Bioelectric Morphogenesis, Cellular Motivations, and False Binaries with Michael Levin

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Michael Levin 00:00

There's bioelectrical events, there's biomechanical events, there's biochemical events, all those things are happening at the same time. But what's really important to ask is, what is each layer doing? And what does each layer give us the opportunity to do? I would argue that the genome is actually not the software, I think what the genome does is actually nailed down the hardware. I think the genome tells every single cell what proteins it gets to have. And so from that perspective, what the genome is giving you is a specification of the lowest level hardware, you can do a lot by manipulating the hardware. But when you're on your laptop, and you want to switch from Microsoft Word to Photoshop, you don't get out your soldering iron and start rewiring because making system level changes by manipulating things at the lowest level of your machine, of the of the hardware, is super hard. And that's not how evolution does it.

Michael Levin 00:50

One of the nice things that this bioelectrical level of control gives you is it actually gives you control over some of the really important physiological software that deals with large scale concepts like the size of certain organs, the shape of certain organs, the positioning, how many heads do you have, and therefore when you interact with that layer, you get to program top down, it's almost as if you're working in a higher level language that doesn't require you to understand, "well, gee, you know, I'm programming on this thing of copper and silicon and aluminum," and God knows what else is in there. You don't need to know all of that, because you have access to these higher level controls.

Michael Shilo DeLay 01:42

Welcome to the first demystifying science podcast of the new year, I'm very, very excited to be here with Dr. Michael Levin, whom has been brought to our attention by you guys by some of our listeners who posted his TED Talk. It was really exciting to see that Dr. Levin had been building a framework for development that didn't rely on typical chemical signaling. So he has this bioelectric network conception of development, which is fascinating, because it's both primitive and sophisticated at the same time. He was also in the news this year for these nanobots. And there's plenty of podcasts and other YouTube shows about that stuff. Maybe we'll talk about it a bit today, too. But what I really wanted to get into was Dr. Levin's philosophy of the self and cognition, which I think is really interesting. Thank you for being here. Dr. Levin,

Michael Levin 02:37

thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Michael Shilo DeLay 02:39

Why do you avoid the word consciousness and stick with these other terms like agency, and cognition, as opposed to the most popular word in philosophy right now, which is consciousness? Can you tell us a bit about the distinction between those two ideas? And then maybe we'll get into the nitty gritties of your ideas?

Michael Levin 03:00

Sure, sure. And then, if you don't mind, I just want to address one really super quick thing from the from the introduction, which is that, you know, my work on bioelectricity is certainly not meant to be, instead of understanding biochemical signaling, so I'm in no way suggesting that the traditional gene regulatory networks, chemical gradients, you know, by biochemical pathways, I mean, no way suggesting that those things aren't important or that somehow bioelectricity will do it all by itself. So those things are absolutely like critical mechanisms. But But and hopefully, we can talk about that later today, I think bioelectricity has some really interesting, unique properties that make it something that is very worthwhile to, to track, in addition to the, you know, kind of the canonical mainstream stuff that has been going on for years. But so so I, you know, I just want to be clear that I'm not I'm not trying to, you know, downplay any of that.

Michael Shilo DeLay 03:52

So it's like, you see, you see those happening in parallel, like, there's all these different systems throughout the organism that are contributing to memory and intelligence, like, this is just another track that's happening. And of course, like, I guess, the traditional paradigm where DNA is, you know, this, what we would say, I guess, the software and the or the genetic information is the software. And then there's this kind of machine running the body is a bit different from the way things which is more. Yeah, hierarchically dispersed, I suppose.

Michael Levin 04:22

I mean, so I would say it a little differently. It certainly all those things are happening simultaneously. So So there's, there's bioelectrical, events there, biomechanical events, there's biochemical events, all those things are happening at the same time. But what's what's really important to ask is, what is each layer doing and but the but what it what does each layer give us the opportunity to do so when you target the bio electrics or when you target the biochemistry or the genetics? What does that allow you to do? And I think, I would argue and I have argued that what the genome the genome is actually not the software. I think what the genome does is actually nailed down the hardware. I think the genome tells every single cell what proteins it gets to have. And so from that perspective, what the genome is giving you is a specification of the lowest level hardware.

Michael Levin 05:10

Now, now, as we know, from from, from working with, with computer technology, you can do a lot by manipulating the hardware. But you know, why do we this is kind of a silly example, use all the time when you when you're on your laptop, and you want to switch from Microsoft Word to Photoshop, you don't get out your soldering iron and start rewiring. Now, why don't you do that? Right? You could. And in the 50s, when I give a talk, I have this picture of what programming looked like in the 40s and 50s. And there's this woman, and she's literally like, like moving wires around, right? That's what reprogramming look like, you could do that. But why don't we do that anymore? Because it's brutally difficult. Because Because making system level changes by manipulating things at the lowest level of your machine, if the hardware is super hard, right? It's just it's just incredibly hard. And that's not how evolution does it, either. And so what what one thing I am, we can get into this, I think that what one of the nice things that this bioelectrical level of control gives you is it actually gives you control over some of the really important physiological software that deals with large scale concepts like the size of certain organs, the shape of certain organs, the positioning, how many heads do you have like that, that kind of a thing.

Michael Levin 06:23

And therefore, when you interact with that layer, you get to program top down, it's almost as if, and it's almost as if you were working at a higher level language that doesn't require you to understand, well, gee, you know, I'm programming on this thing of copper and silicon and aluminum, and God knows what else is in there. You don't need to know all of that, because you have access to these higher level controls. Now, I'm certainly not saying that biology, it resembles the kinds of computers that you and I use today. Right? That's, that's, that's, you know, that's for sure, that gets people very agitated when they when they think that that's being claimed. And so I'm certainly not saying that. But but there is something very profound about computers in general, which is this idea of reprogram ability, and the idea of separation of data from machine and the idea of having different levels of control, where where yes, sometimes you want to go to the very lowest level and deal with the with the, you know, what are the chips made of? And other times you don't want to know that whatsoever. You want to say, well, this is my algorithm, and I wanted to compute this and that, and I don't care what's underneath, right? And so and so that gives you a lot of power. So So I think what, what evolution discovered very early on, like around the time of bacterial biofilm, so really early on, is that and there's some there's some beautiful work out of UCSD on that. I think what evolution discovered is that bioelectric networks are really good at processing information, they make it really easy to do computations, to do memory to integrate information from from across a distance, to have reprogrammability to have this kind of nested architecture, where you have sub routines where you can say, Build an eye here, and you don't need to know how to build an AI, you just need to be able to specify that that's where the AI goes in. There are other modules underneath that, you know, do the do the do the nitty gritty work.

Michael Shilo DeLay 08:11

Are those genetic modules at that point?

Michael Levin 08:14

Yeah, they involve, they involve lots of things. They involve genetics, they involve biomechanics, because you have to bend you know, tissues, and you have to exert forces, and and of course, other bio electrics as well, right. But but that's what I think, is really kind of unique and interesting about bioelectricity. And we could have already guessed that because that's what the brain does, right? What you know, the brain uses that same kind of kind of architecture, to exploit, to exploit bioelectrics to get all these cool features, like, for example, you can learn things during your lifetime, you don't need to completely replace your brain every time you want to learn something new, that same hardware can, can store one of numerous possible, you know, control algorithms for what's going to happen.

Anastasia Bendebury 08:59

And then, and if I can interrupt you, this is sort of the place where the distinction between cognition and consciousness, and the way that you prefer to use cognition becomes relevant, right? Because if you're talking about the human than going out and learning something, there is all of this sort of self generative material that is necessary to create the motivation to go out and to learn something. But for a cell, is it considered cognition by you simply because the instruction has to come from somewhere else to tell it what to do?

Michael Levin 09:30

No, so let me let me address that that question then what's what the what the deal with consciousness is so so my distinction of consciousness versus cognition is not about the level of it. So I'm not avoiding consciousness because I want to reserve consciousness for like a really high order self reflective, you know, metacognition, where I know what I know. And you know that I'm not talking about any of that stuff. I'm I actually, you know, long story short, I actually think that Consciousness is something that goes all the way down. I mean, I'm in no way trying to reserve that for the kind of human-like conscious experience that we have, I think I think consciousness goes all the way down. The distinction, the distinction I make is somewhat different.

Michael Levin 10:14

The thing about the thing about cognition, agency behavior, intelligence, memory, problem solving all these nice terms that I use all the time in the work, the thing with about those words is that they are, they're functional words. In other words, we can study them in third person, you and I can look at something we can define this as a function of what it's doing, we can assign criteria that we, that we are easy to measure, all of these things are measurable, we can agree on whether that did or didn't happen, or it happened to with a 70 to 75%, quality or whatever it's going to be. And we have theories that are where the outcome of those theories are, let's say, quantity, or numbers, predictions of those theories or numbers, I can say, I think that's memory. And because I think that under those same circumstances, you've got an 80% chance that past experience is going to make this thing do XYZ in the future, right?

Michael Levin 11:05

These are, these are all third person kind of objective science experiments that we can do. Consciousness. And this is a controversial view, not everybody agrees with this. I think that consciousness is unique and special, in the sense that it, it's, it's really only applicable to the experience of a first person observer. It's and this has been one way that people who have done way more work in consciousness, and I have put it as, it's the sort of what is it like to be a, you know, whatever.

