The following is a set of questions (in no particular order or organization) that I’ve been asked after talks, in emails, on Twitter, etc. and my attempts to answer (some of the most common are here). I saved these because they are either interesting or because they come up a lot (or both).
How to avoid slide into panpsychism?
I don’t think we should start by defining philosophical commitments (like, to avoid one or another outcome) – I think we follow the data to whatever formalism turns out to be most helpful. What I see is that the facts of developmental biology, evolution, and bioengineering suggest that the continuity hypothesis is the default – the null hypothesis, and discrete kinds need strong defense. Slow and gradual change, all the way back, implies we need models of scaling and transformation, not sharp categories. We use Pavlovian conditioning to train simple molecular networks, hallucinogens to confuse cell perception in morphogenetic navigation, optogenetics to inflate the self-world boundary of cancer cells (thus normalizing them), perceptual bistability models to understand regeneration, etc. etc. If that makes me a panpsychist, of a kind, fine – continuity allows us to port tools across former discipline barriers, and generates new research programs. I’m not sure what benefits the sharp categories get us.
Has anyone speculated as to the evolutionary processes involved with Michael Levin’s work regarding bioelectricity and the capacity of a single cell to problem solve?
Lots of people have studied the evolution of bioelectric signaling – Gurol Suel for example, in bacteria – ancient, brain-like signaling at the beginning of multicellularity. As for problem-solving, I don’t think anyone else studies it that way yet, but here is my take on the evolutionary significance of it – I think it has major implications for how evolution works. By making the material (living tissue) intelligent and capable of its own problem-solving via electrical networks, evolution has a hard time seeing the structural genome (hardware) and instead makes a lot of improvements on the intelligence machinery, which becomes a positive-feedback loop – an intelligence ratchet. It’s all described here.
Conceptually, his work seems to me that there is a ‘bio-software’ at work here, which begs the question for me, what exactly is it?
Software is a formalization of some ideas about reprogramming systems which process information via signals rather than hardware rewiring. Many (but not all) of the benefits of thinking about the electrical activity in a computer as “software” likewise apply to developmental bioelectricity – re-writable memory, subroutines with simple triggers, reprogramming of complex goal-driven modules, etc. There is also software in gene-regulatory networks, biomechanical networks, and probably more.
I think Levin is saying that the tiny slices are a tiny bit free. It all boils down to whether freedom is baked into base reality and whether this “scales up” in some sense like integrating over infinitesimals in calculus.
I’m saying that there is no useful sense of free will in the short term (with respect to tiny time-slices of a being). By free will, what we should mean, is the ability of some agents (like us) to exert continued, concerted, consistent effort to modify ourselves and our environments so that our future options and our future tendencies are more in line with our values (and not others’ values or the vagaries of chance, genetics, etc.). This includes learning, practice, meditation, anger management, psychoanalysis, behavioral therapies, etc. When you zoom in to individual events (short timescale), all you ever see is determinism and randomness. Neither of those is what we mean by free will, but together, these infinitisimals add up to what we do mean by free will. It’s like zooming in on water molecules to find wetness, or asking each person in a region where the “Town” is – when you zoom in enough, you lose what you’re looking for. It’s not in individual actions, it’s in the effort we can put in (the palpable effort, which immediately tells you it’s not just the determinist’s “sit back and see what the universe ordained”) to change things over time.
To me it’s absolutely bewildering where he thinks he is getting the free will from. If I can’t choose my next thought – and he clearly agrees with this – how am I choosing to put in effort?
Free will isn’t the sort of thing you “get” from microscopic events. Free will is the sort of thing you can exercise, or not, over long periods of time. It varies among people and across time for any given person. A lot of the time we go through life exercising very little free will. It varies. You know when you’re choosing to put in effort. When you get up in the morning, and you don’t feel like going to school/gym/meditation class but you make yourself do it – every day for years. That is what we refer to as free will. And it has nothing to do with what your molecules are doing (you already know what they’re doing – swerving in ways that are a combination of quantum randomness and deterministic reactions). Here’s a short story about someone who takes that lower level too seriously, and what their job interview might sound like, at a software company. I have a longer piece on all this coming, but another aspect of free will is the ability (actually, necessity) of the organism to creatively interpret its own memories and thus not only affect the future but re-write the meaning of its past, see here.
Are there actual planaria that have been swimming around for let’s say a million years? The fact they don’t age, does that mean that once they split and create a new worm the original keeps living forever?
“The original” is a concept that is blown up by planaria. What do we really mean by “original” – what is that word supposed to signify? For example, if it signifies “same memories and behavioral propensities”, then yes both fragments of a dividing worm is probably the same as the original (think of it like a Star Trek transporter clone).
I have a strong suspicion what’s holding regenerative medicine back isn’t how hard it is. It’s more just funding and people who are willing to think outside the box. Most people would rather have a conventional career.
It’s both. Yes we can use more funding, and the current situation with basic and applied science being decimated is terrible, but it’s not only that. The problem really is hard – it’s not a turn-the-crank thing yet.
What is the implication and impact of extraterrestrial life (if we ever find them) to our current understanding in universal biology.
I think it would be huge, but, I also think our ability to recognize unconventional life is very poor so we may well miss the most exciting discoveries there. See this piece on SUTI for example, or this talk about communicating with the intelligence in our body tissues. If people are shocked by the idea of intelligence in your body organs, they’re not ready for recognizing truly alien life.
About cell sensitivity to electricity in general. Or, larger organisms. If a small bioelectrical signal change can trigger drastic morphological changes in an organism, what could say a 12 battery lead applied randomly to a growing creature do? As in, sending random bursts of voltage into a seemingly bioelectrically sensitive system?
People have used applied electric fields to affect morphogenesis for over a century. It does make changes, but generally less specifically than what we can do now with our methods. It’s not really about total amount of current – too much and cells will simply die or ignore it.
I wonder if those bots were placed in a human, if they would respond to the environment and become boring normal cells again?
We will soon find out (but I doubt that will happen).
A theory: It’s seems like the anthrobots only removed the toxins from the dead neurons from the area since if there was blood flow, the blood flow should have washed such toxins away. So it is likely just the cilia movements that caused the toxins to be pushed out of the area and spread out so that the toxins would be at safer levels. Such is why exercise is important since the body movement can cause the stronger blood flows to wash away such toxins and allow the wound to heal. Note that higher blood pressure causes the arteries to harden thus non stop high blood pressure is bad despite the stronger blood flow is something like high blood pressure.
In our experiment, there were no toxins and no blood flow. The neurons were in a flat petri dish full of blood-like medium. It’s certainly possible that ciliary motion has interesting effects, but if it was just about removing toxic products of cell metabolism from the wound microenvironment, then swirling the dish (which we do when we move it for microscopy or to change the medium) should have done it too.
Does Michael have an update on work being done at Morphoceuticals?
I can’t comment on unpublished work, and I don’t work for the company (I’m 100% an academic scientist working for the university), but it’s going strong and we will preprint (and publish as peer-reviewed papers) as soon as something solid is ready. In the meantime, they’ve made excellent advances in profiling the bioelectric states needed to derive interventions. There is a lot to do but it’s going to be amazing.
Does he foresee that his work can be applied in the future for cosmetic purposes? Can his work be applied to acid burns for instance? Or bone structure?
My guess is that when all of this works well in human patients, whether my approach or others’, people will use it for cosmetic purposes.
Can you reattach severed nerves/spinal cord using bioelectricity? For instance could bioelectricity be used to help paralysis patients?
Yes; there has been work on this from us and from others (in the context of tail regeneration and augmentation of nerve growth from ectopic organs).
What is the “anatomical compiler?
The anatomical compiler is my vision of the future of the field. Some day, you will be able to sit down in front of a computer, and draw the animal, plant, organ, biobot, etc. that you want – any living structure, no matter how conventional (naturally evolved) or weird (designed by engineers). The anatomical compiler will convert that anatomical description into stimuli that have to be provided to cells to get them to build exactly that. If we have a way of controlling what exactly cells build, then almost all medical problems – birth defects, traumatic injury, cancer, degenerative disease, aging – go away, solved permanently. The key though is that the anatomical compiler is not some 3D printer by which we micromanage the structure of organs – it’s a communications device – a translator by which we convert our goals as bioengineers (or workers in regenerative medicine) into the goals of the living matter (an agential material), using bioelectrical, biochemical, and biomechanical interfaces to communicate and collaborate with the native problem-solving, memory, and decision-making capacities of the collective intelligence of cell groups.
