, the thing is, you're right and I understand, I certainly get phone calls about people complaining about frog skin and so on, but I think we have to separate the kind of deep philosophical aspects from what actually happened. So what really happens on Earth is that people with exactly the same anatomical structure kill each other, you know, on a daily basis, like this, like this, I think it's clear that just knowing that something else is the same or perhaps more cognitive or aware than you. This is not a guarantee of kind behavior, that's what we know, so we looked at commercial mammal breeding and various other things, and I think from a practical point of view long before we got to worry.

About things like frog skin, we have to ask ourselves why, what can we do about the way we have been behaving towards creatures that we know by one factor because of our similarities are basically like us? I know that's completely different, this is a social thing, but, but fundamentally, you know, of course, you're absolutely right that we're thinking about this too, we're on this planet somehow, incredibly lucky, it's just pure luck. than us. It actually only has one dominant species, it didn't have to work that way, so you could easily imagine that there could be a planet somewhere with more than one equally or maybe almost equally intelligent species and then, but, then they may not seem like anything. they like each other, so there can be multiple ecosystems where there are things similar to human intelligence and then you would have all kinds of problems with how you relate to them when they are physically I don't like you at all, but you still know it in terms of behavior and culture and whatever, it's pretty obvious that they know as much as you do or maybe imagine, imagine that there was another group of beings that were like on average, you know, 40 IQ points less, right, like we were quite lucky in many ways, you know that we don't really have them, although we know that we still act badly in many ways, but but the fact is that you know that all humans are more or less in this same range, but it didn't have to work out that way. that way, but I think that's part of the way life on Earth works, maybe human civilization works.

It seems like we want us to be pretty similar and then within that, you know what everyone thinks about the same relatively equal intelligence problem-solving abilities, even physical characteristics, but then we'll find some aspect of that to be different and that seems to be like I. I mean, it's very dark to say, but it seems like I'm not even a mistake, but as a characteristic of the early development of human civilization, you choose the other, your tribe versus the other tribe in your war, it's a kind of evolution. in the space of memes a space of ideas I think there is a new war between us, so we are very good at finding each other even when the characteristics are really the same.

I don't know what I mean, I'm sure. A lot of these things resonate in the biological world in some way, yeah, there's a fun experiment I did. My son came up with this so we did a biology unit together, he would use homeschooling and so we did this. A couple of years ago we did this thing where we imagine you have the crafty mold and the polycephalus and it grows on them, in an agar petri dish, and it spreads out and it's a single cell, you know? it produces, but it's like a giant thing and then you put a piece of oats in it and it wants to go get the oats and it grows towards the oats, so what you do is you take a razor blade and you just separate the piece. of all the culture that's growing into the oh, you just separate it out and now think about the interesting decision-making calculus for that little piece.

I can go get oats and therefore I won't have to share. those nutrients with this giant mass there, then the nutrients per unit volume are going to be incredible, so I should use ethio, but if I rejoin first because faizaram, once you cut it, it has the ability to rejoin if I rejoin first, then that whole calculation becomes impossible because I no longer exist, there is only us and from time to time we will go to eat this well, so, this is interesting, you know this, you can imagine a kind of theory of games where the number of agents is not fixed. and that it's not just about cooperating or defecting, but actually merging and whatever, yeah, that kind of competition, how do you make that decision?

Yeah, so, that, that's right, it's really interesting and empirically what we found. is that it tends to merge first, it tends to merge first and then everything goes away, but it's really interesting that that calculation like we have. I mean, I'm not an expert on economic game theory and all that. but maybe there's an account, maybe some kind of hyperbolic discounting or something, but maybe you know this idea that the actions you take not only change your reward, but they change who or what you are and that you may not be able to take an action afterwards. that you no longer exist or you've changed radically or you're merged with someone else, that's right, as far as I know, that's a whole, you know, we still lack a formalism to know how to model any of that evolution of DC, by the way, it's a process that applies here on Earth or is it from somewhere where evolution came from, yeah, yeah, so this thing, um, from the very origin of life that led us to today, what what the hell is that?

I? I think evolution is inevitable in the sense that if you combine it and basically I think one of the most useful things that was done in the early days of computing, I think it started in the '60s, was evolutionary computing and just show how simple that is. if you have if you have imperfect heredity and competition together those two things were three right things so heredity imperfect heredity and competition or selection those three things and that's it now now you're in the right careers and that can It's not just on Earth because you can do on the computer, it can be done in chemical systems, it can be done in um, you know, Elise Mullen says it works on, you know, cosmic scales, so I think that kind of something is incredibly ubiquitous and general is a feature. general of life it's interesting to think about you know the standard uh the standard thinking about this is that it's uh it's blind, which means that the intelligence of the process is zero is stumbling around and I think in the past, when the options with the options were to be dumb like machines or smart like humans, so of course scientists went in this direction because nobody wanted creationism and so they said, "okay, it has to be that way." completely blind, I'm actually not sure, because I guess I believe everything is a Continuum and I think it doesn't have to be intelligent with foresight like us, but it doesn't have to be completely blind either.

