Micheal Levin; Bioelectricity and where cognition comes from

Michael Levin [00:00:00] Well, when did brains evolve? Or what, what really are brains relative to other types of tissue? You run into these, these really troublesome corner cases because, for example, I've, I've been in, in, in meetings of if devoted to basal cognition where we spend three hours arguing about what a neuron is. It's really not obvious at all because people say, well, it's electrically active. Right? Every cell in your body is, Hmm, well as neurotransmitters. Yeah, lots of cells in your body have neurotransmitters.

Vance Crowe [00:00:25] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we interview Dr. Michael Levin. Dr. Levin is a wild character. This is probably the largest edge case since Lee Cronin, and he might even go further than Lee. Dr. Levin is studying electricity in living beings. He's taking genetics and saying, what is the added component, the thing that makes those genetics come alive? And his research has led him to some fascinating discoveries that I'm guessing many of you have never heard of. I know I certainly hadn't before I started doing research on him. One of the things that his lab has done is they've taken a certain kind of flat worm and cut it in half. Now, this flat worm is able to regenerate. If there was a head left on that flat worm, it would regrow a tail. If there was just a tail, it would regrow ahead. But Dr. Levin has figured out if he applies just the right amount of electricity in just the right way, he can actually prompt two heads to grow. He can prompt a salamander to bring back eyes in a different part of their body. And he has done really amazing and interesting things that brings together genetics and electricity in a way that has been never seen before. And this is a phenomenal and fascinating and mind blowing interview, and I assure you it is not for the faint of heart. There are very few times in an interview when I ever am listening to my guest and saying, oh my gosh, you are describing a future that is somewhat terrifying and totally intoxicating at the same time.

Vance Crowe [00:02:08] So buckle in because this is going to be a wild ride. Christmas is coming up and one of the things that I do when I'm on the off season from traveling to give speeches is I conduct Legacy Interviews. This is when a listener to the podcast decides to hire me to interview one of their loved ones. Maybe it's a grandparent or a parent to tell family stories, to tell all of those values that you wanna make sure are preserved. And it's one of those gifts that is rare and really, truly unique and something that will last not only your lifetime, but potentially to your children and grandchildren. So if you're interested in having me interview a loved one, go to store dot Articulate Ventures and sign up for one. I'm trying to get most of them scheduled before December 15th, and I only have so much time because I'd like to get 'em back to you for Christmas. Or if you'd like to purchase them and give them as a Christmas gift, then we can always do the interview after December. But if you're trying to get it in before the holidays, gimme a shout. I only have so much time between speaking and podcasts and all the other things I do, but this is a wonderful gift to give somebody. So if you'd like me to do a legacy interview, go to store dot Articulate Ventures. Alright, now without further ado, Dr. Michael Levin. Michael Levin, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Levin [00:03:28] Thank you so much. Yeah. Happy to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:03:30] So you are a curious character while most of the world is sitting and focusing on genetics and how can we make gene edits and really focusing on where DNA fits into life. You are focused on the electricity that is going inside of human beings, not just human beings, really all, all, all living organisms. So let's start off with what is probably a super basic question for you. What do you mean that that organisms have electricity in them? What, what is, what is going on there? Where does that electricity come from? What does it actually mean to, to talk about it in this way?

Michael Levin [00:04:07] Yeah. Well, it just to back up for one second. So I have nothing against genetics. It's, it's all good. It's, I the easiest way to understand the distinction is by perhaps analogies to computer, computer science and the difference between hardware and software. So what the genetics does, what the genome is for is to specify the micro hardware that every cell in the body, or in fact in any living organism has. So the genetics specifies all of the proteins that your cells have, and that's, that's the hardware. But once that hardware is up and running, so the metabolism is going every, you know, the cells are alive and everything's going, then there's a very interesting software dynamic that kicks in, which is that these, these devices, which are produced by evolution to survive in the natural world, can process information in really interesting ways. And a lot of that computation that goes on in collections of cells is electrical. And so basically think about all of the things that the brain does. So your brain is a collection of neurons. They are all electrically active. They communicate with each other by passing electrical states back and forth. And as a result, you have this amazing capacity for behavior and learning and cognition and so on. Those processes are way older than brains. Evolution discovered the beauty of electricity around the time of bacterial biofilms really long time ago. And so every cell in your body, not just your neurons, but every cell in your body produces a, a particular set of electrical signals and is able to communicate those signals to its neighbors, and they propagate back and forth through the tissue networks that make up your body.

Michael Levin [00:05:41] And it's basically, this is where brains came from. It is the, it is the, the, this is the incent ancestral state of cell to cell communication.

Vance Crowe [00:05:51] Yeah. As I was pouring through your work and things people have written about you in the New Yorker and on and on, the first time when I was really struck, like, whoa, this is a different way of looking at the world, was when you talked about how mold can actually teach other mold something. I don't think that was necessarily discovered in your lab, but you were talking about it in terms of information is being shared and they can teach one another. This seems so bizarre as to be difficult to even describe.

Michael Levin [00:06:18] Yeah. So this is definitely not work that was done in my lab. This was done by Audrey Disur in France. And yeah, these are sly molds, which, which we have done work on other aspects of sly mold, basal cognition, and they're amazing. And what they're telling us along with many other systems is something that we kind of already know from understanding evolution anyway, which is that problem solving meaning intelligence and the ability to learn from the environment and to anticipate changes in the environment and so on, certainly did not wait for brains to evolve. Right? Ev every, every living creature from the, from the humblest microbe on up has some capacity to process the information in its environment and make better choices as a result of it to try to optimize its survival. And slime olds certainly are an amazing example of it, but it is an ancient, ancient property of life. I'm not even sure you can have life without some aspect of that kind of cognition.

Vance Crowe [00:07:14] Where does this electricity come from? Like, it's, where is it generated? How does it propagate? What, how do I mean, like, I, I feel weird asking you such a simple question, but I I genuinely don't know.

Michael Levin [00:07:27] Yeah, no, it's not weird at all. Because, because it's, it's, it's rare that anybody other than a neuroscience class covers this at all. So every, every cell in the body has these little proteins on its surface called ion channels. And these little, these little proteins can open and close in place, and when they open and close, they can let certain charged, charged par molecules such as potassium chloride, sodium protons, and so on, they can let them in and out. And based on which ones go in and out, that determines the charge imbalance across the cell membrane. So in most cells, there are more negative charges inside than there are outside. That gradient is powered by metabolism. It's powered by, by the food you, you eat. And, and ultimately every cell has to, has to keep up that voltage gradient. One of the implications of this is that all of these electrical phenomena can only be measured in the living state. So unlike ge genome genomic information or RNA information or protein information, which you can get from a dead fixed cell, right? You can recover these molecules and read them out. The bioelectrical properties are literally the spark of life. They, they are gone the minute the cell dies, they're gone. And so in the living state that me metabolic process is sets up this voltage gradient, and then that, that's just, that's just the baseline of having the juice on, so to speak. Right After that, these channels will open and close to modulate it the way that you would in, in any kind of communications device. So you modulate that electrical signal, and you also have ways for that electrical signal to propagate to your neighbor.

Michael Levin [00:08:59] So, so, so cells can sense or read each other's voltage potentials. And very much like in the brain, these electrical states propagate outwards. There are waves that of, of propagating changes. There are memory events where a cell will, for example, change its voltage and then stay that way long after the stimulus that changed it is gone. Right? So that's a basic memory process. And the, the, one of the most important things to know about this is that these ion channels, some of these ion channels, so, so we know that ion channels determine the voltage because they are the ones that let the charges in and out to change that, that that battery across the cell memory. But many of these ion channels are themselves gated, meaning opened or closed by the voltage state. So it's kind of this bi-directional loop where the channels both determine and are themselves determined by the voltage. And that means that what you have is a voltage gated current conductance said another way, it's a transistor. That's all a transistor is, is a voltage gated current conductance. And so what evolution discovered really early on, right around the time of bacterial biofilms is that when you create, when you create this amazing little molecular machine that is a voltage gated current conductance, you can now very easily build feedback loops, memory circuits, all kinds of amazing things that we now exploit in our computer technology, ev evolution, like with many things beat us, beat us to it. That's once you have these kind of transitions, you can build anything, right? That's what, that's what we now know. Any comp computation can be done that way.