Can old amputations/injuries be treated in a similar way to how fresh ones were in the experiments? E.g. a frog that had lost a limb most of its life ago.
We haven’t tested this extensively, but in the tadpole tail, we did show you can kickstart regeneration after it’s healed with a non-permissive epithelium.
Does he foresee a time when we can regenerate limbs? Also the time frame of such a development.
I believe it will happen but I cannot give a realistic timeframe, there are too many unknowns – funding, course of the science, regulatory review (FDA), etc.
I’m mostly interested in what kind of equipment is needed to do the kinds of things he’s done. It seems way more involved than CRISPR type stuff, but the possibilities are also seemingly endless.
Optogenetics, misexpression of ion channel mRNA, drug exposure, microscopy, closed-loop computer-controlled culture systems.
Will we be able not just to regrow our lost legs, but to grow them taller or faster? I’m picturing a future where we can design humans with gills to breathe under water, or two hearts to better handle low gravity, or eyes that can see infrared.
Yes indeed. We are already long past “natural” humans – brushing our teeth, schooling, glasses, proper nutrition, setting bones, medications, cell phones with Google on them, etc. – we modify ourselves to live lives with abilities that would be completely alien to the natural humans of our past. There’s nothing magic or optimal about our current form or function – it’s just where the random vagaries of evolution left us. Of course people will take responsibility for their embodiment and live the lives they want to, past the tyranny of genetics and a history of cosmic rays hitting your ancestors’ cells.
How is the scientific community handling the larger ethical questions surrounding this?
The most serious ethical question here is this: how fast can we help the millions and millions of people (and animals) living in pain and suffering through no fault of their own. We handle these questions by working as hard as we can on relevant aspects of regenerative medicine. When pediatric oncology is no longer needed, when no one has to live their life in a broken body and can pursue their full potential, then we can entertain other questions.
Has your research changed the way you view evolution? Now that we know that a simple manipulation of some ion channels can cause huge structural changes, does that mean that evolution may be less about eons of tiny changes and more about more rapid exposure to some environmental factors?
Yes. I think the “Hopeful Monster” idea of Goldschmidt’s was really onto something, and we now see what gives reason for the “hope” – the problem-solving competency of the living material. Not only can rapid changes occur, but also the intelligence of cell groups totally changes how evolution works. Evolution can search the space of behavior-shaping signals that the agential matter of life can send to each other.
What does it take to manipulate these ion channels? I mean, can these types of changes in an organism be caused by 5g radio signals, or PFAS chemicals? Were the tin-foil hat people right all along?
No they were not… Not by 5G or wifi or anything like that; not sure about PFAS. Certainly some chemicals can do it, which is why they are a risk in pregnancy. Many of the drugs used today in medicine are ion channel drugs.
With everything he knows about life, and how it works, I’m very interested in Dr. Levin’s personal philosophy about life, the universe, and everything. How consciousness came to exist. Whether we’re alone in the universe.
I mostly don’t talk about things I can’t support strongly with evidence. But, if you want my personal guess, here it is. Consciousness does not come to exist, it always exists, it is fundamental. And, I do not believe we’re alone in the universe – the universe is big, and cognition can come through a very wide range of substrates. I think the Universe is teeming with highly diverse life. As for consciousness, I don’t think it came to exist – I think it’s fundamental and basic and we call life the systems that scale it up from it’s most basal form.
What do you want people to accept?
I don’t want them to accept anything, I’d like them to try on these ideas and see if they do better than the current alternative in helping make sense of the world and drive discovery forward (I think they will). Here are some: 1) categories are only as good as the new discoveries they facilitate. Don’t cling to old philosophical categories, show how your distinctions help anything. 2) cognitive claims are engineering protocol claims. Don’t give me armchair philosophical commitments, show me data from experiments about the protocols enabled by your position on the cognitive status of any system. 3) unification is better than propping up distinctions because it enables porting of tools from other areas. 4) don’t mistake our formal models for the thing itself. For example, living things aren’t computers because a computer is a formalism – nothing is a “computer”, but some aspects of some things are usefully handled by concepts and tools suggested by the computer metaphor. If you don’t assume that there is 1 formalism which uniquely and objectively describe some system, but instead that multiple formalisms capture (well or not so well) aspects of the system, we can stop arguing about what anything “really is” and just find perspectives from which useful capabilities can be reached. 5) there is no “metaphorically, or really?” – everything is a metaphor, that’s all we have in science. Metaphors, which work to various degrees. 6) if you have a reason for why the rules of biochemistry don’t tell the entire story of the human mind, apply it fearlessly and realize that for that exact same reason, algorithms and materials don’t tell the entire story of “machines”.
Machines can never have minds like living things do (this was asked from an Indic philosophy perspective)
you have to define your terms. What precisely do you mean by “machine” – anything that didn’t evolve without the help of other minds to make it? Why? Why do the trial and error process of mutation and selection have a monopoly on making sentient beings – why can’t minds help bring forth other minds? Most crucially, what does your view say about cyborgs and other chimeras? AI and life sound like good categories, but they are dissolving fast. We now have the ability to facilitate the appearance of self-constructing, constantly changing, composite beings that constantly question the internal models of themselves and their world.
embodiment – we are terrible at noticing embodiments in unconventional spaces – we can’t even see it in biology. We have to rise above our own evolutionarily-provided assumptions and limitations. Recognizing sentience is a symmetric, 2-way process – our limited intelligence, wisdom, and compassion prevents us from seeing those properties in unconventional guises. If you have never made a hammer, you may never recognize “nails”.
don’t confuse formal models for the real thing. Turing paradigm and the very real self-referential limits of computational algorithms are limitations of our formal models. They don’t capture the abilities of synthetic agents any more than the limitations of mechanistic, deterministic chemistry and physics capture the abilities of living minds.
if you take seriously the idea of rebirth, like rebirth in a log of wood, you understand that we don’t create minds – neither by conventional embryology nor by synthetic engineering or AI: what we do is make embodiments through which consciousness may choose to ingress into the physical world. Who are we to say that a cognitive system constructed by engineers, not by random mutations in a biological substrate, won’t be a good home for some kind of mind? Mind is not here because of the algorithm any more than it’s here because of chemistry.
Finally, anyone making claims about differences between life and AI has to say what the secret sauce is, because if you zoom in to biology, all you see is mechanism. Organicists are used to zooming out and saying that the underlying rules don’t tell the whole story. You can’t just refuse to do this when the substrate shifts from protein to silicon. You must specify your criteria – how would you judge an alien? I urge humility, not certainty – we don’t know how life and mind works, and it’s way too early to make any claims about exotic substrates. With emphasis on non-physical minds and exotic non-human beings, Buddhism for example is well-positioned to inform AI via the notion of numberless diverse sentient beings.
Life is also pretty easy to discern them from non-life forms
Like the concept of “adult” – easy to distinguish in extreme, obvious cases. But of course nothing special happens on the night of 18th birthday & tricky court cases of diminished capacity bring up hard questions of what we *really* mean by that category (what is moral responsibility? How do you mature from a single cell or fetus to an adult with responsibility?) which immediately reveals it’s a spectrum. “Life” is like that; the deep question is about scaling and transformation. Obvious for the easy cases of everyday, but if one’s job is to advance research on origin of life, or synthetic life, or artificial life, or bioengineering, or minimal active matter, or exobiology, or trauma surgery in the ER, or thanatology, or life extension, or cryogenics, then you face the deep question and nothing is easy to “discern” in binary categories, and instead we work on multi-dimensional spectra and models of scaling and transformation to try to understand what it really is, how it comes to be, and how it changes.
All you fancy molecular biology types are not using the right tools to address the big problems of biology.