I think there may be aspects to this and in particular this kind of Multi-Scale Competition could give you a little bit of foreshadowing maybe or a little bit of problem solving but that's going to be completely different in different different systems but I think it's general. I don't think it's just on Earth. I think it's something very fundamental and it seems to have a kind of direction that takes us and that in some way is perhaps defined by the environment itself. It feels like we were heading towards something like we were playing a script that was like a single cell defined the entire organism.

Yes, it feels like a kind of script has been playing out since the origin of the Earth. Yes, you really can't. go the other way, I mean, this is very controversial and I don't know the answer, but people have argued that this is called, you know, rewinding the tape of life, right? and some people have argued, I think I think. I think Conway Morris has maybe argued that there's a deep attractor, for example, between humans and humans, um uh, some kind of structure and that, and that if you were to rewind it again, you'd basically get more or less the same thing. thing and then other people have argued that no, it's incredibly sensitive to Frozen accidents and then once certain stochastic decisions are made, Downstream everything is going to be different.

I don't know, I don't know, you know we're really bad at predicting attractors in the space of complex systems in general terms, right, we don't know, so maybe evolution on Earth has these deep attractors that, regardless whatever happened, it's veryIt will probably end there or maybe not. Don't know. I know it's a really hard idea to imagine that if you ran the Earth a million times 500,000 times you would get Hitler like yeah, we don't like to think like that, we think like that because at least maybe in America you like to think that individual decisions can change the world and if individual decisions can change the world, then surely any disturbance will result in a totally different trajectory, but perhaps there is in this hierarchy of competencies a self-correcting system that is ultimately a bunch of chaos that , ultimately leads towards something. like a super intelligent AI system, the answers are 42.

I mean, there might be some kind of imperative to life that we're heading towards and we're too focused on our everyday life of drinking coffee and snacks and having sex and getting uh , a promotion at work to not see the great imperative of life on earth that is directed towards something, yes, maybe, maybe not, it is difficult, I think one of the important things about um chimerica by engineer Technologies, all of those things are we have to start developing better science to predict the cognitive goals of composite systems, so we're just not very good at that, right, we don't know if I create a composite system and this could be the Internet of Things or robotic swarm or a cell phone a cell swarm or whatever what is the emerging intelligence of this thing in the first place what level is it going to be at and if it has target-directed capability what the targets will be we're just not very good at predicting that yet. and I think it's an existential level.

We need to be able to do that because we're building these things all the time. Well, we are building, we are building both physical structures. as a swarm of robotics and we are building social financial structures and so on with very little ability to predict what kind of autonomous objectives that system of which we are now cogs will have and therefore we learn to predict and control those things is going to be critical, so which, in fact, we have. So if you're right and there is some kind of attractor for evolution, it would be good to know what it is and then make a rational decision about whether we're going to keep going or we're going to get out of it. or trying to get out of there because there's no guarantee, I mean, that's the other big thing, you know, a lot of people I get a lot of complaints from people emailing me and saying yeah, you know what you're doing.

It's not natural, you know, and I'll say make it look natural, it would be nice if someone made sure that natural matched our values, but no one is doing that, but you know, Evolution optimizes biomass, that's all. no one is optimizing, they're not optimizing for your happiness, I don't necessarily think they're optimizing for intelligence or fairness or anything like that. I'm going to find that person who sent you an email, beat him up, take his place, steal everything he owns and say now, now we are, this is natural, this is natural, yes, exactly because it comes from a vision of the old world where you would assume that whatever is natural is probably best and I think we are long out of it. of that kind of Garden of Eden view, so I think we can do it better, I think we have to do it naturally, it's just not good for a lot of life forms, what are some cool synthetic organisms that you?

Think about what you dream about when you think about the embodied mind, what do you imagine what you hope to build? Yes, on a practical level, what I really hope to do is gain a sufficient understanding of the embodied intelligence of such organs and tissues. that we can achieve radically different regenerative medicine so that we can basically say and I think about it as um you know in terms of well, can you what is what is the uh uh what is the goal? and the end game for all of this. For me the end game is something you would call an anatomical compiler, so the idea is that you would sit in front of the computer and draw whatever body or organ you wanted, not molecular details, but this is what I want I want a six-legged frog, you know, with a propeller on top or I want I want a heart that looks like this or I want a leg that looks like this and what I would do if we knew what we were doing is I could turn that anatomical description into a set of stimuli that would have to be given to the cells to convince them to build exactly that correctly.

I probably won't live to see it, but I think it can be done and I think that If we can have that, then that's basically the solution for all of medicine except for infectious diseases, so birth defects, traumatic injuries, cancer, aging, degenerative diseases, if we knew how to tell cells what to build, all those things will go away, then those things will go away. and the positive feedback spiral of economic costs where all advances are increasingly heroic and expensive interventions of a sinking ship when you're like 90 years old and then and so on, all of that disappears because basically instead of trying to fix you get up as you degrade, um, you progressively regenerate, you know, you apply regenerative medicine early before things degrade, so I think that's going to have massive economic impacts on what we're trying to do now, which you're not you at all. be sustainable and uh and that's what I hope I hope I hope we get it so for me yeah the xenobots will do useful things cleaning the environment cleaning you know your joints and all that kind of stuff but more important than that , I think we can use these synthetic systems to try to understand and develop a science of sensing and manipulating the targets of the collective intelligences of cells specifically for regenerative medicine and then something beyond that, if we know something like that.