Vance Crowe [00:10:31] And so, you know, it's clearly going on in the animal kingdom as you're describing. We talked about it being with slime, molds, trees, flowers, they have electrical vols as well.

Michael Levin [00:10:41] Most certainly. So, so, so not quite as much, I think as known about the functional aspects of this as in the animal kingdom. But absolutely some people have done really remarkable work. I mean, going back into the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds, people went around taking all sorts of measurements of various electrical potentials and plants. And more recently it's been shown with, with molecular experiments, finding ion channels in and finding potentials that propagate under damage. And under various kinds of states, I think, I think we're going to find that the basic story, which is the exploitation of these amazing laws of computation, the fact that if you, if you build specific kinds of electrical machines, you can do decision making and integrate information and so on. We're gonna find this exact same thing in the, in the plank kingdom. I'm, I'm, I'm quite convinced of it, especially since we already know, for example, that certain aspects of, of, let's say neuroscience, like the use of neurotransmitters, which many cells use neurotransmitters, not just neurons. Plants in many ways have a similar system. So oxen is very much like serotonin, for example. And it can move around under electrical power within the plant tissues, exactly the way that serotonin is redistributed in early embryos by electrical gradients. So I think that evolution is reusing the same kinds of strategies, not, not

Vance Crowe [00:12:02] Only

Michael Levin [00:12:03] Does it use the same kind of strategies, but another thing that's always struck me this for years ago is this, is this, this idea that fungi or, and, and various plants, right? They may have compounds that cause mammalian brains to hallucinate. So now this is amazing because we have independent origins of multicellularity, right? We, plants and animals became multicellular separately, and yet that ancestor must have that unicellular ancestor must have already been using these kinds of molecules in order for this to appear in both lineages. Why? Why is it that a, that a mushroom or various kinds of homogenic plants just happened to have a compound that is a perfect fit to something that appeared many, many millions of years later in mammalian brains and is part of the cognition. So they don't just poison you, they actually have a very subtle effect in changing your cognition. Isn't that amazing that, that, that, that that would happen? I always thought it was incredible, and

Vance Crowe [00:13:04] I think

Michael Levin [00:13:04] That's why, yeah, I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:13:05] It's, it like you think about the plant human connection, you know, whether you can eat something and it works with you, and it always seems like it was an accident, like a happy accident. But when you start putting it in these kinds of frames, it's totally different, right? You think about the, the fact that a plant produces caffeine or nicotine and that keeps away insects, but oh, lo and behold, it's a great stimulant for human beings. How did that happen? And I've never heard anybody even put forward a, a case other than just it being an accident.

Michael Levin [00:13:36] Yeah. I, I, I don't really, accidents are rarely I think the right, the right answer for these kinds of things. And, and I, I think

Vance Crowe [00:13:46] That, you

Michael Levin [00:13:46] Know, you can, for certain things like various toxins and so on, you can imagine a kind of evolution where it's, it's not, not so much an

Vance Crowe [00:13:53] Accident,

Michael Levin [00:13:53] But, but it developed the toxin to keep the predators away and and so on. But this is a very specific thing, and this is not just a toxin, this is not about poisoning, poisoning various predators. This is having a molecule that can make such a, I mean, poisoning things is easy, right? Ruining complex systems is very easy. But having a ti having the kind of stimulus that will make very specific tweaks in, in a creature's cognitive apparatus, that's, that's not an accident, right? That's, there's, there's no way that that's, you're gonna get that by accident. That has to be a very, a very specific sort of combination of, of conserved molecules all the way

Vance Crowe [00:14:30] Back

Michael Levin [00:14:31] To our unicellular ancestors and some selection pressures, which I have no idea what they were, that that optimized for this kind of relationship. But, but yeah, I don't, I, I don't think it's an accident at all. So

Vance Crowe [00:14:42] Many of the people, when they're writing about you and your work, they talk about your work in the regeneration of something as out there as an entire limb. And this comes from the idea that you took worms and you're able to cut 'em in half and well, I'll let you explain them. What, what kind of goes on in nature, and then how you've taken that idea and been able to evolve it into something much larger.

Michael Levin [00:15:03] Yeah. What we, what we find in nature is an amazing capacity for regeneration. So if you are a salamander, you would be able to regenerate lost limbs, a lost tail, which is important 'cause it has spinal cord eyes, jaws, portions of the heart and the brain, and, and, you know, they're just incredibly regenerative. And, and then these flatworms that we can also talk about, they're even more regenerative. Flatworms can be divided. It can be literally cut up into, into p into many pieces. The record is something like 275 pieces. And every piece will regrow exactly what, what it, what it needs in order to be a perfect little worm. Now, the upshot of all this is two things. First of all, from the point of view of regenerative medicine, we look at these creatures and we see two things. First, that it is possible as a complex organism to restore your structures after they're formed by embryogenesis. So that gives us hope that we can be regenerative someday, right? And the other thing the worms are telling us is that it's actually also possible to be immortal, because these worms have no lifespan limit. There is no such thing as an old plantarium. They, they are continuously regenerating sing cells. They live basically forever. And so, so these things to me, as an engineer, these are kind of design challenges. I look at this and they say, right, so what you're telling me is that it is not impossible to be a complex organism that lives forever and regenerates itself. So that, that's great to know because now we can strive for that. The other important thing about it is what it's really telling us about, about collective intelligence and decision making. I mean, think about, think about it.

Michael Levin [00:16:35] All of these organisms are made out of a huge number of tiny cells. These cells themselves are fairly competent, like amoebas. They can do certain things, but when they work together, they can do massive things. So the goal towards which they work are things like, make a limb, make an eye. These are huge things. No individual cell knows what an eye is or how, how many fingers you have or anything like that, the collective nose. So it's a kind of collective intelligence of, of the cell swarm that is able to do this. And the most amazing thing about regeneration is that it knows when to stop. I mean, think about it. When you, you amputate a a a salamander limb, for example, lots of these cells begin to grow and move and, and, and change shape and differentiate, and all this, this incredibly rapid activity takes place, and then it stops. When does it stop? It stops. When a correct salamander limb is finished. That's when it stops. Now, that is the hallmark of a goal directed process. There's a, there's an endpoint towards which it works. When you've achieved the endpoint, you stop, right? So that is, that is, there's nothing you could say about this other than that. It's a gold directed process now. And in fact, it matches. William James had this amazing definition of intelligence. He said that intelligence is the ability of an agent to get to the same endpoint from different starting positions and despite perturbations along the way, right? That's intelligence. This is absolutely an example of that. And we, I have many amazing examples that I could tell you about. But very simply, if the salamander loses a wrist from the wrist down, all that's formed is, is that if you lose it at the elbow, you get the hole limit knows exactly how much is missing from different starting positions, it gets to exactly the correct final state, a perfect limb forming.

Michael Levin [00:18:13] So the trick here then is to understand how does this collective store, in some way store the information about what it should be doing? So the set point of this homeostatic process, think about it like a thermostat in your house, right? There's a, there's a set point somewhere. You have to record that. I want, I want this around 72 degrees. And then the thing basically has this loop where it takes a measurement, it decides whether it's off of no, of, of where it needs to be, in which direction, and then it takes corrective action until they, the error, until that delta is as small as possible. That's what regeneration does, is it reduces error as much as it can after, after you've deviated it from the correct position. So now we have to understand how does that system remember what the correct pattern is supposed to be? Now, this freaks out a lot of people, and this idea that, you know, at first blush you say, a, a bunch of cells can remember what their, what a limb is supposed to look like. That sounds crazy, except that, let's just think about what memory, what the most familiar kind of memory is. What do you have between your ears when you remember a particular pattern, a geometrical shape, an image? We are all bags of cells, basically, right? We are collections of cells. So there is no way to say that it is bizarre that a collection of cells will in some way remember what it should be doing. We do this on a daily basis, right? We have goal directed activity, you know, you know, fish and, and, and, and, and even single cells can do things like this. So, so, so gold directed activity by a collection of cells should really be not that shocking. And then, and then you say, yeah, but the brain has these really cool electrical network tricks.