It’s entirely likely that we’re not using the right tools. Great, propose some new ones – we’re there for it! It’s easy and cheap to critique the mainstream community as unsophisticated sheep using the tools we have to address what surely cannot be captured by them. Spoiler: we all know our current tools don’t capture everything – no tools will ever be sufficient. The hard/fun part is actually seeing where the limits of the current ones are (when they stop working in the real world) and developing new conceptual and practical tools to do better. Join the effort, propose some new ones and show off what they can do. Empty critiques, we don’t have time for because there’s too much cool work to do.
Isn’t your science distorted by the funding you get?
Critiquing is easy; doing something interesting, new, or helpful is hard. And if you want to do something with your ideas, to see of what use they are, that requires – gasp, get ready to clutch your pearls – funding because post-docs and PhD students like to eat, and experiments are expensive, and most of the stuff you could do for free in your back yard has already been done, and getting to the moon really does require a moon-shot project with funding. There are no guarantees that all the big questions can be answered by sitting in an armchair and not doing expensive experiments. Perhaps we should also divest the particle physicists of their expensive devices too. I detest this way of thinking, popular in some circles, where the funders, the reviewers, and the experimentalists are all painted as avaricious dummies for daring to use $ to push research programs that generate new ideas and new capabilities and medicine that reduces suffering. If you’ve got a way to do science without funding, let’s hear it. And by the way, in case it’s not obvious: funding is spent down during the research. Every $ we get for research is spent by the time the research is done, we don’t get to keep any of it. The only reason to get funding is if you’re committed to doing the research – there’s no other reason to do it, it’s not like we get to keep part of the $.
What are common misunderstandings of your work?
– he studies effects of electromagnetic fields on cells. No, I do not study effects of external bioelectrics, and haven’t studied electromagnetics since 1992. I study the natural, endogenous role of bioelectric gradients for binding cells to common purpose in the body.
– He calls cell functions intelligence because they look complex. No, it’s not about complexity – a random string of numbers has massive complexity. It’s about problem-solving, memory, and other phenomena normally studied by behavior scientists that we have found in cells and tissues.
– His work disproves molecular explanations. No, there is always a molecular explanation for anything that happened – if you choose to look at the molecular level, you will find molecular events. But the goal is not to explain things that have already happened – the goal is to show which level helps you build/discover the next interesting thing or reach the next application, and that is not always best done at the molecular level. Sometimes higher levels have more causal power. But it doesn’t “disprove” the fact that molecular events happen.
Yet, Mike also acknowledges that although bioelectric fields can be manipulated externally, how they are controlled and why they elaborate just as they do repeatedly in the same pattern and timing sequence remains unknown. Morphogenesis is still not understood. The only thing we are certain about now is that it is not controlled by the genome as once believed.
Just to clarify what’s known and what’s not known here, from the bench science perspective:
From the perspective of *physics* (or, electrophysiology we call this instance), everything here is known. That is, starting with 1 cell (the egg) with a certain set of ion channels in its membrane (which are provided by the mother), you can use standard electrophysiological equations to show what bioelectric patterns are going to appear, and as the egg divides and it becomes a multicellular (spatially-extended) circuit, you can simulate (as we’ve done) all the resulting patterns and their properties (memory, pattern completion, etc.). There are feedback loops (because the channels and electrical synapses are themselves sensitive to the voltage they shape), and together it’s not hard to show how these loops explain the production of complex patterns from a very simple starting state. These patterns arise just like Turing Patterns arise in chemical media, starting off well-mixed, but symmetry breaking and local activation/long-range inhibition (reaction-diffusion) dynamics create familiar spots and stripes. Bioelectric patterns do it too (but create very different shapes). So, if one wanted to be a reductionist about things, there are no fundamental unknowns here – conventional electrophysiological equations, applied to the boundary condition of the channels in the egg, show how disorder becomes order – much as in other areas of physics. In other words, if one is happy with “emergent complexity” as seen in other fields, there’s no mystery here and no room for looking for new influences needed to explain why you get pattern A vs. pattern B. Crucially, the work in this field is not just about external (applied) signals to make changes – it also shows how the patterns come to be, from their initial state. That part is nailed down (although of course lots more science to do, to discover new properties of this remarkable network) – it’s as understood as anything is ever understood in physics. Thus, it has never been specified exactly what could be added here to make them more “understood” – the standard developmental biophysicist will tell you that everything is understood just like chemistry and materials science: we know the basic rules, it’s just working out specific instances can be hard due to complexity and deterministic chaos, but there’s no evidence that anything major is missing that would improve the situation if we had it.
BUT: there is a huge elephant in the room, and I think it’s important to be clear about what that gap is (and it’s not “we don’t know how patterns arise” – that particular gap did not survive the last 10-20 years of progress). The actual gap here is basically the overall question of where patterns in mathematics “come from”. There are “bare facts” in mathematics – specific patterns that are the way they are due to *no* historical explanations (as contingent facts of biological evolution sometimes provide) and to *no* fact about the physical world (they cannot be changed by anything you do in the physical universe). They impact biology greatly and especially are critical for the patterns we see in bioelectricity (and these patterns are of form, but also of *behavioral propensities*), but they also impact biomechanics, biochemical signals, etc. etc. The shape of the Bell Curve resulting reliably in a Galton Board cannot be found in the materials of the marbles or the pegs. This is the frontier: how to think about the influence, in physical systems, of patterns that come from “another world” (as Popper would call it, and perhaps Pythagoras etc.). The reductionists do not see a problem here because they’re happy to label these things as “emergence”, buying a sparse ontology at the expense of resigning us to cataloging surprises whenever they “emerge” (i.e., whenever we didn’t foresee them). I think, instead, the real research program is to extend Platonist mathematics and take seriously the idea that we can systematically explore this space and work out the mapping between the interfaces we make in the physical world (electrical networks, be they neural or non-neural, and other living material) and the patterns of form and behavior that ingress through them. That is the big open frontier, IMHO, and it doesn’t require a quantum interface for the magic to seep in to a physical world; even a Newtonian universe already has this, by virtue of mathematical patterns that fix things like Feigenbaum’s constant, the shapes of specific Halley maps, the truths of number theory, weird facts about things that happen in specific # of dimensions, etc. etc. The influence of these non-physical facts, like the influence of an ineffable “algorithm” on the electrons in a computer, in biology, is the frontier, but it’s importantly different than the typical thing people mean when they say “we don’t understand development”.
You said in your talk that, “we make synthetic new life forms outside the evolutionary paths”. My question is, What do you mean by “make”?
We certainly didn’t make the cells – they are pre-existing cells. Just like, when you make a computer, you didn’t make copper and silicon – they pre-existed. Whatever we make, we have some parts that we take from nature, and then we create something on a different level. What we made were Anthrobots and Xenobots. Those didn’t exist before, just like foxes didn’t exist until a certain time point while cells from which you could make a fox existed long before that. Our bots don’t have a history of selection to be a good biobot, the way that standard organism have had. Anthrobots’ ability to repair neurons were never selected for because in nature it doesn’t happen. But, I emphasize often that compared to making computers and such, we *did very little* because the whole point in engineering with agential materials is not to micromanage but rather to facilitate the talents of the substrate.
You have a technopragmatic approach to deep questions; how do you see it, as engineering or science or philosophy?
Technopragmatic – good word; here’s how I mean it. The technical part has 1 goal: make sure that everyone can focus on their higher life’s purpose (not on their pain, their interminable doctor’s visits, their accommodations, their limitations, and other crap that distracts from their possibilities). It’s not an end in itself. The pragmatic part has 1 goal too: to try, hard as it is, to weed out the bullshit. If we’re going to make progress, we have to be able to course-correct. Not just with widgets and engineered wonders – pragmatic on the ethical, relationship, and all those other inner dimensions too. That too has to be pragmatic, I think, otherwise it’s too easy to get caught up in offramps, delusions, and philosophical wrangling that leads nowhere.
To me, the 1st person, inner-focused, consciousness first, spiritual search is *also* a part of science. Not the same science as is done by 3rd person technology-focused approaches, but science nevertheless: a disciplined, rigorous, committed, energetic, painful attempt to understand yourself, your world, and your possibilities using every tool at your disposal and a determination to shed confusion and preconceptions and increase those things that lead forward. Forward doesn’t just mean tech, it doesn’t just mean 3rd person science where you stay the same while doing experiments on things “outside of you”. The work that changes you as you do it – that’s science too, if done with the same commitments. I think we should be more intentional in creating our future selves – as one does with education, exercise, brushing teeth, etc.