Think beyond that, what I hope is something like what you said, all of this prompts a reconsideration of how we formulate ethical standards because this old school is so so so in the old days, what could be done is, obviously, that we are facing something. you could, you could play it correctly and if you heard a metallic sound, you said "ah, okay, right", so you could conclude that it was made in a factory. I could take it apart. I can do whatever is right if you did that and you got a kind of mushy, uh, warm feeling, you'd say I need to be, you know, kind of nice and whatever that's not going to be feasible, it was never really feasible, but it was good enough because we did it.

We don't have any that we don't know better that need to go, and I believe that by breaking down those artificial barriers, we can one day try to build a system of ethical standards that is not based on these completely contingent facts of our earthly history, but on something much deeper. that you know it really requires agency and the ability to suffer and it takes all of that seriously, the ability to suffer and the deep questions I would ask a system are: can I eat it? and I can? having sex with it, um, which are the two fundamental tests of Again The Human Condition uh, so basically I can do what Dali does, which is in physical space, so I print like a 3D print, Pepe the frog with a propeller on the head.

That's the dream, well, yes and no. I mean, I want to stay away from 3D printing because it will be available for some things much sooner. I mean, we can already do bladders and ears and things like that because it's a micro level. control right when you 3D print, you're in charge of where each cell goes and for some things you know, like this one they had, I think 20 years ago or maybe a little bit earlier, you could do that, so yeah, I would. I would like to say the part of the doll where you provide some words, yes, and it generates a painting, so here you say: I want a frog with these characteristics and then I would direct a complex biological system to build something like that, yes, the main magic would be.

I mean, looking at Dali and stuff, I think it seems like the first part is a little bit settled. Now, where you go from words to image, it seems more or less resolved. The next step is really difficult. This is what keeps things like sharp and genomic editing, etc., it's good, this is what limits all the impacts, except uh uh, for gender medicine, because getting back to the good thing, this is the knee joint What do I want or this is the eye I want, now what genes. Do I edit to make that happen? Going back in that direction is really difficult, so instead everything will be fine.

I understand how to motivate cells to build particular structures. Can I rewrite your memory of what you think you should be? building in such a way that then I can, you know, take my hands off the wheel and let them do their thing, so some of that is experiment, but some of that maybe AI can help too, just like with protein folding , this is exactly the problem with protein folding. uh in the simplest medium I tried and solved it with Alpha Fold, which is how the sequence of letters results in this three-dimensional shape and you have to do it.

I guess it didn't solve it because you have to do it if you say I. I want this shape, how can I then have a sequence of letters? Yes, reverse engineering is really complicated. I think I think where and we're doing some of this now is using AI to try to build actionable models. of the intelligence of cellular collectives so try to help us help us get models that that um and we've had some success in this so we did something like this to um uh you know, to repair brain birth defects. . At Frog we've done some of this to normalize melanoma, where you can actually start using AI to make models of how this would impact if you wanted to, given all the right complexities and given all the, controls that know how to do it when you say regenerative medicine, so we talk about creating biological organisms, but if you regrow a hand, that information is already there, the biological system has that information, so how does regenerative medicine work today?

How do you wait? It works, what's the hope? Yes, yes, how can you make this happen? Nowadays there are a set of popular approaches, so one is 3D printing, so the idea is that I'm going to make a scaffold out of what I want. seed it with cells and then and then there it's right, so straightforward and then it works for certain things, you can make a bladder that way or an ear or something like that, um, the other, the other ideas is some kind of stem cell. We transplant ideas if we put stem cells with appropriate factors we can make them generate certain types of neurons for sure, you know, diseases, etc., all those things are good for relatively simple structures, but when you want an eye or a hand or something further.

I think this is perhaps an unpopular opinion. I think the only hope we have in a reasonable period of time is to understand how the thing was motivated to be done in the first place, so what did it do? those cells at first create a particular arm with a particular set of sizes and shapes and number of fingers and all that, and why can a salamander keep losing its and regrow its and a planarian can do the same thing even? more so, for me, kind of the ultimate regenerative medicine was when you can tell the cells to build whatever you need them to build correctly and so that we can all be like planarians, basically, you have to start from the beginning or you can. um make a shortcut okay cast a hand you already have the whole organism yeah so this is what we've done right so we've more or less worked that out in the frogs so the frogs a Unlike salamanders, they do not regenerate their legs when they are adults. and so uh We've shown that with a very um uh intervention, what we do is there's two things you need, you need to have a signal that tells the cells what to do and then you need some way to deliver it, so this is working along with them with David Kaplan and I should do a disclosure here, we have a company called morpheuticals and spin-off where we are trying to address regeneration, you know, limb regeneration, so we have resolved it is in Frog and now we are in trials and mice, so now come on, we're on mammals now and I can't say anything about how it goes, but the Frog thing is resolved, so what you do is, um, after you. have a little Luke Skywalker frog with each growing hand, yeah, basically, yeah, yeah, so what you do is we made it with legs instead of forearms and what you do is after amputation, they normally don't regenerate, you get a portable bioreactor, so it's This thing that happens and Dave Kaplan's lab makes these things and inside it's a very controlled environment, it's a silk gel that contains some drugs, for example, ION channel drugs, and what you're doing is saying: these cells should regrow what normally happens here, so everything is on for 24 hours, then you take it off and don't touch your leg again.