Michael Levin 11:36

And and the thing I want to say, well, there's a couple of things I want to say about consciousness. One is, you have to be very careful, because I think a lot of people who say they're studying consciousness are in fact, studying correlates of consciousness, they're setting behaviors of studying structures. And the way you know, that is, if there's a couple of there's a couple of ways you know, that one is, if somebody gives you a theory of consciousness, right, let's say let's say it has to do with a particular structure in the brain or a particular organization, or some sort of frequency of binding of all, you know, neural activity, or whatever it's going to be, just ask yourself this question, if somebody gave this to this, the story to me on a piece of paper, and so this happens, this happens.

Michael Levin 12:18

If they didn't tell me that this was meant to be a story about consciousness, and I read about all these events going on, would I ever in a million years have said, Oh, that is amazing I can, from that, I can see that, wow, there must be a subject home inside there. And, you know, and it's that, you know, that subject will have an experience of what it's like to be, that never happens, right? Any story about consciousness. And, you know, probably lots of people will be mad at this, but but in my experience, when somebody gives you an account of where consciousness comes from, you can almost always read that account. And you can, you can imagine that you can, there's nothing conscious about it. It's a description of some physics or some chemistry or both, or whatever. It's it's never quite obvious why that in particular has anything to do with consciousness, other than they told you that this was supposed to be a story about consciousness. So now some people will say, right, and that's because there's nothing more to say. And there is that all there is a right of the facts of chemistry, and then the rest of it is a user illusion, and so on. So that that mean, that's fine. That's a that's a,

Anastasia Bendebury 13:19

which makes it a spiritual question, rather than a scientific one.

Michael Levin 13:23

I think I think that's true, I think that you can you very quickly run out of proper terminology, because people, people will, well, people will often say it's an illusion, right? And you say, but illusions usually have a subject that's, that's, that's mistaken about something, right? That's being, you know, confused, or whatever. So, anyway, so So that's, so that's one so so I think that I think that it's very, very difficult to actually do experiment with any kind of work about consciousness. I think that if we want to stick to making progress in terms of experiments that we can do so this is why I usually talk very little about it.

Michael Levin 14:01

Because I think that the what what we actually make progress on are things like cognition and intelligence and behavior, I think it's very hard to make progress on actual consciousness. The other the other way you know this, that there's a problem here is this. Imagine, imagine that some time in the future some some number of decades from now, we have a correct theory of consciousness, let's say somebody cracks it, and we figured out Okay, so now, let's just ask ourselves, so now we have this correct theory, and I am looking at some particular creature in some particular weird state. And I asked this theory to make tell me what the prediction is, right? So what is it? What is the content, the content of the consciousness of this creature? And so the question is, what format does the answer of that theory take? What does it look like?

Michael Shilo DeLay 14:47

Virtual virtual reality or something like how would you output that?

Michael Levin 14:51

You see that's that's the that's the question right? How would you output it because for for any normal scientific theory, we you may not know the answer, but you know what the answer would look like, right? It would be a set of numbers, or it would be up top a lot, you know, some sort of weird topological form or some, you know, we kind of know what what theory is supposed to look like. But what would it what would a theory of consciousness ever output?

Michael Levin 15:12

And so and so I think you're right on the money by saying virtual reality, because I think the only way to actually do real experiments on consciousness is to be the system, itself. To experience it first person. How are you going to experience it first person, but you know, for things that aren't too different, yes, I think virtual reality would would do. But but the other, the other thing that you might do is look, let's let's let's talk about kind of a standard experiments. So so if you're a neuroscientist, and you're looking at this, you know, whatever living thing it's going to be, you've got some electrodes or some some optogenetics, or something, you're watching the brain. All of that stuff is getting processed to be some sort of computer algorithm, it's coming out on a screen, and then you're watching that screen with your eyeballs and saying, Ah, that's a conscious experience of, you know, a fear or whatever it is, right? That's, that's what we're looking at.

Michael Levin 16:05

Now, what you're, what you're seeing, of course, is some sort of third person description of what the neurons are doing, you actually have no idea what the actual experience is, you might be able to say something about behavior, you might be able to say, oh, yeah, I predict this thing's going to, you know, run away from whatever I you know, whatever we just did. But let's but let's go further, let's say why do we have all this weird, technical interface between that creature and my, and my, you know, in my brain? Let's get rid of all that. I'm going to wire, I'm going to I'm going to take the output of my electrodes, I'm going to wire them directly into my brain, I'm not going to go through a computer screen and and, you know, and my eyeballs and my retina and everything else, I'm just going to wire it into my brain. And so now, now you're kind of you're on your way, because now to some extent, you're actually experiencing as if it were a sense, right. So instead of retinas, imagine if instead of retinas, we now had an interface that read other people's brains. You're on your way a little bit, right, because now you're directly experiencing some of what they're experiencing. Not exactly, right?

Michael Levin 17:04

And then eventually, you say, Man, I don't want I don't want this, I don't want these electrodes at all, I'm just gonna fuse my brain to their brain, the way that your left and right hemispheres fuse together, like you were going to do such a good job, and this is all doable, you're going to do such a good job fusing that you want the direct experience, now, the only, the only thing to keep in mind is you are not going to be you are not going to become that creature and know what it's like to be that creature, both you and that creature are going to know what it's like to now be a third creature that didn't exist before that is a combination of the two of you.

Michael Shilo DeLay 17:37

This is like Siamese twin studies or something, it very

Michael Levin 17:40

Close, actually very close, this is all extremely relevant. But But now, you know, the key thing is that we can do all this now, right? We can do all these all these kinds of cut and paste experiments are totally doable. And

Anastasia Bendebury 17:51

Are they limited by the similarity of the brains? Because imagine that if you take something you know, you talk about, like a flatworm, would you be able to fuse the brain of a flatworm with the brain of a of a human?

Michael Levin 18:07

The structures are completely different. But that doesn't matter. You see you so you can never know what it's like to be a flatworm, because you're not a flatworm, only a flatworm will know what it's like to be a flatworm. But you can know what it's like to be a creature that's half you and half flatworm.

Michael Shilo DeLay 18:26

Is that a problem of motivations? Like we're not going to understand the motivations of the flatworm? Is that it? Like we're always gonna be seeing things through human motivational structures?

Michael Levin 18:35

I'm not even sure that it's necessarily human. I mean, we can get into that whole question of what exactly is a human because it's not very obvious at all. But but you know, so there's been work for example, somebody put drosophila neurons into the brains of human patients, like that's been done. And the drosophila neurons we find the interface with the other neurons there, you know, as a treatment for epilepsy, that was done in Russia. And, you know, yeah, you're never going to turn yourself into a into a flatworm.

Michael Levin 19:01

But you can certainly modify your structure. I mean, at some point, with all the bio engineering that goes on, at some point, you're going to say, you know, I would like a third hemisphere. And we know that can work because in the blind, your your other senses take over that new real estate, right? That's, that's released when your eyes aren't working. So we know that your brain regions can take over new real estate, we already know that. So So at some point, you might say, I want a 3rd hemisphere because I want more more processing power for some of the things my brain does. And don't make it out of human cells, I would really like it to be very regenerative. So how about some Axolotl? And you know, and there will be some, you know, the details of immune rejection, whatever, those are just details, you know, the fundament, the fundamental like the, you know, the fundamental aspects of it are totally solvable.

Michael Levin 19:46

So, so then you can do experiments on consciousness, then you can say, Wow, now I see what it's like to be a creature that's got two human hemispheres and a third Axolotl hemisphere, or whatever. I'm making that up wherever you're wherever you're going to be. There then you can study consciousness but but as long as you are observing it from the outside, I don't think you're studying consciousness, I think you're studying correlates of consciousness or things that may or may not potentially conscious.

Michael Shilo DeLay 20:12

What is really the goal of a theory of consciousness anyways? Is it to, are you going to try and explain the, like the emergence of this experience? Is that the goal?

Michael Levin 20:23

Um, that's a really good question. I think that I think that some people who work in this field to them, there's a much more basic question, which is the question of what is what what is it in the first place? Like, what is what is a useful definition of consciousness? Right?

Michael Shilo DeLay 20:40

If what you're saying is correct, that the these cognitive agentic processes go all the way down to the cellular level, then it's almost like when I was reading some of your work, I got the impression that what you were saying, probably totally wrong, correct me, is that consciousness, or cognition, it's an agency, these things aren't something that emerges that this like meta level, you know, at the wider organismal level, but that there are actually goal seeking behaviors all the way down. And so it almost sounds to me, like you're saying that that theory of consciousness, or metacognition, or whatever you want to say, it's sort of an elusive quest, because there's probably something going on at every level. And it's not just this thing that snaps into place all of a sudden,

Michael Levin 21:32

yeah, but Well, all of all of that is true. So, so so. So I do think that there are cognitive experiences of all of your parts. So your your tissues, your organs, your cells, and probably the molecular networks in your cells are goal seeking agents of a particular type. And they will have some kind of cognition, they will have some degree of intelligence meaning problem solving in various weird spaces, like like physiological spaces and transcriptional, spaces and so on. That doesn't mean that when you and I are talking now, there isn't a new emergent, very high level, additional agent that forms right, which, which is great, and it's verbal, and we can have this conversation, but at the same time, there are lots of other agents on both sides of this connection, that are non verbal, that we are not talking to, and that we're only beginning to understand how to how to communicate with them.

Anastasia Bendebury 22:27

You say something interesting there about the sort of the problem solving ability on a cellular level. In the process of regenerating, let's say, a limb, is there really a problem to be solved? Or is there a program to be executed?