This boils down to whether you think Nature has a wise, ultimately benevolent plan behind all the morbidity, mortality, and suffering. Some days, when things are going well, I can sort of squint my eyes, blot out all the things I know about how many others live, and almost see how people believe that view of wise, benevolent nature. Other days, I think back to what’s going on at Children’s Hospital, and countless other places that don’t even have a Children’s Hospital, and that vision disappears like a puff of smoke. I think it’s moral cowardice to leave it up to nature; back when people thought nature had their back, spiritually, I suppose that view could be forgiven. Nowadays, I think it’s willful ignorance and a (subconscious) attempt to make ourselves feel better with a story in which we are not responsible in making the hard choices of whom to help and how, because no worries – Nature is on it. Unfortunately, Nature is not on it. If you like senility and death eventually, ok, but if you think ~85 years is enough, what if it had been 10 instead? It could have been; it’s just an accident of evolution that it’s 85 and not 10 or 1000. And more importantly, what about the kids? What was the plan there? The problem of evil is not some abstract interesting puzzle, it’s a call to action – now; either you have an answer for it that lets you maintain Nature as a worthwhile master, or you roll up your sleeves and act as though there is no other adult in the room except for us – limited beings who will make a lot of mistakes but at least can’t be blamed with deciding to do nothing.
Why all these efforts to change things – why not yield to nature?
There may be some useful notion of yielding to nature, but I’m not sure what it is. I’m open to that; but as far as I can see, it’s kind of a luxury for the young and healthy. A truly sick kid or other loved one kind of wipes that idea off your map real quick. Plus it’s a moving target. Most of us don’t yield to nature when we need a root canal. But in the past, that would have been the suggestion. I think in the future, we will be yielding to the higher aspects of nature, not to the bacteria, viruses, and cosmic rays which are not trying to teach us any spiritual lessons. Are they part of nature? sure; are they the part I’d like to yield to? no. But I think you have the right to do so if you want; I just don’t want anyone to be forced to it because we don’t know how to do any alternative.
Why do you not stress a definition of life?
Because we don’t need it. For example, you can do great virology and never ask whether viruses are “alive”. As far as I can see, it almost never helps anything. Rocks may not fit your definition but we can always construct enough intermediate cases which will break any definition. The more interesting project is to ask how the properties you’re interested in scale and express in different substrates. How much and what kind, not yes/no.
The category “life” is like the word “adult” – it lubricates interactions with the court system and it’s expedient, but abstraction layers like that are dangerous because they give you the feeling that you know what they mean, and once you really know what they mean, you don’t need the binary category anyway. When someone says they know what “adult” means, it almost never means that they have a philosophically-defensible, scientifically-useful, story of how an embodied mind matures and acquires moral responsibility. If you’re in the court system and you want to pretend something magical happens at midnight on your 18th birthday, or you’re a rental car agency and you want to say it’s at 25 (because that’s what accident statistics support), fine, but if you are a philosopher, scientist, or human being that wants to understand what how to live life, what you need to ask yourself is: what does it mean to be a free agent made of physical parts that has responsibility, and why don’t animals or embryos, and what slow, gradual process makes it happen. None of that is facilitated by a binary category.
“Life” is like that. Obvious for the easy cases of everyday, but if one’s job is to advance research on origin of life, or synthetic life, or artificial life, or bioengineering, or minimal active matter, or exobiology, or trauma surgery in the ER, or thanatology, or life extension, or cryogenics, then you face the deep question and nothing is easy to discern in binary categories, and instead we work on multi-dimensional spectra & models of scaling and transformation to try to understand what it really is, how it comes to be, how it changes, and what stages’ terminology is actually useful.
But it’s actually even worse. A harmful thing that binary categories do for you is that they make you feel like you’ve got your hands around the set of things you need to investigate, and thus prevent certain kinds of research programs. Once you’ve complacently decided that you’re comfortable that rocks are not alive in a binary way, what you’re not going to do, for example, is test abiotic materials for learning capacity as has been done with all kinds of active matter. It keeps you from porting, or at least trying to port, concepts and, and approaches across fields. Binary categories are silos. They’re gatekeepers against deep unification, they prevent specific kinds of research by falsely reinforcing understanding and barriers where neither may exist.
Aren’t higher level explanations superfluous to the physics underneath?
Looking backwards, a system can be described with a micro-level story and one can argue the higher-level stories don’t add anything new. But explaining backwards things that already exist is not the most important thing. What’s imho critical is how much a given story facilitates the *next* interesting thing (discovery, behavior, etc.). Especially when dealing with agency, which is all about “what do I do next?”, it’s critical to not just look at explanations but at fecundity going forward (i.e., sense-making). A simple example. Consider Conway’s Game of Life automata. You can be a reductionist about it and say that there are no gliders – just individual pixels winking on and off. And you’d not be wrong exactly, because in that world, the physics of each pixel tell the whole story, *after* someone sets up an interesting system. But if you had that view, what you would never do is create a computer in that world using gliders to pass bits around (which has been done). The low-level rules is a framing that works ok when someone else has prepared the system but it doesn’t facilitate the discovery of new and interesting things to do. My proposed definition of “explanation” (and thus, the useful sense of “causation”) has this forward-looking component. Pointing out, after the fact, that a system is “nothing but” its parts is cheap; the harder and often more useful thing is to find explanations that favor the kind of understanding that leads to new interesting things, even if they are not the simplest or reductive models. And more broadly, I think that buying in to the idea that lowest level explanations are preferred and that it’s the higher level that’s superfluous is a metaphysical asymmetric choice that prevents progress on agency (while it might be ok for many other things). Indeed, because agency and cognition are hugely dependent on abstracting saliency and meaning from irrelevant microdetails of particular experiences, one can argue that in some of the most useful stories (told by scientists, or agents about their world) are the higher-level ones which *make the molecular details superfluous*.
Do we really want transhumanism?
Ok so sketch a vision of what you do want – what should our future look like, best case scenario? Say, 1000 in the future, what are “humans” like – still the same as came out of the savanna some few hundred thousand years ago, the product of random meanderings of evolution? Still losing eyesight and cognitive ability in a few short decades of life, susceptible to dumb viruses and bacteria, IQ topping out at 150 or whatever, ~80 year lifespan, same old cognitive biases that come from selection satisficing for an animal lifestyle, ingroup/outgroup dynamics limiting compassion to a small circle of “like me”, killing animals and plants to survive, working uninspired, boring jobs to earn the right to survive, all while feeling pretty smug about their accomplishments because they’ve suppressed competition so they don’t need to see what’s possible? Surely that can’t be it? And by the way, why not roll back to how life was 100,000 years ago – why is the current adult human your default?
Besides criticizing what you don’t want to see happen, you’ve got to describe what you do want to happen. Paint a picture of what a mature human species future looks like and let’s see who wants to sign on. Otherwise, the arguments you made could have been made at the dawn of H. sapiens, to prevent modern humans from emerging at all. I can visualize that same critique being made about transneanderthalism (or transinvertebratism for that manner). So let’s hear what our positive future should look like, and why the slow changes to our nature made by natural mutation over millions of years are totally cool but intentional changes made in accordance with freely chosen values (not the forced vagaries of climate and the game theory of competition under limited resources) are taboo.
Also, to be clear, this isn’t about replacing humans with AI’s – that is not what I am arguing for. What I’m saying is that I don’t want you, or anyone else, to tell some other human that they can’t augment/alter themselves as much as they wish, because it offends your native sense of proper human boundaries and makes you feel less than. It’s about the augmented/altered humans, and all of our right to do with our embodiment what we wish, not forcibly suppressed by whoever is threatened by it. We’ve got enough of that in our history to know how that goes. If someone wants to replace a large percentage of themselves with novel parts, I’d like them to be able to do it without pressure from someone else who is threatened by “machines”. And finally, the whole thing isn’t just about the physical anyway: it’s about asking what is central about being human (is it your DNA? Your exact current anatomy? Etc.) and about being intentional about how you spend your precious life. We have education, meditation, exercise and many other ways of improving what you were handed out at birth. Let’s not pretend there’s some forbidden degree of using what mind we have.