This is reallyimportant because what we are not looking for is a set of micromanagement. knowing how to print or control the cells that we want to activate, we want to interact with them from the beginning and then not touch them again because we don't know how to make a frog's leg, but the Frog does know how to make a frog's leg. So 24 hours, 18 months of leg growth after that without us touching it again and after 18 months you get a pretty good leg that shows this proof of concept that from the beginning when the cells immediately after the injury , when they make a decision for the first time. about what they're going to do, you can shock them and once they've decided to do a leg, they won't need you, after that they can do their own thing, so that's an approach we're taking now.

What about cancer suppression? That's something you mentioned earlier. How can all of these ideas help with cancer suppression? So let's go back to the beginning and ask what cancer is. So I think you know, asking why there is cancer is the wrong question. I think the right question is why is there anything other than cancer? So, in the normal state, you have a group of cells that cooperate to achieve a large-scale goal, if that cooperative process breaks down and you have a cell that is isolated from that electrical grid that allows it to remember what the big goal is: go back to your single cell lifestyle, so now you think of that boundary between self and the world normally when all these cells are connected by gab junctions in an electrical network. a whole right self, which means its goals have these big goals at the tissue level, and so on, as soon as the cell disconnects from that, the self is Tiny, right, and so on at that point and so on, many people They model cells from cancer cells. how to be more selfish and all that they are not more selfish they are equally selfish it is just that their self is smaller normally the self is huge now they have small selves now what are the objectives of the small selves well they proliferate well and migrate to wherever the life is good and that is metastasis, so that is proliferation of metastasis, so one thing that we found and people have noticed years ago is that when cells turn into cancer, the first thing they see is that they close the gap.

You join and it's very similar, I think it's very similar to that slime mold experiment where until you close Gap Junction you can't even consider the idea of ​​leaving the bus because there is no you at that point, your mind merged with this with this whole other network but as soon as the Gap Junction is closed now the boundary between you now the rest of the body is out of the environment for you you are just a single celled organism in the rest of the body environment so we study this process and we find a way to artificially control the bioelectrical state of these cells to physically force them to stay in that network and then what, what, what. that means that nasty mutations like k-ras and things like that are these really difficult oncogenic mutations that cause tumors if you make them and then but but then but then artificially um uh control of the bioelectrics, you massively shrink the tumor.

Genesis or normalized cells that had already begun to become basically normal cells again and this is another form very similar to the planarian, this is another form in which the bioelectric state dominates what is the genetic state. It's so if you sequence the nucleic acids, you know, you'll see the k-aras mutation, you'll say, ah, well, that's going to be a tumor, but there's no tumor because biologically you've maintained it. the cells are connected and they're just working to create nice skin and kidneys and everything else, so we've started to translate that into human glioblastoma cells and hopefully, you know, a patient in the future, interacting with patients weird possible ways that we can quote uh cure cancer I think so, I think so, I think I think the actual cure, I mean, there are other technologies, you know, immune therapy, I think that's a great technology, um, chemotherapy, I don't think so. it's a good it's a good technology, I think we need to get away from that, so chemotherapy just kills the cells, yes, well, chemotherapy hopes to kill more tumor cells than your cells, that's it, it's a delicate balance, the The problem is the cells are very similar because they are yourselves and therefore if you don't have a very clear way of distinguishing them, then the toll that chemotherapy takes on the rest of the body is just incredible, which is why an immunotherapy tries having the immune system do some of the work exactly, yeah, I think that's potentially a very good, very good approach, if you can teach the immune system to recognize enough cancer cells, that's a pretty good approach, but I think I think that our approach is in some ways more fundamental because if you can, if you can keep the cells focused on organ-level targets rather than individual cell targets, then no one will produce a tumor or metastasize, etc., so that we have been experiencing a pandemic.

What do you think of viruses in this beautiful biological context that we have been talking about? Are they beautiful to you? Are they scary? Also maybe say. Are they since we've been discriminating throughout this entire conversation? They are living? Are they embodied? Embodied minds. Those are idiots as far as I know and I haven't been able to find this article again, but somewhere I looked in the last few months there were some articles showing an example of a virus that actually had physiology, so something was going on, I think proton flow or something like that in the virus itself, but except that viruses are generally very passive, they don't do anything by themselves, so I don't see any particular reason to attribute much of a Mind to it.

They, I think, you know, represent a way of kidnapping other Minds for sure, like cells and other things, but that's an interesting interaction, although if they're kidnapping other Minds, you know what way we were talking about. Living organisms that can interact with each other and alter the trajectory of each one after having interacted. I mean, there is a deep and meaningful connection between a virus and a cell and I think they are both transformed by experience and, in that sense, both. they're living, yeah, yeah, you know the whole category that I, um, I don't understand this question of what is lived and what is not lived.