Michael Levin 22:48

Those are not mutually exclusive. I think executing programs is one way to solve problems. I think, whether or not the metaphor of a program is actually useful to that scenario remains to be seen. But for sure the problem solving paradigm is absolutely useful. So William James, his definition of intelligence was the ability to get to the same goals by different means. The idea was that you're looking at an agential system when you can figure out what it wants. And it has the ability, to some degree of competency, from very primitive intelligence to very advanced intelligence, some capability of getting to its goal, even though things are changing. Perturbations, that the environment changes, you've moved the thin, you know, we've moved stuff around, and it still can do that. That is seen all the way from from bacteria on up in various spaces. You just have to be clever. The thing about the thing about recognizing agency and intelligence is that it's a two way operation. When when when we try to estimate how much intelligence something has, or how much agency it has, we are ourselves taking an IQ test. Because if we're not clever enough to recognize what the system is doing, we're going to say, "that's a paperweight that's not really doing anything." And really, it might be doing all kinds of interesting things.

Michael Shilo DeLay 24:07

This is probably why people think bacteria are very simple little organisms and humans are super complex, because they're not capable of recognizing, just how complicated and difficult it is being a bacteria.

Michael Levin 24:19

Yeah, and the reason you know, the reason is, is because all of our senses are pointing outwards. So our training set of what all animals and in particular humans and other primates and social animals are very good at recognizing, is agency around them. It's extremely important when you look around to say, "is that a rock and therefore, I know it's only going to do certain things do based on its environment, or is that a sleeping Tiger and it's gonna do all kinds of things that have nothing to do with which way the hill is pointing down or not."

Michael Levin 24:53

You know, it's very important for us to catch agency in the in the environment, but all of our senses are pointing outward. So we are very good at seeing intelligence that operates at medium size scales, roughly things about our size and medium timescales - not evolutionary timeframes, nor micron millisecond time. All the intelligence that we know how to recognize takes place in three dimensional space. So we know we can see certain kinds of activities, moving things from here there, opening locks and bringing this to over there.

Michael Levin 25:31

We're primed to recognize intelligence in three dimensional space. That's because all of our senses are pointing outwards. Imagine if we had built in biofeedback, so that you had an immediate sense of everything your your pancreas was doing at any given moment, right? Now, we know we don't, but imagine if you did. If we had an experience all the way from, from our early time we were in an embryo the experience of knowing what was going on and what did our pancreas do in response, we would have no trouble recognizing the pancreas as a kind of really intelligent creature that navigates this amazingly complicated physiological space.

Michael Levin 26:15

Because, you know, the glucose is going up and down, all these hormones, and all this stuff was going on in the environment, things you eat, and all the time, what's the what what are your organs doing? They're trying to keep you in optimal health, despite all this craziness that you subjected them to, with rhythms and diet and everything else. And if we had access to that data set, we would recognize these things as... and nowadays, when we think of robotics, when I say robot, you think it's this thing that moves around and you know, moves around in 3d space, things like an automated insulin pump that you might have in your body, right? If you if you needed one, that's a robot. That's a robot that works in physiological space, it moves around in this physiological space, it might measure all sorts of different chemicals in your bloodstream that are all these orthogonal dimensions of the space. And it is navigating that space, just like any robot would navigate three dimensional space. And it's just on us to to be more open minded than our than our typical senses have led us to be.

Anastasia Bendebury 27:11

But the corollary of that is that you could easily learn to look inward, the same way that you have to learn to be able to identify intelligence, that's non standard. Because I've known diabetics, that after years of carrying an insulin pump, they're able to tell you what's happening to their insulin without the pump. And so what happens is that you have this feedback of what's actually happening, you have something like you were saying earlier about the ability, if you measure something, and you can tie it to something else, then you begin to have kind of a functional system, which allows you to see something that wasn't visible before. And I wonder if it's not the same for other bodily systems, and our inability to see it is due to a lack of data?

Michael Levin 27:55

Yeah, yeah, I think that's I think that's spot on. I think that's exactly right. And let's be clear, there are lots of pre-scientific traditions, people have spent before modern science a lot of time figuring this out. So if you want to think about yoga, there are a lot of people who do all kinds of exercises to a gain control over various body functions that you normally don't have any access to. And these kinds of ideas that talk about the various kinds of intelligence of the different subsystems of your body have existed for a really long time.

Michael Levin 28:36

This is not just something that's coming up now. And by the way, to put this back to the discussion about consciousness, people saying that the only way to understand your consciousness is to work on your consciousness and to experience it, whether or not it's going to be through thought modification practices, which might be meditation, or there's a whole bunch of techniques, or whether it's psychedelic drugs, whether it's different ways to change how you how you go through life, whatever. But this idea that, that you have to be a participant in the study of consciousness, you can't be an external observer is is ancient, super ancient.

Michael Levin 28:36

We're discovering it now in a rigorous sort of mathematical way, but these ideas have been around forever. And, and the idea that Pavlov, of course, even older than that, but Pavlov in the 20s was trying to train organs, you know? He didn't just train dogs, he actually trained the organs of the dogs. He was doing all kinds of interesting experiments with memory of bodily organs.

Anastasia Bendebury 29:39

It's funny that you say that, because I've always sort of looked at the world now and I've thought that we are entering into an era where the ability to understand and communicate will be the most important ability, because we have developed all of these technological tools up until this point, and it seems sort of to be a little bit dramatic about that the final frontier is the ability to communicate and in order to be able to communicate to, to cause the sorts of changes that you want in the world without having to micromanage them.

Michael Shilo DeLay 30:12

Or within your own body too. Like, I was thinking about these, these, these, what do you call them robot organs? Don't they need to be able to integrate into that sense of self as well, like, they need to communicate in such a way that they understand that this is their self now?

Michael Levin 30:33

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting question. We like to, we like to draw boundaries around the organisms so that you say, okay, you know, here's a human and right at this at the sort of at the edge of their skin is where the body stops. But if you think about the internal organs, what's their external environment? As far as your kidneys concerned? The cells sitting next to it, that's its external environment. Right?

Michael Levin 30:58

So yes, it's part of a greater it's part of a greater organism as, as we are parts of an even greater system. But but at every point, there are smaller selves within within these larger selves. And they have an external environment, which, from the perspective of the higher level system, you look down, you say, you still all part of me, you're still part of the same thing. But and that's, and that's great for you. But for them, they are dealing with an external environment. Whatever comes through the bloodstream, they don't have immediate control over that. They can take actions and maybe you know, the next 20 minutes, things will get better. Maybe they won't. But these are things that are happening to them from the outside as far as they're concerned.

Michael Shilo DeLay 31:37

But you also run in this problem then with like, externalities, right? Where you if they don't treat their external environment as something that's theirs, then perhaps you could build up damage? You get aging? Yeah, you get problems, right. To the extent that we understand how aging even occurs in cancer, and things like corrosive disorders, damage, sure,

Michael Levin 32:00

Sure, sure. And we have we have we have some some work on this in specifically in cancer, where what you can do is you can you can specifically disconnect cells from their neighbors electrically. And as soon as you do that, the, as I've called it, this cognitive light cone, the boundary of the goals that these that these systems can, can take care of, shrinks from, from the large goal of, "hey, I'm maintaining a nice organ," to a tiny goal of "I'm a single cell, and the rest of this body is just external environment. As far as I'm concerned, I'm an amoeba again, and what are my goals, my goals are to become two amoebas. And, and to go where life is good." So that's metastasis. And so and maybe at some point, I'll try to regain some sort of the half-assed multicellularity, I'll try to make a tumor but you know, not really useful as far as the larger system is concerned. But and you can go in the opposite direction, you can take a cell expressing a really nasty oncogene, which is trying to depolarize and disconnect, and you can artificially force it to remain connected. And then guess what, even though the genetic damage is there, it will be part of a normal tissue, right. And so and so this idea of the boundary between self and world, shrinking and growing, happens all the time in our bodies, it grows during embryonic development and shrinks during cancer.

Michael Shilo DeLay 33:19

Outside of our bodies too! I mean, I can't like help but see the social implications of this as well, where like, especially in our country, right now, you have this like stark division between the ideas of individuals, stark individualism, especially where we live, like in the state of Jefferson out here. There's this real tension between the idea of how much does "me" matter versus my community, versus my country, and so on and so forth. And it seems like a huge part of bioengineering in the future and is social engineering, the right word?Governing a society is gonna come down to patterning, the development of that balance.

Anastasia Bendebury 34:02

like how much does this translate from the organismal level to the social level? Is that something that's beyond the scope here?

Michael Levin 34:10

I mean, I don't think it's beyond the scope. I want to be careful and be clear that I don't have any particular expertise in, in talking about the social.

Anastasia Bendebury 34:19

This is our speculation hour so you're okay.

Michael Shilo DeLay 34:20

You're a human though, so you're entitled to a human perspective.

Michael Levin 34:23

Yeah, we can do that. I've actually lived, you know, the first part of my life, my childhood in Russia, during the height of the USSR.

Michael Shilo DeLay 34:35

So was Anastasia, actually.

Anastasia Bendebury 34:37

Well, not during the height. I advented the collapse.

Michael Levin 34:43

Well, while I was there, I was there long before that. And so and so we can we can talk about that a little bit. I think. I think what's really important to keep in mind is that the cancer example, is a little misleading because what you take away from that is, "oh, man everything should just be connected and following these large scale goals and then light and then we're good, right? We don't have cancer, we have a nice organism." That sort of suggests that you should just connect everything up and follow these higher goals and so on. You got to be careful with that, because because when was the last time you lost any sleep over how many cells you shed every day, right? Never. And so the important thing about these large systems is that they develop new goals that often don't really overlap at much at all with the goals of the subsystems. So when you when you connect all of these things into this larger, glorious whole, you got to remember to ask yourself, what happened to the, to the individuals? And are they better off or worse off?

