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

it turns out that if you train a. planarian and then cut their heads off. the tail will regenerate a brand new. brain that still remembers the original. information I think planaria hold the. answer to pretty much every deep. question of life for one thing they're. similar to our ancestors so they have. true symmetry they have a true brain. they're not like earthworms they're you. know they're much more advanced life. form they have lots of different. internal organs but they're these little. um they're about you know maybe two. centimeters in in the centimeter to two. in size. I have a head in the tail and the first. thing is plenary are Immortal so they do.

not age there's no such thing as an old. planarian so that right there tells you. that these theories of thermodynamic. limitations of on lifespan are wrong. it's not it's not that well over time of. everything degrades no planaria can keep. it going for uh probably you know how. long have they've been around 400. million years right so these are the. actual so the planaria in our lab are. actually in physical continuity with. planaria that we're here 400 million. years ago. the following is a conversation with. Michael Levin one of the most. fascinating and Brilliant biologists.

I've ever talked to he and his lab at. Tufts University works on novel ways to. understand and control complex pattern. formation in biological systems Andre. carpathi a world-class AI researcher is. the person who first introduced me to. Michael Levin's work. I bring this up because these two people. make me realize that biology has a lot. to teach us about Ai and AI might have a. lot to teach us about biology.

this is Alex Friedman podcast to support. it please check out our sponsors in the. description and now dear friends here's. Michael Levin. embryogenesis is the process of building. the human body from a single cell I. think it's one of the most incredible. things that exists on Earth from a. single embryo so how does this process. work yeah it is it is an incredible. process uh I think it's maybe the most. magical process there is and I think one. of the most fundamentally interesting.

things about it is that it shows that. each of us takes the journey from. so-called just physics to mind right. because we all Start Life as a single. quiescent unfertilized oocyte and it's. basically a bag of chemicals and you. look at that and you say okay this is. chemistry and physics and then nine. months and some years later you have an. organism with high level cognition and. preferences and an inner life and so on. and what embryogenesis tells us is that. that transformation from physics to mind. is gradual it's smooth there is no.

special place where you know a lightning. bolt says boom now you've gone from from. physics to True cognition that doesn't. happen and so we can see in this process. that the whole mystery you know the. biggest mystery of the you of the. universe basically how you get mind from. matter from just physics in quotes yeah. so where's the magic into the thing how. do we get from information encoded in. DNA. and make physical reality out of that. information so one of the things that I. think is really important if we're going. to bring in DNA into 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. gets to play with so all the proteins. all the signaling factors the ion. channels all the cool little pieces of. Hardware that cells have that's what's. in the DNA the rest of it is in. so-called generic laws and these are. laws of mathematics these are laws of. computation these are laws of um of. physics of all all kinds of interesting. things that are not directly in the DNA. and that that process you know I think I.

think the reason the reason I always put. just physics in quotes is because I. don't think there is such a thing as. just physics I think that thinking about. these things in binary categories like. this is physics this is true cognition. this is as if it's only faking other. these kinds of things I think that's. what gets us in trouble I think that we. really have to understand that it's a. Continuum and we have to work up the. scaling the laws of scaling and we can. and we can certainly talk about that. there's a lot of really interesting. thoughts to be had there so the physics. is deeply integrated with the.

information so the DNA doesn't exist on. its own the DNA is a integrated as in. some sense in response to the the laws. of physics at every scale the laws. of the environment it exists in yeah the. environment and also the laws of the. Universe I mean the thing about the. thing about the the DNA is that it's um. once Evolution discovers a certain kind. of machine that if if the physical. implementation is appropriate it's sort. of uh and this is hard to talk about. because we don't have a good vocabulary.

for this yet but it's a very kind of a. platonic notion that if the machine is. there it pulls down interesting uh. interesting things that you do not 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 you evolve the second angle but you. don't need to evolve the third you know. what it is already now why do you know. that's that's a gift for free from. geometry in a particular space you know. what that angle has to be and if you. evolve an ion Channel which is Ion.

channels are basically transistors right. they're voltage-gated current. conductances if you evolve that ION. channel you immediately get to use. things like truth tables you get logic. functions you don't have to evolve the. logic function you don't have to evolve. a truth table doesn't have to be in the. DNA it's you get it for free right and. the fact that if you have nand Gates you. can build anything you want you get that. for free all you have to evolve is that. that first step a first little machine. that that enables you to couple to those. laws and there's laws of adhesion and. and many other things and this is all um. that interplay between the the hardware.

that's set up by the genetics and the. software that's paid right the. physiological software that basically. does all the computation and the. cognition and everything else is a real. interplay between the information and. the DNA and the laws of physics of. computation and so on so is it fair to. say just like this idea that the laws of. mathematics are discovered. they're Laden within the fabric of the. universe in that same way the laws of. biology are kind of discovered yeah I. think that's absolutely and it's. probably not a popular view but I think.

that's right on the money yeah well I. think that's a really deep idea. then embryogenesis is the process of. revealing. of um. embodying of manifesting these laws. you're not building the laws you're just. creating the capacity to reveal yes I. think again not the standard view of. molecular biology by any means but I. think that's right on the money I'll. give you a simple example you know some. of our latest work with these xenobots. right so what we've done is to take some.

skin cells off of an early frog embryo. and basically ask about their plasticity. if we give you a chance to sort of. reboot your multicellularity in a. different context what would you do. because what you might assume by the. thing about embryogenesis is that it's. super reliable right it's very robust. and that really obscures some of its. most interesting features we get used to. it we get used to the fact that acorns. make oak trees and frog eggs make frogs. and we say well what else is it going to. make that's what it you know that's what. it makes that's a standard story but the. reality is and so and so you look at.

these um these skin cells you say well. what do they know how to do well they. know how to be a passive boring. two-dimensional outer layer keeping the. bacteria from getting into the embryo. that's what they know how to do well it. turns out that if you take these skin. cells and you remove the rest of the. embryo so you remove all of the rest of. the cells and you say well you're by. yourself now what do you want to do so. what they do is they form this little um. this multi-little creature that runs. around the dish they have all kinds of. incredible capacities they navigate. through mazes they have various.

behaviors that they do both. independently and and together they uh. they have a uh but they basically they. Implement Von Neumann's dream of. self-replication because if you sprinkle. a bunch of loose cells into the dish. what they do is they run around they. collect those cells into little piles. they they sort of mush them together. until those little piles become the next. generation of xenobots so you've got. this machine that builds copies of. itself from loose material in its. environment none of this are. things that you would have expected from. the Frog genome in fact there's wild. type the genome was wild type there's.

nothing wrong with their genetics. nothing has been added no Nano materials. no genomic editing nothing and so what. we have done there is engineer by. subtraction which you've done is you've. removed the other cells that normally. basically bully these cells into being. skin cells and you find out that what. they really want to do is is to be this. they want their default behaviors to be. a xenobot but in Vivo in the embryo they. get told to be skinned by these other. cell types and so so now so now here. comes this this really interesting. question that you just posed.

when you ask where does the form of the. tadpole and the Frog come from the. standard answer as well it's it's it's a. selection so over over millions of years. right it's been shaped to to produce the. specific body with that's fit for froggy. environments where does the shape of the. xenobot come from there's never been any. zenobots there's never been selection to. be a good xenobot these cells find. themselves in the new environment in 48. hours they figure out how to be an. entirely different uh proto-organism. with new capacities like kinematic. self-replication that's not how frogs or.

tadpoles replicate we've made it. impossible for them to replicate their. normal way within a couple days these. guys find a new way of doing it that's. not done anywhere else in the biosphere. well actually let's step back and Define. what are xenobots. so a xenobod is uh self-assembling. little proto-organism it's also a. biological robot those things are not um. distinct it's a member of both classes. how much is a biology how much is it. robot. at this point most of it is biology. because what we're doing is we're. discovering natural uh behaviors of.

these uh of these of the cells and also. of the cell collectives now one of the. really important parts of this was that. we're working together with Josh. bongard's group at University of Vermont. their computer scientists do Ai and. they've basically been able to use an. evolutionary a simulated Evolution. approach to ask how can we manipulate. these cells give them signals not rewire. their DNA so not Hardware but experience. as signals so can we remove some cells. can we add some cells can we poke them. in different ways to get them to do.

other things so in the future there's. going to be you know we're now and this. is this is future on published work but. we're doing all sorts of interesting. ways to reprogram them to new behaviors. but before you can start to reprogram. these things you have to understand what. their innate capacities are okay so that. means. engineering programming you're. engineering them in in the future and in. some sense the the definition of a robot. is something you impart engineer yeah. and first versus evolve I mean um.

it's such a fuzzy definition anyway in. some sense many of the organisms within. our body are kinds of robots yes yes and. I think robots is a weird line because. it's we tend to see robots as the other. I think there will be a time in the. future when there's going to be. something akin to the Civil Rights. movements for robots but we'll talk. about that later perhaps sure anyway. um. so how do you can we just Linger on it. how do you build a zenobot what are we.

talking about here. from from whence does it start and how. does it become. the Glorious zenobot yeah so just to. take one step back one of the things. that a lot of people uh get stuck on is. they say well uh you know engineering. requires new DNA circuits or it requires. new nanomaterials you know what the. thing is we are now moving from Old. School engineering which use passive. materials right that 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 you it's on you as an. engineer to make them do everything. they're going to do and then there were. active materials and now computationals. this is a whole new era these are. agential materials this is your you're. now collaborating with your substrate. because your material has an agenda. these cells have you know billions of. years of evolution they have goals they. have preferences they're not just going. to sit where you put them that's. hilarious that you have to talk your. material and to keep your kitchen that's. it that is exactly right that is exactly. right stay there it's like getting a.

bunch of cats or something and trying to. organize the shape out of them it's. funny we're on the same page here. because in a paper this is this is. currently um just been accepted in. nature by engineering one of the figures. I have is building a tower out of Legos. versus dogs right yeah so think about. the difference right if you build out of. Legos you have full control over where. it's going to go but if somebody knocks. it over it's game over with the dogs you. cannot just come and stack them they're. not going to stay that way but the good. news is that if you train them then. somebody knocks it over they'll get. right back up so it's all right so as an.

engineer what you really want to know is. what can they depend on this thing to do. right that's really you know a lot of. people have definitions of robots as far. as what they're made of or how they got. here you know design versus evolve. whatever I don't think any of that is. useful I think I think as an engineer. what you want to know is how much can I. depend on this thing to do when I'm not. around to micromanage it what level of. uh what level of dependency can I can I. give this thing how much agency does it. have which then tells you what. techniques do you use so do you use. micromanagement like you put everything. where it goes do you train it do you.

give it signals do you try to convince. it to do things right how much you know. how intelligent is your substrate and so. now we're moving into this into this. area where you're you're working with. agential materials that's a. collaboration that's not that's not old. old style what's the word you're using a. gentle a gentle what's that mean agency. if it comes from the word agency so so. basically the material has agency. meaning that it has some some level of. obviously not human level but some level. of uh preferences goals memories ability. to remember things to compute into the. future meaning anticipate uh you know.

when you're working with cells they have. all of that to some to various degrees. is that empowering or limiting having. material as a mind of its own literally. I think it's both right so it raises. difficulties because it means that it if. you if you're using the old mindset. which is a linear. um kind of extrapolation of what's going. to happen you're going to be surprised. and shocked all the time because biology. uh does not do what we linearly expect. materials to do on the other hand it's. massively liberating and so in the.

following way 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 if you you had a rat and uh. 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 try. to control every neuron and try to play. the thing like a puppet right and maybe. someday that'll be possible maybe or you. can train the rat and this is why. Humanity for thousands of years before. we knew any Neuroscience we had no idea.

what's behind what's 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 it is. you know what kinds of things it likes. to do you are searching a much more much. smoother much nicer problem space than. if you try to micromanage the thing and. then regenerative medicine when you're. trying to get let's say an arm to grow. back or an eye to repair so birth defect. or something do you really want to be. controlling tens of thousands of genes.

at each point to try to micromanage it. or do 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. that's I I think it's it's both it's. both the difficult and it challenges us. to develop new ways of engineering and. it's it's hugely empowering okay so how. do you do I mean maybe sticking with the. metaphor of dogs and cats. I presume you have to figure out the. find the dogs and uh dispose of the cats.

um because you know it's like the old. herding cats is an issue so you may be. able to train dogs. I suspect you will not be able to train. cats. or if you do you're never going to be. able to trust them so is there a way to. figure out which material is amenable. to hurting is it in the lab work or is. it in simulation right now it's largely. in the lab because we are our. simulations do not capture yet the most.

uh interesting and Powerful things about. biology so the simulation what what. we're pretty good at simulating are feed. forward emergent types of things right. so cellular automata if you have simple. rules and you sort of roll those forward. for every every agent or every cell in. the simulation then complex things. happen you know ant colony or algorithms. things like that we're we're good at. that and that's and that's fine the. difficulty with all of that is that it's. incredibly hard to reverse so this is a. really hard inverse problem right if you. look at a bunch of termites and they.

make a you know a thing with a single. chimney and you say well I like it but. I'd like two chimneys how do you change. the rules of behavior for each termite. so they make two chimneys right or or if. you say hear a bunch of cells that are. creating this kind of organism I I don't. think that's optimal I'd like to to. repair that birth defect how do you. control all the all the individual. low-level rules right all the protein. interactions and everything else rolling. it back from the anatomy that you want. to the low-level Hardware rules is in. general intractable it's a it's an. inverse problem that's generally not. soluble so. um right now it's mostly in the lab.

because what we need to do is we need to. understand how biology uses top-down. controls so the idea is not not. bottom-up emergence but the idea of. things like gold directed uh test. operate exit kinds of Loops where where. it's basically an error minimization. function over a new space it's not a. space of gene expression but for example. a space of anatomy so just as a simple. example if you have you have a. salamander it's got an arm you can you. can amputate that arm anywhere along the. length it will grow exactly what's. needed and then it stops that's the most.

amazing thing about regeneration is that. it stops it knows when to stop when does. it stop it stops when a correct. salamander arm has been completed so. that tells you that's the right that's a. that's a uh a mean Zen's kind of. analysis where it has to know what the. correct limb is supposed to look like. right so it has a way to ascertain the. current shape it has a way to measure. that Delta from from what shape it's. supposed to be and then we'll keep. taking actions meaning Remodeling and. growing and everything else until that's. complete so once you know that and we've. taken advantage of this in the lab to do. some some really wild things with with.

both planaria and frog embryos and so on. once you know that. um you can start playing with that uh. with that homeostatic cycle you can ask. for example well how does it remember. what the correct shape is and can we. mess with 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 mess with the measurement. apparatus right so it gives you it gives. you those kinds of so so the idea is to. basically appropriate a lot of the um. approaches and Concepts from cognitive. neuroscience and Behavioral Science into.

things that uh previously were taken to. be dumb materials and you know you get. yelled at in class if you if you for. being anthropomorphic if you said well. my cells want to do this and my cells. want to do that and I think I think. that's a that's a major mistake that. leaves a ton of capabilities on the. table so thinking about biologic systems. is things that have memory have almost. something like cognitive ability. but. I mean. how incredible is it you know that the. salamander arm is being. rebuilt not with a dictator.

it's kind of like the cellular automata. system all the individual workers are. doing their own thing. so where's that oh wait top down signal. that doesn't control coming from like. how can you find it yeah like why does. it stop growing how does it know the. shape how does it have memory of the. shape and how does it tell everybody to. be like whoa whoa slow down we're done. so the first thing to to think about I. think is that there are no examples. anywhere of of a central dictator.

because in in this in this kind of. science because everything is made of. parts and so we we even though we we. feel as a unified Central sort of. intelligence and kind of point of of. cognition we are a bag of neurons right. we all intelligence is collective. intelligence there's this this is. important to kind of um and think about. because a lot of people think okay. there's real intelligence like me and. then there's collective intelligence. which is the ants and flocks of birds. and you know termites and things like. that and and you know and and maybe it's.

appropriate to think of them as a as a. as an individual and maybe it's not a. lot of people are skeptical about about. that and so on but you've got to realize. that we are not there's no such thing as. this like indivisible Diamond of. intelligence that's like this one. Central thing that's not made of parts. we are all made of parts and so if if. you believe that which I think is is. hard to uh to get around that that we in. fact have a centralized um set of goals. and preferences and we plan and we do. things and so on you are already. committed to the fact that a collection.

of cells is able to do this because we. are a collection of cells there's no. getting around that in our case what we. do is we navigate the three-dimensional. world and we have Behavior this is. blowing my mind right now because we are. just a collection of stuff oh yeah yeah. so when I'm moving this arm. I feel like I'm the central dictator of. that action but there's a lot of stuff. going on like every all all the cells. here collaborating in some interesting. way they're getting signal from the. central nervous system well even the.

central nervous system is is. misleadingly named because it isn't. really Central again it's it's what it's. just a bunch of cells I mean all of the. right there are no you there are no. singular indivisible intelligences. anywhere we are all every every example. that we've ever seen is is a collective. of some of something it's just that. we're used to it we're used to that you. know we're used to okay this thing is. kind of a single thing but it's really. not you zoom in you know what you see. you see a bunch of cells running around. and so is there some unifying I mean. we're just jumping around but that.

something that you look as the the. biological signal versus the biochemical. the. um the chemistry the electricity. maybe the life isn't that. versus the cells. it's the uh there's there's an orchestra. playing and uh the resulting music is. the dictator that's not bad um Dennis. that's Dennis Nobles uh kind of view of.

things he has two really good books. where he talks about this musical. analogy right so so I think that's. that's I like it um I like it is it. wrong though I don't think it's no I. don't think it's wrong. um I don't I don't think it's wrong I. think I think the important thing about. it is that we have to come to grips with. the fact that a true a a true proper uh. cognitive intelligence can still be made. of Parts those things are and in fact it. has to be and I I think it's a real. shame but I see this all the time when.

you have uh when you have a collective. like this whether it be uh a group of. robots or a you know a collection of. cells or neurons or whatever as soon as. as soon as we gain some insight into how. it works right meaning that oh I see in. order to take this action here's the. information that got processed via this. camera mechanism or whatever immediately. people say oh well then that's not real. cognition that's just physics I think. this is this is fundamentally flawed. because if you zoom into anything what. are you going to see of course you're. just going to see physics what else. could be underneath right that's not.

going to be fairy dust it's going to be. physics and chemistry but that doesn't. take away from the magic of the fact. that there are certain ways to arrange. that physics and chemistry and in. particular the bioelectricity which I. like a lot uh to give you an emergent uh. Collective with goals and preferences. and 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 how this happens. during embryogenesis and so on what. we're getting into is the origin of the. of a self yeah with a big with a capital.