Michael Levin [00:19:48] And I say, right, all cells in your body do that. And so this is what I'm stressing is the sort of continuity between the kind of collective intelligence that cells execute in managing your anatomy is very smoothly. And, and sort of directly related to how the neurons in your head use their collective intelligence to operate behavior, cognition, and the things that we're familiar with.

Vance Crowe [00:20:13] You know, it seems to me that one of the challenging parts of exploring new fields the way that you are, is that our language inherently locks you into a way of thinking, right? Oh, you think about intelligence and you think, well, I don't exactly know what that definition is, but I kind of know what intelligence is. I'm just gonna leave it alone. But you have to be willing and capable of opening up basically every word. Yeah. And trying to understand, well, what do we actually mean by that in order to be able to, to spot patterns among things that seem dissimilar?

Michael Levin [00:20:46] Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is absolutely true. And, and there are kind of, I, I divide all of that, the whole problem into two categories. There are some aspects of this, which are in some way of problems of our own making. So for example, a lot of people will look at something and they will say, is it intelligent? Does it have cognition? Or is it just physics? And what that way of framing the problem is, is assuming, is that these terms, like, like cognitive, intelligent, maybe conscious, these kinds of terms are binary. You're either are or you aren't. And once you do that, you lock yourself into a really terrible set of pseudo problems. Because then if you would take evolution seriously, you're then asking someone to think back, okay, let's see. So there's this, I've got this creature here that I think is true. Maybe it's me, or maybe it's a great ape or whatever. It's gonna be, you know, a non-human primate, whatever. This is truly co cognitive. It has true intelligence, true memory. And then, then I'm looking at fish or, or insects, and I'm saying, ah, they're just faking it. That's not, you know, that's just the mechanism, right? Wherever you wanna say. And so what you can do though, is draw a very smooth line of creatures between connecting them and either through evolution or even through bioengineering. You can make every step along the way. And if you think that those terms are actually binary, you have to, what you're really making the claim of is that somewhere there are a couple of parents that are non-cognitive, non-intelligent, or just, you know, mechanical machines, and then they have an offspring.

Michael Levin [00:22:17] And boom, that offspring is now true, has true cognition that is completely implausible, given everything we know about biology. So, so, so you're, you're locked into this, to this problem because you've chosen to say, is something cognitive or isn't it, as opposed to what kind and how much? Right? The much better question is what kind of cognition does it have and how much, if it's a thermostat, it's a tiny little amount. If it's a human, it's much bigger amount and, and, and so on. So that's, so those are kind of problems of our own making, but there are, there are actually deeper problems that are more foundational, that are harder to resolve. And Josh Bonard and I recently wrote a paper taking apart a number of terms, like, for example, robot or machine. And this is now tough because it used to be the years ago that you could, if you wanted to know what something was, you could sort of walk up and knock on it. And so you, so you'd sort of knock on it. And if you heard a metallic clanging sound, you could conclude a whole bunch of things. You could say, it came out of a factory, it's going to be pretty boring and dull. It's not gonna do anything that I don't expect it to do. Humans made it. And by the way, I am ethically perfectly justified in taking this thing apart and, and rebuilding a, you know, building something else out of it or trashing it or whatever. Whereas if you were to sort of touch it and instead you felt something, something warm and furry and, and, and, you know, sort of soft, then you would say, right, this was a product of, of natural evolution. It, it's going to be interesting and surprising in many ways. It has all kinds of behaviors, quite possibly.

Michael Levin [00:23:48] It has an inner perspective. It, it has preferences and it, and it, you know, there's a kind of a first person on what does it feel like to be whatever that is, and I have ethical responsibilities towards it. I need to be nice to it. And, and and so on. That kind of distinction was fine decades ago. It is, it is, it is rapidly becoming useless now. And all of these, you know, people, people love to write these, these papers about how living things are not machines. And then they list some categories of, of what it is to be a machine. And then, then they try to show that that living things don't match. That all of these categories that, that, that, that people use are things that haven't been true of machines in decades, right? That, that distinction is, is, is being wiped out by all kinds of things. First of all, the use of evolutionary technologies in, in designing machines, so many machines are in fact not designed by humans at all. They're designed by an evolutionary process. Now, also, the fact that you can, many, many processes going on in living things are, are in fact, well described by the kinds of processes that a modern science of machine behavior, not, not a 19th century science of machine behavior, but a modern science of machine behavior would, would, would undertake. And of course, there's hybridization and chimerization, the fact that we already have cyborgs, we have people who control prosthetic limbs with, with their mind, right? We have, we have the converse, which are, which are robots that house living cells that help them get around, you know, these are called hybrids. And everything in between is possible. So there are other words like robot, like, machine like evolved, designed, and so on, which are not nearly as crisp or obvious as they used to be.

Michael Levin [00:25:29] And that vocabulary is going to get very difficult as, as time goes on, because we don't know yet what, if anything that's interesting about the natural world. These words even pick out, it's just completely unclear. If you try to define what a machine is, you know, you might start out saying that, well, it should definitely, you know, tell me apart from a lawnmower maybe, but you're gonna very quickly run into a ton of in-between cases where you're gonna get into trouble and, and your terminology's gonna be almost useless.

Vance Crowe [00:25:56] This to me, is a harbinger of, of, you know, I, I've read in your articles that people sometimes are accusatory of you, like that the things that you're doing, they're Frankenstein esque. But the one that seems more dangerous to me in culture is the human mind needs to be able to categorize things, right? We have certain intelligence that you're able to dedicate to things being spread out, right? As you talk about this, this splitting up of things, the human mind starts to, you can only hold so many things in your brain, seven plus or minus two at any one time. And after you go outside of those limits, then you have to have shortcuts. 'cause you just can't handle it. And I would imagine that culture will really struggle if the idea of what is life itself comes into question. I mean, just look at how much struggle there is about whether there are two genders, just imagine alive and dead or robot and,

Michael Levin [00:26:46] And

Vance Crowe [00:26:46] Human. This is, this is a harbinger of, of I think great tumult coming forward.

Michael Levin [00:26:52] Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree that we have some difficult times conceptually ahead of us, but I don't think that the answer to this is to invent crisp categories that don't exist. So, so that's not gonna, that that's a, that's a, that's not a way for mature society to go. So, so, so just, you know, just to give you a simple example in Yeah, I don't, I don't think inventing false categories is, is the answer. Now, for some things you need, you need rough and ready types of distinctions. So for example, in the legal system, we have this notion of being an adult. And so we, we all know that when you, the day you turn 18, nothing much happens. You don't get magically smarter. Or, and, and in fact, we know that the reason we have different ages for, for driving and getting insurance and doing various other things is because actually these things don't all mature at once and so on. But, but you need some kind of a, a heuristic to, to make the legal world run. Okay? So that's fine, and we're always gonna have those kinds of things, but I do think that it's essential to not make up categories where, where they don't exist in a way that makes, makes, makes distinctions that seem like they're, they're much sharper than, than they really are. And some of the, I mean, there, there are, there are lots of, there, there are lots of, you know, really, really bad ones that, that, that need to go away. One, is this what you started out by saying, you know, these, these Frankenstein esque kinds of things. It's funny, everybody on the, on this question of like, what's, what are, what are technologies that are okay and which technologies are scary?

Michael Levin [00:28:29] So the thing is, everybody places everyone places that boundary differently. And in particular, where you place that boundary is mostly determined by whether you have kids that are sick and whether you need some kind of medical care, because I get phone calls and emails every day, and they sort of come in in two flavors, right? You've got the people that say what you're doing is, is scary and, and you should stop. And then you've got the other people that's saying, what, what is taking you so long? I've got a, I've got a, I've got a child with a birth defect, or I've had a spinal cord injury, or I'm missing a limb. What, what are you sitting on? Like, hurry up already. And, and, and those people will, will shift drastically depending on how the course of your life goes. It's very easy to, you know, sort of be scared and freaked out about things when you're coming from a place of everything is great now, and all we should do is not make things worse, but look around things are not great. And, and, you know, there's nothing magical about, about what's natural or what's, what's, what's presently the case. Now we can do so much better, right? And we, and we have to, I think we have a moral obligation to do better. And so this is the sort of that sort of distinction between this is fine and this is scary, I think is, is is profoundly mistaken because it's not really based on anything. You know, some people, and and of course some people say, well, setting bones is okay, but you know, transfusions no go. And other people say, brain surgery, great, but don't give me any, any implants. And other people say, I, I'll, I'll take the implant because, because I want to be, why can't I be smarter than I used to be? You know, why? Well, who's who said that, that my old IQ was the best IQ I should ever be, right?