Michael Levin 35:45

Well, that's great for you. But you see where I'm going. So I think I think we have to be very careful with interpreting the cancer example as suggesting that we should just max out, the larger the goal, the better. I don't think that's that necessarily true at all.

Michael Levin 35:45

People think about evolution, and they say, "of course, you're better off!"I mean, look at the the large animal. It's able to, be very successful as opposed to individual bacteria." Sure, the large animal is, but how about the individual cells of that a large animal? Are they any better off than they would have been if they were bacteria? I'm not sure, right? It's not obvious at all. So these higher levels show up, and then they have goals, and then they have bigger goals that say, you know, I'm going to take up boxing, okay? And I'm going to meet all my personal goals of, you know, whatever. And, yeah, you know, I'm going to lose some cells about lose some brain cells and lose some knuckles, skin and lose some other stuff, no problem.

Michael Shilo DeLay 36:45

Well, no, I was seeing it more like as a balancing act, actually. Right. And I wonder what it's like integrating, you know, back to the robotic organs, or back to tissue regeneration or cancer remediation. It seems like, you're always going to be seeking this really delicate equilibrium, and trying to typify the pattern of that equilibrium so that you can instruct the tissue to wander in that direction. And it seems to me, like I could be totally wrong, but from your work, I'm getting the impression that it's about finding out what the goals of those cells on those different scales are so that the goals can be complimentary to the maximum extent so you have this balance between all of their different goals, and then you would have maybe perfect health or something.

Michael Levin 37:34

Yeah, I think you're right, I think the key is, there's going to be some sort of positive balance that that will be optimal. There, I think we're very rapidly leaving the domain of science and entering I'm not sure what, because, I don't think there's any scientific method that's going to tell you what the right balance is. There's going to be science that tells you what balances are achievable, what balances are stable, what balances are, you know, possible with certain methods, whatever, but, but all of them are going to be trade offs in the sense that somebody's goals are going to be met, and somebody else's goals are not going to be met.

Michael Levin 38:14

And the systems making those decisions are biased. You know, when a bunch of people sit around and decide what to do, they're awfully bias to the human scale side of things. And so finding this finding a proper balance and deciding what a good balance is distinctly non-trivial. I mean, I'll give you a simple kind of kind of example that keeps me up at night sometimes. There was a story of a psychotherapist, who was he was treating somebody with what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, I guess now it's dissociative identity disorder. And so the deal is that the patient comes in and he says, "this is driving me crazy, I can't I can't keep a job because these other personalities are coming up. And some of them are pretty rowdy. And you know, and I'm getting fired. And like, I can't have this, we got to fix this." And, and the, the therapist says, "yep, we got this thing called integration therapy, and we're going to work together and we're going to, you know, we're going to integrate you and you'll be back, you know, you back back to normal."

Michael Levin 39:15

So they're working on this and, and so one day patient comes in, and it's the other and it's the other personality. He says, "Hey, Doc, what's this? I hear about integration." He says, Well, let's just break that down for me. When when when you integrate, where am I going to be?" And he's like, "Well, you're kind of going to be gone." And "really? and so that's, I don't like the sound of that! What happened to the Hippocratic Oath? You and this other guy are working on making me disappear. What's up with that?"

Michael Levin 39:41

And so that really, to me, that really gets to the bottom of this whole issue, right? Because there are certain selves and agents that are very that are verbal, and very good at advocating for themselves, like your left hemisphere for most of us. You are home to another agent which is normally not heard from until somebody cuts the, you know the, the corpus callosum, and then and then you can find out what your right hemisphere thinks. And there's all kinds of other subunits inside of us. You normally are going to take the side of the larger system, not necessarily the side of the cell. So all of this, I think, is really tricky, as far as who's deciding what on whose behalf, and who's forcing what other system into a different fate than they otherwise would have had. It's, it's, it's very non obvious.

Anastasia Bendebury 40:32

So in a worm where you are, you know, leading it to generate two heads, or you take a salamander and you regrow its limbs, even going from the non - I don't want to say non-natural, but the sort of the bodily organization that's not found in nature, to the regular aspect of regrowth, is there a difference in the sort of communication that's happening there, or is the only difference that it's coming from the outside versus internal?

Michael Levin 41:10

I think that one, one way to think about this is you can notice that the pieces of a flatworm have an electrical circuit, every cell has a particular set of ion channels. And the whole thing forms this giant electrical circuit that has a number of stable states in it, it has a number of different conditions that it could land in. And those electrical states turn on and off various genes downstream that cause heads or tails to be built in various configurations.

Michael Levin 41:52

What the genome does really well is make sure that, by default, with without with nothing else happening, that electrical circuit will always land in the correct state, one head of the right size and shape for that species. Boom, nice and stable. But we figured out how to do is to go in and push the cells towards one of these other stable states. When you do that, you basically push it towards a different memory, I mean, literally a different memory of what a correct Planarian should look like. So we can so then the pieces will make multiple heads, they will make heads belonging to other species. So this is, you know, you said, we just use the word natural a moment ago, it's natural in the sense that there really are other species of Planaria crawling around with those kinds of heads. Just not correct for this species. It goes back to this idea of hardware software, the hardware hasn't been changed.

Anastasia Bendebury 42:40

And you can do this just by manipulating the ion channels?

Michael Levin 42:43

That's correct. That's correct.

Michael Shilo DeLay 42:45

And this is what I meant at the beginning, when I said this isn't like your typical biochemical situation. Because when I took developmental biology in college, granted, like 15 years ago, it was like, "Oh, well, this chemical is being emitted over here, this portion of the embryo is gonna start moving over this way, there's these chemical gradients, and that's pretty much controlling everything," and you're like, "No, you can just grow a head wherever you want, as long as it gets the right patterning somehow,

Michael Levin 43:11

I mean, those things are not incompatible. So all the things that you just said, are still happening, right? So there are still gradients that are still chemicals, there are still genes being turned on and off all that is still happening. The trick is to ask yourself, well, here's a simple question that hardly anybody works on. We still don't know, how does it know when to stop? So you got a Planarian and you cut its head off, and then the cells will start to grow like crazy, faster than any tumor, they start to grow, but then it stops. Why does it stop? It stops because the correct Planarian head has been finished? Well, how does it know what a correct Planarian head is supposed to look like?

Anastasia Bendebury 43:47

Is this what you mean by memory? Because when you when you speak of memory, I think of something that has been sort of held over from the past. But this seems like something that is discovered in the future. Do you know what I mean by that?

Michael Levin 44:02

Yeah, I use a very generic definition of memory. So memory is a some sort of physical data structure that guides your future behavior based on things that have happened in the past. So that could be that could be computer memory, that could be behavioral memory, that could be pattern memory. It's a memory, because what we can do is we can take a Planarian, change the electrical pattern, and it'll just sit there. Nothing is happening until you cut the head off. It's a latent memory. It's not active.

Michael Levin 44:35

When you cut the head, it's a memory of what you're going to do in the future if you get injured. It's a counterfactual memory. And in fact, it's a false memory because instead of a nice picture of a one headed worm, you're now carrying this weird idea of what a worm is supposed to look like, it's actually a two headed shape. So it's kind of a false memory, but whatever, it's your memory. And so now, when you do get injured, the cells will use that memory as their setpoint of what a correct Planarian should look like. And when can we stop? Can we stop when we've made one head? No, because the memory of what a correct planarian is, is two heads. The simplest way to think about this, is to think about your thermostat in your house.

Michael Levin 45:17

The thermostat is a very simple example the basement of agential systems. It has a simple memory. What does it remember? it only remembers one thing, what is the correct temperature. It needs to know that, it's encoded, and it will keep working as hard as it can to make sure that the Delta, the error between the measured temperature and these memories is as low as possible.

Michael Levin 45:39

That's what all these regenerative systems do. They measure the error, which when you get injured, the error goes sky high, stress goes up, you're stresseds the stress says, "I gotta reduce this, I gotta reduce the stress, I gotta reduce that error. And I'm going to do whatever I can to get back to the setpoint. In the meantime, some scientists like us came along and changed the setpoint.

Anastasia Bendebury 45:57

I have a question about this. This might be a stupid question. So when you cut the head off of a worm, I imagine that there's two ways in which it can regrow. One is just the sort of almost 3d printed version where the front, each each layer of cells that is deposited, has the structures within it. And they basically build until the structure is in three dimensional space appropriate, and then they stop versus a sort of more route based way of things growing where you have, let's say, you develop the circular system as the circulatory system. And then cells grow out from that, like leaves on a tree, which way does a Planarian regrow its head,

Michael Levin 46:40

Neither. A Planarian does something entirely different. So what a Planarian does is kind of amazing. And what they do is, you see, all the Planarian cells and we have no idea how this works, but all the Planarian cells together, the collective, not individual cells, but the collective, has a really good idea of what the size and scale of a proper planarian is.

Michael Levin 47:01

So what happens is, when you chop off the head, the remaining cells at the at the wound, become a head. They become the nose. I mean, there's no nose, but you know, the tip. They basically decide that they are now the tip, the front, the most anterior tip of the Planarian. The cells behind them will say, "well, then I must be brain." And so they will remodel themselves to be a brain, the cells behind them say, "Well, I got to be, you know, something else." And the whole thing as it's regenerating, the whole thing is shrinking. Why is it shrinking? Because when the new tiny little head forms, you don't want to be a big planarian with a tiny head. You want to be you want to be perfectly proportion. So it's it's absolutely amazing. They keep their proportion, the rest of the animals shrinks to be correctly size and shapes, much smaller worm, right? So so that's what happens.