S so we ourselves there are many other. kinds of selves and we can tell some. really interesting stories about where. selves come from and how they become. unified yeah is this the first. or at least humans tend to think that. this is the the level at which the self. with the capital s is first born. but uh and we really don't want to see. um human civilization or Earth itself as. one living organism yeah that's very. uncomfortable to us it is yeah but is um. yeah where's the self born we have to.

grow up past that so what I like to do. is uh I'll tell you two quick stories. about that I like to roll backwards so. so as opposed to so if you start and you. say okay here's a paramecium and you see. it um you know it's a single cell. organism you see it doing various things. and people will say okay I'm sure. there's some chemical story to be told. about how it's doing it so that's not. true cognition right and people will. argue about that I I like to work it. backwards I said let's let's agree that. you and I as as we sit here are examples. of true cognition if anything is if. there's anything that's true cognition.

we are we are examples of it now let's. just roll back slowly right so you roll. back to the time when you're a small. child and used to doing whatever and. then just sort of day by day you roll. you roll back and eventually you become. more or less that paramecium and then. and then you sort of even below that. right as an unfertilized Osa so it's no. one has to my knowledge no one has come. up with any convincing discreet Step At. which my cognitive Powers disappear. right it just doesn't the biology. doesn't offer any specific step it's com.

it's incredibly smooth and slow and. continuous and so I think this idea that. it just sort of magically shows up uh at. one point and then and then uh you know. humans have true selves that don't exist. elsewhere I think it runs against. everything we know about Evolution. everything we know about developmental. biology these are all slow continua and. the other really important story I want. to tell is where embryos come from so. think about this for a second amniot. embryo so this is humans birds and so on. mammals and birds and so on imagine a. flat disc of cells so there's maybe 50.

000 cells and in that so when you get an. egg from a from a fertilizer let's say. you buy a fertilized egg from a farm. right that that egg uh will will have. about 50 000 cells in um in a flat disc. it looks like a little little tiny. little Frisbee and in that flat disc. what will happen is there'll be uh one. one set of cells will uh becomes will. become special and it will tell all the. other cells I'm I'm going to be the head. you guys don't be the head and so it'll. amplify symmetry breaking amplification.

you get one embryo there's a there's a. you know there's some neural tissue and. some other stuff forms now now you say. okay I had one egg and one embryo and. then there you go what else could it be. well the reality is and I used to I I. did all of this as a grad student if you. um if you take a little needle and you. make a scratch in that blasted room in. that in that disc such that the cells. can't talk to each other for a while it. heals up 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. of them and then when they heal up they.

become conjoint Twins and you can make. two you can make three you can make lots. so the question of how many selves are. in there cannot be answered until it's. actually played all the way through it. isn't necessarily that there's just one. there can be many so what you have is. you have this medium this this. undifferentiated I'm sure there's a. there's a psychological. um version of this somewhere that I. don't know the proper terminology but. you have this you have this list like. put ocean of potentiality you have these. thousands of cells and some number of. individuals are going to be formed out.

of it usually one sometimes zero. sometimes several and they they form out. of these cells because a region of these. cells organizes into a collective that. will have goals goals that individual. cells don't have for example make a limb. make an eye how many eyes well exactly. two so individual cells don't know what. an eye is they don't know how many eyes. you're supposed to have but the. collective does the collective has goals. and memories and anticipations that the. individual cells don't and that that the. establishment of that boundary with its. own ability to maintain to to pursue.

certain goals that's the origin of of. selfhood. but I is that goal. in there somewhere but they always. destined like are they discovering that. goal like where the hell did Evolution. um discover this when you went from the. prokaryotes to you you carry out excels. 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 tricky thing to try to. understand you make it sound like this. cells didn't get together and came up. with a goal but the very Act of them. getting together. revealed the goal that was always there. there was always that potential for that. goal so the first thing to say is that. there are way more questions here than. than certainties okay so everything I'm. telling you is is Cutting Edge. developing you know stuff so so it's not. as if any of us know the answer to this. but but here's here's here's my opinion.

on this I think what evolution I I don't. think that Evolution produces solutions. to specific problems in other words. specific environments like here's a frog. that can live well in a froggy. environment I think what evolution. produces is problem-solving machines and. that that will that will solve problems. in different spaces so not just. three-dimensional space this goes back. to what we were talking about before we. the the brain is a evolutionarily a late. development it's a system that is able. to to pursue goals in three-dimensional.

Space by giving commands to muscles. where did that system come from that. system evolved from a much more ancient. evolutionarily much more ancient system. where collections of cells gave. instructions to for cell behaviors. meaning cells move to to divide to to. die to change into different cell types. to navigate morphe space the space of. anatomies the space of all possible. anatomies and before that cells were. navigating transcriptional space which. is a space of all possible Gene. expressions and before that metabolic. space so what evolution has done I think.

is is is produced Hardware that is very. good at navigating different spaces. using a bag of tricks right which which. I'm sure many of them we can steal for. autonomous vehicles and Robotics and. various things and what happens is that. they navigate these spaces without a. whole lot of commitment to what the. space is in fact they don't know what. the space is right we are all brains in. a vat so to speak every cell does not. know right every cell is some other some. other cells external environment right. so where does the with that border.

between you you and the outside world. you don't really know where that is. right every every collection of cell has. to figure that out from scratch. and the fact that Evolution requires all. of these things to figure out what they. are what effectors they have what. sensors they have where does it make. sense to draw a boundary between me and. the outside world the fact that you have. to build all that from scratch this. autopoiesis is what defines uh the. border of a self now biology uses like a. um a multi a multi-scale competency. architecture meaning that every level.

has goals so so molecular networks have. goals cells have goals tissues organs. colonies uh and and it's the interplay. of all of those that uh that enable. biology to solve problems in new ways. for example and xenobots and various. other things. um this is. you know uh it's it's exactly as you. said in many ways the cells are. discovering new ways of being but at the. same time Evolution certainly shapes all. this so so evolution is very good at. this agential bioengineering right when.

evolution is uh discovering a new way of. being an animal yet one animal or a. plant or something sometimes it's by. changing the hardware you know protein. changing proteins protein structure and. so on but much of the time it's not by. changing the hardware it's by changing. the signals that the cells give to each. other it's doing what we as Engineers do. which is try to convince the cells to do. various things by using signals. experiences stimuli that's what biology. does it has to because it's not dealing. with a blank slate every time as you. know if you're a Evolution and you're. trying to uh uh make make a make an.

organism you're not dealing with a. passive material that is is fresh and. you have to specify it already wants to. do certain things so the easiest way to. do that search to find whatever is going. to be adaptive is to find the signals. that are going to um convince cells to. do various things right. your sense is that Evolution operates. both in the software and the hardware. and it's just easier more efficient to. operate in the software yes and I should. also say I I don't think the distinction. is sharp in other words I think it's a. Continuum but I think we can but I think.

it's a meaningful distinction where you. can make changes to a particular protein. and now the enzymatic function is. different and it metabolizes differently. and whatever and that will have. implications for Fitness or you can. change the huge. um amount of information in the genome. that isn't structural at all it's it's. uh it's signaling it's when and how do. cells say certain things to each other. and that can have massive changes as far. as how it's going to solve problems I. mean this idea of multi-hierarchical. competence architecture which is.

incredible to think about so this. hierarchy that Evolution builds I don't. know who's responsible for this. I also see the incompetence of. bureaucracies of humans when they get. together. so how the hell does evolution build. this where. at every level only the best get to. stick around they somehow figure out how. to do their job without knowing the. bigger picture. and then there's like the bosses that do.

the bigger thing. somehow or that you can now abstract. away the small group of cells as a as an. organ or something and then that organ. does something bigger. in the context of the full body or. something like this. how is that built is there some. intuition you can kind of provide of how. that's constructed that that. hierarchical confidence architecture. I love that confidence just the word.

confidence is pretty cool in this. context because everybody's good at. their job somehow yeah no it's really. key and the other nice thing about. competency is that so so my my central. belief in all of this is that. engineering is the right perspective on. all of this stuff because it gets you. away from uh subjective uh terms you. know people talk about sentience and. this and that those things very hard to. define or people argue about them. philosophically I think that engineering. terms like competency like um you know. pursuit of goals right all of these.

things are uh are empirically incredibly. useful because you know it when you see. it and if it helps you build right if I. if I can pick the right level I say uh. this thing has I believe this is X level. of like con if you competency I think. it's like a thermostat or I think it's. like a a better thermostat or I think. it's a you know a a various other kinds. of you know many many different kinds of. complex systems if that helps me to. control and and predict and build such. system then that's all there is to say.

there's no more philosophy to argue. about so so I like competency in that. way because you can quantify you could. you have to in fact you have to you have. to make a claim competent at what and. then or if I say if I tell you it has a. goal the question is what's the goal and. how do you know and I say well because. every time I deviated from this. particular State that's what it spends. energy to get back to that's the goal. and we can quantify and we can be. objective about it so so so the the when. we're not used to thinking about this I. I give a talk sometimes called why don't. robots get cancer right and the reason. robots don't get cancer is because. generally speaking with a few exceptions. are our architectures have been you've.

got a bunch of dumb parts and you hope. that if you put them together the the. the the overlying machine will have some. intelligence and do something rather. right but the individual Parts don't. don't care they don't have an agenda. biology isn't like that every level has. an agenda and the final outcome is the. result of cooperation and competition. both within and across levels so for. example during embryogenesis your. tissues and organs are competing with. each other and it's actually a really. important part of development there's a. reason they compete with each other.

they're not all just uh you know sort of. helping each other they're also. competing for for information for. metabolic for limited metabolic. constraints. but to get back to your your other point. which is you know which is which is this. seems like really efficient and and good. and and so on compared to some of our. human efforts we also have to keep in. mind that what happens here is that each. level. bends the option space for the level. beneath so that your parts basically. they don't see the the geometry so so.

I'm using um and I think I I take this. this seriously uh terminology from from. like um from like relativity right where. the space is literally bent so the. option space is deformed by the higher. level so that the lower levels all they. really have to do is go down their. concentration gradient they don't have. to in fact they don't they can't know. what the big picture is but if you bend. the space just right if they do what. locally seems right they end up doing. your bidding they end up doing things. that are optimal in the in the higher. space conversely because the components.

are good at getting their job done you. as the higher level don't need to to try. to compute all the low level controls. all you're doing is bending the space. you don't know or care how they're going. to do it give you a super simple example. in the um in the tadpole we found that. okay so so tadpoles need to become frogs. and to become 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 to come out the. nostrils move like everything moves it. used to be thought that because all. tadpoles look the same and all frogs. look the same if you just remember if.

every piece just moves in the right. direction the right amount then you get. your you get your frog right so we. decided to test we I had this hypothesis. that I thought I thought actually the. system is probably more intelligent than. that so what did we do we made what we. call Picasso tadpoles so these are so. everything is scramble so the eyes are. on the back of the head their jaws are. off to the side everything is scrambled. well guess what they make they make. pretty normal frogs because all the. different things move around in novel. paths configurations until they get to. the correct froggy sort of frog face. configuration then they stop so so the.

thing about that is now imagine. Evolution right so so you make some sort. of mutation and it does like every. mutation it does many things so so. something good comes of it but also it. moves your mouth off to the side right. now if if if there wasn't this. multi-scale companies you can see where. this is going if there wasn't this. multi-scale competency the organism. would be dead your Fitness is zero. because you can't eat and you would. never get to explore the other. beneficial consequences of that mutation. you'd have to wait until you find some. other way of doing it without moving. them out that's really hard so so the.

fitness landscape would be incredibly. rugged Evolution would take forever the. reason it works one of the reasons it. works so well is because you do that no. worries the mouth will find its way. where where it belongs right so now you. get to explore so so what that means is. that all these mutations that otherwise. would be deleterious are now neutral. because the competency of the parts. make up for all kinds of things so all. the noise of development all the the. variability in the environment all these. things the companies do the parts makes. up for it so the so so that's all that's.

all fantastic right that's all that's. all great the only other thing to. remember when we compare this to human. efforts is this every component has its. own goals in various spaces usually with. very little regard for the welfare of. the other levels so so as a simple. example you know. um you as a as a complex system. um you will go out and you will do you. know Jiu Jitsu or whatever you'll have. some to go rock climbing scrape a bunch. of cells off your hands and then you're. happy as a system right you come back. and you've you've accomplished some. goals and you're really happy those.

cells are dead they're gone right did. you think about those cells not really. right you had some you had some bruising. out selfish SLB that's it and so and so. that's the thing to remember is that. um you know and we know this from from. history is that is that just being a. collective isn't enough because uh what. the goals of that Collective will be. relative to the welfare of the. individual Parts is a massively open. place justify the means I'm telling you. Stalin was on to something no that's the. danger but we can exactly that's the. danger of uh.

for us humans we have to construct. ethical systems. under which we don't take seriously the. full mechanism of biology and apply it. to the way the world functions which is. which is an interesting line we've drawn. the world that built us. is the one we reject in some sense when. we construct human societies the idea. that this country was founded on that. all men are created equal that's such a.

fascinating idea it's like uh you're. fighting against. nature. and you're saying well there's something. bigger here than um yeah a hierarchical. competency architecture yeah uh but. there's so many interesting things you. said so from an algorithmic perspective. the act of bending the option space. that's really that's really profound. because if you look at the way AI.

systems are built today there's a big. system like I said with robots and as a. goal and he gets better and better at. optimizing that goal at accomplishing. that goal but if biology built a. hierarchical system where everything is. doing computation. and everything is accomplishing the goal. not only that. it's kind of dumb. you know with the uh with the limited.

with the bent option space it's just. doing the thing that's the easiest thing. for it in some sense and somehow that. allows you to have. um Turtles on top of turtles literally. dump systems on top of dump systems that. as a whole create something incredibly. smart yeah I mean every system is has. some degree of intelligence in its own. problem domain so so cells will have. problems they're trying to solve in. physiological space and transcriptional.

space and then I could give you some. some cool examples of that but the. collective is trying to solve problems. in anatomical space right and forming a. you know a creature and growing your. blood vessels and so on and then the. collect the the the the whole body is. solving yet other problems they may be. in Social space and linguistic space in. three-dimensional space and and who. knows you know the group might be. solving problems and and um you know I. don't know some sort of financial space. or something so one of the major. differences with with most. um uh with most AIS today is is a the.

the kind of flatness of the architecture. but also of the fact that they're. constructed. from outside their their borders and. their you know so so if you're so to a. large extent and of course there are. counter examples now but 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. this is given from the outside.

biology constructs this from scratch now. the best example of this that that. originally uh in in robotics was. actually Josh bongard's work in 2006. where he made these these robots that. did not know their shape to start with. so like a baby these are floundered. around they made some hypotheses well I. did this and I moved in this way well. maybe I'm a whatever maybe I have wheels. or maybe I have six legs or whatever. right and they would make a model and. eventually they would crawl around so. that's I mean that's really good that's. part of the autopoiesis but we can go a. step further and some people are doing. this and then we're sort of working on.

some of this too is this idea that let's. 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 is is certain things. like active inference meaning you're. trying to minimize surprise right you. have some metabolic constraints you. don't have all the energy you need you. don't have all the time in the world to. to think about everything you want to. think about so that means that you can't. afford to be a micro. um reductionist you know all this data. coming in you have to coarse grain it. and say I'm going to take all this stuff. and I'm going to call that a cat I'm. gonna take all this I'm going to call. that the edge of the table I don't want. to follow off of and I don't want to.

know anything about the microstates what. I want to know is what is the optimal. way to cut up my world and by the way. this thing over here that's me and the. reason that's me is because I have more. control over this than I have over any. of this other stuff and so now you can. begin to write so that's. self-construction that that figuring out. making models of the outside world and. then turning that inwards and starting. to make a model of yourself right which. immediately starts to get into issues of. agency and control because. in order to if if you are under. metabolic constraints meaning you don't.