I really am, I'm not sure and I know there are people working on this and I want to do it. I don't want to upset anyone, but, um, I haven't found it particularly useful to try to make some sort of binary distinction. I think the level of cognition is very interesting, but like a Continuum, but living like I don't live in you know, I don't know, I really know what to do with that, I don't know, I don't know what you do next after you make that distinction, for That makes the distinction very binary, can I have sex with that or not?

Eat it or not, because they're actionable, right, yeah, well, I think that's a critical point that you brought up because it's really about how you relate to something, as an engineer, how do I control it, but maybe I shouldn't? be controlling him maybe I should be, you know? Can I have a relationship with him? Should I be listening to his advice since you know I need to completely disarm him? You better do what you say because you seem to be pretty smart and everything else, right, that's really what we're asking. Yes, we need to understand our relationship with him.

We are looking for that relationship even in the most trivial senses. You came up with a lot of interesting terms. We've mentioned some of them, agency stuff that's really interesting, really interesting for the future of computing, artificial intelligence and computer science, and everything else, let me also go over some of them if they spark any interesting thoughts. there is teleophobia, the unjustified fear of expressing oneself on the side of too much agency when considering a new system, yes, I mean, that's the opposite, I mean being afraid of maybe anthropomorphizing the thing, this will make some people angry I think, but , I do not do it.

I don't think, I think the whole notion of anthropomorphizing is a holdover from an A from a pre-scientific era when humans were magical and everything else wasn't magical and you were anthropomorphizing when you dared to suggest that something else had some characteristics. of humans and I think we have to go much further than that and this issue of anthropomorphization, I think it's a cheap burden, I don't think it holds up at all other than when someone makes a cognitive claim. I think all cognitive statements are actually engineering statements, so when someone says this knows, this expects, this wants, or this predicts, whatever you can say is fabulous, give me the engineering protocol you derived using that. hypothesis and we will do it. see if this helps us or not and then we can know and then we can make a rational decision.

I also like the Anatomy compiler, a future system that represents the long-term end of the science of morphogenesis and reminds us how far we are from true understanding; one day you will be able to sit in front of an anatomical computer, specify the shape of the animal or plant you want and will convert that shape specification into a set of stimuli that will have to be given to the cells to build exactly that shape, no matter how strange it ends up being, you have full control, just imagine the possibility of memes in physical space. One of the glorious achievements of human civilizations is memes in the digital space.

Now this could create memes in physical space. Both excited and terrified by that possibility. uh, cognitive light cone. I think we also talked about the outer limit in space and time of the largest gold that a given system can work towards. It is something like shaping the set of options. It's a little different than the options. It's just that he's really focused on that, then, on this. I first thought of this in 2018. I mean we had a conference at Templeton, a conference where they challenged us to come up with frameworks, I think actually. it's here, it's the diverse intelligence community that Summer Institute, yeah, they had a Summer Institute, but, um, the logos, the B with some circuits, yeah, it has different different life forms and you know, the whole program It's called diverse intelligence. and they challenge you to come up with a framework that is appropriate for analyzing different types of intelligence together, because the kinds of things you do to a human that are not good with an octopus, are not good with a plant, etc.

So I started thinking about this and um, I asked myself what do all cognitive agents do no matter their Providence, no matter what their architecture is, what do cognitive agents have in common and it seems to me that what they have in common is true. degree of competence in pursuing a goal and then what you can do is draw and what I ended up drawing was something like a reverse Minkowski cone diagram. where all of space could collapse into an axis and then and then here and then time is this axis and then what you can do is draw any creature that you can, you can semi-quantitatively estimate what are the spaces and temporal targets that it can and is capable of to chase, for example, if you're a tick and all you can, all you can really chase is Maxima or bacteria to maximize the level of some chemical in your vicinity, that's it. you have a little icon, then you are a simple system like a tick or a bacteria, if you are something like a dog, well, you have some capacity to um uh, to care about some spatial region, some temporal region.

I know you can, you can remember a little bit back, you can, you can predict a little bit forward, but you will never care what happens in the next city four weeks from now, it's just as far away as we know. Just impossible for that kind of architecture, if you're a human being, you could be working for world peace long after you've done it, so you could have a goal on a planetary scale, which is huge, right, and then, there may be, being another higher intelligence is somewhere that can care in the linear range about how many creatures you know, some kind of Buddha-like character who can care about the well-being of everyone, really cares about the way we don't we can um and such and such that it's not it's not a mapping of what you can feel to what extent you can feel good it's not a mapping of how far you can act it's a mapping of how big the goals are that you are able to imagine and why which to work with and I think that allows you to put the synthetic types of AIS alien constructs or swarms of whatever on the same diagram because we're not talking about what you're made of or how you got here, we're talking about which ones are which . the size and complexity of the gold storage you can work with.

Are there any other terms that come to mind that are interesting? I'm trying to remember this is it. I have a list of them somewhere on my trail. Objective morphology, yes, people. Yes, definitely check it more, more suitable. I like that ionoseutical,yes, yes, I mean those that refer to different types of interventions in the regenerative medicine space, so amorphous is something that is a type of intervention that really targets the decision making of the cells. The process of what they are going to build and the ionaceuticals are like that, but more specifically focused on bioelectricity.