Michael Levin [00:30:02] And so these kinds of things we're, this is a spectrum, it's a total spectrum. We're absolutely going to have to wrestle with all of this. And there's another, there's another thing which is a really deep problem that we're gonna have to wrestle with, which is, I, I think in the coming decades, not that far off, I think you and I will both get to see this. There will be a, just a, a massive explosion in the number of unusual agents that we interact with. There are going to be all kinds of bioengineered creatures, novel synthetic constructs, hybrids, broads, cyborgs. The every possible combination of, of living tissue designed materials, machines, and software is going to be around in some fashion. And we are not going to be, when you look at these unusual creatures, you will not be able to do what we normally do, which is to look at something and say, well, I know where this fits on the, on the phylogenetic tree. This is kind of like fish. Like, so, so I can sort of, I know what to expect from it. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm gonna use it in a sandwich and we're all good. It's, you are gonna be seeing things that don't look like anything you've ever seen before. And we are going to need, and, and I'm not saying I have the answer to this, I'm just pointing this out, that we're going to have to develop a new, a new ethic, a new way to relate to creatures where, what they're made of and how they got here, right? Their origin story and their composition are not really guides to not good guides to what you owe them ethically, because they just don't look like anything you've ever seen before. You have no idea what, what, what they're like and, and what the, what the cognition might be in there that's looking out at you.

Michael Levin [00:31:36] So that is going to be, I think a, a, a profound challenge to our, our abilities to come up with, with ethical norms. When you can't simply draw lines somewhere across a familiar evolutionary tree, you know, and, and, and just say, if you're below this line, anything goes. And if you're above this line, you know, you have certain rights that that simple distinction is gonna have to go away. And I don't know what replaces it, but something has to,

Vance Crowe [00:32:03] When you think about, you know, we talked earlier about life having electricity, right? And as soon as the electricity stops, then there's not life.

Michael Levin [00:32:10] Does this

Vance Crowe [00:32:11] Give you some sort of different sense or different definition of something that really does become binary where people say there is a God, there's no God, right? Is do you have some sort of sentimental feeling about where the, the sacredness of, of the energy is? Or do you think, no, this is a, a false notion that carried us to a certain point and it's something that should be Yeah. Not held onto too tightly?

Michael Levin [00:32:36] Well, there, there was a few different things there. I i I, I most certainly do think there that there is a sacredness in

Vance Crowe [00:32:45] The,

Michael Levin [00:32:46] In, in being a cognitive agent, right? So, so having preferences is as soon, as soon as you're some sort of agent that has preferences and has, has has goal directed activity, that that, that I think that, that, that I think is, is, is quite sacred. The fact that that that in, in, in this physical universe, which the remarkable thing about this physical universe is that we can arrange parts of it to become bodies that have minds, right? That once you've arranged a particular kind of body, and it might not be electrical, or it might be, and it might be living or it might be non-living, or it might be whatever it's made of. Once you've, once you've created something that has a first person perspective looking outwards, the, the, the fact that that exists in our universe I think is profoundly sacred. I don't consider it binary because I think it comes in degrees. I think there are very simple ones like thermostats, and I think there are very complex ones like humans, there are probably, you know, humans are probably not the top of the food chain at some point. And there are going to be either here or somewhere else. We're going to see creatures that are, that, that are, are way more advanced than us in their cognitive capacities. So, so it is a continuum. I don't think it's binary, but the fact that this exists at all, I think is, is it just fills me with awe. I, I think it's, it's incredibly sacred.

Vance Crowe [00:34:04] So a a mutual friend of ours, Lee Cronin, who's a favorite on the podcast, when I asked him, Hey, what would you ask Michael? He wanted to know, I wanna read this precisely, ask him how electricity invents intelligence through brains, which I think we've kind of been around all of this with cognition, but you brought up a point, like a memory is there, but there's no place I can open up my brain and say, there's the memory right there. We could just cut it out. It's, it's something going on as a mass of those cells. Yeah. Are those the same question?

Michael Levin [00:34:35] Well, the, they're, they're related. And, and so what I would say is this, I would think, I would say that what, what the study of electricity in living things has taught us is that brain, the word brain should not, it does not refer to a particular grayish substance of a certain size and shape. That's not what brains are. Brains are particular kinds of networks of subagents that can do the things that we think brains do. So they make decisions, they store memories, they, they house preferences. And so, so brain to me is a functional term. It's not a structural term. When you, when you look at something and ask if it's a brain, the way to know is to do certain kinds of behavioral experiments, not by, by looking at it and saying, oh, this looks like a, this looks like a monkey brain. I've seen this before. That's not, that's not what brains are. And we, that's, you know, we shouldn't be terrified of this. We, that, that's happened to lots of, lots of, lots of our, our lots of terms that, that we've had before where you've had to say, what's really essential about, about this term? Is it, is it, you know, it's gotta be this particular thing, thing. No, because somebody just, you know, some, somebody just discovered a bunch of other things that really fit, but they don't look like it. But they are really the same thing. The most comfortable people with that sort of thing are the computer scientists. Because it is a fundamental notion in computer science that what you're made of and what you look like doesn't matter. What matters is what your function is. How are you able to, what, what computations are you able to do? And so you and I use a particular kind of computer, at least in theory, that same kind of computer, as Dan puts it, can be made of beer cans and string.

Michael Levin [00:36:09] You can, because, and it doesn't matter because the computations that it will carry out will in the end be exactly the same. So that's what I think electricity is telling us, that there's brains everywhere. Root, the root tips of plants are a kind of brain, and I'm not the first person to say that. Other people have said that there, there are brains all over the place and not just between our ears. And that, I think that's a much more useful definition of, of, of what a brain is.

Vance Crowe [00:36:32] Good. Golly, man, you must be wildly open on the spectrum because the, the, the ability to be able to redefine something as simple as a brain is, is one that is very, very difficult to, to wrap your mind around, my wife and I were talking about this interview last night. She's a physical therapist and she was bringing up the idea that, you know, sometimes you can get someone better, they have an injury to their knee or to, you know, their ankle. And yet, even if all of the tissue is perfectly where it's supposed to be, there's no inflammation. They tell you I'm in pain, and then you stick them in an FMRI machine and their brain lights up in these, in these,

Michael Levin [00:37:13] In

Vance Crowe [00:37:14] These parts of the, of the brain. What is going on there with that electrical signal? Is it a bad electrical signal? Is is there a short circuit somewhere? What's going on?