have the energy right that all the. energy in the world you have to be. efficient that immediately forces you to. start telling stories about course. grained agents that do things right you. don't have the energy to like laplaces. demon you know calculate every every. possible uh State that's going to happen. you have to you have to coarse grain and. you have to say that is the kind of. creature that does things either things. that I avoid or things that I will go. towards that's a mate or food or. whatever it's going to be and so right. at the base of uh simple very simple. organisms starting to make.

models of Agents doing things that is. the origin of uh models of of Free Will. basically right because you see the. world around you as having agency and. then you turn that on yourself and you. say wait I have agency too I can I do. things right and and then you make. decisions about what you're going to do. so all of this one one model is to view. all of those kinds of things as. being driven by that early need to. determine what you are and to do so and. to then take actions in the most.

energetically efficient space possible. right so free will emerges when you try. to simplify tell a nice narrative about. your environment I think that's very. possible yeah do you think free was an. illusion. so so you're kind of implying that it's. a useful hack. well I'll say two things the first thing. is I think I think it's very plausible. to say that any organism that's self or. any agent that's self whether it's. biological or not any agent that.

self-constructs under energy constraints. is going to believe in free will but. we'll get to whether it has free will. momentarily but but I think but I think. what what it definitely drives is a view. of yourself and the outside world as an. agential view I think that's inescapable. so that's true for even primitive. organisms I think so I think that's now. now they don't have now obviously you. have to scale down right so so so so. they don't have for the kinds of complex. metacognition that we have so they can. do long-term planning and thinking about. Free Will and so and so on but but the.

sense of agency is really useful to. accomplish a tasks simple or complicated. that's right in in all kinds of spaces. not just in in obvious three-dimensional. space I mean we're very good that the. thing is. humans are very good at detecting agency. of like medium-sized objects moving at. medium speeds in the three-dimensional. world right we see a bowling ball and we. see a mouse and we immediately know what. the difference is right and how we're. gonna mostly things you can eat or get. eaten by yeah yeah that's our that's our. training set right from the time you're. little your training set is visual data.

on on this this like little chunk of. your experience but imagine if imagine. if uh from the time that we were born we. had innate senses of your blood. chemistry if you could feel your blood. chemistry the way you can see right you. had a high bandwidth connection and you. could feel your blood chemistry and you. could see you could sense all the things. that your organs were doing so your. pancreas your liver all the things if if. we had that you we would be very good at. detecting intelligence and physiological. space we would know the level of. intelligence that our various organs. were deploying to deal with things that.

were coming to anticipate the stimuli to. you know but but we're just terrible at. that we don't in fact in fact people. don't even you know you talk about. intelligence to these other spaces and a. lot of people think that's just crazy. because because all all we're all we. know is motion we do have access to that. information so it's actually possible. that uh so Evolution could if we wanted. to construct an organism that's able to. perceive the flow of blood through your. body the way you see an old friend and. say yo what's up how's the wife and the.

kids uh in that 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 no just your. own because you don't have access to. other people's lives not yet but you. could imagine some really interesting. connection right but like sexual. selection like oh that girl's got a nice. liver well that's like the the way her. blood flows the the Dynamics of the. blood. uh is very interesting it's novel I've. never seen one of those but you know. that's that's exactly what we're trying.

to half-ass when we when we um uh judge. Judgment of beauty by facial Symmetry. and so on that's that's a half-assed. assessment of exactly that of exactly. that because if your cells could not. cooperate enough to keep your your. organism symmetrical yeah you know you. can make some inferences about what else. is wrong right like that's a that's a. very you know that's a very basic. interesting yeah so that in some deep. sense actually that is what we're doing. where. trying to infer. how. the health we use the word healthy but.

basically how functional is this. biological system I'm looking at so I. can con hook up with that one and make. Offspring yeah yeah well what kind of. Hardware might their genomics give me. that that might be useful in the future. I wonder why Evolution didn't give us. um higher resolution signal like why the. whole peacock thing with the feathers it. doesn't seem. the very low bandwidth signal for sexual. selection I'm gonna and I'm not an.

expert on on this stuff but on peacocks. well no you know but but I'll take a. stab at the reason I think that it's. because it's an arms race you see you. don't want everybody to know everything. about you so I think that as much as as. much as and in fact there's another. interesting part of this arms race which. is. if you think about this uh the the most. adaptive evolvable system is one that. has the most level of top-down control. right if it's really easy to say to a. bunch of cells make another finger.

versus okay here's 10 000 gene. expression changes that you need to do. to make it to change your finger right. the the the the the the system with good. top-down control that has memory and we. need to get back to that by the way. that's a question I neglected to answer. about where the memory is and so on. um a system that uses all of that is. really highly evolvable and that's. fantastic but guess what it's also. highly um subject to hijacking by. parasites by uh by by by cheaters of. various kinds by con specifics like we.

we found that um and then that that goes. back to the story of the pattern memory. these in these planaria there's a. bacterium that lives on these planaria. that bacterium has an input into how. many heads the worm is going to have. because it's hijacks that that control. system and it's able to make a chemical. that basically interfaces with the. system that calculates how many heads. you're supposed to have have and they. can have to and they can make them have. two heads and so you can imagine that if. you are two so you want to be. understandable for your own parts to. understand each other but you don't want. to be too understandable because you'll. be too easily controllable and so I. think that that my guess is that that.

um that that that that opposing pressure. keeps this from being a super high. bandwidth kind of thing where we can. just look at somebody and know you know. everything about them so it's a kind of. biological game of Texas Hold'em yeah. he's showing some cards and you're. hiding other cards and that's part of it. and there's bluffing and there's and all. that and then just probably whole. species that would do way too much. bluffing that's probably where peacocks. fall I mean there's a there's a book. that I don't remember if I read or if I.

if I wrote If I read summaries of the. book but it's about the evolution of. beauty and birds where is that from is. that a book or does Richard Dawkins talk. about it but basically there's some. species start to like over select for. beauty not overselect they just some. reason select for beauty there is a case. to be made actually now I'm starting to. remember I think Darwin himself made a. case that you can select based on beauty. alone. so yeah that beauty there's a point.

would be it doesn't represent some. underlying biological truth you start to. select for for beauty itself and I think. the the Deep question is there is some. if is there some evolutionary value to. Beauty but that's an interesting kind of. thought that this. can we deviate completely from the deep. biological truth to actually appreciate. some kind of the the summarization. itself.

let me get back to memory because that's. a really interesting idea. um. how do a collection of cells remember. anything how do biological systems. remember anything how is that akin to. the kind of memory we think of humans as. having within our big cognitive engine. yeah one of the ways to start thinking. about bioelectricity is to ask ourselves. where did neurons and all these cool. tricks that the brain uses to run these.

amazing problem-solving abilities on and. basically an electrical Network right. where did that come from they didn't. just evolve you know up here out of. nowhere it must have evolved from. something and what it evolved from was a. much more ancient ability of cells to. form networks to solve other kinds of. problems for example to navigate morphos. space to control the body's shape and so. all of the components. of uh of neurons so so ion channels um. neurotransmitter Machinery electrical. synapses all this stuff is way older. than brains way older than neurons in.

fact older than multicellularity and so. it was already even even bacterial. biofilms there's some beautiful work. from UCSD on on on brain-like Dynamics. and bacterial biofilms so Evolution. figured out very early on that. electrical networks are amazing at. having memories at integrating. information across distance at different. kinds of optimization tasks you know. image recognition and so on long before. there were brains can you actually step. back we'll return to it what is. bioelectricity what is biochemistry what.

is what are electrical networks I think. a lot of the biology Community focuses. on. the chemicals as the signaling. mechanisms that make the whole thing. work you have. I think. to a large degree uniquely maybe you can. correct me on that have focused on the. bioelectricity which is using. electricity for signaling there's also. probably mechanical sure sure knocking.

on the door. uh so what what what's the difference. and what's an electrical Network yeah so. I want to make sure and and kind of give. credit where creditors do so so as far. back as 1903 and probably. um late 1800s already people were. thinking about the importance of. electrical phenomena in in life so I'm. for sure not the first person to stress. the importance of electricity. um people there were there were waves of. research in the in the 30s in the 40s. and then again in the kind of uh 70s 80s.

and 90s of of sort of the pioneers of. bioelectricity who did some amazing work. on all this I think I think what what. we've done that's new is to step away. from this idea that and I'll describe. what what the bioelectricity is is step. away from the idea that well here's. another piece of physics that you need. to keep track of to understand. physiology and development and to really. start looking at this as saying no this. is a a privileged computational layer. that gives you access to the actual. cognition of the tissue of basal. cognition so so merging that that.

developmental biophysics with ideas and. cognition of computation and so on I. think I think that's what we've done. that's new but people have been talking. about bioelectricity for a really long. time and and so also I'll Define that so. um what happens is that uh if you have. uh if you have a single cell cell has a. membrane in that membrane are proteins. called ion channels and those proteins. allow charged molecules potassium sodium. chloride to go in and out under certain. circumstances and when there's an. imbalance of of those ions there becomes.

a voltage gradient across that membrane. and so all cells all living cells try to. hold a particular kind of voltage uh. difference across the membrane and they. spend a lot of energy to do so when you. now now so so that's that's a single. cell when you have multiple cells that's. all sitting next to each other they can. communicate their voltage state to each. other via a number of different ways but. one of them is this thing called a gap. Junction which is basically like a. Little Submarine hash that's just kind. of docks right and the ions from one. side can flow to the other side and vice.

versa. so isn't it incredible that this evolved. it's not it's not wild because that. didn't exist. correct this had to be this had to be. evolved and had to be invented that's. right somebody invented electricity in. the in the ocean one of this is a good. event yeah so so I mean it is it is. incredible um the guy who discovered Gap. Junctions Werner Lowenstein I visited. him he was really old human being he. discovered because who really discovered. them live probably four billion years.

ago good point so your your give credit. where credit is due he he rediscovered. he rediscovered uh Gap Junctions but um. when I visited him in in Woods Hole uh. maybe 20 years ago now uh he told me. that he was writing and unfortunately he. he passed away and I think this this. book never got written he was writing a. book on on Gap Junctions and. Consciousness and I think I think it. would have been a an Incredible Book. because because Gap junctures are magic. I'll explain why in a minute uh what. happens is that just imagine the thing.

about both these ion channels and these. Gap Junctions is that many of them are. themselves voltage sensitive. so that's a voltage sensitive current. conductance that's a transistor and as. soon as you've invented one immediately. you now get access to from from this. platonic space of of mathematical truths. you get access to all of the cool things. that transistors do so now when you have. a network of cells not only do they do. they talk to each other but they can. send messages to each other and the. differences of voltage can propagate now.

to neuroscientists this is old hat. because you see this in the brain right. this action potential is the you know. the electricity. um you can you can they have they have. these awesome movies where you can take. a zebra like a transparent animal like a. zebrafish you can literally look down. and you can see all the all the firings. as the fish is like making decisions. about what to eat and things like this. right it's amazing well your whole body. is doing that all the time just much. slower so there are very few things that. neurons do that other cells that all the. cells in your body don't do they all. they all do very similar things just on.

a much slower time scale and whereas. your brain is thinking about thing how. to uh solve problems in. three-dimensional space the cell embryo. are thinking about how to solve problems. in anatomical space they're 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 that Gap Junctions are magic is. Imagine right from the from the from the. earliest from the earliest time. I'm here are two cells this cell uh how. can they communicate well well the.

simple version is this cell could send a. chemical a chemical signal it floats. over and it hits a receptor on this cell. right. because it comes from outside this cell. can very easily tell that that came from. outside it's this is whatever. information is coming that's not my. information that information is coming. from the outside so I can I can trust it. I can ignore it I can do various things. with it whatever but I know it comes. from the outside now imagine instead. that you have two cells with a gap. Junction between them something happens. let's say the cell gets poked there's a. calcium Spike the calcium Spike or. whatever small molecule signal.

propagates through the Gap Junction to. the cell there's no ownership metadata. on that signal this cell does not know. now that it's didn't that it came from. outside because it looks exactly like. its own memories would have looked like. of being of being of whatever had. happened right so Gap Junctions to some. extent wipe ownership information on. data which means that if I can't if if. you and I are sharing memories and we. can't quite tell who the memories belong. to that's the beginning of a mind melt. that's the beginning of a scale up of. cognition from here's me and here's you.

two no now there's just us so they. enforce the collective intelligence. that's our Gap Junction that's right it. helps it's the beginning it's not the. the whole story by any means but it's. the start where's State stored. of the system so there's some is it in. part in the Gap Junctions themselves is. it in the cells there are many many. layers to this as always in biology so. there are. um uh chemical networks so for example. Gene regulatory networks right which. which are or basically any kind of. chemical pathway where different.

chemicals activate and repress each. other they can store memories so in the. dynamical system sense they can store. memories they can they can get into. stable states that are hard to pull them. out of right so that's that becomes once. they get in that's a memory a permanent. memory of so or a semi-permanent memory. of something that's happened there are. cytoskeletal structures right that are. physically they store they store. memories in in physical configuration. there are uh electrical memories like. flip-flops where there is no physical. right so so if you look at it I show my.

students this example as a flip-flop and. the reason that it stores a zero one is. not because some some uh piece of the. hardware moved it's because there's a. there's a cycling of the current in one. side of the thing if I come over and I. hold. um you know I hold the other side to uh. to a high voltage for for you know a. brief period of time it flips over and. now it's here but the heart none of the. hardware moved the information is in a. stable dynamical sense and if you were. to x-ray 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 the energetic state of. the system so there are also so there. are bioelectrical states that are held. in that exact way like like volatile Ram. basically like in the in the electrical. status it's very akin to. the different ways the memory is stored. in a computer. so there's Ram there's hard drives you. can make that mapping right so I think. the interesting thing is that based on. the biology we can have a more. sophisticated you know I think we can. revise some of our some of our um. Computer Engineering methods because.

there are some interesting things that. biology does we haven't done yet but but. you can but that map but that mapping is. not bad I mean I think it works in many. ways yeah I wonder because I mean the. way we build computers at the root of. computer science is the idea of proof of. correctness we program things to be. perfect. reliable. you know this idea of resilience and. robustness to unknown conditions is not. as 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 a. computer to a biological system in the. future yeah I think that you know you. know the thing about biology like is is. all about making really important. decisions really quickly on very limited. information I mean that's what biology. is all about you have to act you have to. act now that Stakes are very high and. you don't know most of what you need to. know to be perfect and so there's not. even an attempt to be to be perfect or. to get it right in any sense there are. just uh things like active inference.

minimize surprise optimize uh some some. efficiency and and some things like this. that that guides the whole the whole. business I mentioned to uh Offline that. um somebody is a Affinity work is Andre. capathi and he's uh amongst many things. also uh writes occasionally a great blog. he came up with this idea I don't know. if he coined the term but of software. 2.0 uh where the programming is done in.

the space of configuring these. artificial neural networks. is there some sense in which that would. be the future of programming for us. humans where we're. less doing like python-like programming. and more. um. how would you how would that look like. but basically doing the hyper parameters. of something akin to a biological system. and watching it Go and keeping it.

adjusting it and creating some kind of. feedback loop within the system so. correct itself yeah and then we watch it. over time. accomplished the goals we wanted to. accomplish is that kind of the the dream. of the the dogs that you described in. the nature paper yeah yeah I mean that's. what you just painted is a very good um. description of our efforts at. regenerative medicine as a kind of. somatic Psychiatry so the idea is that. you're not you know you're not trying to.

micromanage I mean think about the. limitations of of a lot of the medicines. today we try to. interact down at the level of Pathways. right so so we're trying to micromanage. it what what's the problem well one. problem is that for almost every. medicine other than antibiotics once you. stop it the problem comes right back you. haven't fixed anything you were. addressing symptoms you weren't actually. curing anything again except for. antibiotics uh that's one problem the.

other problem is you have massive amount. of side effects because you were trying. to interact at the lowest level it's. right it's like I'm gonna you know I'm. gonna I'm gonna try to program this. computer by changing the the melting. point of copper like maybe you can do. things that way but my God it's hard to. to program it right at the hardware. level so what what I think we're we're. starting to understand is that and and. by the way this goes back to what you. were saying before about uh that we. could have access to our internal state. right so people who practice that kind.

of stuff right so yoga and then. biofeedback and those those are all the. people that uniformly will say things. like well the body has an intelligence. in the scenario like those two sets. overlap perfectly because because that's. exactly right because once you once you. start thinking about it that way you. realize that the better locus of control. is not always at the lowest level this. is why we don't all program with a. soldering iron right we we we take. advantage of of the high level. intelligences that are there which means. trying to figure out okay which of your. tissues can learn what can they learn uh.

what you know why is it that um certain. drugs stop working after you take them. for a while with this habituation right. and so can we understand habituation. sensitization associative learning and. these kinds of things in chemical. Pathways we're going to have a. completely different way I think. um we're gonna have a completely. different way of of using drugs and of. medicine in general when we start. focusing on the goal state States and on. the intelligence of our subsystems as. opposed to treating everything as if the. only path was micromanagement from. chemistry upwards well can you speak to.