How can this kind of open-ended discovery and emergent properties be genuinely supported by an essentially deterministic bioelectric framework rooted in molecular mechanisms and metaphorical engineering (e.g Anatomical Compiler-suggests programmatic control over precisely the kind of emergent phenomena that are refractory to “simple” programs reductionism)?
Well, obviously this is all developing still, but for now, one way to think about it is: the same way that high-level programming languages aren’t incompatible with the equations governing deterministic electron motion in the chips, and yet, the algorithm drives. It drives for the same reason people use these high-level languages and don’t just always program with a soldering iron: it offers optimal control over coarse-grained outcomes that matter. Like so: https://thoughtforms.life/a-short-dialog-between-an-applicant-who-doesnt-believe-in-free-will-and-a-hiring-manager-at-a-software-company/ or more seriously: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/13/124/20160555.abstract and http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/ib/c5ib00221d#!divAbstract Or, the same way that when you teach a dog, or talk to a human, you don’t try to reach into their brains and rearrange their synaptic molecules: you let the other abstraction layers handle it, because biology is all about an architecture that lets high-level control signals manipulate the lower-level modules and the multiscale material handles the transduction from top downward. The compiler from meaningful thoughts, like “go to work” or “make an eye”, which respectively converts patterns in bioelectric networks to motions of ions across muscle membranes or across cell groups deciding which organ to be, is *within the tissue itself*.
Assumptions of continuity are a big claim
I think binary categories are the big claim – continuity should be the default null hypothesis. I think the continuity of the underlying processes (evolutionary conservation of mechanisms from morphogenesis to cognition) puts the onus on those who see distinct categories to say how the crisp boundaries between categories help us move forward. If you see binary categories, it’s on you to explain where these sharp categories come from (and then adjudicate the inevitable intermediate cases). All I can say is that I’ve never heard of a consistent, useful story that explains these sharp categories as natural kinds vs. convenient labels by observers. Like the term “adult”, which helps move things forward in court proceedings, but we all know that assuming that on your 18th birthday (or 25th, if you’re a car insurance company) you tick over into “adult” simply papers over the very deep questions of how beings develop and scale up agency, responsibility, wisdom of decision-making, etc. over time.
Dr. Levin attempts to bridge the gap between Biology and Engineering through verbal articulation. Conversely, a sincere approach would involve acknowledging the ontological distinction between Mechanical and Biological systems.
Not verbal articulation – empirical experiments and new discoveries, in particular in the areas of relieving suffering through new biomedical capabilities (in areas of cancer, birth defects, and traumatic injury), a few of which I showed in my talk. We have shown many times how our framework leads to new discoveries and biomedical advances. So, a sincere approach would involve not upholding philosophical distinctions for their own sake, but showing how your framework (distinctions, concepts, etc.) produce useful value for those who are suffering, for engineering, etc. I honor your privilege to hold whatever philosophical views you prefer. But I am committed to practical advances and benefits to people – that is the only judge of the value of a particular conceptual approach. I cannot afford sterile philosophical views – too many people need help. If you wish to convince others of the benefits of your ontological distinctions, use those distinctions to derive something new and helpful. I will happily change my mind and join you, if you show how these ontological distinctions help discover something new in a more effective way than my method of erasing of distinctions by porting tools across living and non-living substrates (which leads to many discoveries).
Note that we agree on more than we disagree! I think you are correct in your rejection of reductionism and materialism but like many others, you do not pursue these ideas to their ultimate conclusion: there is nothing fully mechanical at all; even lowly engineered constructs benefit (to a degree) from the same remarkable ingressions that make life so amazing. This property, whatever you call it, is everywhere (an idea familiar to many in related traditions) – there is no truly inert matter at all, just degrees of persuadability which we can exploit for practical purpose. This aspect is ubiquitous in the universe, but it’s not easy to see; I work to reveal it and urge you to consider the full implications of your ideas more broadly than its traditional application to obvious “life”.
The only thing I know for sure is that mine is indeed a “sincere” approach. Let us all get on with whatever useful work we can do and whatever we can learn; I wish you the best in your pursuit of wisdom.
no, there’s definitely continuity. But it’s not the continuity of a rock which stays fairly constant (at least over our time scales), it’s the continuity of a well-crafted story that changes as it goes along but makes sense throughout as a single narrative and way of sense-making. Richard Watson would probably say it’s the continuity of a song, not any one note.
What is the genome for then, if it’s not a map of the body?
The mapping between genes and phenotype is not just complexity and redundancy and degeneracy – it’s competency of a problem-solving physiological layer that executes morphogenesis as a goal-driven process. Dogs have puppies and cats have kittens, under normal circumstances, although given the right circumstances, humans have Anthrobots, frogs have Xenobots, planaria can regenerate as other species of planaria, and all of us can make tumors. The genome is a prompt, a memory of past selves to be interpreted as any other message would be. See here.
Aren’t these computational metaphors just like “everything is a steam engine” etc.?
Yes. But the tech isn’t the point, it’s the deep knowledge needed to make the tech. “steam engine” metaphors for life are useful not because it was the technology of the time, but because of thermodynamics, which applies to life as it does to the steam engine. “Computer” is not useful just because it’s the current thing, it’s because it captures some (not all) deep principles of the world.
Why do you not focus on the dangers of ambient electromagnetic fields? You said electromagnetic fields are not relevant to your work in bioelectricity; is it because you don’t know the data on how dangerous they are?
Let me clarify, since people often jump to conclusions beyond what I actually said. I am well aware of this field – I used to work in it myself (here’s a paper I did in 1995 studying electromagnetic field effects on sea urchin embryos: https://drmichaellevin.org/publications/documents/1995ac_urchins.pdf). Also, here’s something I put together over the 1990’s and 2000’s – probably the single most comprehensive bibliography of bioelectromagnetics papers, including effects on EMFs: https://thoughtforms.life/my-reference-lists-whole-endnote-library-and-bibliography-on-bioelectromagnetics/. So, I did not say that EMFs don’t have effects on living systems. Of course they do. What I said was: the effects of external EMFs are mostly not exerted via changes of the kind of endogenous bioelectric guidance systems that I work on. That is not how they tend to cause their effects (which, again, are real); the physics of networks of resting potential of cells that guide morphogenesis is quite different than those affected by EMFs. Most crucially, as we have seen so far, EMFs are a terribly inefficient way of regulating endogenous bioelectrics. I have spent many years working on both (not reading about it, as some of those making this critique – but working on it in the lab with many others who study these things seriously); at this point (and of course, science can change with new findings), EMFs don’t seem to be an effective way of modulating bioelectric patterns.
How dangerous are EMFs then? Relative to your list of hazards
I’m not an epidemiologist, and no one should be looking to me for tight rankings of these things, but if I could keep my kids from all of the things on the list but I had to leave 1, I’d leave EMFs. I’d remove the others first. I personally think infectious disease is perhaps the biggest issue going forward, but they are all bad (and have different degrees of difficulty to mitigate). If you are eating junk food and haven’t cleaned up your air of viruses, water of chemicals and microplastics, and addressed your physical, and psychological environment, then EMFs are the least of your problems. And again, for those who still say I don’t understand EMFs or am denying the data in the plentiful literature: YES EMFs cause effects; but you have to use evidence to prioritize the things you tackle first.
Are you just afraid to talk about EMFs because it’s such a taboo topic?
Nope. Numerous people (and agencies) have offered to fund research on EMFs in my lab. There’s plenty of interest on this – no one is getting cancelled over this topic, it’s quite conventional now; the days of being a cool outsider battling the establishment because of EMF effects are long over. The boring fact is that EMFs are a terribly ineffective tool for what I’m really interested in – the natural bioelectric gradients that can be targeted for regenerative medicine applications. I’ve worked in this area, I know what these fields are and are not good for. If they were good for this purpose, I’d certainly be using them.