Michael Levin [00:37:23] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:37:23] Well, so, so

Michael Levin [00:37:24] I'll, I'll make a more general point because I'm, I'm not a physical therapist, and so I don't know exactly in that particular case what's going on, but I'll make a more general comment, which is this, when your computer is misbehaving, getting out your soldering iron and rewiring the hardware is only one of the tools you have. And in fact, for advanced machines, that's really your last resort, right? That's, that's not really where you go first because there are lots of things that are handleable in software. So I, I think, I'm not surprised in the slightest by the fact that somebody would have their, their physical hardware would be fine, and there's nothing wrong with your joint and the, the nerves work and everything else, but you're in pain for all kinds of reasons. You could imagine top down kinds of things where

Vance Crowe [00:38:07] You

Michael Levin [00:38:07] Might be in pain for psychological reasons. There might be, you know, you might be associating past events with this, with this trauma. And, you know, we're talking about thing things

Vance Crowe [00:38:16] Like

Michael Levin [00:38:16] Phantom limb pain. And there, there are all kinds of poorly understood phenomena, I think speak to this issue. So, so phantom limb pain is one, Hypno dermatology is another. So this, this, this idea that you can treat certain kinds of skin diseases. So you usually with an autoimmune component, but not necessarily with, with hypnosis and suggestion and things like this. We know that there is a e evolution U uses uses massive software layers on top of the hardware. And most of the interesting things we're talking about are not necessarily better handled at the hardware level. The hardware might actually be fine, and you might have all kinds of sort of top down issues that are, that are, that are presenting with phenotypes. And so, you know, and, and, and to your, and to your previous point about, you know, how, how I'm sort of being just incredibly plastic with all these terms. On the one hand, look, if you're in a neuroanatomy class and you wanna reserve the word brain, because that's the thing, you're all dissecting all day and that's what you're studying. I mean, of course, fine, I I understand that, you know, we can, we can't just go around and, and not have any idea what we're talking about. That's fine. But in a deeper sense, if you sort of ask, well, when did brains evolve or what, what really are brains relative to other types of tissue? You run into these, these really troublesome corner cases because for example, I've, I've been in, in, in meetings of if devoted to basal cognition where we spend three hours arguing about what a neuron is, it's really not obvious at all because people say, well, it's electrically active, right?

Michael Levin [00:39:49] Every cell in your body is, Hmm, well, as neurotransmitters Yeah, lots of cells in your body have neurotransmitters. Well, it, it, you know, it it processes information. Yeah, of course all cells do. And so you, you, you sort of go through this whole rigmarole and eventually, you know, you fi and then, and then somebody says, well, so, so, so eventually you land in a particular set of definitions. And then I say, right, so where'd that come from? What did, what did the previous, you know, go, go, go back, you know, of, of a half a million years or whatever? What'd that look like? And you say, well, it kind of had some of these features but not others. So now what is it a, is it an, is it a brainer, isn't it? And, and that, that's where these, we can use these categories and we can use these terms, but we have to be clear that the metaphors, sometimes they constrain and sometimes they help. And you have to be clear on when you use a binary category like that, what are you really claiming? Right? That's, that's, that's really the key,

Vance Crowe [00:40:41] You know? So I have a friend that's got, he's doing some what I call imaginary math, right? So he's on the outer edges of the extreme of mathematics. And I one time was like, man, come on the podcast, we'll talk all about it. And he said, no, I'm I I'm not gonna come on the podcast. And I kind of pushed him and we kind of joked around about it, but then he was like, well, the reason I can't come on your podcast is because it took me eight years of study just to get to the point where I understood everything that was known about mathematics. And then I had to go out into the wild and discover something new. And the thing about mathematics is it is precise. It's not like something else. It's not a simile, it's not like, and when use, he used the example of biology, he's like, you know, in biology you can kind of use these metaphors and kind of get there. But if I do that right, if I say it's like something else without actually saying what it is, you've broken the very thing that makes this beautiful to me, which is its precision and therefore it's not a good, it's not a good fit for me. There seems to be something, you know, moldable, imp, pliable about our understanding of biology that you're actually uncovering. I is actually more precise in some ways. It, it's, and it's also way more fluid and open in other ways. It's, it's like a, it's, it's an I didn't expect that the conversation would go here, but does that strike you as, as something connected to what you're saying?

Michael Levin [00:42:04] Yeah, no, I think it is, and I, I, I'm no mathematician by any means. But, but I will give you a thought to maybe to maybe discuss with your friend, which is that he's, he's, he's right in that there is a certain kind of precision when you say two things are isomorphic or they're really the same or whatever, you, there's a kind of precision here that you don't get in other areas of thought. That's true. But I would dare say that you can, and you can ask him, I, I would dare say that most of the mathematical objects that he deals with, right? Rings and fields and others, all this crazy stuff that I don't, you know, I can't even fathom what exactly, if those aren't metaphors, and if those are, what, what are they? In other words, you know, this is, this is a longstanding argument. Is mathematics discovered or invented? Are these things sort of hanging out there somewhere in, in some sort of invisible platonic space or, you know, because because when, when he says, I, you know, people will say, I study this, I study a manifold, and you know, some, it's a mathematical terrain. I study manifold say, so, so what do you mean by that? So where's like, where is it? Well, you can't find it. It's, you know, right. But, but what are you actually studying? Well, imagine it's sort of like, yeah, that great. So, so what I would like to find out is, does he think these things that he's actually studying are exists somewhere, are hanging out somewhere, right? In some sense. And some people, some people certainly believe that, I mean, I'm close to that view on many things, but I would be very leery of claims that as a mathematician, he's being precise and studying real sharp things.

Michael Levin [00:43:37] Where are these things that he's, that he's studying? I i, it, it's it that, that bears some digging into, actually,

Vance Crowe [00:43:43] Yeah. The metaphor that he made, which made me laugh and probably got me to leave him alone, which was he's like, I, I liken it to painting really, really specialized seascapes, and only I and a few other people in the world, you know, care about these seascapes, but I only care about the other people that can see the seascape. So I take your point, the, but it, it's, it's just an interesting thing because in a lot of ways, biology, some of their biggest flaws. So I've had a professor on named Doug Salmons who actually worked in genetic engineering and all, all sorts of plant interactions with chemistries. And he says, you know, the, the best scientists in the world have this unending desire for consilience where everything makes sense, right? Where it all fits together. And in fact, the people that allow there to be big gaps between an understanding where they're like, ah, you know, it's close enough, they're the ones that never quite jumped the chasm to be able to discover something new. And it's interesting because, you know, you, you're both saying, we should be wide open, but also understand much more precisely what it is that we're talking about. It's, it's, I didn't expect this to be go here.

Michael Levin [00:44:55] Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's true. And I, I certainly love consilience and, and I love symmetry. I, I, I really, one, one of the sort of strategies that I use for thinking about things is to this, this idea of symmetry borrowed basically from physics to ask, what kind of knobs can I turn and, and make it so that one thing becomes something else. So you take, you know, you take, you take, you take a brain and you say, so what if I relax the, the, the requirement that it look a certain way, what other things then are also brains? Or if I say, what if I, you know, these, these kinds of things, right? So, so I, so I love all of that and I love finding commonalities, you know, there are splitters and lumpers, right? And so, so I'm definitely a lumper and I find commonalities between things that other people often say, how are those really the how, how can you, how can you say those things are the same? And then, you know, my job is, is if I, if I believe it is to, is to show the symmetries, to find, here's why they're the same, because here's the common factor that's the same between those two. And it's really important, right? The thing, the, the, the differences that you see are incidental, they're hiding the truth that these are really the same problem in some way. So that's, so that's all well and good, and I'm totally on board with how, how, how lovely that is as a way of doing science. I do think though we have to be humble about the following thing. This idea of consistency and consilience and things fitting together is by, its is in itself. It's, it's an axiom. It's not something we can prove. It's something we set out from the very beginning. We

Vance Crowe [00:46:24] Say, I believe

Michael Levin [00:46:25] Good science should all fit together. Right? That's great. And that'll guide you. You, you know, that, that certainly has, has led to all kinds of progress. Fantastic. But I always think back, there's an old saying which is show me,

Vance Crowe [00:46:37] Show me the, the your

Michael Levin [00:46:38] Fishing net and the size of the holes in your fishing net. And I'll tell you what you're gonna catch.

Vance Crowe [00:46:42] Because

Michael Levin [00:46:43] The only thing you're gonna catch with that thought, with that kind of approach are things that in fact are susceptible to consilience. Things that, you know, if we say right from, from the get go that I don't consider to be science, anything that doesn't fit or doesn't follow standard logic or whatever, whatever your, your, your favorite, you know, axioms are for, for, for the, for the scientific method and the, and the content of science. Maybe there isn't anything else, and maybe we're super lucky and, and that's just that we, we've already caught on to, you know, sort of the way to catch everything. Our net is like the finest net you can have, and that's great, but how are you ever going to know? Because you've automatically, right, you've automatically left behind all of the things that don't match your preconception of how things are supposed to go. And, and so when, when you, you know, when you drag with a certain kind of net and you say, I got everything in here, right? You got everything that was bigger than, than, than the gaps in your net. So I don't know of any way to guarantee that re the reality, which is probably much stranger than any science that that, that, that our brains can, can conceive is actually so nice that everything is conciliatory. Do I, you know, can we, can we show in any way that, that a good picture of the world isn't gonna be actually inconsistent The way that, the way that the girdles show that you can have in a sufficiently powerful system, you're gonna have inconsistent statements. And they may all, they may all be useful simultaneously. And I don't have any guarantee that the final reality is something where everything is completely consistent with each other.