this idea of somatic Psychiatry what are. somatic cells how do they form. networks that use bioelectricity to have. memory and all those kinds of things. yeah what are somatic cells like Basics. here systematic cells just means the. cells of your body so much just means. body right so so somatic cells are just. this I'm not even specifically making a. distinction between somatic cells and. stem cells or anything like that I mean. basically all the cells in your body not. just neurons but all the cells in your. body. they form electrical networks during. embryogenesis during regeneration what.

those networks are doing. in part is processing information about. what our current shape is and what the. goal shape is now how do I know this. because I can give you a couple of. examples one one example is when we. started studying this we said okay. here's a here's a planarian a planarian. is a flatworm it has one head and one. tail normally and the amazing the. several amazing things about planaria. but basically they kind of I think I. think planaria hold the answer to pretty. much every deep question of life for one.

thing they're similar to our ancestors. so they have true symmetry they have a. true brain they're not like earthworms. they're you know they're much more. advanced life form they have lots of. different internal organs but they're. these little um they're about you know. maybe two centimeters in in the. centimeter to two in size. I have a head and a tail and the first. thing is plenary are Immortal so they do. not age there's no such thing as an old. planarian so that right there tells you. that these theories of thermodynamic. limitations of on lifespan are wrong. it's not it's not that well over time of. everything degrades no planaria can keep.

it going for uh probably you know how. long have they've been around 400. million years right so these are the. actual so the plenary in our lab are. actually in physical continuity with. planaria that we're here 400 million. years ago so there's planaria that have. lived that long essentially what does it. mean physical continuity because because. what they do is they split in half the. way they reproduce is they split in half. so so the planarian the back the back. end grabs the petri dish the front end. takes off and then they rip themselves. in half but is it isn't in some sense.

where. like you are a physical continuation Yes. except that except that we go through a. bottleneck of one cell which is the egg. they do not I mean they can there's. certain planarians so we go through a. very uh ruthless compression process and. they don't yes like an auto encoder you. know squash down to one cell and then. back out these these guys just tear. themselves in half and then each and. then and so the other amazing thing. about them is they regenerate so you can. cut them into pieces the record is I. think 276 or something like that by. Thomas Hunt Morgan uh and each piece.

regrows a perfect little worm they know. exactly every piece knows exactly what's. missing what needs to happen uh in fact. in fact if you chop it in half as it. grows the other half uh the original the. original tissue shrinks so that when the. new tiny head shows up they're. proportional so it keeps it keeps. perfect proportion if you if you starve. them they shrink if you feed them again. they expand their control their. anatomical control is is just insane. somebody cut them into over 200 pieces. yeah yeah Thomas Hunt Morgan did hashtag.

science yeah amazing yeah 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. that humans can do that. because well yeah yes I mean again true. I accept that you can't at the embryonic. level well that's that's the thing right. so so I tell when I talk about this I. said just remember that is as amazing as. it is to grow a whole planarian from a. tiny fragment half of the human. population can grow a full body from one. cell right so so development is really.

you can look at development as a as a. just an example of regeneration yeah to. think we'll talk about regenerative. medicine but there's some sense what. would be like that warm in like 500. years ago. regrow hand yep I with we're given time. it takes time to grow large things but. for now yeah I think so I think you can. probably why not accelerate oh biology. takes his time I'm not going to say. anything is impossible but I don't know. of a way to accelerate these processes I.

think it's possible I think we are going. to be regenerative but I don't know of a. way to make it fast if you just think. people from a few centuries from now be. like well they have to they used to have. to wait a week for the hand to regrow. it's like when the microwave was. invented you can you can toast your. um what's that called when you put a. cheese on a toast. um. foreign. all right so uh planaria why were we.

talking about the magical planaria that. they have the Mystery of Life yeah so. the reason we're talking about plenary. is not only are they Immortal okay not. only do they regenerate every part of. the body uh they do they generally don't. get cancer right so which we can talk. about why that's 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 their heads off. the tail will regenerate a brand new. brain that still remembers the original. information do they have a biological. Network going on or no yes so their.

somatic cells are forming a network and. that's that's what you mean by true. brain what's the requirement for a true. brain I I like everything else it's a. Continuum but but a true brain has. certain characteristics as far as the. density like a localized density of. neuronsa guides behavior in the head. exactly exactly if you cut their head. off uh the the tail doesn't have that. doesn't do anything it just sits there. until the new brain is is you know until. a new brain regenerates they have all. the same neurotransmitters that you and. I have but here's why here's what we're. talking about them in in this in this.

context so here's your plenary you cut. off the head you cut off the tail you. have a middle fragment that middle. fragment has to make one head and one. tail how does it know how many of each. to make and where do they go how come it. doesn't switch how come. so so we did a very simple uh thing and. we said okay let's let's make the. hypothesis that there's a somatic. electrical Network that remembers the. correct pattern and then what it's doing. is is recalling that memory and building. to that pattern so what we did was we. used a um a way to visualize electrical. activity in these cells right it's a.

it's a it's a variant of what people use. to look for electricity in the brain and. we saw that it has a that that fragment. has a very very particular electrical. pattern you can literally see it once. once we developed a technique it has a. very particular electrical pattern that. shows you where the head and the tail. goes right you can you can just see it. and then we said okay well now let's. test the idea that that's a memory that. actually controls where the head and the. tail goes let's change that pattern so. basically incept a false memory and so. what you can do is you can do that in. many different ways one way is with.

drugs the target ion channels to say and. so you pick these drugs and you say okay. I'm going to do it so that instead of so. that instead of this one head one tail. electrical pattern you have a two-headed. pattern right you're just editing the. electrical information in the in the. network when you do that guess what the. cells build they build a two-headed worm. and the coolest thing about it now no. genetic changes so we haven't touched. the genome The genome is totally wild. type but the amazing thing about it is. that when you take these two-headed. animals and you cut them into pieces. again. some of those pieces will continue to. make two-headed animals.

so so that information that that memory. that that electrical circuit not only. does it hold the information for how. many heads not only does it use that. information to tell the cells what to do. to regenerate but it stores it once. you've reset it it keeps and we can go. back we can take a two-headed animal and. put it back to one-headed so now imagine. so there's a couple of interesting. things here that um that have. implications for understanding what web. genomes and things like that imagine I. take this two-headed animal. um oh and by the way when they reproduce. when they tear themselves in half you. still get two-headed animals so imagine.

they take them I throw them in the. Charles River over here so 100 years. later some scientists come along and. they scoop up some samples and they go. oh here's a single headed form in a. two-headed form wow a speciation event. cool let's sequence The genome and see. why what happened the genomes are. identical there's nothing wrong with the. genome so if you ask the question how. does so so this goes back to your very. first question is where do body plants. come from right how does the planarian. know how many heads it's supposed to. have now it's interesting because you. could say DNA but what hap what what as. it turns out the DNA produces a piece of.

of Hardware that by default. says one head the way that when you turn. on a calculator by default it's a zero. every single time right when you turn it. on just a zero but it's a programmable. calculator as it turns out so once. you've changed that next time it won't. say zero it'll say something else and. the same thing here so you can make you. can make one-headed two-headed you can. make no headed worms we've done some. other things along these lines some. other really weird constructs. so so this this is this this question. all right so again it's really important. the the hardware software distinction is. really important because the hardware is.

essential because without proper. Hardware you're never going to get to. the right physiology of having that. memory but once you have it it doesn't. fully determine what the information is. going to be you can have other. information in there and it's. reprogrammable by us by bacteria by. various parasites probably. um things like that the other amazing. thing about these planarias think about. this most animals when we get a mutation. in our bodies our children don't inherit. it right so you could go on you could. run around for 50 60 years getting. mutations your children don't have those.

mutations because we go through the egg. stage planaria tear themselves in half. and that's how they reproduce so for 400. million years they keep every mutation. that they've had that doesn't kill the. cell that it's in so when you look at. these planaria their bodies are what's. called mixoploid meaning that every cell. might have a different number of. chromosomes they look like a tumor if. you look at the the the the the the the. the the the genome is an incredible mess. because they accumulate all this stuff. and yet the the their body structure is. they are the best regenerators on the. planet their Anatomy is Rock Solid even. though their genome is always all kinds.

of crap so this is uh kind of a scandal. right that you know when we learn that. well you know what are genomes to what. genomes determine your body okay why is. the animal with the worst genome have. the best anatomical control the most. cancer resistant the most regenerative. right really we're just beginning to. start to understand this um relationship. between the genomically determined. hardware and and by the way just as a as. of a couple of months ago I think I now. somewhat understand why this is but it's. really it's really a major you know a. major puzzle I mean that really throws a. wrench into the whole.

nature versus nurture. because you usually associate. electricity within with the nurture. and the hardware with the nature as. there's just this weird integrated mess. yeah that propagates to Generations yeah. it's much more fluid it's much more. complex. um you can you can imagine what's what's. happening here is just imagine the. evolution of a of an animal like this. that multi-skillers goes back to this.

multi-scale competency right imagine. that you have two two you have an animal. that um that where it's it's tissues. have some degree of multi-scale. Competency so for example if the like. like we saw in the tadpole you know if. you put an eye on its tail they can. still see out of that eye right that the. you know there's all this incredible. plasticity so if you have an animal and. it comes up for selection and uh the. fitness is quite good. Evolution doesn't know whether the. fitness is good because the genome was. awesome or because the genome was kind. of junky but but the competency made up.

for it right and things kind of ended up. good so what that means is that the more. competency you have the harder it is for. selection to pick the best genomes it. hides information right and so that. means that uh so so what happens you. know Evolution starts basically starts. although start all the hard work is. being done to increase the competency. because it's harder and harder to see. the genomes and so I think in planaria. what happened is that there's this. runaway phenomenon where all the effort. went into the algorithm such that we. know you got a crappy genome we can't.

keep we can't clean up the genome we. can't keep track of it so what what's. going to happen is what survives are the. algorithms that can create a great worm. no matter what the genome is so. everything went into the algorithm and. which which of course then reduces the. pressure on keeping a you know keeping a. clean genome so this idea of right and. different animals have this in different. to different levels but this idea of. putting energy into an algorithm that. does not over train on priors right it. can't assume I mean I think biology is. this way in general Evolution doesn't.

take the past too seriously because it. makes these basically problem-solving. machines as opposed to like exactly what. you know to to deal with exactly what. happened last time yeah problem solving. versus memory recall so a little memory. but a lot of problems so I think so yeah. in many cases yeah problem solving. foreign. I mean it's incredible that those kinds. of systems are able to be constructed. um especially how much they contrast. with the way we build problem solving.

systems in the AI world. um back to xenobots. I'm not sure if we ever described. housing about our bill but I mean you. have a paper titled biological robots. perspectives on an emerging. interdisciplinary field and the. beginning you uh you mentioned that the. word zenobots is like. controversial do you guys get in trouble. for using xenobots or what do people not. like the words endobots are you trying. to be provocative with the word xenobots.

versus biological robots I don't know. this yeah is there some drama that we. should be aware of so there's a little. bit of drama uh I think I think the. drama is basically related to people. um having very fixed ideas about what. terms mean and I think in many cases. these ideas are completely out of date. with with where science is now and for. sure they're they're out of date with. what's going to be I mean these these. Concepts uh are not going to survive the.

next couple of decades so if you ask a. person and including um you know a lot. of people in biology who kind of want to. keep a sharp distinction between. Biologicals and robots right see what's. a robot well a robot it comes out of a. factory it's made by humans it is boring. it is a meaning that you can predict. everything it's going to do it's made of. metal and certain other inorganic. materials living organisms magical they. they arise right and so on so there's. these distinctions I think these these. distinctions I think were were never. good but uh they're going to be.

completely useless going forward and so. part of there's a couple of papers that. that's one paper and there's another one. that Josh bongard and I wrote where we. really attacked the terminology and we. say these binary categories are based on. very. um non-essential kind of surface uh. limitations of of technology and. Imagination that were true before but. they've got to go and so and so we call. them xenobot so so Zeno for xenopus. lavis whether it's the frog that these. guys are made of but we think it's an. example of of of of a biobot technology.

because. ultimately if we if we under once we. understand how to uh communicate and. manipulate. um the inputs to these cells we will be. able to get them to build whatever we. want them to build and that's robotics. right it's it's the rational. construction of machines that have. useful purposes I I absolutely think. that this is a robotics platform whereas. some biologists don't but it's built in. a way that. uh all the different components of doing.

their own computation so in a way that. we've been talking about so you're. trying to do top down control now that's. a biological system and in the future. all of this will will merge together. because of course at some point we're. going to throw in synthetic biology. circuits right new new um you know new. transcriptional circuits to get them to. do new things of course we'll throw some. of that in but we specifically stayed. away from all of that because in the. first few papers and there's some more. coming down the pike that are I think. going to be pretty pretty Dynamite. um that uh we want to show what the. native cells are made of because what.

happens is you know if you engineer the. heck out of them right if we were to put. in new you know new transcription. factors and some new metabolic machinery. and whatever people will say well okay. you engineered this and you made it do. whatever and fine. I wanted to show uh and and the whole. team uh wanted to show the plasticity. and the intelligence and the biology. what does it do that's surprising before. you even start manipulating the hardware. in that way yeah don't try to uh Over. Control the thing Let It flourish.

the the full beauty of the biological. system why xenopus love is how do you. pronounce it for slavis yeah yeah it's a. very why this frog it's been used since. I think the 50s uh it's just very. convenient because you can you you know. we keep the adults in this in this very. fine frog habitat they lay eggs they lay. tens of thousands of eggs at a time. um the eggs develop right in front of. your eyes it's the most mad magical. thing you can you can see because. normally you know if you were to deal. with mice or rabbits or whatever you.

don't see the early stages right because. everything's inside the mother here. everything's in a Petri dish at room. temperature so you just you you have an. egg it's fertilized and you can just. watch it divide and divide and divide. and on all the organs form you can just. see it and at that point. um the community has has developed lots. of different tools for. understanding what's going on and also. but for manipulating right so it's. people use it for um you know for. understanding birth defects and. neurobiology and cancer Immunology also. so you get the whole uh embryogenesis in. the pizza dish.

that's so cool to watch Is there videos. of this oh yeah yeah there's been yeah. there's there's amazing videos on on. online I mean mammalian embryos are. super cool too for example monozygotic. twins are what happens when you cut a. mammalian embryo in half you don't get. two half bodies you get two perfectly. normal bodies because it's a. regeneration event right a development. is just it's just the kind of. regeneration really and why this. particular frog is just uh because they. were doing in the 50s and it breeds well. in um you know in in case it's easy to. raise in in the laboratory and uh it's.

very prolific and all the tools. basically for decades people have been. developing tools there's other some. people use other frogs but I have to say. this is this is this is important. xenobots are fundamentally not anything. about frogs so. um I I can't say too much about this. because it's not published and. peer-reviewed yet but we've made. xenobots out of other things that have. nothing to do with frogs it's this is. not a frog phenomenon this is it we. started with frog because it's so. convenient but this this plasticity is. not a fraud you know it's not related to. the fact that their frogs what happens.

when you kiss it does it turn to a. prince no or princess which way uh. Prince yeah princess yeah that's an. experiment I don't believe we've done. and if we have I don't know we'll. collaborate I can I can take on the lead. uh on that effort okay cool uh how does. the cells coordinate let's focus in on. just the embryogenesis so there's one. cell. so it divides doesn't have to be very. careful about what each cell starts.

doing once they divide yes and like yeah. when there's three of them it's like the. co-founders or whatever like what like. slow down you're responsible for this. when do they become specialized and how. do they coordinate that specialization. so so this is the the basic science of. Developmental biology there's a lot. known about all of that but um but what. I'll tell you what I think is the kind. of the most important part which is yes. it's very important who does what. however because going back to this issue.

of of well I made this claim that. um biology 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 it's expected to be right and. here's an example of that. um this was this was done this was this. was an old experiment going back to the. 40s but um basically imagine it's a newt. the salamander it's got these little two. tubules that go to the kidneys right. there's a little tube take a cross. section of that tube you see eight to. ten cells that have cooperated to make.

this little tube and cross-section right. so one amazing one amazing thing you can. do is. um you can you can mess with the very. early cell division to make the cells. gigantic bigger you can you can make. them different sizes you can force them. to be different sizes so if you make the. cells different sizes the Whole Nude is. still the same size so if you take a. cross section through the through that. tubule instead of eight to ten cells you. might have four or five or you might. have you know three until you make the. cells so enormous that one single cell.

wraps around itself. and and gives you that same large-scale. structure by a completely different. molecular mechanism so now instead of. cell to cell communication to make a. tubule instead of that it's one cell. using the cytoskeleton to bend itself. around so think about what that means in. the service of a large scale it talk. about top-down control right and the. service of a large scale anatomical. feature different molecular mechanisms. get called up so now think about this. you're you're you're you're a nude. selling trying to make an embryo if you.