Michael Shilo DeLay 47:50

Why can't humans do this?

Michael Levin 47:54

Humans can do this, when they are very, very young. So human embryos, you know what happens when you cut a human embryo in half? Right? You get twins, you get, you get monozygotic twins? Yeah. So I remind my students when they say, "oh, man, you know, Planaria are amazing. They can regenerate from even a small fraction of their body." Well, half of you can regenerate a whole human from one cell. Right? We can do that! We all start life as a fertilized egg. And we regenerate. I mean, development, I think, and this is also controversial, but I think that development is just a special case of regeneration.

Anastasia Bendebury 48:30

So can you cut the planarians in such a way that they regenerate into two worms?

Michael Levin 48:38

Well they do. I mean you can cut it, the record is like 276 pieces and every piece gives rise to a worm, to a full on worm.

Michael Shilo DeLay 48:46

But there's clearly something else going on here, right? Like they're they're definitely multicellular organisms that are able to regenerate whole organ systems. Right? I mean, a head, let's say.

Anastasia Bendebury 48:58

Do they sexually reproduce?

Michael Levin 49:01

They can. Some planarian species can, Yeah. They often don't bother, I mean. Which is a whole other interesting thing. Imagine, when we creatures reproduce through sperm and egg, there's this thing we have which is called Weisman's barrier, which is the idea that if you get some crazy mutation in your body during your lifespan that doesn't transfer to your children, because your children all come from one cell, right, the rest of your body is disposable.

Michael Levin 49:29

In Planaria, that's not true, because the way they generally reproduce - not all species, but the way some species reproduce is they tear themselves in half. They literally tear themselves in half, the front half makes a new tail, the back end makes a new head, now you got two worms, great, right? Now you've reproduced. So if you do that, think about what that means.

Michael Levin 49:47

That means that every mutation that doesn't kill the stem cell that it hits, is amplified into the new offspring. And so this is why the genomes of the planarians are an incredible mess. They're mixaploid. They have different numbers of chromosomes for God's sake! The genetics are a mess. We don't have a proper assembly for some of these species because you don't know what you're sequencing, every cell has a different number of chromosomes. Now, think about what that means, right? For 400 million years, you've been accumulating mutations, you every cell has a different number of chromosomes, you're a complete mess at the genetic level, and you are the world champion regenerator your anatomy is rock solid every time you get cut 100% of the time you make the correct thing.

Anastasia Bendebury 50:32

100% of the time? Like you'll never see a misshaped worm come out of a cut?

Michael Levin 50:37

It's extremely rare. If you cut if you cut very thin, tiny pieces, they get confused. Sometimes you can do that. But regular, normal cuts into into large chunks? They never screw up, they always do it. Right.

Anastasia Bendebury 50:52

how is that possible?

Michael Shilo DeLay 50:53

Yeah, does this lead to a lot of problems? Do you get a lot of really deranged scenarios like, whole species of monsters?

Michael Levin 50:59

No, no, absolutely no, absolutely not. I want to say two things about that, that are interesting. One is that, think about think about how little we must know about the relationship between the genome and the anatomy, when you can basically trash the genome for hundreds of millions of years, and still have rock solid anatomy. If you didn't know about Planaria, you went through a developmental biology or genetics class, and somebody said to you at the end, "I want you to make a prediction, I'm going to screw up the genome so bad, your cells are going to be mixaploid, like a tumor that has damage and different numbers of chromosomes. I'm going to do that. What do you think your anatomy is going to be like?" What would you have said? Any normal person going through a genetics or developmental biology class would says "ha, you're going to be a mess, you're going to be a tumor at best."

Michael Shilo DeLay 51:47

But that does happen, though, right? Like we do have...

Anastasia Bendebury 51:51

teratomas?

Michael Shilo DeLay 51:52

There's developmental disorders that babies are born with multiple chromosomes. And it makes makes problems.

Michael Levin 51:58

Sometimes! but you see, we're not very regenerative, is the problem.

Michael Shilo DeLay 52:03

Right. Right. So what is that hinge?

Michael Levin 52:06

Nobody has any idea? My point is not that I haven't answered. My point is that I think it's very critical to keep an eye on your your knowledge gaps, because because people go through a whole education in genetics and developmental biology and they never hear of this stuff. When you read a developmental biology or genetic textbook, you get the feeling that "yeah, this is cool, we got this under control, we know a bunch of stuff. "And I'm saying "no, no, there are fundamental gaps in our knowledge that we don't even know."

Michael Levin 52:36

We have no idea what's going on here. Because nobody would have predicted that this thing would be true. So that's a kind of important thing about Planaria, about any of this, is that there's this distinction between what the hardware is going to do and the specification of the hardware you get out of the genome, and then the amazing ability of the software to do all kinds of interesting things. And we can get into all the plasticity and the you know, including the xenobots that I mentioned, and all the other types of amazing problem solving that we see. It's just they are huge things we don't understand.

Michael Shilo DeLay 53:19

When we talked on the phone earlier. Before the show, you mentioned that so the xenobots got a lot of coverage in the news, you seem to express that some aspects of that had been handled poorly. Do you recall mentioning this or you felt like you felt like some of the key points were sort of glossed over?

Michael Levin 53:40

Well, this is true. I certainly think that a lot of people have not yet understood what I think to be the main the main importance of this, and other people focused on aspects of this that I think they got, you know, they got the story wrong. And then there have been some just completely crazy news stories that just totally screwed up the facts, you know, in a very wild way.

Michael Shilo DeLay 54:06

Sounds about right. What do you think are the salient features that that maybe got missed? Or could have been centered better?

Michael Levin 54:15

Well, there's there's a couple of things. Let's start off with what I think what I think is important and significant here. There are three ways in which this whole technology, and just to remind, in case, anybody doesn't know what this is, this is the observation that when you - this is joint work that is done in collaboration with Joshua Bongard's lab at the University of Vermont, and this is Sam Kriegman, who's the computer scientist and Doug Blakiston, who's in my group, who's the biologist is a joint project. And it's the observation that when you take skin cells from a frog embryo, and you liberate them from the instructions that normally say, "you're going to have a very boring life, you're going to sit there quietly as a two dimensional layer on the outside of the outside of the embryo, you're gonna keep out the pathogens, that's what you're gonna do."

Michael Levin 55:07

When you liberate cells from that condition, you you take these skin cells, you put them in a separate, in a different environment. And you basically say, "Well, now you don't have those instructive cues, you can reimagine your multicellularity, what are you going to be?" They could have done all kinds of things, they could have crawled off, they could have made a monolayer like a cell culture, they could have died, they could have done all sorts of things.

Michael Levin 55:27

Instead, what they do is they come together, in about 48 hours, they come together, and they form this new creature that we call a Xenobot, for Xenopus laevis, the name of the frog. And it's a biobot. It makes this little proto-organism that does all kinds of amazing things. It swims around on its own, and has all kinds of behaviors, it has group behaviors, it has individual behaviors, it can regenerate if you damage it, it does all these interesting things.

Michael Levin 55:54

One of the most amazing things that it does, is that because it can't reproduce the normal way, because it doesn't have the normal frog reproductive organs, it figured out a completely new way to replicate itself. So what it can do is if you give it a bunch of loose cells, it basically does a version of what von Neumann was toying with, this idea of a replicator that goes around and collect parts and and builds a copy of itself.

Michael Levin 56:17

They basically run around and they in the herd, like sheep dogs, they herd a bunch of loose cells into little piles and sculpt them into others xenobots. And then guess what they do? They will run around and do the same thing, you know, three or four generations down. And there's no genomic editing anywhere here. If you sequence these things, all you can ever see is Xenopus laevis. And you have no idea, you would have zero idea. This is this is going back to that, that idea of how much do we really know about the genome and the anatomy? If you can have something that acts and looks in a completely different way, and has the same wild type genome?

Anastasia Bendebury 56:51

Do you think that this is possible with cells from or from other organisms? Or is this something special about frogs?

Michael Levin 56:56

There's there's nothing froggy about this. I can't I can't go into details now, because I don't talk about unpublished work in these contexts, but I can just tell you, this has nothing to do with frogs. It's a much more general phenomenon.

Anastasia Bendebury 57:11

So you think that you could make something like this from human cells?

Michael Levin 57:14

We will see. Stay tuned.

Michael Shilo DeLay 57:17

Might need some permission for that.

Michael Levin 57:19

We'll see.

Anastasia Bendebury 57:20

Yeah, we'll put that on the calendar

Michael Levin 57:22

So let me just let me just finish to finish that point. So this is what they're doing with their standard genomes, right? And what I think is really significant here, is that for every other creature on Earth, if you ask the question, "Why does it look the way it looks? Why does it have the behavior? It has? Why's that this color wise of this many eyes?" The answer is always the same, because for millions of years, the ancestor was selected for this and that, that doesn't exist here.

Michael Levin 57:51

These things never existed before, all of these cells were selected to be a nice, quiet, skin skin layer, right? Instead, on their own, they have a much more exciting life. They're autonomous, they run around, they do all kinds of stuff. So the question of where do these things come from? Where does its body plan come from? Right? If you ask, where does a frog body plan come from? Well, people will say, well, selection, you know, millions of years of selection for being a nice frog. Where does that a xenobot body come from? There's never been selection.

Michael Shilo DeLay 58:17

Artificial selection, is it not? I mean, if you're scraping off this skin cells.

Michael Levin 58:24

We're not selecting them. I mean, we do not know anything that it takes to build a robot that does this kind of stuff, right? The answer to how does it know to do all these things is not because Mike and Josh made them do it. I mean, there's a component of the project where we use machine learning to kind of nudge them towards specific outcomes. Right? And that's, that's very important to learn to do this.