Michael Levin [00:48:18] We like to think so, and that's a good way to work as if that's your goal. But let's not kid ourselves that we can somehow prove that that's gonna be the case. We would be good.

Vance Crowe [00:48:26] I'm, I'm what were you like as, what were you like as a child? What, what was it like it was a pain in the ass. Were you, were you a, a pain in the ass because you questioned everything or you're disagreeable or

Michael Levin [00:48:36] I, no, I wasn't disagreeable. I, I questioned everything, but it was also pretty obvious that some people didn't enjoy that. And so I, you know, I I was a pretty quiet kid because there were some people you could talk about this stuff with and the majority of people had no interest in, in that kind of thing. And so, you know, I kept, I kept most of it to myself really? Yeah. And in fact, in fact, that was, that was a strategy that I used through, throughout my career. I was kind of, when, when I was, when I was younger, I, I, I made a study of various kinds of scientific cranks and, and, you know, pe people who had wacky ideas, a small percentage of whom broke through and, and discovered great things and were very successful. And then the majority that didn't. And one thing that's obvious from that kind of thing is that there is such a thing as being too far ahead. In other words, you, you don't wanna be a hundred years ahead of everybody because, because you get nowhere. Your, your impact is gonna be low because nobody knows what you're talking about. No one's comes with you on this journey. No one can can work with you or help you. You want to be, I don't know, 20 years ahead, 50 years ahead at best, maybe. And so at best, and so, you know, I think it's very clear that it's important to look at your audience and to ask, which part of my vision am I gonna roll out at any given moment, right? What, what's gonna make an impact now? What, what are people ready to sort of think about with me and help? And, and you know, sort of what, what, what, what's gonna move the ball forward as opposed to, I'm just gonna tell you every crazy idea I have right now.

Michael Levin [00:50:08] And you're gonna say, wow, that most of that, I, most of that is crap. And, and then we're done. So, so that's, that's kind of how I was as a kid anyway. I would just sort of, I would only talk about the, you know, I would try to read the room as best as, as best as I could.

Vance Crowe [00:50:22] I, I, I relate to that in a big way. Like my work right now, I spend a lot of, of time going out and traveling and talking with different groups, oftentimes about philosophical or how to, how to get along with people better. Yeah. But for the first 10, 15 years of my professional career, I was just a ramrod. I was like, I don't really care what you want to talk about. I wanna talk about what I want to talk about, and I'm just gonna make you do it. And it took me a long time to figure out, like, you're, you're not gonna get anywhere, but the internet allows you to interconnect with people in a way that wasn't before. You know, it used to be that you were wherever you were born, right. That geography around you, whoever you were around. But it's gotta be quite, quite different. Now, one of the ideas that I read that you put forward with Daniel Dennet was about the concept of the cone of cognition. Do you think you could describe this and then we can kind of have a discussion about it?

Michael Levin [00:51:11] Sure. Yeah. So, so, so the, so I came up with this idea of the cognitive light cone. It was originally, I, I had a paper in I think 2018 describing it. And then Dan and I sort of developed it a little, a little further in that, in that paper afterwards, the, the idea is this, if you, this, this came out of a, a conference that we had in, in Scotland put on by the Templeton Foundation that was around the theme of diverse intelligences. And the idea was that if you think about, if you think broadly about intelligence, and you think about all of the potential intelligent agents that might exist. So we're talking about not just, you know, I mean, some people say, you know, there's, there's some, there's, there's a, there are birds and mammals, and then there's an octopus. How do we compare mammals with octopus intelligence? Right? But you can go, I mean, that's just a tiny corner, but you can say, fine. And so we're gonna have intelligent machines, and there might be possible alien species, and there might be bio-engineered creatures that you've never seen before. Like all of these different types of intelligence. How could you possibly compare them? And so the idea was, what they challenged us to do was to come up with a framework or a rubric for placing all of these intelligences on the same scale. Which, which really fundamentally goes back to your question before about identifying symmetries. It's really about asking what is the common thread. So if you have an octopus or a machine that a, a created robot that runs around and does various things, or some alien somewhere, the, what is the common factor that allows you to call all of these intelligence?

Michael Levin [00:52:43] What's the important thing? It's not what they're made of that, that, surely that doesn't matter. But, but what matters is, okay, what is the common factor? So, so, so different people had different, a number of groups came up with different ideas. And, and here was mine. Mine, my idea was that what's central about intelligent agents is some degree of goal directedness. That basically, in order to be an intelligent agent, you should be able to work towards specific goals. And what I mean by that is not in, not in a scary mystical sense, but but in the cybernetic sense that, that you're a system that exerts energy towards a preferred state of affairs in whatever space that that might be, right? It might be, might be a liver trying to keep you in your blood and homeostasis. It might be a creature doing something. It might be a cell trying to pick out gene expression out of a, you know, out of the 20,000 different genes that might, it might have and so on. And so, so goal directiveness. And so I said, fine. So, so we say, we say that the fundamental thing about being an intelligent agent is, is being able to pursue goals. And then the question is, so how do we map this out? How do we, how do we, what, what kind of, what kind of a a ma a map can we make of different intelligences? And so I said, let's just, let's just take a, let's just try to estimate the scale of the biggest goal that any system could possibly entertain. And so I'll just give you an example. And, and so what we're talking about is, is in space and time. So in space and time, what are the biggest, the most grandiose goals you could conceive of? So, so here's some examples. If you're a, if you're a bacterium, all of your goals center around a very tiny region of space, right around you, you're, you're, you're working towards increasing the amount of sugar or what whatever it is that you eat in that tiny little space, you have a little bit of memory, I think about 20 minutes back, you know, a little bit of memory, maybe a little bit of predictive capacity going forward.

Michael Levin [00:54:31] So in space and time. So, so I drew this map with this diagram, which looks very much like those light cone diagrams that they draw in physics, where one dimension sideways is, is space. So distance along three, however many spatial dimensions doesn't matter. You collapse them onto one, and then the vertical dimension is time. So you come out with this little, so every creature. So now you imagine this giant plane where the horizontal is a measure of how far away from the agent it cares about things happening and in time, how far away in time, so past and future. So now, so now if you are a bacterium or, or a tick or something like that, you have a very tiny little, little, little circle on that, on that map, because you have a little bit of memory going back. You have a, maybe a little bit of predictive capacity going forward. Really all you care about is this tiny little space right around you. That's it. Okay? You, you are, you're, and so, and so the reason it's a, it's a cognitive boundary is because beyond that scale, you are fundamentally incapable of, of working towards goal. So, so if you're, if you're a tick or a bacterium, you are never going to be able to be concerned or working towards the state of the economy or the, you know, what happens next week. It's just not, it's just impossible, right? If you are, so let's just think about some other things. If, if, if you're a dog, you have, you have quite a bit of memory going backwards, you have some predictive capacity going forwards, you have a bigger cognitive cone, but you are never, ever going to care about what will happen next month. Three towns over, just not gonna happen, right? As far as we know, it's not gonna happen. So you have, you have a bigger light cone, but you have a light cone, right? We all do. Every, every real agent is limited and finite, right?