had a fixed idea of who was supposed to. do what you'd be screwed because now. your cells are gigantic nothing would. work the there's an incredible tolerance. for changes in the size of the parts in. the amount of DNA in those parts. um all sorts of stuff you can you can. the life is highly interoperable you can. put electrodes in there you can put. weird nanomaterials it still works it's. it's uh this is that problem solving. action right it's able to do what it. needs to do even when circumstances. change that is you know uh the Hallmark. of intelligence right William James.

defined intelligence as the ability to. get to the same goal by different means. that's this you get to the same goal by. completely different means and so so why. am I bringing this up is just to say. that yeah it's important for the cells. to do the right stuff but they have. incredible tolerances for things not. being what you expect and to still get. their job done so if you're you know all. of these things are not hardwired there. are organisms that might be hardwired. for example the nematode C elegans in. that organism every cell is numbered.

meaning that every AC Elegance has. exactly the same number of cells as. every other C elegans they're all in the. same place they all divide there's. literally a map of how it works that in. that in that sort of system it's it's. much more cookie cutter but but most. most organisms are incredibly plastic in. that way is there something particularly. magical to you about the whole. developmental biology process. is there something you could say because. you just said it they're very good at. accomplishing the goal of the job they. need to do the competency thing but you.

get freaking organism for one cell. it's like uh. it's very hard. to Intuit that whole process. to even think about reverse engineering. that process right they're very hard to. the point where I often just imagine I I. sometimes ask my students to do this. thought experiment imagine you were you. were shrunk down to the to the scale of. a single cell and you were in the middle. of an embryo and you were looking around. at what's going on and the cells running. around some cells are dying it you know.

every time you look it's kind of a. different number of cells for most. organisms and so I think that if you. didn't know what embryonic development. was you would have no clue that what. you're seeing is always going to make. the same thing never mind knowing what. that what that is never mind being able. to say even with full genomic. information being able to say what the. hell are they building we have no way to. do that but but just even to Guess that. wow the the the outcome of all this. activity is it's always going to be it's. always going to build the same thing the. imperative to create the final you as.

you are now is there already. so you can you would so if you start. from the same embryo you create a very. similar organism. yeah on except for cases like the. xenobots when you give them a different. environment they come up with a. different way to be adaptive in that. environment but overall I mean so so I. think so I think to you know kind of. um uh summarize it I think what. evolution is really good at is creating. Hardware that has a very stable Baseline.

mode meaning that left to its own. devices it's very good at doing the same. thing but it has a bunch of. problem-solving capacity such that if. any if any assumptions don't hold if. your cells are a weird size or you get. the wrong number of cells or there's a. you know somebody stuck in electrode. halfway through the body whatever it. will still get most of what it needs to. do done. you've talked about the magic and the. power of biology here if we look at the. human brain how special is the brain in. this context you're kind of minimizing.

the importance of the brain or lessening. it's we think of all the special. computation happens in the brain. everything else is like the help. you're kind of saying that the whole. thing is the whole thing is doing. computation. but nevertheless how special is the. human brain in this full context of. biology yeah I mean look there's no. getting away from the fact that the. human brain allows us to do things that. we could not do without it you can say.

the same thing about the liver. this is true and so and so you know I I. my goal is not no you're right my goal. is you're just being polite to the brain. right now well looking a politician like. listen everybody has everybody has a. role yeah and it's very important role. that's right we have to acknowledge the. importance of the brain you know there. are more than enough people who are um. cheerleading the the brain right so so I. I don't feel like uh nothing I say is. going to reduce people's excitement.

about the human brain and so so I I. emphasize others credit I don't think it. gets too much credit I think other. things don't get enough credit I think. the brain is is the human brain is. incredible and special and all that I. think other things need more credit and. and I also think that. this and I'm sort of this way about. everything I don't like binary. categories but almost anything I like a. Continuum and the thing about the human. brain is that it by by accepting that as. as some kind of an important category or.

essential um essential thing we end up. with all kinds of weird pseudo problems. and conundrum so for example uh when we. talk about it you know if you don't want. to talk about. um uh uh ethics and other other things. like that uh and and what you know this. this idea that surely if we look out. into the universe surely we don't. believe that this human brain is the. only way to be sentient right surely we. don't you know and to have high level. cognition I just I can't even wrap my. mind around this this idea that that is.

the only way to do it no doubt there are. other architectures made made of. completely different principles that. achieve the same thing and once we. believe that then that tells us. something important it tells us that. things that are not quite human brains. or chimeras of human brains and other. tissue or human brains or other kinds of. brains and novel configurations or. things that are sort of brains but not. really or plants or embryos or whatever. might also have important cognitive. status so that's the only thing I think.

we have to be really careful about. treating the human brain as if it was. some kind of like sharp binary category. you know you are or you aren't I I don't. believe that exists so when we look out. at all the beautiful variety of. semibological architectures out there in. the universe how many how many. intelligent alien civilizations do you. think are out there yeah boy I have you. know no expertise in that whatsoever. yeah you haven't met any I I have met.

the ones we've made I think that I mean. exactly in some sense with synthetic. biology are you not creating aliens I. absolutely think so because because look. all of life all of St all standard model. systems are an N of one course of. evolution on earth right and trying to. make conclusions about biology from. looking at life on Earth is like testing. your theory on the same data that. generated it it's all it's all kind of.

like locked in so we absolutely have to. create novel uh examples that have no. history on Earth that don't you know as. xenobots have no history of selection to. be a good xenobot the cells have. selection for various things but but the. xenobot itself never existed before and. so we can make chimeras you know we make. frogalodels that are you know sort of. half frog have Axolotl you can make all. sorts of high brats right constructions. of living to issue with robots and. whatever we need to be making these. things until we find actual aliens.

because otherwise we're just looking at. an N of one set of examples all kinds of. Frozen accidents of evolution and so on. we need to go beyond that to really. understand biology but we're still even. if you when you do a synthetic biology. you're locked in to the basic components. of the way biology is done on this Earth. yeah right yeah yeah. and also the basic constraints to the. environment even artificial environments. to construct in the lab are tied up to. the environment I mean what do you okay.

let's say there is I mean what I think. is there's. a nearly infinite number of intelligent. civilizations living or dead out there. um. if you pick one out of the box. what do you think it would look like. so. in in when you think about synthetic. biology. or creating synthetic organisms. how hard is it to create something.

that's very different. yeah I think it's very hard to create. something that's very different right. it's um uh we are just locked in both. both uh experimentally and in terms of. our imagination right it's very hard and. you also emphasize several times that. the idea of shape yeah the individual. cell get together with other cells and. they kind of. they're gonna build a shape so it's. shape and function but shape is a. critical thing yeah so here I'll take a.

stab I mean I I agree with you to. whatever extent though that we can say. anything I I do think that there's you. know probably an infinite number of of. different uh different. um uh architectures with with that are. with interesting cognitive properties. out there uh what can we say about them. I think that. um the only things that are going I I. don't think we can rely on any of the. typical stuff you know carbon based yeah. no no like I think all of that is just. um you know us being having having a. lack of imagination but I think the.

things that um are going to be Universal. if anything is are things for example. driven by resource limitation the fact. that you are fighting a hostile world. and you have to draw a boundary between. yourself and the world somewhere the. fact that that boundary is not given to. you by anybody you have to you have to. assume it you know uh estimate it. yourself and the fact that you have to. coarse grain your experience and the. fact that you're going to try to. minimize surprise and the fact that like. these these are the things that I think. are fundamental about biology none of. the you know the facts about the genetic.

code or even the fact that we have genes. or or the biochemistry of it I don't. think any of those things are. fundamental but um it's going to be a. lot more about the information and about. the creation of the self the fact that. so in my in my framework selves are. demarcated by uh the scale of the goals. that they can pursue so from little tiny. local goals to like massive you know. planetary scale goals for for certain. humans. um and everything and everything in. between so you can draw this like. cognitive light cone about that that. determines the the scale of the goals. you could possibly pursue I think those.

kinds of Frameworks uh like that like. active inference and so on are going to. be universally applicable but but none. of the other things that are that are. typically um discussed. quick pause during the bathroom break. we were just talking about uh you know. aliens and all that that's a funny thing. which is yeah I don't know if you've. seen them there's a kind of debate that. goes on about cognition and plants and. what can you say about different kinds. of computation and cognition implants. and I always I always look at that. something like if if you're weirded out. by cognition in Plants you're not ready.

for exobiology right if if you know. something that's that similar here on. Earth is already like freaking you out. then I think there's going to be all. kinds of cognitive life out there that. we're gonna have a really hard time. recognizing. I think robots will help us yeah. like expand our mind about cognition. either that or the word like xenobots so. and they maybe becomes the same thing it. is you know really when the human.

Engineers the thing at least in part and. then is able to achieve some kind of. cognition that's different than what. you're used to then you start to. understand like oh. cut you know every living organism is. capable of cognition oh I need to kind. of broaden my understanding what. cognition is but do you think plants um. like when you when you eat them are they. screaming I don't know about screaming I. think you have to see what I think when. I eat a salad yeah good yeah I think you.

have to scale down the expectations in. terms of right so so probably they're. not screaming in the way that we would. be screaming however there's plenty of. data on Plants being able to um to do. anticipation and certain kinds of memory. and and so on. um I think you know what you just said. about robots uh I I hope you're right. and I hope that's but but there's two. there's two ways that people can take. that right so one way is exactly what. you just said to try to kind of expand. their expand their their their Notions. for that category the other way people. often go is uh they just sort of Define.

the term as if if it's not a natural. product it's it's just faking right it's. not really intelligence if it was made. by somebody else because it's that same. it's the same thing they 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 and I think. people have a real tendency for that and. they sort of which which I find really. strange in the sense that if somebody he. said to me. we have this this sort of blind like.

like uh hill climbing search and then. and then we have a really smart team of. Engineers which one do you think is. going to produce a system that has good. intelligence I think it's really weird. to say that it only comes from the blind. search right it can't be done by people. who by the way can also use evolutionary. techniques if they want to but also. rational design I think it's really. weird to say that. um real intelligence only comes from. Natural Evolution. so I hope you're right I hope people. take it the other the other way but. there's a nice shortcut so I work with.

Lego robots a lot now from for my own uh. personal pleasure not in that way. internet uh so the four legs. and uh one of the things that. changes my experience with the robots a. lot is um. when I can't understand why I did a. certain thing and there's a lot of ways. to engineer that. meet the person that created the. software that runs it. there's a lot of ways for me to build.

that software in such a way that I don't. exactly know why it did a certain basic. decision. of course as an engineer you can go in. and start to look at logs you can log. all kind of data sensory data the the. decisions you made you know all the. outputs and neural networks and so on. but I also try to really experience that. surprise and that really experience as. another person would that totally. doesn't know how it's built and I think. the magic is there and not knowing how. it works.

that I think biology does that for you. through the layers of abstraction yeah. it because nobody really knows what's. going on inside the biological like each. one component is clueless about the big. picture I think there's actually really. cheap systems that can that can. illustrate that kind of thing which is. even like um you know uh fractals right. like you have a very small short formula. in Z and you see it and there's no magic.

you're just going to crank through you. know Z squared plus C whatever you're. just going to crank through it but the. result of it is this incredibly Rich. beautiful image right that that just. like wow all of that was in this like 10. character long string like amazing so. the fact that you can you can know. everything there is to know about the. details and the process and all the. parts and everything like there's. literally no magic of any kind there and. yet the outcome is something that you.

would never have expected and it's just. it just you know is incredibly rich and. complex and beautiful so there's a lot. of that you write that you work on. developing conceptual Frameworks for. understanding unconventional cognition. so the kind of thing we've been talking. about I just like the term. unconventional cognition. and you want to figure out how to detect. study and communicate with a thing. you've already mentioned a few examples. but what is unconventional cognition is. it as simply as everything outside of.

what we Define usually as cognition. cognitive science the stuff going on. between our ears or is there some deeper. way to get at the fundamentals of. what is cognition. yeah I think like uh and and if I'm. certainly not the only person who works. in unconvention unconventional um. cognition so it's the term used yeah. that's one that so I've coined a number. of weird terms but that's not one of. mine like that that's an existing thing. so so for example somebody like Andy. adamasky who um I don't know if you've.

if you've had him on if you haven't you. you should he's a he's a he's a you know. very interesting guy he's a computer. scientist and he does unconventional. cognition and Sly molds and all kinds of. weird um he's a real weird weird cat. really interesting anyway so so that's. on you know there's a bunch of terms. that I've come up with but that's not. one of mine so I think like many terms. that one is is really defined by the. times meaning that unconventional. cognitive thing things that are. unconventional cognition today are not. going to be considered unconventional. cognition at some point uh it's one of.

those it's one of those things and so. it's you know it's it's it's this it's. this really deep question of how do you. recognize communicate with. um um classify cognition when you cannot. rely on the typical Milestones right so. so typical. um you know again if you stick with the. with the uh 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. fewer of those and this one has a bigger. frontal cortex and this one right so.

these are these are landmarks that that. we're that we're used to and and it. allows us to make very um kind of Rapid. judgments about things but if you can't. rely on that either because you're. looking at a synthetic thing or or an. engineered thing or an alien thing then. what do you do right how do you and so. and so that's what I'm really interested. I'm interested in mind in all of its. possible implementations not just the. obvious ones that we know from from. looking at brains here on Earth. whenever I think about something like.

unconventional cognition I think about. cellular automata I'm just captivated by. the beauty of the thing. the fact that from simple little. uh objects you can create some such. beautiful complexity that very quickly. you forget about the individual objects. and you see the things that it creates. as its own organisms that blows my mind. every time like honestly. I could full time just.

eat mushrooms and watch cellular time. don't you have to do mushrooms uh just. just sell your automata it feels like I. mean from an engineering perspective I. love. when a very simple system captures. something really powerful because then. you can study that system to understand. something fundamental about complexity. about life on Earth. anyway how do I communicate with a thing. for cellular automata can can do.

cognition if a plant can do cognition if. uh a xenobot can do cognition how do I. like whisper in its ear and and and get. an answer back to how do I have a. conversation yeah. um well how do I have a xenobot on a. podcast that's really a really. interesting line of um investigation. that that that that opens up I mean I. mean we thought about this so you need a. few things you need you need to. understand the space in which they live. so uh what not not just the physical.

modality like can they see like can they. feel vibration I mean that's important. of course because that's how you deliver. your message but but not just not just. the ideas for a communication medium not. not just the physical medium but what is. saliency right so so what are these what. what are important to this what's. important to this system and systems of. all kinds of different levels of. sophistication of what you could expect. to get back and I I think what's what's. really important I call this um the the. spectrum of persuadability which is this. this idea that when you're looking at a.

system you can't you can't assume where. on the Spectrum it is you have to do. experiments and so so for so so. uh for example uh if you look at a gene. regulatory Network which is just a bunch. of bunch of nodes that turn each other. on and off at various rates you might. look at that and you say wow there's no. magic here I mean clearly this thing is. uh is is as deterministic as it gets. it's a piece of Hardware the only way. we're going to be able to control it is. by rewiring it which is the way my. molecular biology works right we can add. nodes remove notes or whatever well so. we've done simulations and shown that.

um biological and now we're doing this. in in the lab the biological networks. like that have have associative memory. so they can actually learn they can. learn from experience they have. habituation they have sensitization they. have associative memory which you. wouldn't have known if you assume that. they have to be on the left side of that. Spectrum so when you're going to. communicate with something and we've. even um uh uh Charles Abramson I've. written a paper on um behaviorist. approaches to synthetic organism meaning. that if you're given something you have. no idea what it is or what it can do how.

do you figure out what its psychology is. what its level is what does it and so. and so we literally lay out a set of. protocols starting with the simplest. things that I'm moving up to more. complex things where you can make no. assumptions about what this thing can do. right just from you you have to start. and you'll find out. so so when you're gonna so so here's a. simple I mean here's one way to. communicate with something if you can. train it. that's a way of communicating so if you. can provide if you can figure out what. the currency of reward of positive and. negative reinforcement is right and you. can get it to do something it wasn't. doing before based on experiences you've.

given it you have taught it one thing. you have communicated one thing that. that such and such an action is good so. some other action is is not good that's. that's like a basic atom of a primitive. atom of communication what about. in some sense if it gets you to do. something you haven't done before is it. answering back yeah most most certainly. and then there's there's I've seen. cartoons I think maybe Gary Larson or. somebody had had a cartoon of these of. these rats in the Maze and the one rat. you know assists to the other hey look.

at this every time every time I walk. over here he starts scribbling in that. on the you know almost the clipboard. that he has it's awesome if we step. outside ourselves. and really measure how much like if I if. I actually measure how much I've changed. because of my interaction with certain. cellular automata and you really have to. take that it's a consideration about. like well these things are changing you. too yes I know you know how it works and. so on but you're being changed by the.

thing absolutely I think I think I read. um I don't know any details but I I. think I read something about. um how how wheat and other things of. domesticated humans in terms right but. by their properties change the way that. the human behavior and societal. structures in that sense cats are. running the world. because they they took over the so first. of all so first they while not giving a. shit about humans clearly would ever. with with every ounce of their being.

they've somehow got just millions and. millions of humans to to to to take them. home and feed them and then not only the. physical space that they take over they. took over the digital space they. dominate the internet in terms of. cuteness in terms of immutability. and so they're they're like they got. themselves literally inside the memes. they become viral and spread on the. internet. and they're the ones that are probably.