Michael Shilo DeLay 58:45

Is that like tuning the soup or something?

Michael Levin 58:47

No, not yet. Although that's where it's going. Up until now. We've just been sculpting. The AI says, you know, if you just cut away some cells from here to there, they'll move better, or they'll do certain things.

Michael Levin 58:58

So look, there's three really important things about about all this. One is that at some point we'll have useful synthetic living machines. So the you know, there'll be the scraping the plaque off your artery walls or chasing down tumor cells in your gut or something, you know, there's all kinds of useful applications. The second thing is that they're teaching us about how do collectives of cells make decisions about what to be? That that's the answer to regenerative medicine. The whole field of regenerative medicine is basically stuck because we don't know the answer to that question. How do collections of cells make decisions about what they're going to do?

Michael Levin 59:35

The genome is not the answer, stem cell biology is not the answer. If we do not understand how collectives of cells make decisions, large scale decisions, this is a sandbox model, a platform, it's a very simple systems with only one type of tissue, just the skin okay. So, ultimately what this is for ,way beyond useful machines, is we are going to try to understand how do you how do cells get their goals? How do collectives of cells get their goals?

Michael Levin 1:00:05

Where did the goal of being a Xenobot come from? Because it showed up in 48 hours, it did not require millions of years of evolution. So the question is, where did that goal come from? And more importantly, how do we specify it? So if we, if I said, you know, that's great and all but I don't a round Xenobot, I want a long flat one, and I wanted to do this and that, like, what what, what are the signals that I need to give you? Because once we crack that, that's the key to proper regenerative medicine where we can make new organs, we can fix birth defects, we can reprogram tumors.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:00:32

Is that because you'd understand the goals of the organ cells and you could kind of give them what they want and they'll just execute their programs?

Michael Levin 1:00:40

It'll be a combination of giving them what they want meaning meaning incentivizing them with rewards and punishments, and a combination of re specifying the goal states, just like in the Planaria. If your goal state for whatever reason is screwed up, and you think you're going to be a tumor, I got a better goal state for you. Here's a new pattern memory that you're going to follow. And I'm going to incentivize that with a little bit of, you know, whatever, reward or punishment or whatever, whatever we're going to do.

Michael Levin 1:01:03

And then and then the bigger picture, this sort of takes us back to this conversation about like society, and then everything that we were talking about the bigger picture, I see this as mitigation of existential risk for humanity. I mean, look at this. We are surrounded by systems, large scale systems, like Internet of Things, computer networks, swarm robotics, social structures, financial structures, we have have only the barest beginnings of a science of knowing what do these collectives want as goals, we have absolutely no idea.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:01:41

We've turned ourselves into cells that are part of a larger organism.

Michael Levin 1:01:45

That's correct. And the cells have no clue what the organism is going to want to do. What are the what are the goals of the larger scale system? In fact, if you think of shrinking yourself down to the level of a single cell inside of an early embryo, and you're looking around, and you're seeing all this stuff that's happening, and all the noise and chaos, and cells are dying off and moving from falling off, and all this stuff, would you ever in a million years know that this is going to make a 100% reliable fish or frog of human? You would never know that if you didn't already know about embryonic development in the fact that it was reliable, you would never know that that's what was going to happen.

Michael Levin 1:02:21

So we are surrounding ourselves with complex systems that are going to have goals. Those goals are going to be different from ours, but they're going to be as inscrutable to us as the goals of the organism are to the cells. When you think about your goals in the morning, or your life plan for the next three years, the cells in your body and the organs and the tissues don't even have the beginnings of a cognitive system to appreciate what gonna go on.

Michael Levin 1:02:48

We're surrounding ourselves with this and we do not have a good science of anticipating and managing collective goals. So my point is if we can learn from some frog skin, which by the way, frogs are shedding into rivers all the time. People get all crazy, I mean, that's another thing because oh my god, you know, these these Xenobots. This is frog skin! For God's sake, do you understand that we've had, we've had synthetic bacteria, viruses, both natural and synthetic? We've had germ warfare, we've had genetically modified, organisms being released? Like compared to all of that, this should be so far down on your list of things to worry about. It's ridiculous.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:03:29

The news cycle is hungry?

Anastasia Bendebury 1:03:30

Well, the new cycle is hungry and I did have this weird feeling when they were starting to release genetically modified mosquitoes were I was like, why is no one freaking out about this? It was very manner of fact.

Michael Levin 1:03:41

People. I mean, some people did freak out about it. People

Anastasia Bendebury 1:03:44

I personally was freaking out about it. Because I'm like, we have crossed the Rubicon at this point! This is this is a huge decision to make to drive a specific parasite or disease carrying mosquito to extinction. I'm like, I don't know that we've given enough thought to it

Michael Levin 1:04:01

Yeah, no, you're right. But I mean, we've kind of done that before. I mean, we've more or less driven polio to extinction, right? Native wheat and the old school crops that are almost gone now.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:04:18

The Oceans.

Michael Levin 1:04:21

Yeah, we've been doing that for a while.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:04:24

People are just so tired of it that they're like, "eh, what's another one?"

Michael Levin 1:04:27

No, I don't think so. Because when they hear about the Xenobots they suddenly are full of energy again and people freak out! I just, I think we ought to be really realistic about apportioning our finite energy for concern, apportioning it proportionally to what's an actual problem. And I think we have plenty of problems to worry about. This is an extremely safe system in which to understand a really critical thing, which is where complex systems get their goals. Like that's crucial.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:05:02

Do you think that you could go out into the environment and find self made Xenobots? Like you say that frog skin is getting shed into the environment. I'm sure that there's lots of other skin cells from lots of other animals, our own skin cells get washed down the drain, right?

Michael Levin 1:05:20

It's an interesting, it's an interesting point. I read just yesterday, I read a paper about cancer and clams. And the amazing thing about clam cancer is that the individual clam, tumor cells get released into the waterway. And they find their way too other clams and they get in there and they infect them. So they can live on their own. And and I don't know if you get to see that, um, life death and self paper, but I talk about that exactly, that you could imagine an organism, it wouldn't be a mammal, because it wouldn't work in dry land. But in the water, you could imagine an organism that, when the organism dies, there's still a bunch of living cells in there, right? When a fish or a frog dies for whatever reason, there are plenty of living cells in there. That could be a life history, where the cells go off, they go off on their own, and they either become amoebas, and live as amoebas. Or they come back and they become some kind of a Xenobot looking thing and then, you know, maybe they develop another developmental sequence. But all have perfectly viable. lifestrategy. So you might find maybe on Earth, maybe somewhere else, I don't see why not.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:06:31

This really puts into perspective, the funeral rites of various cultures, the fact that we're like, so like, you know we got to make sure that that body cannot do anything, it's still very much alive.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:06:43

Why do you call them bots instead of straight up organisms? One of the one of the really cool papers you sent us, I'll try to put all these in description, too, is where you're sort of making this dichotomy between machines and organisms.

Michael Levin 1:06:57

I'm trying to burn down the dichotomy.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:06:59

Oh, yeah. Sort of.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:07:01

Are you thinking about the one where it was talking about the intelligence of machines?

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:07:04

Yeah, you do make some like specifications, right? We're, like, Anastasia says, you're saying that, organisms are intelligence at all these scales and machines never could be even intelligent

Michael Levin 1:07:17

I've never said they couldn't be. What I think I said...

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:07:22

Really?

Michael Levin 1:07:22

No, no, I don't think so. Well hopefully I never have

Anastasia Bendebury 1:07:24

There's a heading in one of the papers that says "machines are not intelligent and never will be"

Michael Levin 1:07:30

Oh yes. That's because those headings, if you look at all the headings, we are basically trying to demolish the typical statements that are made by people. Those are some of the things that we're arguing against. All of the headings are things that the rest of the text is trying to shoot it down.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:07:47

So you're trying to say that the idea of a machine as we understand it is outdated, and that we need to start thinking about machines in different ways.

Michael Levin 1:07:54

Here's what I think. A lot of the terminology that people use around this: machines robots, organisms, intelligence; a lot of these things, the the definitions we have now are not going to survive the next couple of decades, they are based on extremely outmoded criteria.

Michael Levin 1:08:14

I mean, look, in the olden days, some number of decades ago, you could walk up to something if you didn't know what it was, you could knock on it. And if you heard a clanging metallic sound, you could know several things. It came off a factory, I'm morally in my rights to do whatever I want with this thing, take it apart, put it in the garbage heap fine. And it's going to be boring and it's not going to do anything interesting, right?

Michael Levin 1:08:33

Whereas if you do this and it's sort of wet and squishy, then you would say, "Ah, this this was evolved on earth it wasn't designed by a by a mind, I better be nice to it. And I can expect some really interesting hijinks if I have it in my house."

Michael Levin 1:08:51

Those conclusions they were made entirely based on the limitations of past technology. They're not deep they're just total crap basically, at this point, they're not going to survive. Now we have machines that that are that are designed, that are evolved using using evolutionary strategies. There are designed organisms. Going into the future, what you look like, what you're made of, and how you got here, your origin story are going to be terrible guides to your moral standing and to your cognitive capacity. They're gonna be terrible.

Michael Levin 1:09:25

You we will be surrounded, this is this is something I was just writing about the other day, we are going to be surrounded by every possible combination of evolved living material, designed artificial materials and software, every kind that you can think of. You know that Star Wars cantina scene? It's going to be just totally tame compared to what how we're actually going to be living. And this distinction when people say machines "Can't do this, and machines can't do that," if you just push on that a little bit and say, "Okay, tell me what a machine is. Tell me what a robot is. And by way that definition better be useful beyond like 1960. You know, it better be a modern definition that that doesn't lean on these ridiculous limitations that are just not even true anymore. Certainly not gonna be true in the future."