Michael Levin [00:56:04] None of us are, are infinite co cognitive agents. So you are going to have a cone. If you're a human, your cone might be enormous. You might, I mean, I, I literally know people that are depressed because the, the sun is gonna, you know, expand at one point and wipe out the earth. The, you know, it's how many billions of years in the future, right? But, but they're already depressed about it. And so there is a cognitive system that can comprehend. And in the case, you know, people work towards the world peace and do all kinds of things that are gonna be here long after they're dead. We are a cognitive system that can represent goals and can, can set ourselves to work up towards goals that are massively huger than our own. And by the way, something, something interesting, a, a transition that happens is that we are perhaps the only creature that is able to represent goals that are bigger than our own survival cone on this diagram. Because if you're, if you're a goldfish and your goal is to survive the next 20 minutes, that's totally doable, right? That's likely to ta your goal is achievable. You have an achievable goal. If you're a human, you have all sorts of goals that are absolutely unachievable. Because, because you, you, because, you know, 80 a hundred year, however long you're gonna live, you, you have, we are capable of comprehending all sorts of goals beyond that, what are my children going to do? What society going to do? What science going to do? Where's the planet gonna be? Are we gonna be all these things? We are, we are uniquely capable of coming up with goals that are for sure unachievable by us, for for sure. And so, you know, whether that's the root of a lot of our psychosis, I have, I have no idea. But, but, but it's a unique thing that our goals are now bigger than, than our own survival cone on this diagram right now.

Michael Levin [00:57:37] So, so on this, on this diagram, you can now place any possible creature if you make an AI that it, it might have a weirdly shaped cone. It might have all kinds of memory going back, maybe no predictive power going forward. Maybe it cares about all sorts of things, but only in the next 10 seconds, you know, you can have all kinds of weird shapes that you could build. Maybe there are aliens or maybe future humans will have a massively bigger cone than that of current humans. I'll give you a simple example. When, when we hear about some sort of tragedy, befalling, you know, 10,000 people we're pretty sad about it. If you now find out that actually it was a hundred thousand people, we're not 10 times sadder, right? Because we simply can't, we don't have the, the, the, the cognitive capacity to really be in the linear range of, and, and really viscerally have the, the welfare of all these other creatures as our goal, but maybe future humans can maybe, you know, I always, I always think about again, in, in court there's this notion of diminished capacity. So somebody goes to court and they say, well, this is a case of diminished capacity. This, this, this person doesn't have the, the, the competency to care about as many things as a standard issue human and therefore whatever. Fine, that's diminished capacity. What does increased capacity look like? What does, what does a human or whatever we're going to be, you know, a thousand years from now they go to court and somebody says, you've got a hundred times the capacity of a standard human. You should have absolutely foreseen that XY z's gonna happen.

Michael Levin [00:59:09] And you've, you know, you should be, you should have the personal welfare of 7 billion people in your mind at all times. You are capable of it. That's what we expect of you. Right? So, so it's entirely possible. I mean, I don't see any reason why today's human should be, should be a ma, should be the maximum, you know, on this, on this chain. A few. In fact, as far as I can tell, it's, it's infinite.

Vance Crowe [00:59:30] So yeah. And that's exactly the way we parent children, right? You, you look at their cone of cognition and you say, ah, that, you know, you should have known that coloring on the wall

Michael Levin [00:59:39] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:39] Is is not good.

Michael Levin [00:59:40] Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:41] Or if they're a little bit younger, you're like, ah, you really didn't know that was, that's on me.

Michael Levin [00:59:45] And, and that's, and that's exactly right. And that goes back to, and that goes, goes, goes exactly back to your, your idea of making it, making it binary. And, but you start kids, it, it isn't binary because, because you know that every day there are certain things that you're like, should they have known or could they have known? I don't know. You have no idea, right? And you'd kind of do your best and there's some, some heuristics about things, but it's very much, it's very fluid and it's always a work in progress, and you try to match expectations to what a creature can be expected to do, right? If you're a learning agent or you're not a learning agent, or, you know, we, and, and the this stuff comes up all the time. Somebody, somebody goes to court and they did horrible things and you find out they had a brain tumor. So, you know, can you really blame someone where the by where the chemistry of their brain was such that I'm not sure they could have done anything differently. What does it even mean for them to try to do something different? They, you know, they're, they're a different kind of cognitive system now. They're, instead of nice brain tissue, there's massive tumor that's, that's, you know, messing up all the, all the signaling. So these things have been with us for forever, right?

Vance Crowe [01:00:46] You know, you're giving me a whole different way to look at probably my favorite science fiction novel written in the last 20 years. The Three Body Problem, right? Where, where they have to, are you familiar with the book? Yeah.

Michael Levin [01:00:55] Where

Vance Crowe [01:00:56] They have to predict what's gonna happen in 10,000 years and, and be prepared for this problem. And, but the zone of cognition or the cone of cognition, it really is about expecting people to do things. And that's why that book is so fascinating, right? It really expands it out. So speaking of children, you know, you have the ability to zoom the camera lens way out and be able to see a future that is unimaginable to most people. How are you preparing your children to live in this world where there's so much optionality?

Michael Levin [01:01:27] Yeah, boy, that's, that's a good question. And I, I, I struggled with this a lot. My kids, well, we, we did a lot of, we did a lot of homeschooling for, for, for part of their education. And I did, I personally did philosophy classes with them. Not, not philosophy in the sense of, you know, here are a bunch of guys who said x, y, ZA hundred years ago. But, but, but philosophical problems, critical thinking, working through things like what we're talking about now. Yeah. I think to whatever extent kids listen to anything we say, which I'm not convinced

Vance Crowe [01:02:02] That, you

Michael Levin [01:02:02] Know, that that really, that, that talking about things really digs in, I think mostly they watch by example and, and so on.

Vance Crowe [01:02:10] I'm a hundred percent in that camp. I, I believe in the Renee Gerard kind of mimetic desire child. If you've shown an interest in it and you can get your children to wanna be like you, then that's how they learn. But very little of what you tell them is gonna stick. Yeah, yeah. That, that's probably true. But, but

Michael Levin [01:02:24] To the extent that any of it

Vance Crowe [01:02:25] Does,

Michael Levin [01:02:27] What I, you know, what I really Try to tell my kids is to is, is that a lot of what they see and hear are, are, are passing through p people's people's lenses. Everybody has a lens and in fact, multiple lenses on how they see the world. And when you see people doing things or saying things or you read things, none of it is, none of it is, is is absolute or God-given. All of it is, is somebody's attempt to make sense of the world. Their attempt to make sense of the world might be useful to you, and you should squeeze it for every bit of, you know, inspiration that you can find. But you should develop yours and you should also be clear and humble about the fact that yours is just as flawed as everybody else's, but yours is the one you have control over. And so, so you don't have any control really over what anybody else is going to do and why people say the things they do. But you have really good over time, you have really good control over, over being able to hone your own lenses into ones that show you the world that you want to see and that you wanna work, that you wanna live in and you wanna operate in. You know, it's like I have, you know, somebody, I forget who said, but you know, dirty windows, right? Dirty windows, everything looks, looks dirty when you look out. So, so this idea that what they need to do is they need to not take anything for granted that anybody says, including me, but to actually work through and ask themselves, here's a, here's a metaphor in, here's a way to look at the world. How's that working out? Is that working out for me?

Michael Levin [01:03:57] And if it's not, change it and, and is it working out for everybody else? And what does it mean? You know, is it what, what, what, what are the, what are the ways to see the world that makes for a more productive and a happier existence for everybody? Not just for you, but you know, for, for everybody. And I think, I think that that level of plasticity is it, it goes into a lot of stuff. It goes into things like,

Vance Crowe [01:04:20] Like

Michael Levin [01:04:21] Taking, taking things personally. I say I, I, you know, I said to them, to them a lot. I say, there's almost never a cause to take things personally and almost nothing is personal people, people have stuff going on. It's, it's about the people have stuff going on in their own life and it's not about you. And there's no point in getting mad about why anybody said or what. It's, there are, there are various factors, psychological, it's historical, whatever for why people say the things they do, move on, move on, take what you can from it. Leave, leave everything else behind, move on, do something better, right? It's just e everything. That's that, that, that, that, that's my central message is that, is that everything is a metaphor that nothing, nothing is, is God given ev everything you see in here. And the only question is, how's it working out for you? Is it, you know, is it, is it working or not?

Vance Crowe [01:05:06] Yeah, I think that's actually one of the challenges of raising children, because at the one hand, you're trying to get them to have an awareness, like turn the lights on and make sure you're aware that you are an independent agent and you can make decisions. And yet you are not the center of the universe because it doesn't do you any good to perceive yourself as the bringer of all things, or the reason that people did things is because of you. And so you have this, like, this, this dichotomy or this pull that is, is gotta be diff, you know, right now my, my child is 14 months old, so I've got lots of time to think about this without actually having to put it into practice.