controlling humans that's my theory. another that's a follow-up paper after. the frog kissing okay. I mean you mentioned. sentience and consciousness. uh you have a paper titled generalizing. Frameworks for sentience Beyond natural. species. so beyond. normal cognition if we look at. sentience and Consciousness and I wonder.

if you draw an interesting distinction. between those two uh elsewhere. outside of humans and uh maybe outside. of Earth. you think aliens are half sentients and. if they do how do we think about it so. when you have this framework what is. this paper what is what is the way you. propose to think about ascensions yeah. that that particular paper was was a. very short um commentary on another. paper that was written about crabs.

there's a really good paper on them uh. crabs and and various like like a rubric. of uh of different types of behaviors. that that could be applied to different. creatures and they're trying to apply it. to crabs and so on them I I've. Consciousness we can talk about a. feeling but it's a whole separate kettle. of fish I I 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. mostly what I talk about is is cognition.

because I think that that's much easier. to deal with in a um kind of rigorous. experimental experimental way I think. that um all of these all of these terms. have uh you know sentience and and so on. have different definitions and I. fundamentally I think that people can as. long as they specify what they mean. ahead of time. um I think people can Define them in. various ways the one the the the the. only thing that I really kind of insist.

on is that. the right way to think about all this. stuff is is an energy from an. engineering perspective what does it. help me to to control predict and uh to. and does it help me do my next. experiment so so so so that that's. that's not a universal perspective so. some people have uh philosophical kind. of underpinnings and those are primary. and if anything runs against that then. it must automatically be wrong so so. some people will say I don't care what. else if your theory says to me that.

thermostats have little tiny goals I'm. not I'm not I'm not so that's it I just. like that's my philosophical you know. preconception that like thermostats do. not have goals and that's it so um so. that's one way of doing it and some. people do it that way I do not do it. that way and I think that we can't if we. we can't I don't think we can know much. of anything from our from a. philosophical armchair I think that all. of these theories and ways of doing. things stand or fall based on just just. basically one set of criteria does it. help you run a rich research program.

that's it if I agree with you totally. but so forget philosophy what about the. Poetry of ambiguity what about at the. limits of the things you can engineer. using terms that are that can be defined. in multiple ways. and living within that yeah. uncertainty in order to play with words. until something lands that you can. engineer I mean that's to me where. Consciousness sits currently nobody. really understands the the hard problem.

of Consciousness is the subject what it. feels like because it really feels like. it feels like something to be this. biological system this conglomerate of a. bunch of cells in this hierarchy of. competencies feels like something and. yeah I feel like one thing and is that. just. is that just a as a side effect of a. complex system. or is there something more. that humans have or is there something.

more than 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 s of agency yeah. uh boy uh yeah that's a deep question. now is there room for poetry and. Engineering or no no there definitely is. and a lot of the Poetry comes in when we. realize that none of the categories we. deal with are sharp as we think they are. right and so and so in the you know in. the different areas of of all these.

Spectra are where a lot of the Poetry. sits I have many new theories about. things but I in fact do not have a a. good theory about Consciousness that I. plan to trot out so and you almost don't. see it as useful for your current work. unconsciousness I think it will come I. have some thoughts about it but I don't. feel like they're going to move the. needle yet on on that but do you want to. ground in in engineering always. so well. I mean I don't so so so so if we really. tackle Consciousness per se in terms of. the hard problem I don't I don't that.

that isn't necessarily going to be. groundable in engineering right that. that aspect of the cognition is but. actual Consciousness per se you know for. first person perspective I'm not sure. that that's groundable in engineering. and I think specifically what's. different about what's different about. it is there's a couple things so so. let's you know here we go I'll say a. couple things about about Consciousness. one one thing is that what makes it. different is that for every other type. aspect of science.

when we think about having a correct or. a good theory of it we have some idea of. what format it that theory makes. predictions in so whether those be. numbers or whatever we we have some idea. we may not know the answer we may not. have the theory but we know that when we. get the theory here's what it's going to. output and then we'll know if it's right. or wrong for actual 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 what.

what format would would it make. predictions in right because because all. the things that we know about it. basically boil down to observable. behaviors so the only thing I can think. of when I think about that is is is. it'll be poetry or it'll be it'll be. it'll be something to um if if I ask you. okay you've got a great Theory Of. Consciousness and here's this here's. this creature maybe it's a natural maybe. it's an engineer one whatever and I want. you to tell me what your theory says. about this this beings um what it's like.

to be this being the only thing I can. imagine you giving me is some piece of. art a poem or or something that once. I've taken it in I share I I I I now. have a similar State as whatever that's. that's about as good as I can come up. with well it's possible that that once. you have a good understanding of. Consciousness it would be mapped to some. things that are more measurable so for. example it's possible that.

a conscious being is one that's able to. suffer. so you start to look at pain and. suffering you can start to connect it. closer to. things that. you can measure that in terms of how. they reflect themselves in Behavior. and problem solving and uh creation and. attainment of goals for example which I. think suffering is one of the you know.

life is suffering it's one of the one of. the big aspects of the The Human. Condition. and so if Consciousness is somehow a. maybe at least a catalyst for suffering. you could start to get like Echoes of it. and you start you you start to see like. the actual effects of Consciousness and. behavior that it's not just about. subjective experience it's like it's. really deeply integrated in the problem. solving uh decision making of a system.

uh something like this but also it's. possible that we realize this is not a. philosophical statement philosophers can. write their books I welcome it uh you. know I I take the touring test really. seriously I I don't know why people. really don't like it. when a robot convinces you that it's. intelligent I think that's a really. incredible accomplishment and there's. some deep sense in which that is. intelligence.

if it looks like it's intelligent it is. intelligent and I think there's some. deep aspect. of. um a system that appears to be conscious. it. 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. yeah I don't disagree with any of that I.

mean especially intelligence I think is. a publicly observable thing I I and and. I mean you know science fiction has. dealt with this for a century or or much. more maybe uh this idea that when you. are confronted with something that just. doesn't meet any of your typical. assumptions so you can't look in the. skull and say oh well there's that. frontal cortex so then I guess we're. good right if it's if it's you know so. so this thing lands on your front lawn. and this you know with the the little. door opens and something trundles out. and it's sort of like.

um you know kind of shiny and aluminum. looking and it hands you this uh you. know it hands you this poem that it. wrote while it was on you know flying. over and how happy it is to meet you. like what's going to be your criteria. right for whether whether you get to. take it apart and see what makes a tick. or whether you have to you know be nice. to it and and whatever right like all. the all the criteria that we have now. and you know that people are using and. as you said a lot of people are down on. the touring tests and things like this. but but what else have we got you know. because measuring measuring a quart. excise isn't gonna isn't gonna cut it.

right in the broader scheme of things so. uh I think this is it's it's a wide open. it's a wide open problem that right that. we you know our our solution to the. problem of other Minds it's very. simplistic right we we give each other. credit for having Minds just because we. sort of on uh you know on an anatomical. level we're pretty similar and then so. that's good enough but how how far is. that going to go so I think that's. really primitive so um yeah I think I. think it's a major unsolved problem it's. a really challenging. uh direction of thought to the human.

race. uh that you talked about like embodied. Minds if you start to think that other. things other than humans have Minds. that's really challenging yeah because. all men are created equal starts. starts being like all right well we. should probably treat. not just cows with respect yeah but like. plants and not just plants but.

uh some kind of organized conglomerates. of cells in a petri dish. in fact some of the work we're we're. doing like you're doing and the whole. community of science is doing with. Biology people might be like we weren't. really mean to viruses yeah. I mean yeah I the thing is you're right. and and I get I get I certainly get. phone calls about uh people complaining. about frog skin and so on but. I think we have to separate the sort of. deep philosophical aspects versus what.

actually happened so what actually. happens on Earth is that people with. exactly the same anatomical structure. kill each other you know on a daily. basis right so so so it I think it's. clear that simply knowing that something. else is equally or maybe more uh. cognitive or conscious than you are is. is not a guarantee of of of kind. behavior that that much we know of so. then and so then then we look at a. commercial farming of mammals and. various other things and so so I think. on a practical basis long before we get.

to worrying about. um things like frog skin we have to ask. ourselves why are we uh what what can we. do about the way that we've been. behaving with the towards creatures. which we know for a factor because of. our similarities are are basically just. like us you know that's kind of a whole. other this is a social thing but but but. fundamentally you know of course you're. absolutely right in that we we are also. thinking about this we are on this. planet in some way incredibly lucky it's. just dumb luck that we really only have.

one dominant species it didn't have to. work out that way so you could easily. imagine that there could be a planet. somewhere with more than one equally or. maybe near equally intelligent species. and then uh but but then they may not. look anything like each other right so. there may be multiple ecosystems where. there are uh things of of similar to. human-like intelligence and then you'd. have all kinds of issues about you know. how do you how do you relate to them. when they're physically not like you at.

all but yet yet you know in terms of. behavior and culture and whatever it's. pretty obvious that they've got as you. know as much on the ball as you have or. maybe imagine imagine that there was. another. um group of beings that was like on. average you know 40 IQ points lower. right like like we're just we're pretty. lucky in many ways we you know we don't. really have even though we we sort of. you know we still act badly in many ways. but but but the fact is you know all. humans are more or less in this like in. the same that same range but didn't have. to work out that way well but I think. that's part of the way life works on.

Earth maybe human civilization works. is it seems like we want us ourselves to. be quite similar. and then within that you know what. everybody's about the same relatively IQ. intelligence problem solving. capabilities even physical. characteristics. but then we'll find some aspect of that. as different and that seems to be like. I mean it's it's really dark to say but.

there seems to be the. I'm not even a bug but like a feature of. the early development of human. civilization you pick the other your. tribe versus the other tribe in your War. it's a kind of evolution evolution in. the space of of memes a space of ideas I. think a new war with each other so we're. very good at finding the other even when. the characteristics are really the same.

that's I don't know what. that I mean I'm sure so many of these. things echo in the biological World in. some way yeah there's a fun um. experiment that uh I did my my son. actually came up with this so we we did. um a a biology unit together he would. use so homeschool and so we did this a. couple years ago we did this thing where. it imagines you get the sly mold right. and polycephalum and it grows on them uh. on a uh on a petri dish of agar and it. sort of spreads out and and it's it's. it's a single cell you know produce but.

it's like this giant thing and so you. put down a piece of oat and it wants to. go get the oat and it sort of grows. towards the oat so what you do is you. take a razor blade and you just you just. separate the piece of the whole culture. that's growing towards the the oh you. just kind of separate it and so now. think about think about the interesting. decision-making calculus for that little. piece I can I can go get the oat and. therefore I won't have to share those. nutrients with this giant mass over. there so the so the nutrients per unit. volume is going to be amazing so I. should go ethio. but if I first rejoin because faizaram.

once you cut it has the ability to join. back up if I first rejoin then that. whole calculus becomes impossible. because there is no more me anymore. there's just we and then and then we. will go eat this thing right so so this. interesting you know this this you can. imagine a kind of game theory where the. number of Agents isn't fixed and that. it's not just cooperate or defect but. it's actually merge and and whatever. right yeah so that kind of that that. competition how does it do that decision. making yeah so so that right so so it's. it's really interesting and so and so.

empirically what we found is that it. tends to merge first it tends to merge. first and then the whole thing goes but. but it's really interesting that that. that that that calculus like do we even. have I mean I'm not an expert in the. economic Game Theory and all that but. maybe there's account maybe some sort of. hyperbolic discounting or something but. but maybe you know this idea that the. the actions you take not only change. your payoff but they change who or what. you are and that you may not you you. could take an action after which you. don't exist anymore or you are radically. changed or you are merged with somebody.

else like that's I you know as far as I. know that's a whole you know we're still. missing a formalism for even knowing how. to how to model any of that DC evolution. by the way is a process that applies. here on Earth or is it some where did. Evolution come from yeah yeah so this. thing. um that from the very origin of life. that took us to today what what what the. heck is that I think evolution is. inevitable in the sense that if you. combine and and basically I think one of.

the most uh useful things that was done. in early Computing I guess in the 60s it. started was was evolutionary computation. and just showing how how uh simple it is. that if you have if you have imperfect. heredity and competition together those. two things were three things right so. heredity imperfect heredity and. competition or selection those three. things and that's it now now now you're. you're off through the races right and. so that can be it's not just on Earth. because it can be done in the computer.

it can be done in chemical systems it. can be done in um you know Elise Mullen. says it it works in on on you know. Cosmic scales so I think that uh that. kind of thing is incredibly. um pervasive and and and and general. it's a general feature of life it's it's. interesting to think about. you know the standard uh the standard. thought about this is that it's uh it's. blind right meaning that the the the. intelligence of the process is zero it's. stumbling around. and I think that back in the day when.

the options with the options were it's. dumb like machines or it's smart like. humans then of course the scientists. went in this direction because nobody. wanted creationism and so they said okay. it's got to be like completely blind I'm. not actually sure right because because. I I think that um I think that. everything is a Continuum and I think. that it doesn't have to be smart with. foresight like us but it doesn't have to. be completely blind either I think there. may be aspects of it and in particular. this kind of multi-scale Competency. might give it a little bit of look ahead.

maybe or a little bit of um problem. solving sort of baked in but but that's. going to be completely different in. different in different systems but I do. think I do think it's General I don't. think it's just on Earth I think it's a. very fundamental thing and it does seem. to have a kind of direction that is. taking us. that's somehow perhaps is defined by the. environment itself. it feels like we're headed towards. something. like. we're playing out a script that was just. like a single cell defines the entire.

organism yeah it feels like from the. origin of Earth itself. playing out a kind of script yeah you. can't really go any other way I mean so. this is very controversial and I don't. know the answer but people have people. have argued that this is called uh you. know sort of rewinding the tape of life. right and and some people have argued I. think I think I think Conway Morris. maybe has argued that it it is that. there's a deep attractor for example to.

human to the human um. uh kind of uh structure and that and. that if you were to rewind it again. you'd basically get more or less the. same thing and then other people have. argued that no it's it's incredibly. sensitive to Frozen accidents and then. once a certain stochastic decisions are. made Downstream everything is going to. be different I don't know I don't know. you know we're very bad at predicting uh. attractors in the space of complex. systems generally speaking right we. don't know so may so maybe Evolution on. Earth has these deep attractors that no. matter what has happened it pretty much.

would likely to end up there or maybe. not I don't know what's a really. difficult idea to imagine that. if you ran Earth a million times 500 000. times you would get Hitler. like yeah we don't like to think like. that we think like 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 perturbation results in a totally.

different trajectory but maybe there's a. in this competency hierarchy it's a. self-correcting system. that's just ultimately there's a bunch. of chaos that ultimately is leading. towards something like a super. intelligent artificial intelligence. system. the answers 42. I mean there might be a kind of. imperative for life that is headed to. and we're too focused on our day-to-day.

life of getting coffee and snacks and. having sex and getting uh a promotion at. work not to see the big imperative of. life on earth that is headed towards. something yeah maybe maybe I don't it's. it's it's difficult I think one of the. things that's important about. um. chimerica by engineer Technologies all. of those things are that we have to. start developing a better science of.

predicting the cognitive goals of of. composite systems so we're just not very. good at it right we don't know uh if if. if if I create a composite system and. this could be internet of things or. swarm robotics or a cellular a cellular. swarm or whatever. what is the emergent intelligence of. this thing first of all what level is it. going to be at and if it has goal. directed capacity what are the goals. going to be like we are just not very. good at predicting that yet and I think. that uh it's it's a.

it's a it's a existential level uh need. for us to be able to because we're. building these things all the time right. we're building we're building both. physical structures like swarm Robotics. and we're building uh a social Financial. structures and so on with very little. ability to uh predict what sort of. autonomous goals that system is going to. have of which we are now cogs and so. right so so learning learning to predict. and control those things is going to be. critical so we've so so in fact so so if.

you're right and there is some kind of. attractor to Evolution it would be nice. to know what that is and then to make a. rational decision of whether we're going. to go along or we're going to pop out of. it or try to pop out of it because. there's no guarantee I mean that's. that's the other you know kind of. important thing a lot of people. I get a lot of complaints uh from from. people email me and say yeah you know. what you're doing uh it isn't natural. you know and I'll say look natural that. that'd be nice if if somebody was making. sure that natural was was was matched up. to our values but no one's doing that.

but you know Evolution optimizes for. biomass that's it nobody's optimizing. it's not optimizing for your happiness. it's I don't think necessarily it's. optimizing for for for intelligence or. fairness or any of that stuff I'm gonna. find that person that emailed you beat. them up take their place. um steal everything they own and say now. we're now this is natural this is. natural yeah exactly because because it. comes from it comes from a from an old. world view where you could assume that. whatever is natural that that's probably.

for the best and I think we're long out. of that Garden of Eden kind of view so I. think we can do better we I think we and. we have to right natural it just isn't. great for for a lot of a lot of life. forms what are some cool synthetic. organisms that you you think about you. dream about out when you think about. embodied mind what do you imagine what. do you hope to build yeah on a practical. level what I really hope to do is to. gain enough of an understanding of the. embodied intelligence of the organs and.