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:10:13

First of all, I love that you're obsessed with definitions. That's something that we are completely nuts about DemystifySci, we have a Facebook group, and most of what we do is argue about definitions. And so that's awesome. Before we go any further with that, the machines you define as basically, they have to be useful, right?

Michael Levin 1:10:35

That's one way to do it. So just to back up a second, here's what I think about definitions. The reason you want definitions is to facilitate progress. You don't want definitions that that hinder you from from thinking in various ways. And so to me, there are no, and this is this, this also gets me crazy. Some people will say, "well, that's just a metaphor, and it's not" - okay, everything is a metaphor, there's, there's no, we don't have it, we don't have access, at least I don't believe that we have access to any any real objective truth, ever. What we do have access to are metaphors, which can be good, they can be more or less useful, right?

Michael Levin 1:11:11

So what am I'm going to suggest is that the extent that you want to use the word machine, for example, it better be a definition that is that is useful in some fashion. It helps you do something. So to me, right now, a useful definition of machine doesn't have anything to do with what you're made of, or whether you were designed or evolved. I think the salient and I'm not saying I have the best answer, by the way, I'm sure I'm sure there's plenty of work to be done to get better definitions of all of all of this. But I think the interesting thing about a machine is that it's a system that works according to understandable logical rules that's able to be manipulated to for specific outcomes.

Michael Levin 1:11:52

So now, a machine is something that you can with with sufficient effort, and brain power, you can say, Okay, I see how this works. And part of seeing how this works is if I wanted to change it to do something it doesn't normally do. Here's how I would do that. Right? Anything, you can do that too. That's, that's a machine. So I also the other important thing about all of this is that I don't believe in binary definitions for almost anything. So there's no such thing as "yes, this is a machine that is not a machine." There's no binary about machines, there's no binary about cognition, about consciousness about intelligence, it's never "does it or doesn't it?" It's always "how much and what kind?"

Michael Levin 1:12:30

So if somebody shows me, somebody shows me, a bacterium, I'm gonna say, yes, that's, that's quite a, it's got many properties of what you consider an organism, it's got quite a few properties of what you would consider a machine. By the time you get to a human has some of the properties of the machine, there's a lot you can do with the physiology and the behavior, but it's got a bunch of other stuff that really, you wouldn't help you to treat it as a machine, at least now, it wouldn't maybe sometime in the future, you could.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:13:00

So this context have a lot to do with this, then like, does a definition need to be set in some place? Like, you know, if I'm sitting here next to a washing machine, and we're trying to decide which two of us is the machine, maybe one definition would work quite nicely. Whereas if you're comparing me to something that's a little bit more on the edge where you're talking about, like an engineered organ or something. It's kind of, you know, a little bit tricky. Yeah.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:13:28

Pancreas versus an insulin pump, I think is maybe like a better comparison.

Michael Levin 1:13:33

Boy. Yeah, I think, I think they're certainly both kinds of machines, they have different. There's some different properties, and they're useful in different circumstances. I think it's not just context, I think it's all observer dependent. So it's everything to me, everything is in the eye of the beholder, it's in the eye of the observer. Now the observer, by the way, might be the system itself, when it looks at itself. We can talk about that in a minute. But if I look at something and I say, it's the same thing with seeing intelligence, if I look at you and the washing machine, and my goal is to I need a paperweight, I need a really good paperweight I look at the washing machine I go, "that's awesome. I think I'm going to set that thing down on my papers that's not going anywhere. You are a terrible paperweight because you have a tendency to get up and wander around. I don't like it."

Michael Levin 1:14:24

On the other hand, if I want to do do some kind of useful thing, "I'm gonna say this washing machine is very limited. I'm never gonna get this thing to like guard my house or do anything else. All it does is just one thing. It's a very boring kind of machine." I you know, you look at an organism you say, "that is much more interesting machine. That does all kinds of stuff. And maybe I can get it to do certain things. And maybe I can't, because it's a kind of machine that is self motivated." And at some point, you might decide to just leave and then you know, yeah, so it's in the eye of the of the observer. All of this.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:15:00

That is just terrifying, because does that kind of destroy the any chance of defining life itself? If we can't really separate machines from organisms?

Michael Levin 1:15:12

Well, look, what useful definition of life do we really have to begin with? If you ask yourself, if, what tools do we have when we go to other planets, and or synthetic biology. I mean, already, people make all kinds of stuff that that you can have a week of arguments about whether it's primitive life or not, right? And knowing what you find... You're sitting at home one day and spaceship lands on your front lawn, and this, this thing trundles out and it's kind of shiny and metallic, but it walks up to you, and it's got this poem that it wrote on the way over, right? And it's like, look, I'm here to meet you here. And you're looking at it. And so now, what do you have in your toolkit that you're gonna say? Is it alive? Does it have cognition? Was it made by someone? Did it evolve somewhere?

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:16:07

We usually, I mean, we usually start I mean, we argue about this non stop in our social media and so forth. It's actually one of our favorite topics is what is life and like, the closest we've gotten is something like autonomous intention, like the some some expression of intention. You know, if these machines are going to be capable of goal oriented behavior, then it's like, and it's autonomous to some extent.

Michael Levin 1:16:31

I mean, defining I, I'm sympathetic to what you're trying to do, but but I think defining that in a in a rigorous way, is brutally hard. I mean, your Roomba has autonomous intentions.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:16:48

It's been programmed by us.

Michael Levin 1:16:51

Yeah, but it's not difficult to set up an evolving algorithm that would just would evolve this from scratch, right? Look, I don't even know that the word life is particularly useful.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:17:10

That's what I was getting.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:17:12

I've always had this feeling that the question of what is alive versus what isn't alive is a question of how can I treat this object?

Michael Levin 1:17:21

Yes, yes. I 100% agree. I think that is what all of this stuff is about. I think that that alive is not particularly useful. It was useful pre, you know, I don't know, at the turn of the century it was useful, because it was pretty clear that you could segregate things into alive and not alive. And that would that would correlate great with how you're supposed to treat them.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:17:45

Kind of, kind of, right? Because if you look at something like the biosphere, it's very hard to look at Earth and be like, Earth is alive. And yet, when it comes down to looking at the turn of the century, and you have the Industrial Revolution, and you have the consumption of raw materials, there's nothing inherently bad about breaking up a mountain and taking coal or whatever else out of it. But there is something about the extractive process, which if you're able to look at the Earth as being alive, despite the fact that it's this object, you begin to have a different attitudes towards the way that you can treat it. And so I'm not sure that it was necessarily possible to easily bend things even 100 years ago, I think people did.

Michael Levin 1:18:29

Yeah, you're right. Of course, I think I think you're right. The problem is that alive, we have a we have a terrible history of not using the category of alive to dictate proper behavior, right? So we we farm animals, and we do all kinds of horrible things to the things that we're pretty sure are alive, right? So I think long before you get to worry about whether the mountain kind of ecosystem was alive. We've got questions about factory farming and what we do to each other and various kinds of things. Right. So So I think alive, doesn't really do the trick. In fact, I don't know what it does. I honestly don't know of any really great useful things you can get out of the word alive.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:19:13

I mean, here's one thing, what about like large scale physics? You know, there's like the motion - this might not actually be relevant to things on Earth, but certainly a lot of people spend their careers trying to figure out why the heck the galaxies are rotating the way they are and things like that. And there's no consideration to intentionality in those processes, because we don't consider them alive.

Michael Levin 1:19:38

I think that the question of whether or not there's intentionality, there has nothing to do with whether or not or how alive it is. I think, I think there are plenty of things that have intentionality that you wouldn't say are alive, maybe? Again, I don't know what saying that something is or isn't alive, what does that allow you to then assume? As far as I can tell almost nothing.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:20:00

I guess you could explain something without relying upon Newtonian physics or, you know, traditional momentum based calculations, right? You can be like, Okay, well, the reason these things don't orbit the way that we thought they would is not because there's an invisible substance, it's just because they don't want to or something like that.

Michael Levin 1:20:21

So that's not about being alive. That's about picking the right level of agency for any given system. And I will say, I have a whole story I can tell about that. But basically, I think, the interesting thing is that I don't think you can, much like with almost anything else, I don't think you can sit back in your armchair and make decisions on what's agential and what's not, you've got to do experiments.

Michael Levin 1:20:44

So for that I'll just give you a simple example. Gene regulatory networks, right, the little pathway arrow models that people build all the time. They're like, the paradigm example of determinism there's, there's no magic, there's no weird forces. You know, what all the genes do, and people treat them as deterministic systems. And they work because there's a law, it may not be Newtonian, but whatever it is.

Michael Levin 1:21:09

And then, and then a bunch of people, a few, a few groups and our lab, as well show that actually, they can learn they have associative learning. So they have a tiny little bit of agency. It's tiny, it's Nano, but they can learn, which means that in your relationship to them, you don't just push things around at the hardware level, you can train them with experiences.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:21:30

What does it mean that they learn?

Michael Levin 1:21:32

Meaning that their future behavior is altered by their past experiences, I'll give you a simple example of associative learning. You have, you have a pathway, gene regulatory network, you have a drug that causes a particular outcome. And what you can do is you can take another drug that targets another part of the network that doesn't cause that outcome, right? If you present them together long enough, over a few iterations, eventually, you can just you can just provide the second one and you'll get the same outcome. It's Pavlov's dog. It's the bell, you know, it's the bell and the meat, right? Because because the system has that bit of memory that's able to associate past stimuli, remember them and act upon them in the in the future.