Michael Levin [01:05:42] It's amazing. Oh, I found it's really incredible when you, when you watch, when you watch little kids, especially the acquisition of language, you know, there, there are these, there are these communities that, that talk about intelligence and artificial intelligence. And so if you have, if you have a chat bot that kind of, you know, it's some software that more or less kind of carries on some kind of conversation, right? So what people will say is it's just using a statistical model. It doesn't know what it's talking about, it's just, it's just using statistics to figure out what words are gonna make sense next. Whereas me, I really know what words mean and I'm using it intentionally, right? When you watch a kid learn language, what you see is a completely smooth transition between the first type of phenomenon in the second you don't see, it's not, yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:06:31] This is, this is

Michael Levin [01:06:32] A chatbot and a robot, and this is a real big no no. They turn the one turns into the other. And it's a massive mystery of how that happens. Because I used to, my, my youngest used to used to run around for a short time period, and he would, he would add the words.com to everything. You know, he'd go sanders.com because, because, because he heard this and he sort of figured out that you could add it on to certain words and then things ha interesting things happen. So he

Vance Crowe [01:06:56] Try it out.

Michael Levin [01:06:56] And then after a few days of that, when he realized that no, it doesn't actually work for, then he stopped and then, you know, and, and it's like that, it's just a funny thing. But it's like that with, with everything they, you can see at first that it is all statistical modeling. They're just trying to repeat things they've heard before in various combinations and link and trying to get good things to happen. They're just sort of messing around with it to see what'll happen. And then before you know it, you're like, oh, you, you, you really seem like you know what you're talking about there. And that's the same creature, it's the same creature that went from state A to state B. It isn't that you have two wildly different. So, so that's just one of the many interesting things that, you know, that you can learn on this whole area from, from just from watching kids.

Vance Crowe [01:07:36] Yeah,

Michael Levin [01:07:36] There's, it's, it's an interesting thing

Vance Crowe [01:07:38] Because there's so much noise at first, right? They're trying out every single phone m that the human mind can, can possibly put together, and then they start parsing out all the ones that aren't useful. And then whatever's left over is, is signal for them to be able to use to get what they want in the world. And it's, it's fascinating to, to watch and to embrace. So we're gonna wrap up, but I want to give you

Michael Levin [01:08:02] One, one

Vance Crowe [01:08:03] Chance to do something that, for my audience that I think they'll really enjoy if they've come all the way through to this long into the interview, you are around people that are really thinking about the, the rough edges of the universe that we can just barely peak to, you know, our, your cone of cognition way out there into the way the world could, could work. You know, the Long Now Foundation is famous for asking people to think 10,000 years into the future. I don't know that I'll ask you to do 10,000 years, but give me a scenario about the future that you think is conceivable, but but way, way off in the distant future.

Michael Levin [01:08:43] Wow. I mean I I I find that very difficult in the sense that I, I think it's, I mean, we can't even, we we're, we're terrible at, at predicting things that are gonna happen 10, 20 years into the future. I find I find it really hard to, to make any kind of plausible predictions going forward. What, what I think, what I think I'll say is, is this, this one, one way in which I think the future is gonna be completely transformed, and I don't think it's gonna take thousands of years. I think it's gonna be decades, literally, but, but it's gonna transform everything. Is that the space of possible embodiments of, of agents, of various kinds, the different bodies that, that you see around you is going to be massively exploded and the, the, we're gonna live in. So, so Darwin had this, this phrase endless forms most beautiful, right? And he was looking out into, I think a riverbank and he was saying, look at all these life forms and they're so different. You know, here's a, here's grass and here's a, a bug and here's a frog. And, you know, they're so different, okay? All of that is still a tiny corner of the option space. Just, it's just an end of one of earth's particular evolution. You the, you know, the phylogenetic web here, the, the, the number of creatures that are going to exist of all kinds of different kinds of bodies and different kinds of minds is going to be astronomical. Whether it is just here in society or when we get off the planet and just sort of spread out. That's really what it means to leave the Garden of Eden.

Michael Levin [01:10:17] You know, there's this, there's this great painting Adam in the Garden of Eden, and what he is doing is he's naming the animals, right? So the animals walk up to him and he names them. So that's great and that, that's, that's fantastic when you have a finite set number of animals and there aren't anymore, like here, here are, here are, you know, a thousand different animals and that's all that there are and these are the natural kinds. That's not the world we live in. The world we live in allows every possible combination, I mean literally of, of, of living tissue designed machines, software, hybridization, between, I mean, even back then, people knew that you could sort of, you know, you had your donkeys and your horses, but you could also make a mule. That's interesting. What else could you make? Right? And so, so there were some plants, of course, people have been hybridizing for, for real, while

Vance Crowe [01:10:58] Tree grafting

Michael Levin [01:10:59] Is nothing

Vance Crowe [01:10:59] Short of black magic, right?

Michael Levin [01:11:01] Absolutely. Right. So, so, so this is what I think is gonna be the major change right now. We, you know, people think about, you know, what's gonna happen to humans and are there still gonna be humans? Well, there's gonna be someone, whether or not you want to call them humans, probably you won't. And does it matter that they don't look like humans? You don't look like an embryo when, when you wear an embryo you look completely different because you, and you have more capabilities because of it. So that's, that's the, the future that I think about mostly where, you know, it's like you, you, you know, what comes to, to me in terms of sort of popular culture in sci-fi, that that comes, the, the closest is kind of like the Star Wars universe. You know, you start with the like, like the canteen, the scene, right? So you got a bunch of aliens and you got a bunch of robots and you got, you got the ones that are basically just like drink carts on wheels that are just strolling around and bringing drinks. And you got C3 po who is, oh my God, what am I gonna do? You know, is he's, that, that, that level, that level of cognition have everything in between. You have every crazy kind of, you know, that's, that's actually the universe we're gonna be living in, whether it's already like that or whether we're going to make it like that, but

Vance Crowe [01:12:05] Sooner or

Michael Levin [01:12:05] Later that's, you know, if we don't, if, if we don't kill the whole planet, of course that's, that's what it's gonna be like. And so, so that's about the only thing I'm comfortable saying for sure, that I think is going to happen. That if we manage not to sort of kill off everybody, I think the future is an incredible diversity of bodies and minds beyond anything we could even comprehend at this point.

Vance Crowe [01:12:27] It's amazing that you use the metaphor of the Garden of Eden because Yosha Bach one time had had a commentary about the Garden of Eden is the version of childhood, right? It's the, it's the, it's the period of time where you get to name the animals and, and children are learning how to live in the world before they go out and they get scandalized in some way. And so to put it in that metaphor is, is really scary to think of as, you know, a 40-year-old adult to that you haven't left the Garden of Eden yet and you're about to, to enter the, the wild world. Yeah, in some ways is extremely exciting to me because I love newness and novelty, but it's also somewhat scary. And I, for 1:00 AM really glad that there is somebody out there as brave as you are and, and as prolific in your writing and your work. So man, I hope you just keep going as hard as you can go. 'cause I think you're, regardless of, of whatever you put into the world, the way you think about it, I think just makes the world more colorful. So thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

Michael Levin [01:13:25] Thank you so much. Yeah, that's a real pleasure. It was a good conversation. Thank you.

Vance Crowe [01:13:28] And if people wanted to learn more about your lab or, or what you're working on, what

Michael Levin [01:13:32] Would anything

Vance Crowe [01:13:33] You would direct them to?

Michael Levin [01:13:34] Yeah, we have, we have a number of websites that maybe, maybe we can put up the links with the, with the audio. So, so there's my main website, which is dr mic eleven.org and that's just my, my Tufts lab website that has all, all kinds of things relevant to the work. We have my, my Allen center, my Allen Discovery Center website, which is allen center.tufts.edu. And then I have a Twitter presence, which is at dr. Mic 11.

Vance Crowe [01:13:58] Alright, Mike Levi, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you.