tissues such that we can achieve a. radically different regenerative. medicine so that we can say basically. and I I think about it as um you know in. terms of like okay can you what's the. what's the uh uh what's the goal kind of. uh and and end game for this whole thing. to me the end game is something that you. would call an anatomical compiler so the. idea is you would sit down in front of. the computer and you would draw the the. body or the organ that you wanted not. not molecular details but like this is.

what I want I want a six-legged uh you. know frog 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 it would do if we knew what we were. doing is. put out uh it could convert that. anatomical description into a set of. stimuli that would have to be given to. cells to convince them to build exactly. that thing right I probably won't live. to see it but I think it's achievable. and I think what that if if we can have. that then that is basically the solution. to all of medicine except for infectious.

disease so birth defects right traumatic. injury cancer aging degenerative disease. if we knew how to tell cells what to. build all of those things go away so. those things go away and the um positive. feedback spiral of economic costs where. all of the advances are increasingly. more heroic and expensive interventions. of a sinking ship when you're like 90. and then and so on right all of that. goes away because basically instead of. trying to fix you up as you as you. degrade you you.

um you progressively regenerate you know. you apply the regenerative medicine. early before things degrade so I think. that that'll have massive economic. impacts over what we're trying to do now. which is not at all you know sustainable. and uh and that that's what I hope I. hope that I hope that we get it so so to. me yes the xenobots will be doing useful. things cleaning up the environment. cleaning out you know your or 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 to to develop a science of. detecting and manipulating the goals of. collective intelligences of cells. specifically for regenerative medicine. and then sort of beyond that if we you. know sort of think further beyond that. what I hope is that kind of like what. you said all of this drives a. reconsideration of how we formulate um. ethical Norms because this old school so. so so in the olden days what you could. do is obviously we were confronted with. something you you could you could tap on.

it right and if you heard a metallic. clanging sound you'd said ah fine right. so you could conclude it was made in a. factory I could take it apart I can do. whatever right if you did that and you. got you know sort of a squishy uh kind. of warm sensation you'd say I need to be. you know more or less nice to it and. whatever that's not going to be feasible. it was never really feasible but it was. good enough because we didn't have any. we didn't know any better that needs to. go and I think that. uh by by breaking down those artificial. barriers someday we can try to build a a.

system of of ethical Norms that does not. rely on these completely contingent. facts of of our Earthly history but on. something much much deeper that you know. really um takes takes agency and and the. capacity to suffer and all that takes. that seriously. the capacity to suffer and the Deep. questions I would ask of a system is can. I eat it and can I have sex with it. um which is the the two fundamental. tests of Again The Human Condition. uh so I can basically do what Dali does.

that's in the in in the physical space. so print out like a 3D print a Pepe the. frog with a propeller head. propeller hat. uh is the is the Dream well yes and no I. mean I want to get away from the 3D. printing thing because that will be. available for some things much earlier I. mean we can already do bladders and ears. and things like that because it's micro. level control right when you 3D print. you are in charge of where every cell.

goes and for some things that you know. for for like this thing they had that I. think 20 years ago or maybe a little. earlier than that you could do that so. yeah I would like to have says the dolly. part where you provide a few words yeah. and it generates a painting so here you. say I want a frog. with these features and then it would go. direct a complex biological system to. construct something like that yeah the. main magic would be I mean I think from. from looking at Dali and so on it looks.

like the first part is kind of solved. now where you go from from the words to. the image like that seems more or less. solved the next step is really hard this. is what keeps things like crispr and. genomic editing and so on it's good this. is what limits all the except. uh uh impacts for for gender medicine. because going back to okay this is the. knee joint that I want or this is the. eye that I want. now what genes do I edit to make that. happen right going back in that. direction is really hard so instead of. that it's going to be okay I understand. how to motivate cells to build.

particular structures can I rewrite the. memory of what they think they're. supposed to be building such that then I. can you know take my hands off the wheel. and let them 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 that protein folding uh in in. the most simple. medium tried and has solved with Alpha. fold which is how does the sequence of.

letters result in this three-dimensional. shape and you have to. um I guess it didn't solve it because. you have to. if you say I want this shape how do I. then have a sequence of letters. yeah the reverse engineering stuff is. really tricky it is I think I think. where where and we're doing some of this. now is is to uh use AI to try and uh. build actionable models of the. intelligence of the cellular collectives. so try to help us to help us gain models.

that that. um and and we've had some success in. this so we did something like this for. um uh for you know for repairing uh. birth defects of the brain in frog we've. done some of this for um normalizing. melanoma uh where you can really start. to use AI to make models of how would I. impact this thing if I wanted to given. all the complexities right and and given. all the uh the the the controls that. that it knows how to do so when you say. regenerative medicine so we talked about.

creating biological organisms but if you. regrow a hand that information is. already there. right the biological system has that. information. so how does regenerative medicine work. today how do you hope it works what's. the hope there yeah yeah how do you make. it happen well today there's a set of. popular approaches so so one is 3D. printing so the idea is I'm going to. make a scaffold of the thing that I want. I'm going to seed it with cells and then.

and then there it is right so kind of. direct and then that 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. sort of stem cell transplant into the. ideas if we uh if we put in stem cells. with appropriate factors we can get them. to generate certain kinds of neurons for. certain you know diseases and so on all. of those things are good for relatively. simple structures but when you want an. eye or a hand or something else I think. in this maybe an unpopular opinion I.

think the only hope we have in any. reasonable kind of time frame is to. understand how the thing was motivated. to get made in the first place so what. is it that that made those cells in the. in the beginning create a particular arm. with a particular uh set of sizes and. shapes and number of fingers and all. that and why is it that a salamander can. keep losing theirs and keep regrowing. theirs and a planarian can do the same. even more so to me a kind of ultimate. regenerative medicine was when you can.

tell the cells to build whatever it is. you need them to build right and so so. that we can all be like planarian. basically do you have to start at the. very beginning or can you um. do a shortcut okay throwing a hand. you already got the whole organism yeah. so here's what we've done right so so. we've we've more or less solved that in. frog so frogs unlike salamanders do not. regenerate their legs as adults and so. so uh We've shown that with a very um uh.

kind of simple intervention so what we. do is there's two things you need to uh. you need to have a signal that tells the. cells what to do and then you need some. way of delivering it and so this is work. together with them with David Kaplan and. I should do a disclosure here we have a. company called morpheuticals and. spin-off where we're trying to uh to. address uh regenerate you know limb. regeneration so we've solved it in the. Frog and we're now in trials and mice so. now we're going we're in mammals now and. I can't say anything about how it's. going but the Frog thing is solved so. what you do is um after you have a.

little frog Luke Skywalker with every. growing hand yeah basically basically. yeah yeah so what you do is we did it. with legs instead of forearms and what. you do is after amputation normally they. they don't regenerate you put on a. wearable bioreactor so it's this thing. that um that goes on and Dave kaplan's. lab makes these things and inside it's a. it's a very controlled environment it is. a silk gel that carries uh some drugs. for example ION channel drugs and what. you're doing is you're saying to these. cells. you should regrow what normally goes.

here so uh that whole thing is on for 24. hours then you take it off you don't. touch the leg again this is really. important because what we're not looking. for is a set of micromanagement you know. printing or controlling the cells we. want to trigger we want to we want to. interact with it early on and then not. touch it again because because we don't. know how to make a frog leg but the Frog. knows how to make a frog 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. kind of shows this proof of concept that.

early on when the cells right after. injury when they're first making a. decision about what they're going to do. you can you can impact them and once. they've decided to make a leg they don't. need you after that they can you know do. their own thing so that's an approach. that we're now taking what about cancer. suppression that's something you. mentioned earlier how can all of these. ideas help with cancer suppression so. let's let's go back to the beginning and. ask what what what what cancer is so I. think um you know asking why there's. cancer is the wrong question I think the. right question is why is there ever. anything but cancer so so in the normal.

State you have a bunch of cells that are. all cooperating towards a large-scale. goal if that process of cooperation. breaks down and you've got a cell that. is isolated from that electrical Network. that lets you remember what the big goal. is you revert back to your unicellular. lifestyle as far as now think about that. border between self and world right. normally when all these cells are. connected by gab Junctions into an. electrical Network they are all one self. right meaning that um their goals they. have these large tissue level goals and.

so on as soon as the cell is. disconnected from that the self is Tiny. right and so at that point and so so. people a lot of people model cancer cell. cells as being more selfish and all that. they're not more selfish they're equally. selfish it's just that their self is. smaller normally the self is huge now. they got tiny little selves now what are. the goals of tiny little selves well. proliferate right and migrate to. wherever life is good and that's. metastasis so that's proliferation of. metastasis so so one thing we found and. people have noticed years ago that when. cells convert to cancer the first thing.

they see is they close the gap Junctions. and it's a lot like I think it's a lot. like that experiment with the slime mold. where until you close that Gap Junction. you can't even entertain the idea of. leaving the collective because there is. no you at that point right your mind. melded with this with this whole other. network but as soon as the Gap Junction. is closed now the boundary between you. now now the rest of the body is just. outside environment to you you're just a. you're just a unicellular organism on. the rest of the body's environment so so. we so we study this process and we.

worked out a way to artificially control. troll the bioelectric state of these. cells to physically force them to remain. in that Network and so then then what. that what that means is that nasty. mutations like k-ras and things like. that these are these really tough. oncogenic mutations that cause tumors if. you if you do them and then but but then. but then artificially um uh control of. the bioelectrics you you you greatly. reduce tumor Genesis or or normalized.

cells that had already begun to convert. to basically they go back to being. normal cells and so this is another much. like with the planaria this is another. way in which the bioelectric state uh. kind of uh dominates what the what the. genetic state is so if you sequence the. the you know if you sequence the nucleic. acids you'll see the k-aras mutation. you'll say ah well that's going to be a. tumor but there isn't a tumor because. because biologically you've kept the. cells connected and they're just working. on making nice skin and kidneys and. whatever else so so we've started moving. that to um to to human glioblastoma.

cells and we're hoping for um you know a. patient in the future um interaction. with patients foreign. possible ways in which we may quote uh. cure cancer I think so yeah I think so I. think I think the actual cure I mean. there are other technology you know. immune therapy I think it's a great um. technology. um chemotherapy I don't think is a good. is a good technology I think we got to. get out get off of that so chemotherapy. just kills cells yeah well chemotherapy. uh hopes to kill more of the tumor cells.

than of your cells that's it it's a fine. balance the the problem is the cells are. very similar because they are yourselves. and so if you don't have a very tight. way of distinguishing between them then. uh the toll that chemo takes on the rest. of the body is just unbelievable so an. immunotherapy tries to get the immune. system to do some of the work exactly. yeah I think that's potentially a very. good uh very good approach. um if if the immune system can be taught. to recognize uh enough of of the cancer. cells that's a pretty good approach but.

I but I think but I think our approach. is in a way more fundamental because if. you can if you can keep the cells. harnessed toward words organ level goals. as opposed to individual cell goals then. nobody will be making a tumor or. metastasizing and so on. so we've been living through a pandemic. what do you think about viruses in this. full beautiful biological context we've. been talking about are they beautiful to. you are they terrifying. also maybe let's say are they.

since we've been discriminating this. whole conversation are they living. are they embodied Minds. embodied Minds that are assholes. as far as I know and I haven't been able. to find this paper again but but. somewhere I saw in the last couple of. months there was some there was some. papers showing an example of a virus. that actually had physiology so there. was some something was going on I think. proton flux or something on the virus. itself but but barring that uh generally.

speaking viruses are very passive they. don't do anything by themselves and so I. don't see any particular reason to. attribute much of a mind to them I think. um you know uh they represent a way to. hijack other Minds for sure like like. cells and and other things but that's an. interesting interplay though if they're. hijacking other Minds. you know the way we're we were talking. about living organisms that they can. interact with each other and have it uh.

alter each other's trajectory. by having interacted I mean there that's. that's a deep. meaningful connection between a virus. and a cell. and I think both are transformed by the. experience and so in that sense both are. living. yeah yeah you know the whole category. that I um. I don't this question of what's living. and what's not living I I really am I'm. not sure I and I know there's people. that work on this and I want to I don't.

want to piss anybody off but but. um I have not found that particularly. useful as as to try and make that a. binary um kind of uh distinction I think. level of cognition is very interesting. but as a Continuum but but living a. non-living at you know I don't I really. know what to do with that I don't I. don't know what you do next after after. making that distinction that's why I. make the very binary distinction can I. have sex with it or not can I eat it or. not those because those are actionable.

right yeah well I think that's a. critical point that you brought up. because how you relate to something is. really what this is all about right as. an engineer how do I control it but. maybe I shouldn't be controlling it. maybe I should be you know uh can I have. a relationship with it should I be. listening to its advice like like all. the way from you know I need to take it. apart all the way to uh I better do what. it says because it seems to be pretty. smart and everything in between right. that's really what we're asking about. yeah we need to understand our. relationship to it we're searching for.

that relationship even in the most. trivial senses. you came up with a lot of interesting. terms. we've mentioned some of them uh agential. material that's a really interesting one. that's a really interesting one for the. future of computation and artificial. intelligence and computer science and. all that. there's also let me go through some of. them if they spark some interesting. thought for you there's teleophobia the. unwarranted fear of airing on the side.

of too much agency when considering a. new system. yeah I mean that's the opposite I mean. being afraid of. maybe anthropomorphizing the thing this. will get some people um ticked off I. think but but I I don't think I I think. I think the whole notion of. anthropomorphizing is a holdover from an. A from a pre-scientific uh age where. humans were magic and everything else. wasn't magic and you were. anthropomorphizing when you dared. suggest that uh something else has some.

features of humans and I think we need. to be Way Beyond that and this this. issue of anthropomorphizing I think is. um it's a cheap it's a cheap charge I. don't think it it holds any water at all. other than when somebody makes a. cognitive claim I I think all cognitive. claims are engineering claims really so. when somebody says this thing knows or. this thing hopes or this thing wants or. this thing predicts all you can say is. fabulous give me uh the engineering. protocol that you've derived using that.

hypothesis and we will see if this thing. helps us or not and then and then we can. you know then we can make a rational. decision I also like Anatomy compiler a. future system representing the long-term. end game of the science of morphogenesis. that reminds us how far away from True. understanding we are someday you will be. able to sit in front of an anatomical. computer specify the shape of the animal. or a plant that you want and it will. convert that shape specification to a. set of stimuli that will have to be.

given to cells to build exactly that. shape no matter how weird. it ends up being you have total control. just imagine the possibility for memes. in the physical space one of the. Glorious accomplishments of human. civilizations is memes in digital space. now this could create memes in in. physical space I am both excited and. terrified by that possibility uh. cognitive light cone I think we also.

talked about the outer boundary in space. and time of the largest gold a given. system can work towards. is this kind of like shaping the set of. options it's a little different than. options it's it's really focused on so. so so back in uh this this I I first. came up with this back in 2018 I want to. say we had a there was a conference um a. Templeton a conference where they. challenged us to come up with Frameworks. I think actually it's the here it's the.

diverse intelligence uh community that. summer Institute yeah they had a summer. Institute but um the logos the B with. some circuits yeah it's got different. different life forms and you know so so. so the whole the whole uh program is. called diverse intelligence and they. sort they challenge you to stick them up. with a framework that was suitable for. analyzing different kinds of. intelligence together right because. because the kinds of things you do to a. human who are not good with an octopus. not good with a plant and so on so so I. started thinking about this and. um I I asked myself what uh what do all.

cognitive agents no matter what their. Providence no matter what their um uh uh. architecture is what what what do. cognitive agents have in common and it. seems to me that what they have in. common is some degree of Competency to. pursue a goal and so what you can do. then is you can draw and so what I what. I what I ended up drawing was this thing. that it's kind of like a like a. backwards um minkowski cone diagram. where all of space is could collapsed. into one axis and then and then here and. then time is is this axis and then what.

you can do is you can draw for any. creature you can you can. semi-quantitatively estimate what are. the what are the spatial and temporal. goals that it can that it's capable of. pursuing so for example if you are a. tick and all you can uh all you really. are able to pursue is Maxima or. bacterium in the maximizing the level of. some some chemical in your vicinity. right that's all you've got it's a tiny. little icon then then you're a simple. system like a tick or a bacterium if you.

are something like a dog well you've got. some ability to um uh to care about some. some spatial region some temporal you. know you can you can remember a little. bit backwards you can you can predict a. little bit forwards but you're never. ever going to care about what happens in. the next town over four weeks from now. it just it's just as far as We Know It's. Just impossible for that kind of. architecture if you're a human you might. be working towards World Peace long. after you're dead right so you might. have a a planetary scale goal that's. that's enormous right and and so and and.

then there may be there may be other. greater intelligence is somewhere that. can care in the linear range about. numbers of creatures that you know some. sort of buddha-like character that can. like care about everybody's welfare like. really care the way that we can't. um and so and so that it it's it's not a. it's not a mapping of what you can sense. how far you can sense right it's not a. mapping of where how far you can act. it's a mapping of how big are the goals. you are capable of envisioning and. working towards and I think that enables. you to put.