Michael Levin 1:22:11

Now, nobody would have said that sitting back in their armchair "You know, I think I think pathways could be agents," nobody would have said that you have to do experiments. And so when you talk about the galaxies, okay, I have no reason to think that this is true. However, this is something that I was actually last year I was I was driving a couple of astronomers crazy trying to say, could we could we could we design a galactic scale system of synapses working in gravitational space, such that such that passages of masses would would would deflect certain things that would hold state, they would have memories of who you make, who would make a giant synapse, like a, you know, a solar system size synapse? And if we did, and if we and there was something like that, would we know what could we tell that from the inside? In other words, to me, these are all open questions to be settled by experiment. And you can do experiments, you will, how do you do experiments on this?

Michael Levin 1:23:03

If you think about it, I call this in the paper that just went up on the archive yesterday, I call it the continuum of persuade ability. The question is, how do you relate this back to what you just said? How do you relate to the system? So just imagine this continuum, on the left side you have, you have boring mechanisms like mechanical clocks, right? If that's what you're dealing with, then then you're not going to convince it of anything, you're not going to punish it, you're not going to train it, you just have to rewire the hardware, that is the only way you're going to relate to this thing.

Michael Levin 1:23:36

Then then you go a little further on the continuum, you have an interesting system like a thermostat. Now, that thing is interesting, you still not going to convince it of anything, you're not going to punish it, but it has a setpoint. And what you what you can do is you can alter the setpoint and get the whole system to do something different, you don't even need to know how it works really all you need to know that it is in fact, a thermostat. And you need to know how to read and write the setpoint, you need to know how to how to change the setpoint. And then so that's a completely different way of interacting with a system because it's a goal directed system, you change the goals, and you let the system do what it does best. You don't rewire it, you just change the rules.

Michael Levin 1:24:09

Go a little further, and you've got a rat. And now that system has preferences, and it's able to learn from rewards and punishments. Now, you don't need to know how it stores the set points. You don't need to rewire it mechanically, you can get it to do circus tricks, and all kinds of complex behaviors with rewards and punishments. This is why humans have been training animals for 1000s of years without knowing any neuroscience. Why can you do that? Because you don't need to know the neuroscience! You can relate to it from the level of motivation, not from the level of micromanagement and not the level of setpoints. Right?

Michael Levin 1:24:43

And then you go further still and now you've got a rational human. And now you don't even need to do any of that. You can give them a logical argument, right? A teeny weeny sort of amount of energy spent you're just to say, "Hey, did you know that XYZ" and now you're completely hands off, you're relying on that system to go oh my god, you're "Well, that means I gotta work towards world peace or whatever you're going to do." You can launch this like massive effort on the part of the system, you're not micromanaging it, you know, you don't know how it sets, its, you know, set points, you're not rewarding it directly. You're communicating logic to it right.

Michael Levin 1:25:15

So all along here you have different kinds of systems that when you when you say, the galaxies spinning, where are they along this thing? I don't know. But I also think it's not a great idea to just pick a spot and say, I'm sure it's there, you know, problem solved. All of these things are empirical questions. It's not magic. It's not philosophy. It's science. Let's what is the best system?

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:25:46

I know we've taken a lot of your time already. One last thing I really wanted to ask you about, which you have, I'm gonna just read a little quote from this paper. This is the paper you did in AEON magazine, the journals called Aeon, I believe, with Dan Dennett, and you say I'm going to read the sentence "Thanks to Charles Darwin, biology doesn't ever have to invoke quote, 'an intelligent designer' who created all of those mechanisms. Evolution by natural selection has done and is still doing all that refining and focusing and differentiating work." When you, when you make evolution an actor, do you think that you're really moving away from the idea of an intelligent designer? In that you have a conceptual actor, that's not actually a physical entity that's doing?

Michael Levin 1:26:35

Yeah, I think that's, that's a great point. So So here's what I think we're doing there, what I think we're doing is saying that a designer is not really what you think it is. You don't need to be an engineer with a pencil behind your ear that's able to envision all the different things that could happen and work towards them. That's a kind of designer. And that's great. There are other much more miniature, much more humble versions of that also produce amazing, amazing and pieces of engineering and novelty and creativity. And when we say that's not a designer, ultimately, I mean, this was like, this was a short piece, you know, we can we can go into all this stuff here. And actually, I don't even know, you know, if Dan would would agree with everything I'm saying here, but I'm just gonna tell you what I think. I think that evolution is not nearly as as dumb and short sighted as people say it is for a couple of interesting reasons. But I also think it is not so far on the right of that scale, where where you could say it has specific second order goals, and it knows where it's going. It's not that kind of designer. But again, I don't like this idea of designer being a binary term. There's almost no binary terms that I like. And and I think that being a designer is a matter of degree. And I think evolution is kind of a small one that's still quite impressive, actually. But but but it's not the kind of designer that you would want from a human or you know, or God or whatever. It's not that kind of designer.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:28:10

But it is still a non-physical actor.

Michael Levin 1:28:16

It's a it's a process. I mean, what's a physical actor? I don't know. We're not physical actors, either, right? We're sort of meta stable whirlpools of energy moving through, a particular construct, like what's really a physical actor? I don't know.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:28:30

A sledgehammer. I guess, or something.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:28:32

I think that evolution is a physical actor to some degree, because you have these axiomatic principles as to how molecules interact, and the outcome of those interactions.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:28:44

evolution is an idea, though.

Anastasia Bendebury 1:28:45

But evolution is also a process which is emergent from cells living, doing, and getting eaten versus not getting eating.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:28:55

Certaintly the cells are doing something

Michael Levin 1:29:01

Yeah, I think I think it's important to keep in mind that evolution is much deeper. Evolution doesn't have anything to do with cells really, right? You can do you can do evolution in an afternoon with algorithms that have nothing to do with cells. And what's cool about the core properties of evolution, this idea that all you need is three things: you need some kind of heredity, you need unlimited resources, and you need your heredity not to be perfect. So that sometimes you make mistakes.

Michael Levin 1:29:38

That's it, those are the three things. and what are the three things that that applies to? It can be, you know, it can be it can be concepts in your head, it can be engineered artifacts, it can be cells. It's a very generic kind of system. It has all kinds of interesting properties that we don't, that we that we can't anticipate, you know, in advance. And by the way, when you think of an actual designer, we don't have any idea.

Michael Levin 1:30:07

We know how in science, we know how to take something and say, "Don't worry, folks, there's no designer here. Here's how it works through evolution." Let's go the other direction. Let's take an example of a designer that is non controversial. Here's our engineer, right? And she's sitting there with, you know, the pencil behind me and is designing something, which okay, what is going on in that case that's magical and different from this other case? I mean, what's happening in there? I mean, kind of running through some options, right? And saying, okay, these are all trash. I'm going to focus on these four. And I kinda like this one. This might be it? Why, how much different does that sound than this other system?

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:30:42

I guess just because it's not embodied? Right? I guess it's like, it's sort of this disembodied actor, which is very, it's just just seems like often to me, like, it's not that far off from a deity. Like, if you have this disembodied actor called evolution that's doing stuff, like the fact that it has the verb do like it, isn't it? Yeah, you know what I'm saying? I don't know.

Michael Levin 1:31:04

I know, I know, I know what you mean. But But here's, here's the thing, I think it only seems to disembodied because we're looking at the wrong scale. So at our scale, we're teeny tiny beings, both in space and time. And when we say "how, wait, where is all this cool stuff happening?" Evolution is, in fact, a lineage, you know, 50,000 years of alligators or whatever, 50 million years? That is an individual, right? It's a massive individual, we don't see it. Every every genome is a hypothesis made in the mind of that individual about what the outside world is like. Those hypotheses, and this is, you know, from Carl Friston's work on hypothesis testing in the brain, every each one of those hypotheses gets tested, many of them die, because no, no, no good, the good ones, you know, sort of go go forth, we're just looking at the wrong scale. If you if you back off and look at a whole evolving lineage over a massive, you know, time and spatial scale, then it's very embodied. And you can point to all the things you're used to, you can say, here's where the computation happens. Here's where the hypotheses are formed. Here's where the hypotheses are tested against the world, it looks exactly like the modern pictures of the brain with active inference and everything else. So I just, you know, at a different scale, things look different.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:32:20

And so maybe there's a more appropriate more physical term for that meta actor that we just haven't really stumbled upon right now. And so we're referring to the process as the actor in the meantime, or something like that.

Michael Levin 1:32:30

I think actor, like all these other terms, actor is a fine term, as long as we understand that, it's, it's a continuum. So when I say actor, you say, no, no, do you mean a tiny little actor? Or do you mean like a human level actor or something in between or something post human? Like, what kind of actor? All of these questions need to be specified with? What kind? And how much? That's my main message, that the binary never helps us out the binary just makes all kinds of pseudo-problems that you can argue over endlessly.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:33:00

I feel like the scale is part of the context. And I think that's what I was kind of trying to get out earlier. But yeah, man, it's been a real privilege to talk to you today. I feel like we have probably taken enough of your time for one slot. Maybe you have other things you'd like to do with your evening. We would love to catch up with you down the road.

Michael Levin 1:33:20

I would be happy to! Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a very fun conversation. Um, great. Great questions. Yeah, I'd be happy to happy to come back anytime.

Michael Shilo DeLay 1:33:28

Awesome. And everybody, Happy New Years. And we'll see you guys next time.

Michael Levin 1:33:33

Take it easy. Bye. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.