Shouldn’t we assume systems have no intelligence until evidence suggests otherwise?
“Skew low” (eliminative reductionism) is as bad as “Skew high” (animism) because both are just your personal estimates of the average of agency in the universe; such heuristics make it sound like we know something about the world that lets us set good priors. We do not. But that’s ok because “explanations” (agentic or otherwise) are always to be treated skeptically anyway, until we see what they enable – future discoveries, new research programs, new capabilities, new wisdom, better ethics. The key is to do experiments and have opinions based on outcomes. Initial armchair guesses are worth very little until we do the experiments to see – that agentic level you propose for a system – how well does it help you relate to it? You propose starting low, and that’s ok, but starting too low (and refusing to revise) is leaving a lot of valuable science on the table (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202400196). Ultimately, setting it too low or too high will both cost you in the engineering space. But erring low will bear terrible costs in the ethics space (and humans have a very long history of that mistake). We want a mature science of getting it as close as possible to optimal, and the beginnings of it already exist (the field of diverse intelligence; https://frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full , https://nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06037-4 , http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00902/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Psychology&id=196518 , etc.). But if we’re going to get it wrong, I’d rather live in a world where we guess too high for uncertain cases (which are way more common than we realize) than a world where we guess too low.
It raises ethical questions in longevity research: Are we enhancing life, or merely delaying the discomfort of aging? In pursuing anti-aging therapies, do we risk medicalizing natural processes and distancing ourselves from reality?
Reality? Which reality? Reality used to be getting pneumonia outside because we didn’t have an indoors or fire; or letting your teeth fall out in early age because we didn’t know about tooth brushes or fluoride. Do you really want your life determined by the vagaries of cosmic rays hitting your cells? by the trial and error process of the evolutionary lineage? We could have had life spans of 20 years and IQs of 50, or much higher – no one optimized the rate of accidents, mutations, damage, and limitations of the frozen accidents of evolution to be “natural”. Reality is what we make it, with all the intellect and hard work we can muster, to make things better than they were before. There’s a reason you’re happy with today’s status quo and not rolling back to the life of 100,000 years ago.
Why do you think the future is bright?
My point isn’t that we can be blindly optimistic because “things will just go well”. Nor that we know enough now to be able to predict much about how the fan-out of possibilities will look. My point is that the only worthwhile attitude to guide the blood, sweat, and effort of our lives is the idea that there exists at least one future worth living in. And thus, that with hard-won wisdom and compassion we could find a path (perhaps one among many bad ones) that gets us there. I don’t think anything good just happens while we sit there complacently, and it’s as easy for me as for anyone else to imagine all the horrible things that could happen. Dystopian visions are easy – much easier than Utopian ones. I think, but obviously cannot prove, that with applied effort, our future can be positive and interesting, however that will look. If you want, take it as an unfounded, unprovable heuristic (and I don’t know what a good alternative heuristic is). My practical, simplistic view is captured in this diagram I sometimes send out to people who email me asking what to do, given some specific view on what they are: https://thoughtforms.life/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Slide1.jpeg
Biology always obeys the laws of physics
Nobody actually knows the deepest physical principles of biology. To the extent that biology benefits from (exploits, not just obeys) mathematical patterns that are not determined by any aspect of physics, “mechanical” was never an option anyway. But, I argue this is true for many other things that we don’t think of as biology too. I think the idea of mechanical dumb machines which do exactly as their makers, their algorithms, and their materials say, applies fully to very few, if any, systems.
What if cells push back? (to the various interventions you’re describing)
They do! That’s one thing we work on in all the work on birth defects, regeneration, cancer – the signals you give cell groups have to be more convincing than their priors and than the signals they’re getting from their neighbors. That means, better models of cellular collective decision-making and more cracking of the bioelectric code to re-specify their setpoints. We know it can work because: (1) just a few hours of exposure to bioelectric-targeting drugs re-sets planaria from their evolutionary default of 1-headedness to a new, permanent line of 2-headed worms (with no genomic editing needed); (2) 24 hours of exposure to our bioreactor makes adult frogs grow back a leg for 18 months; (3) the right ion channel modulation makes tumor cells build normal tissue despite nasty human oncogenes; (4) ion channel modulating drug exposure causes normal brain/face/etc. development despite powerful mutation in Notch gene. Defaults can be overridden!
How to detect and establish AI rights and protections?
If the intent is to explore machine rights and protections, I would begin with the case study of rights and protections of obviously conscious animals used in the food industry. If society can’t seem to act on what we know about them, what kind of practical implications could possibly be expected for more unconventional cognitive agents? How can we protect them if we can’t protect pigs, cows, etc. etc.? So let’s not focus on how to detect at the expense of: having detected it, what are we going to do? Because it’s clear that having basically definitive evidence of intelligence ability to suffer is not sufficient to receive protections for their welfare.
How is bioelectricity related to pain?
Not getting in to the Hard Problem issues here, but note that bioelectricity was a very early indicator of damage. If you are a primitive cell floating in the ocean, the key innovation you can do is segregate goodies inside while the rough environment is outside – a membrane that separates Self from World. As soon as you segregate molecules, you end up with a charge separation = voltage gradient across membrane. Any kind of damage, which rips your membrane, depolarizes as the ions short-circuit and run down the electric gradient. A nice robust membrane and metabolism keeps the resting voltage potential high (a sign that life is going well for you). So, from the very beginning of life, a bioelectric state was a great signature of dangerous events happening. Depolarization = pain for unicellular organisms. Bioelectricity = the spark of life (at least on Earth). No wonder it mediates valence.
Why do you keep saying evolution is trial and error and our current form isn’t special? What about god etc.?
I don’t mean it’s totally random. My point is only that whatever it’s doing, with whatever level of intentionality, I see no evidence that we can rely on it to minimize suffering and optimize for the other things we value as cognitive beings who want to live a meaningful life. Whatever this process ends up being (random meanderings, motivated traversal, or the effort of a great cosmic mind), it’s not looking out for us reliably enough that we can be complacent. It’s very clear that at minimum, we need to do our part (as a practical matter, I’m assuming we’ll need to do all of it, but would be happy to be pleasantly surprised). The problem of evil has been long discussed; there is no good answer yet. If you believe in God, fine, but it’s obvious that he’s looking for you to help the kids with cancer, not sit around and wait for him to do something about it.
How can you judge god?
I don’t know what it means to judge god or why that would be useful or interesting. I only judge myself and my possible future actions. What I’m interested in is frameworks that help us know what to do – as humans, limited beings who have to make important decisions in a short period of time with minimal information, we have to take our best guess as to what we owe. The fact that some other mind with some radically different perspective might make a different decision, is neither here nor there for us. If they exist, fine, that is their plan; we have to construct and follow our plan. Having been blessed (or cursed) with a mind that must make decisions about what to do next, we need to take responsibility and ask ourselves what our values are. Whatever your conception of God, he’s left quite a lot to us.
And I’m not making any claims against god or against a deeper meaning behind the physical or anything like that. My point is simple: whatever the deeper reality is, however much intelligence it has, it’s not something that we can rely on to do our work for us. That much becomes obvious from even a short visit to Children’s Hospital. So, think about god if you want, believe in a deeper reality, draw inspiration from it if you want, or not, but either way – roll up your sleeves or support those who do things to actually reduce suffering and improve the potential for meaningful lives. You want to believe that occasionally a miracle happens? Fine; but even then, you have to admit that it can’t be relied upon. So I take a practical approach; hope and pray if you want, but don’t let that stop you from needing to do what’s done. People bend over backwards to give themselves an out – some story of a master plan that we can rely on to make it all seem ok – we want to believe that someone somewhere is on it. No one is on it, in any reliable way, and no viable version of the ineffable says that the status quo is ok. I believe it’s a moral imperative to try to do something about the suffering we see and the limitations on our ability to have meaningful lives, because nothing and no one else will do it for us. Self-delusions to the contrary waste our precious mind and will. And again, all of that is not a denial of the importance of the spiritual dimension of life – I don’t talk about that publicly (yet), or about my personal view of those matters (which is not, as people assume, a materialist view of things), but that’s irrelevant – what’s clear is, the responsibility is on us.