um the. synthetic kinds of constructs AIS aliens. um swarms whatever on the same diagram. because because we're not talking about. What You're Made Of or how you got here. we're talking about what are the what. are the the the the size and complexity. of the gold storage which you can work. is there any other terms that pop into. mind that are interesting. I'm trying to remember this is a I have. a list of them somewhere on my way. Target morphology yeah people yeah. definitely check it out more more. suitable I like that one ionoseutical.

yeah yeah I mean those those those refer. to different types of interventions in. the regenerative medicine space so. amorphosutical is something that uh it's. a kind of uh intervention that really. targets the cells. decision making process about what. they're going to build and ionaceuticals. are like that but more focused. specifically on the bioelectrics I mean. there's also of course biochemical. biomechanical who knows what else you. know maybe Optical um kinds of signaling. systems there as well Target morphology. is is interesting it really uh it's.

designed to capture this idea that it's. not just feed forward emergence and. oftentimes in biology I mean of course. that happens too but but in many cases. in biology the system is specifically. working towards a Target in anatomical. amorphous space right it's a it's a. navigation task really these kind of. problem solving can be um uh uh ski you. know uh formalized as navigation tasks. and that they're really going towards a. particular region how do you know.

because you deviate them and then they. go back. let me ask you because you've. really challenged a lot of ideas in. biology in in the work you do probably. because uh some of your rebelliousness. comes from the fact that you came from a. different field of Computer Engineering. but could you give advice to young. people today in high school or college. they're trying to pave. their life story whether it's in science.

or elsewhere how they can have a career. they can be proud of or a life they can. be proud of advice boy it's dangerous to. give advice because things change so. fast but uh one Central thing I can say. moving up and and through Academia and. whatnot you will be surrounded by really. smart people and what you need to do is. be very careful at distinguishing. specific. critique versus kind of Meta Meta advice. and what I mean by that is.

if if somebody really smart and. successful and obviously uh competent is. giving you specific. um critiques on what you've done it. that's gold that's an opportunity to. hone your craft to get better at what. you're doing to learn to find your. mistakes like that's great. if they are telling you what you ought. to be studying how you ought to approach. things what is the right way to think. about things. you should probably ignore most of that. and the reason I make that distinction.

is that a lot of really. um a really successful uh people are. very well calibrated on their own ideas. and they on in their own field and their. own you know sort of uh area and they. know exactly what works and what doesn't. and what's good and what's bad but. they're not calibrated on your ideas and. so so uh the things they will they will. say oh you know this is a dumb idea. don't do this and you shouldn't do that. that stuff is generally uh worse than. worse than useless it can be very very.

um uh demoralizing and and and and. really limiting and so so what I say to. people is read very broadly work really. hard know what you're talking about take. all specific criticism as a. um as an opportunity to improve what. you're doing and then completely ignore. everything else because I I just tell. you from like from from my own. experience um most of what I consider to. be interesting and useful things that. we've done very smart people have said. this is a terrible idea don't don't. don't do that don't you know just um.

yeah I think I think we we just don't. know we have no idea beyond beyond our. own like at best we know what we ought. to be doing we very rarely know what. anybody else should be doing yeah and. their ideas. their perspective has been also. calibrated not just on their field and. specific situation but also on a state. of that field at a particular time in. the past so there's not many people in. this world that are able to achieve. revolutionary success multiple times in. their life so whenever you say somebody.

very smart usually what that means is. somebody who's smart who achieved the. success at certain point in their life. and people often get stuck in that place. where they found success to be. constantly challenging your world view. is a very difficult thing. um so yeah and that also at the same. time probably if a lot of people tell. that's the weird thing about life if a. lot of people tell you. that something is stupid or is not going.

to work. that either means it's stupid it's not. going to work or. it's actually a great opportunity to do. something new. and you don't know which one it is it's. probably equally likely to be either if. no well I don't know the probabilities. depends how lucky you are it depends how. brilliant you are but you don't know and. so you can't take that advice as actual. data yeah you have to um you have to and. this is this is kind of hard and fuzzy. like hard to describe and fuzzy but I.

I'm uh a firm believer that you have to. uh build up your own intuition so over. time right you have to take your own. risks that seem like they make sense to. you and then learn from that and build. up so that you can trust your own gut. about what's a good idea even when and. then sometimes you'll make mistakes and. they'll turn out to be a dead end and. that's fine that's that's science but. but um you know what I tell my students. is is uh life is hard and science is is. hard and you're going to sweat and bleed. and everything and you should be doing.

that for uh ideas that that really fire. you up inside and and um you know and. and really don't let uh kind of the uh. the the common denominator of. standardized approaches to things slow. you down. so you mentioned planaria being in some. sense Immortal what's the role of death. in life. what's the role of death in this whole. process we have is is it uh when you. look at biological systems.

is death an important feature. especially as you climb up the hierarchy. of uh competency boy that's an. interesting question. um I think that uh it's certainly a. factor that promotes change and turnover. and an opportunity to do something. different the next time. for a larger scale system so apoptosis. you know it's really interesting I mean. death is really interesting in a number.

of ways one is like you could think. about like what was the first thing to. die you know that's that's an. interesting question what was the first. creature that you could say actually die. it's a tough it's a tough thing because. we don't have a great definition for it. so if you bring a a cabbage home and you. put it in your fridge. at what point are you gonna say it's. died you're right then so so that's it's. kind of hard. um to know there's also there's also uh. the the there's there's one paper in. which I talk about this idea that I mean.

think about think about this and and. imagine that uh you have you have a. creature uh that's aquatic let's say. let's say it's a it's a frog or. something or a tadpole and the animal. dies in the in the pond it dies for. whatever reason. most of the cells are still alive so you. could imagine that if when it died there. was some sort of um breakdown of of of. of the of the connectivity between the. cells a bunch of cells crawled off they. could have a life as amoebas they some. of them could join together and become a.

zenabot and toodle around right so we. know from planaria that there are cells. that don't obey the hayflick limit and. just sort of live live forever so you. could imagine an organism that when the. organism dies it doesn't disappear. rather the individual cells that are. still alive crawl off and have a. completely different kind of lifestyle. and maybe come back together as. something else or maybe they don't so so. all of this I'm sure is happening. somewhere on some on some on some Planet. so so. um death in any case I mean we already. kind of knew this because the molecules. we you know we know with something nice.

the molecules go through the ecosystem. but even the cells don't necessarily die. at that point they might have another. life in a different uh in a different. way you can think about something like. Gila right The Gila cell line you know. that has this that's had this incredible. life uh there are way more Hela cells. now than there ever been than there than. there were when when she was alive it. seems like as the organisms become more. and more complex like if you look at the. mammals their relationship with death. becomes more and more complex. so the survival imperative starts.

becoming interesting and humans. are arguably the first species. that have invented the fear of death the. understanding that you're going to die. let's put it this way like a long-term. so not like ins instinctual like I need. to run away from the thing that's going. to eat me but starting to contemplate. the finiteness of Life yeah I mean one. thing so one thing about the human light. cognitive light cone is that for the.

first as far as we know for the first. time you might have goals that are. longer than your life that are not. achievable right so if you're if you're. let's say and I I don't know if this is. true but if if you're of goldfish and. you have a 10 minute attention span I'm. not sure if that's true but let's say. let's say there's some organism with a. with a short um you know kind of. cognitive light cone that way. all of your goals are potentially. achievable because you're probably going. to live the next 10 minutes so whatever. goals you have they are totally. achievable if you're a human you could. have all kinds of goals that are. guaranteed not achievable because they.

just take too long like guaranteed. you're not going to achieve them so I. wonder if you know is that is that a per. you know like a perennial um you know. sort of thorn in our in our psychology. that drives some some psychosis or. whatever I have no idea another. interesting thing about that actually. I've been thinking about this a lot in. the last couple of weeks this notion of. giving up so you would think that. evolutionarily the most um adaptive way. of being is that you go you you you. fight as long as you physically can and.

then when you can't you can't and. there's in there's this Photograph. there's some videos you can find of. insects crawling around where like you. know this like like most of it is. already gone and it's still sort of. crawling you know like. um um a Terminator style right like as. far as as long as you physically can you. keep going. mammals don't do that so so a lot of. mammals including rats have this thing. where when when they think it's it's a. hopeless situation they literally give. up and die when physically they could. have kept going I mean humans certainly. do this and there's there's some like.

really unpleasant experiments that the. the this guy forget his name did with. them drowning rats where if he where. where rats normally drown after a couple. of minutes but if you teach them that if. you just tread water for a couple of. minutes you'll get rescued they can. tread water for like an hour and so. right and so they literally just give up. and die and so evolutionarily that. doesn't seem like a good strategy at all. evolutionarily since why would you like. what's the benefit ever of giving up you. just do what you can and you know one. time out of a thousand you'll actually. get rescued right but this issue of of. of actually giving up suggests some very.

interesting metacognitive controls where. you've now gotten to the point where. survival actually isn't the top drive. and that for whatever you know there are. other considerations that have like. taken over and I I think that's uniquely. a mammalian thing but um I don't know. yeah the Camus. the existentialist question of Why Live. just the fact that humans commit suicide. is a really fascinating question from an. evolutionary perspective and what was. the first and that's the other thing. like what is the simplest uh system.

whether whether evolved or you know. natural or whatever that is able to do. that right like you can think you know. what other animals are actually able to. do that I'm not sure maybe. you could see animals over time for some. reason lowering the value of survive at. all costs gradually until other. objectives might become more important. maybe I don't know how evolutionarily. how that how that gets off the ground. that just seems like that would have.

such a strong pressure against it you. know. just imagine a you know a population. with with with a lower. um you know what what if if you were a. mutant in a population that had less of. a uh less of a survival imperative would. you would your genes outperform the. others it seems no is there such a thing. as population selection because maybe. suicide is a way. uh for organisms to decide that. themselves that they're not. fit for the environment somehow yeah.

that's a that's a really uh country you. know population level selection is a is. a kind of a deep controversial area but. it's tough because on the face of it if. that was your genome it wouldn't get. propagated because you would die and. then your neighbor who didn't have that. would have all the kids it feels like. there could be some deep truth there. that we're not understanding. um what about you yourself as one. biological system are you afraid of. death. to be honest I'm more concerned with uh.

especially now getting older and having. helped a couple of people pass I think. about what's a um. what's a good way to go basically like. nowadays I don't know what that is I you. know sitting in a you know a facility. that sort of tries to uh stretch you out. as as long as you can that doesn't seem. that doesn't seem good and there's not a. lot of opportunities to sort of. um I don't know sacrifice yourself for. something useful right there's not.

terribly many opportunities for that in. modern society so I don't know that's. that's that's more of I'm not I'm not. particularly worried about uh death. itself but uh I've I've seen it happen. uh and and it's not it's not pretty and. I don't know what what a better what a. better alternative is so the existential. aspect of it does not. worry you deeply the fact that this ride. ends. no it began I mean the ride began right. so there was I don't know how many.

billions of years before that I wasn't. around so that's okay but isn't the. experience of life. it's almost like feels like you're. Immortal because the way you make plans. the way you think about the future I. mean if if you re if you look at your. own personal Rich experience. yes you can understand okay eventually I. died there's people I love that have. died so surely I will die and it hurts. and so on but like it sure doesn't it's.

so easy to get lost and feeling like. this is going to go on forever yeah it's. a little bit like the people who say. they don't believe in Free Will right I. mean you can say that but but when you. go to a restaurant you still have to. pick a soup and stuff so right so so I. don't know if I know I've I've actually. seen that that happen at lunch with a. with a well-known philosopher and uh he. wouldn't believe in Free Will and you. know the waitress came around and he was. like well let me see I was like what are. you doing you're gonna choose a sandwich. right so um it's I think it's one of. those things I think you 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 so you buy insurance and then you. do some stuff like that but but but. mostly you know. um I think you just you just live as if. uh as if as if you can make plans. fuck. we talked about all kinds of life we. talked about all kinds of embodied Minds. what do you think is the meaning of it. all. what's the meaning. of all the biological eyes I've been. talking about here on Earth why are we.

here. I don't know that that's a that that's a. well-posed question other than the. existential question you posed before is. that question hanging out with the. question of what is consciousness and. their uh Edward Retreat somewhere not. sure because sipping pina coladas and. because they're Ambiguously defined. maybe I'm I'm not sure that any of these. things really ride on the the.

correctness of our scientific. understanding but I mean just just for. an example right. um I've I've always found I've always. found it weird that uh people get really. worked up uh to find out realities about. their their bodies for for example right. you've seen them uh ex machina right and. so so there's this great scene where. he's cutting his hand to find out he's. you know he's full of cock now to me. right if if I open up and I find out and.

I find a bunch of cogs my conclusion is. not oh crap I must not have true. cognition that sucks my conclusion is. wow cogs can have true cognition great. so right so so it seems to me I guess I. guess I'm with Descartes on this one. then whatever whatever the truth uh ends. up being of of how is what is. consciousness how it can be conscious. none of that is going to alter my. primary experience which is this is what. it is and if and if a bunch of molecular. networks can do it fantastic if it turns. out that um there's a there's a.

non-corporeal you know Soul uh great we. could you know we'll study that whatever. but but the fundamental. um existential aspect of it is you know. if somebody if somebody told me uh today. that uh yeah yeah you were created. yesterday and all your memories are you. know sort of uh fake you know kind of. like um like like boltzmann brains right. and the human you know human skepticism. and all that uh yeah okay well so so but. but here I am now so so let's experience. is Primal so it like that's the that's.

the thing that matters so the the back. story doesn't matter the explanation I. think so from a first person per second. now from a third person like. scientifically it's all very interesting. from a third person perspective I could. say wow that's that's amazing that that. this happens and how does it happen or. whatever but from a first person. perspective I could care less like I. just it's just what I've what I learned. from any of these scientific facts is. okay well I guess then that's that then. I guess that's what is sufficient to to. give me my uh you know amazing first. person perspective well I think if you.

dig deeper and deeper and get a. get surprising answers to why the hell. we're here. it might give you some guidance on how. to live. maybe maybe I don't know um 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 possibly give you. that guidance right so so you would. think that it would have to be that or. it would it would have to be science. because there isn't anything else so so. that's so maybe on the other hand.

I am really not sure how you go from any. you know what they call from an is to an. ought right from any factual description. of what's going on this this goes back. to the natural right just because. somebody says oh man that's completely. not natural it's never happened on Earth. before I I'm not you know impressed by. that whatsoever I think I think whatever. has or hasn't happened we are now in a. position to do better if we can right. well there's also good because you said. there's science and there's nothing else.

there it's it's really tricky. to know. how to intellectually deal with the. thing that science doesn't currently. understand. right so like. the thing is if you believe that science. solves everything. you can too easily in your mind think. our current understanding like we've.

solved everything right right right like. it jumps really quickly to not science. as a mechanism as a as a process. but more like the size of today like you. could just look at human history and. throughout human history just physicists. and everybody would claim we've solved. everything sure sure like there's a few. small things to figure out and just we. basically solved everything uh where in. reality I think asking like what is the. meaning of life.

is uh resetting the palette. yeah of like. we might be tiny and confused and don't. have anything figured out it's almost. going to be hilarious a few centuries. from now when they look back how dumb we. were yeah 100 agree so so when I say uh. science and nothing else I certainly. don't mean the science of today because. I think overall I think we are we know. very little I think most of the things. that we're sure of now are going to be.

as you said are going to look hilarious. down the line. um so I think we're just at the. beginning of a lot of really important. things. when I say nothing but science I also. include the kind of first person what I. call science that you do so the. interesting thing about um I think about. Consciousness and studying Consciousness. and things like that in the first person. is unlike doing science in the third. person where you as the scientists are. minimally Changed by it maybe not at all. so when I do an experiment I'm still me.

there's the experiment whatever I've. done I've learned something so that's a. small change but but overall that's it. in order to really study Consciousness. you will you are part of the experiment. you will be altered by that experiment. right whatever whatever it is that. you're doing whether it's you know some. sort of contemplative practice or. uh or or some sort of uh you know. psychoactive but you know whatever uh. you are now you are now your own. experiment and you are right and so so I. can say I fold that in I think that's. that's part of it I think that exploring. um our own mind and our own.

Consciousness is very important I think. much of it is not captured by what. currently is third person science for. sure but ultimately I include all of. that in science. with a capital s in terms of like a um. uh a rational investigation of both. first and third person aspects of our. world. we are our own experiment as beautifully. put and uh when when two systems get to. interact with each other that's the kind. of experiment so I'm deeply honored you.

would uh do this experiment with me. today thanks so much I'm a huge fan of. your work likewise thank you for doing. everything you're doing. um I can't wait to see the kind of. incredible things you build so thank you. for talking today really appreciate. being here thank you. thank you for listening to this. conversation with Michael Levin to. support this podcast please check out. our sponsors in the description and now. let me leave you with some words from. Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species.

from the war of nature from famine and. death. the most exalted object which we're. capable of conceiving namely the. production of the higher animals. directly follows. there's Grandeur in this view of life. with its several Powers having been. originally breathed into a few forms or. into one and that whilst this planet has. gone cycling on according to the fixed. laws of gravity from a so simpler.

beginning endless forms most beautiful. and most wonderful have been and are. being evolved. thank you for listening I hope to see. you next time.