I mean, there are also, of course, biochemical, biomechanical, who knows what else, maybe, optical, um, types of signaling systems, too. The morphology of the target is interesting. It's really designed to capture this idea that it's not just a breakthrough emergence and often in biology I mean, of course, that happens too, but in many cases in biology the system is working specifically toward a goal in an amorphous anatomical space. a navigation task really this type of problem solving can be um uh uh ski, you know, formalized as navigation tasks and they actually go towards a particular region, how do you know?

Why do you divert them and then they come back, let me ask you. because you've really challenged a lot of ideas in biology in the work that you do, probably because part of your rebelliousness comes from the fact that you come from a different field than computer engineering, but could you give advice to young people today? school or university are trying to pave the story of your life, whether in science or anywhere else, how can they have a career they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of advice guy, it's dangerous to give advice because things change very quickly, but uh, one central thing I can say as you move up and advance in the Academy and all that, you're going to be surrounded by really smart people and what you have to do is be very careful about distinguishing specific criticism versus types of advice.

Goal Goal and what I mean by that is If someone really smart and successful and obviously competent is giving you specific critiques on what you've done, that's gold, that's an opportunity to hone your craft and get better at what you're doing, learn to find your mistakes, that's right. great if they're telling you what you should be studying how you should approach things what the right way to think about things is you should probably ignore most of that and the reason I make that distinction is that a lot of things really, um, really Successful people are very well calibrated in their own ideas and in their own field and in their own area, and they know exactly what works and what doesn't, and what is good and what is bad, but they are not calibrated. about your ideas and so on, the things that they'll say, they'll say, oh, you know, this is a dumb idea, don't do this and you shouldn't do that, those things are usually worse than useless, they can be very, very um uh demoralizing and and and and really limiting and so soWhat I tell people is read very broadly, work very hard, know what you're talking about, take every specific criticism as an opportunity to improve what you're doing and then completely ignore everything else because I'm just telling you from like from From my own experience, most of the things that I think are interesting and useful that we've done, very smart people have said that's a terrible idea, no, no, don't do that, don't you know?

Just, um, yeah. I think I think we just don't know we don't have any ideas beyond our own, at best we know what we should do, very rarely we know what others should do, yes, and their ideas, their perspective too has been calibrated. not only in your specific field and situation, but also in the state of that field at a particular time in the past, so there are not many people in this world who can achieve revolutionary success several times in their life, so as long as say someone very intelligent Usually what that means is someone intelligent who achieved success at a certain point in their life and people often get stuck in that place where they found success, constantly challenging their worldview is a very difficult, um, so yeah, and that's also in the At the same time, probably if a lot of people tell you that's the strange thing about life, if a lot of people tell you that something is stupid or that it's not going to work, that means that it's stupid, that it's not going to work, or that it's actually a great opportunity to do it. something new and you don't know what it is, it's probably just as likely if you don't, well I don't know, the odds depend on how lucky you are, it depends on how bright you are, but you don't know, that's why you can do it.

Don't take that advice as factual data, yes you have to, and this is a little difficult and confusing, like hard to describe and confusing, but I firmly believe that you have to build your own. intuition, so over time you have to take your own risks that make sense to you and then learn from that and build so that you can trust your own instinct about what is a good idea, even when, and then sometimes, you will do it. mistakes and they will result in a dead end and that's fine, that's science, but, you know, what I tell my students is that life is hard and science is hard and you're going to sweat and bleed and everything. and you should be doing that for ideas that really turn you on inside and, you know, and don't really let the common denominator of standardized approaches to things slow you down, so you mentioned that the planarian is in some sense Immortal What is the role of death in life?

What is the role of death in this whole process we have? When you look at biological systems death is an important feature especially as you move up the hierarchy of competencies boy that's an interesting question um I think it's certainly a factor that promotes change and turnover and an opportunity for do something different next time for a larger scale system, so apoptosis, you know, is really interesting. I mean, death is really interesting in several ways. It's like you can think about what was the first thing to die. You know, it's an interesting question. What was the first creature you could really say died?

It's a difficult thing, it's a difficult thing because we don't have a great definition for it. So if you bring a cabbage home and put it in your refrigerator, at what point are you going to say that it has died? So you're right, so it's a little bit hard to know that there's also a role in what I'm talking about this idea, I mean, think about this and imagine that you have a creature that's aquatic, let's say, let's say it's a frog or something like that. or a tadpole and the animal dies in the pond, it dies for whatever reason, most of the cells are still alive, so you can imagine that if when it died there was some kind of breakdown of connectivity between the cells, a lot of cells crawled, they could have a life like amoebas, some of them could join together and become a zenabot and walk around, so we know from planarian that there are cells that don't obey the hay film boundary and just live forever, so you could imagine an organism that when the organism dies, it doesn't go away, but rather the individual cells that are still alive crawl around and have a completely different lifestyle and maybe they come back together as something else or maybe they don't. , so I'm sure that this is all happening somewhere on some planet, so, um, death in any case, I mean, we already knew this because the molecules that we know, we know, with something nice, the molecules go through the ecosystem, but even the cells do not necessarily die. at that time they could have another life in a different way, in a different way, you can think of something like Gila, right?