One example you’ve given of the insufficiency of DNA is the information transfer that occurs outside of the genome, as in the planaria and Picasso tadpoles. Are there other reasons to suspect that DNA isn’t enough? I’m pushing on this because the central dogma still has a hold on most researchers.
It’s a little subtle. Enough for *what*? The central dogma surely explains how proteins come about. Fine; but if you ask me how your computer is calculating the digits of Pi and I say, “oh yeah, it’s because it’s got silicon and copper. The laws of physics take care of it.” – was that satisfying? In a certain sense, it’s not wrong, but in another sense it’s totally sterile as far as facilitating future discoveries. Would you hire a coder for your software firm who said it’s all in Maxwell’s equations, they make the electrons move and that’s all there is, the rest (algorithms and such) are just fiction.”. I wouldn’t hire that person as they won’t code a damn thing. Same in biology. You can always point to proteins and DNA when asked “how did this biology do that?”, but then you can also point to quantum foam… The better question is, what formalism allows us to make/discover the next thing? For things about enzymes and other *protein-level* problems, the Central Dogma is fine. For issues of large-scale form and function (i.e., all biomedicine and bioengineering), the central dogma is like writing code with an atomic force microscope to move around atoms in your computer. Not helpful… Here are some examples (more here):
1) baby axolotls have legs. Tadpoles do not have legs. In our lab we make a frogolotl – an embryo that’s got some frog cells and some axolotl cells. Will frogolotls have legs? You have the frog genome, and the axolotl genome. You know everything there is to know about their genetics. Why can’t you tell me if the frogolotl will have legs, and if so, will they be made entirely of axolotl cells or also include frog cells?
2) you take stem cells from a planarian with a square head and put them into a planarian species with a round head. You cut off the head; what head shape forms? Is one shape dominant to the other, or maybe an inbetween form, or maybe the head will never cease morphing because neither set of cells is happy with the outcome. We have the genome, why is there no model that makes a prediction of what will happen?
3) you want to change the symmetry type of an animal from bilateral to 3-fold. Which genes would you edit? You want to know why there are 2 bones in your forearm, not 1 or 3. What genes are responsible and how come you can’t tell, even though the genetics of limb formation are perhaps the best understood textbook story of molecular genetics in development? Why can’t you tell me what kind of anatomy a genome encodes (without cheating by comparing the genome to other animals that you already know the shape of)?
3) how do you use the Central Dogma to predict that a bioelectric signal can induce an eye in the gut region, and that the cells you affected will actually recruit their neighbors to help them build it? Or that an eye placed on the tail will actually allow the animal to see (with no connection to the brain!) without new rounds of selection or mutation? Why did the central dogma not predict that planaria can be induced to form heads of other species of planaria, that animals that don’t regenerate can be made to do so, that the body’s left-right axis can be reversed or randomized by bioelectric cues, and that cells liberated from frog skin would become Xenobots and do kinematic self-replication and hearing, with hundreds of novel genes expressed despite same environment and wild-type genetics? Or that Anthrobots with a normal human genome would heal neural tissue. Why did we discover all this stuff paying 0 attention to the central dogma?
4) why doesn’t the central dogma predict that the animal (planaria) with the messiest, most unstable genome is the one that is highly regenerative, cancer resistant, and immortal (ageless)? A focus on the genome predicts the exact opposite.
5) I give you a sample of tissue: you sequence it, and confidently proclaim
– it encodes a human body! Wrong, it was an Anthrobot.
– it encodes an oak leaf shape! Wrong, it was a gall structure.
– it will have a birth defect, since it’s carrying a dominant Notch gene mutation. Wrong; the bioelectric pattern was reinforced and there was no defect despite the mutation.
– it will have a tumor, it’s carrying a powerful oncogene! Wrong, the bioelectric pattern was reinforced and there was no tumor, despite the oncoprotein being blazingly expressed.
All of this boils down to one thing. The genetics sets the hardware. We’ve known for almost 100 years that the hardware is just the beginning of the story: the software, and more importantly, the intelligence implemented by the software, is the much bigger story.
Why do you say future people will think it’s weird that we preferred our kids to others?
What I am definitely *not* saying is that anyone in the future will (or should) mock our love for our families. Love for one’s kids is not only natural (as you point out, baked into our firmware), but spiritually sacred. I am in no way saying that this should change; I was born in, and escaped from, a communist country so I’ve seen first-hand what happens with these obscene ideas of letting the state take over family units. That is not what I am proposing whatsoever. What I do think is that our future development involves not losing our love for our children, but our expansion of that love for others. I don’t believe it’s a zero sum game and I don’t believe that loving others will devalue our love for our own kids; sure, our cognitive apparatus is limited, but I think the future involves expanding it so that we can love more others. I think a mature species has a wider cone of compassion that over-rides in-group/out-group dynamics of evolution and allows us to love each other more. Do you really think that would be bad? Let’s start small. Suppose we found that some neurodivergent people loved their kids as much as you and I do, but turns out they also love their nieces and nephews the same. Is that a problem? I don’t see it as a problem. In a future world where we hopefully won’t always have to solve trolley problems like “do I let my kids, or someone else’s kids survive?”, why is it bad to expand the ability to love others who are not genetically related? We already know how to do this – with spouses and adoptees. I agree with you that if we were to do this at the *expense* of loving our kids as we do now, that’s a no-go. We can’t substitute that for some sort of washed out lip service where “everyone is great” but we don’t really care about anyone including our kids. I am conjecturing that this is not the only way forward for us; I believe (but of course cannot prove) that if we make it to maturity as a civilization, we will not have a zero sum game for love and we will not decrease our love for our kids, we will not dilute it. I’m not proposing redistributing it, I think we will grow the pot – prosperity of spiritual and emotional space, not just of the material world. I don’t think you can characterize this as a non-human argument – religious figures have made this argument for thousands of years. I honestly don’t think I’m saying anything new here at all, except the bit about genetics and the idea that we will (I hope) stretch our cone of compassion beyond the borders that even great figures of the past meant when they said love thy neighbor. That neighbor is going to be pretty weird, and I think that’s great. What do you think, does this resonate any better?
I prefer no dualism – I like materialism.
Where does your commitment come from – what anchors what you commit to, if it’s not related to what works to advance discovery? How else do you decide, how do you ever let go of sub-optimal philosophical positions? I guess you can just pick, but I don’t see why. You can definitely keep an ontology of what physically exists, but I don’t know why you can assume that’s the only thing that exists – it just seems an unjustified assumption and in fact it seems mathematics tells us it’s untenable as a restriction. And I’m no physicist, but my understanding is that at bottom, physics resolves to facts of mathematics (symmetries of abstract objects etc.) anyway. It’s certainly not “physical objects” all the way, as standard physicalist closure proposes. “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. The smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.” – Werner Heisenberg
There’s a version of non-reductive materialism that obviates the need for your Platonic Space concept.
Non-reductive or no, what is the materialist explanation for the specific shape of the images in https://thoughtforms.life/halleys-method-fractal-art/… ? I could have picked almost any mathematical object. The explanation for why it specifically looks like this, and not like something else, cannot be found within anything that is the realm of the physicists – it relies on no fact of physics, and nothing you do to the basic constants of physics can change it. If mathematical patterns inform (literally, in-form) biology, which they do, then chasing down explanations of biological outcomes will eventually lead you outside the set of things physics deals with.
Is your position that “dualism/materialism is irrelevant, just make applications”? That we shouldn’t commit to one of these views?
Philosophy is important, and philosophical positions can constrain or enable progress, and rather than commitment, we take a position, see where it leads us, and enhance or drop that commitment (or modify the original position) in proportion to what it’s done for our ability to gain understanding, wisdom, and exploratory potential. In other words, I am NOT suggesting we dump philosophy as unnecessary in favor of empirical research. It can’t be done; people often say to me, “stop talking about all this philosophical stuff and just do the experiments!”. That’s silly; why did we do those experiments, which no one had done before – specifically because of the philosophical stance driving the work. So I’m not saying those isms are pointless fluff. What I am saying is: 1) they are important to try on, but one’s commitment has to be fed back upon by how it’s been working out for you and others, and 2) as far as I can tell, physicalism is unnecessarily restrictive and untenable at this point. I realize this is not a mainstream position (but neither is it novel or lacking in serious adherents).