The Gila cell line, you know, has this one that has had this incredible life, there are many more Hela cells now than ever before. that when she was alive, it seems that as organisms become more and more complex, like if you look at mammals, their relationship with death becomes more and more complex, so the survival imperative starts to get interesting. and humans are possibly the first. species that have invented the fear of death, the understanding that you are going to die, let's put it this way, in the long term, so it is not instinctive, that is, I need to run away from what is going to eat me, but I begin to contemplate . the finiteness of life, yeah, I mean one thing, one thing about the cognitive light cone of the human light is that for the first time, as far as we know, it is possible for you to have goals that are longer than your life and that are not achievable, so if you are if you are let's say and I don't know if this is true but if you are a goldfish and you have an attention span of 10 minutes I'm not sure if that's true but let's say let's say there are some organisms with a short um you know, kind of a cognitive light cone that way, all of your goals are potentially achievable because you're probably going to live for the next 10 minutes, so whatever goal you have, it's totally achievable if you're a human.

You could have all kinds of goals that are guaranteed and can't be achieved because they take too long, like it's guaranteed that you're not going to achieve them, so I'm wondering if you know what a perennial, you know, like a perennial, um, you know, something like that. A thorn in our psychology that drives some psychosis or whatever. I have no idea anything else interesting about that. I've actually been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks, this notion of giving up, so you might think that evolutionarily the most adaptive way to be is that you go, you fight as much as you physically can and then when you can't, You can't, and there's this photograph, there's some videos that you can find of insects crawling around wherever you like. you know this like most of it is already gone and it's still crawling around, you know like um um, a Terminator style, to the extent that you physically can, go on, mammals don't do that, so a lot of mammals.

Even rats have this thing where when they think it's a hopeless situation, they literally give up and die when they physically could have kept going. I mean, humans certainly do this and there are some really nasty experiments where this guy forgets his name. I did with them drowning rats where if he where rats normally drown after a couple of minutes, but if you teach them that if you just float in the water for a couple of minutes you will be rescued, they can float in the water for like an hour and that's how it is. and then they literally just give up and die, and so evolutionarily that doesn't seem like a good strategy at all, evolutionarily, because why would you like what's the benefit of giving up?

You just do what you can and know how to do once at a time. thousand, you will actually be rescued, but this surrender thing suggests some very interesting metacognitive checks in that you have now reached the point where survival is not really the main goal and that, for all you know, there are other considerations that have taken over and I think it's purely a mammalian thing, but I don't know, yeah, Camus, the existentialist question of Why Live, just the fact that humans commit suicide is a really fascinating question from an evolutionary perspective and which was the First, and that's the other thing, like what's the simplest system, whether evolved or natural or whatever that's capable of doing that well, how can you think you know what other animals are actually capable of doing? , I'm not sure about that, maybe. you could see animals over time, for some reason, gradually reducing the value of surviving at all costs until other goals can become more important, maybe I don't know how evolutionarily how that takes off that seems like it would have such strong pressure on its versus, you know, imagine a population with a lower um.

Do you know what would happen if you were a mutant in a population that had less uh less survival imperative? Would your genes outcompete the others, it seems not, is there population selection because maybe suicide is a way for organisms to decide for themselves that they are unfit for the environment in some way, yes that is a country really, you know, selection at the population level is a It's a deeply controversial area, but it's difficult because, on the face of it, if that were your genome, it wouldn't spread because you'd die and then your neighbor who didn't have it would have all the children it seems.

There could be a deep truth there that we don't understand. What happens to you as a biological system? Do you fear death? To be honest, I'm more worried, especially now that I'm getting older and I've helped a couple people through. Think about what's a good way to do it basically like nowadays I don't know what that is. You know, sitting in a you know, a facility that tries to stretch you as much as you can. It doesn't seem like that doesn't sound good and there aren't many opportunities to, um, I don't know, sacrifice yourself for something useful.

There's not a lot of opportunity for that in modern society, so I don't know, that's it, that's more. I'm not, I'm not particularly worried about death itself, but, yeah, I've seen it happen, uh, and it's not, it's not pretty and I don't know what better, what better alternative is. The existential aspect of this does not concern you deeply. The fact that this journey ends, no, it began. I mean, the journey just started, soThere were I don't know how many billion years before I wasn't around, so it's okay, but no. It's not the experience of life, it's almost like you're immortal because the way you make plans, the way you think about the future, I mean, if you look at your own rich personal experience, yes, you can understand it, okay, eventually. died, there are people I love who have died so I'm sure I'll die and it hurts etc but it sure won't, it's so easy to get lost and feel like this is going to go on forever, yeah it's a bit like people.

They say they don't believe in free will, right? I mean, you can say that, but when you go to a restaurant you still have to choose a soup and stuff, so I don't know if I know I've done that. In fact, I've seen that happen at lunch with a very well-known philosopher and he wouldn't believe in free will and you know, the waitress came up to me and said, "Well, let me see." I said: what are you doing? I'm going to make a good sandwich choice, so I think it's one of those things. I think you can know that you know you're not going to live forever, but you can't, you can't, it's not practical to live that way. unless you know, you buy insurance and then you do things like that, but mostly you know, um, I think you just live as if, uh, as if you can make plans, damn, we talk about all kinds of life, we talk. about all types of embodied Minds, what do you think is the meaning of all this?

What is the meaning of all the biological eyes I have been talking about here on Earth? Why are we here? I don't know if that's a good... The question raised apart from the existential question that you raised before is that question that relates to the question of what consciousness is and its uh Edward I retire somewhere I'm not sure because I'm drinking pineapples strains and because they are ambiguously defined maybe I'm not sure that any of these things really depend on the accuracy of our scientific understanding, but I'm just referring to one example, right. I've always found it strange that people get so excited about discovering facts about their bodies, for example, right, you've seen them, uh ex machina, right, and there's this great scene where he cuts off his hand to find out what it is. , you know it's full of cock for me now, right, if I open up. and I discover it and I find a bunch of gears, my conclusion is not, oh shit, I must not have true cognition, that sucks, my conclusion is wow, gears can have true cognition, cool, very good, so it seems to me I guess, I guess I'm with Descartes on this one, whatever the truth ends up being, what consciousness is like, how it can be conscious, none of that is going to alter my primary idea. experience which is this is what it is and if a bunch of molecular networks can make it great if it turns out that there is a non-corporeal soul you know, great, we could know that we will study that anyway, but but the fundamental existential aspect of this is that you know if someone, if someone told me today that , yeah, yeah, you were created yesterday and all your memories are, you know, kind of fake, you know, kind of like um, like Boltzmann brains, right? the human, you know, human skepticism and all that, uh, yeah, okay, that's right, but here I am now, so let's experience it's Primal, so that's what matters, so the backstory doesn't matter the explanation, I think. so from a first person by second now from a third person scientifically everything is very interesting from a third person perspective.

I might say wow, it's amazing that this happens and how it happens or whatever, but from a first-person perspective I might care. less like me, it's just what I've learned from any of these scientific facts okay, well, I guess that's it, so I think that's enough to give me my, you know, amazing first-person perspective, well, I guess If you dig deeper and deeper and get surprising answers about why the hell we're here, it might give you some guidance on how to live, maybe, maybe, I don't know, that would be nice, on the one hand, you might be right because on the one hand, If I don't know what else could give you that guidance, then you'd think it would have to be that or it would have to be science because there's nothing else, so that's it.

So maybe, on the other hand, I'm not really sure how you get past that. Any you know what they call an is to a must of any factual description of what is happening. This goes back to natural law just because someone says oh man. that's not completely natural, it's never happened on Earth before. I'm not, you know, impressed by that. I think that, whatever happens or not, we are now in a position to do better if we can. Well, it's also good because you said there's science and there's nothing else there, it's really complicated to know how to intellectually deal with what science doesn't currently understand well, so if you think that science solves everything, you can too easily think about your mind. our current understanding that we've got everything figured out well, well, jumps very quickly not to science as a mechanism but as a process, but rather to today's size, as if you can just look at human history and across history human only the physicists and they would all say we have solved everything, sure, sure, there are some little things to solve and we basically solved everything, where actually I think asking what the meaning of life is is resetting the palette, yeah, like we could be . small and confused and have nothing figured out, in a few centuries it will be almost funny when they look back at how stupid we were, yes, 100 agree, so when I say science and nothing else, I certainly don't mean today's science because I think that in general I think we know very little.

I think most of the things we're sure about now will be like you said and look fun in the future. So I think that Right at the beginning of a lot of really important things, when I say nothing but science, I also include the kind of first person that I call science, that you do. The interesting thing about um, I think about Consciousness and studying Consciousness and things like that in the first person is different than doing science in the third person where you as scientists change minimally, maybe not at all, so when I do a experiment is still me, there is the experiment, whatever I have done, I have learned something. that's a small change, but in general that's it to be able to really study Consciousness, you will be part of the experiment, you will be altered by that experiment, whatever it is that you are doing, whether you know some kind of contemplative practice or uh or or some kind of uh you know psychoactive but you know whatever uh now you're your own experiment and you're right and so I can say I include it I think that's part of it I think exploring um Our own mind and our own Consciousness are very important.

I think a lot of it is not captured by what is currently third-person science, but ultimately I include all of that in capital-S science in terms of it being a rational inquiry. From the first and third person aspects of our world, we are our own experiment, beautifully put, and when two systems interact with each other, that's the kind of experiment, so I'm deeply honored that you're doing this experiment with me today. Thank you very much, I am a big fan of your work. Also, thank you for doing everything you're doing. I can't wait to see the kind of amazing things you build, so thanks for speaking today.

I really appreciate being here, thank you. you for listening to this conversation with Michael Levin to support this podcast, check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you a few words from Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, about the war of nature, about hunger and death, the more exalted. object which we are able to conceive, namely, the production of the higher animals, it follows directly that there is Greatness in this vision of life with its various Powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that while this planet has continued its cycle according to the fixed laws of gravity from such a simple beginning, infinite forms, the most beautiful and wonderful, have evolved and are evolving thank you for listening, hope to see you next time