What has been the response of the scientific community to the mind-everywhere ideas?
Well, there is a community of scientists who work on this (the diverse intelligence community). But from the mainstream, there is resistance from the reductionist/mechanist camp (who expect everything to be handled at the molecular level, with no need for cognitive tools). To them I say that we are currently in biology where computer science was in the 1950’s – programming by rewiring the hardware. A good start, but the reason we have these amazing information technologies is that we understood the magic of reprogramming and software – we don’t operate our laptop with a soldering iron anymore, and we don’t communicate with humans and animals by reaching in and tweaking their synaptic proteins. We use communication interfaces to reprogrammable or (in the case of life) agential materials. But there is another community that resists my message – the organicists who believe that life is a binary, special category which has magic that cannot be replicated in “mere machines”, and that it’s a category error to place living intelligence on the same spectrum with that of materials. To them I point out that even minimal matter and simple algorithms (as we’ve discovered) do things beyond what their algorithms dictate. For the same reason that the laws of biochemistry don’t tell the whole story of the human mind, the laws of physics and algorithms don’t tell the whole story of even “machines”. Cognition is baked into the universe, arising from the properties of mathematical objects that guide the behavior of even simple molecular networks. It is fundamental, and our formal models of machines, computers, etc. don’t capture it fully in living, engineered, or hybrid media. That’s perhaps the hardest idea for people to assimilate, because they expect the world to be neatly divided into magical categories of “dumb matter” and “majestic life”. It is one spectrum and we are now starting to understand how things scale along that spectrum. Like back when we had no theory of electromagnetism and thought that light, magnets, static electricity, and lightning were all totally different phenomena (and were blind to many wavelengths, as we are now blind to unconventional minds all around us).
What are you working on now?
Many things, some of which I can talk about like:
– better imaging of bioelectric states of complex tissues in vivo
– better ways to communicate new goals to cells in regenerative contexts using the bioelectric interface
– cracking the bioelectric code so that we can specify for cells what we want them to build
– using AI to communicate with cells and learn to copy their amazing ways to improvise solutions to novel stressors they’ve never seen before
– understanding the plasticity of what cells, with a normal genome, are willing and able to build (in the context of our work on the synthetic living machines, or biobots)
– learning to communicate not just with matter (cells, tissues) but the information *patterns* that traverse bodies
The following were questions by Trenton Jerde for this paper:
What inspired you to write this article? Was there a particular event, observation, or experience that spurred your focus on conceptual clarity in biological versus machine intelligence?
There was no single event, but I was frustrated by the large number of papers, talks, and discussions – in both academia and public discourse – that are prevalent today with strong opinions on these matters that do not define their terms or address major questions that render many of those opinions untenable. I think the field needs much more conceptual clarity and the consideration of questions raised by modern science (not just being trapped in ancient philosophical categories). I think people need to think beyond the “human” as defined in philosophy of mind and everyday usage to the deeper realities revealed by developmental biology and bioengineering, which hint at a wider space of bodies and minds and a continuum for us with other, unconventional forms (not magical sharp categories and charges of anthropomorphism to try to gate-keep tools from being used in novel contexts).
Your article suggests a set of questions or a checklist for researchers to consider when studying living versus machine intelligence. How did this idea evolve, and what gaps or challenges in the field were you aiming to address with this approach?
It was inspired by the way some journals use checklists for primary papers to enforce clarity and rigor – statistics and other aspects of experimental design. Their idea is that a manuscript cannot be taken seriously until it passes basic checks to make sure the authors took into account common ways to be misled. Same here – I wanted to have something short and sweet, which wouldn’t be a lengthy paper that few could remember but instead something very concise and crisp that immediately focused people’s attentions on key questions. If your worldview, lecture, paper, book, etc. can’t answer these questions, it needs work. There are far too many such out there which sound like they make sense at first blush, but fall apart when one tries to answer these questions. However, we did write a few things in long-form on all this:
You emphasize the need for conceptual clarity. In your view, is the field primarily lacking clarity in researchers’ underlying ideas, or is the issue more about ambiguity in the terms and descriptions they use?
Well, it’s both. First, many researchers are experts in one field (philosophy, AI, physics, etc.) but not aware of ideas in others (biology, bioengineering, etc.) which allow them to keep ideas which are locally consistent but quickly break down when confronted with the facts of other disciplines. Also, the terms and descriptions are critical. For example, if you hold that “goals” or “memories” are something that only brains can have, then you won’t be able to use powerful tools of behavioral science and cognitive neuroscience to study these in unconventional substrates. Terminology and allegiance to ancient categories (and the fear of making “category errors”, as if these categories were given to us from on high) can hold back practical progress by preventing the spread of tools from one discipline to another. For example, the tools of neuroscience work wonderfully outside of neurons (applicable to all cells); tracking the tools – making cognitive claims operational protocols, not natural kinds – helps keep us oriented toward empirically-verifiable progress and not separating disciplines according to departments, journals, etc. that are outliving their utility. And people need to be clear: when someone asks whether my use of cognitive terms to apply to cells, molecular pathways, or systems made of silicon are “just metaphorical or real”, are they truly claiming that we have access to some sort of objective truth which is not dependent on testing of metaphors to see how productive they are? Everything, including things like “pathways” and other practical refuges of reductionist molecular biologists, is a metaphor. That’s all we have – diverse metaphors and data on how well each one helps or hinders specific discoveries and capabilities.
Also, it’s not just about researchers – as scientists and philosophers, we’re supposed to be the tip of the spear in guiding word usage. I don’t think it’s on us to match colloquial meanings of terms – if the science reveals those meanings to be bad categories, we need to say so and try to shift its use. “Water witch” and “Kitchen witch” used to be categories in widespread use, as were the supposed distinctions between them. Another example. Someone said to me once, “when you talk about memories in cells, you make people upset – that’s not how most people thing of the word memory. So why don’t you come up with another term – then no one has to argue.” My reply: imagine that someone said to Isaac Newton, ok, “gravity” is what keeps the moon in orbit around Earth, but don’t freak people out, just call “shmavity” the thing that makes the apple fall, that will keep people happy. What’s wrong with that approach is that it misses the whole point of the scientific project of unification – we need to know when apparently-different things are in fact just forms of the same thing, and to understand how they scale, differentiate, etc. We can still use terms like “adult” in court, but everyone needs to be clear that it’s not some magic category that ticks over on midnight of your 18th birthday (or 25th, for renting a car) but a simplification that doesn’t reflect the underlying reality of smooth, continuous changes and some kind of scaling/metamorphosis process.
You invite researchers to consider whether intelligence is binary or exists on a continuum. Some researchers have proposed introducing new categories, such as “machine understanding,” to move beyond debates about topics such as understanding or intelligence in biology versus machines. How do you see such proposals fitting into the ideas expressed in your Comment?
My question for all of these things is: what utility does your favorite term or framework give you? What can you achieve by invoking this nomenclature or categorization? One thing you achieve is giving people the feeling that the scientists have a good handle on what human understanding is and how it works, and on what defines “machine” vs. whatever we are. That’s not very useful, and it’s false. We need to be clear with ourselves and with the public that *no one* has a good, useful definition of what the difference is, and likely to be in the future (in an age of cyborgs, novel AI architectures, etc.). Moving beyond the debate is great but it can’t be bought as cheaply as inventing new words that advance no scientific discoveries and using them to pacify the public into thinking the old categories will hold. What I like instead is operational terms that tell you what kind of relationship you can have with a system. Attached is a diagram I use in my talks. It’s like a paradox of the heap (sorites), which some use to critique the continuum view. If you tell me you have a heap and want it moved, I’m not going to wrestle with the question of what is and is not a heap, but rather I need to know – am I bringing tweezers, a spoon, a shovel, a bulldozer, or a spray of noxious chemicals (if it’s a heap of insects you want gone). We don’t need “machine” etc. – we need categories for the kinds of beings and what sort of relationship we can have with them, functionally. That’s the project we need to move on asap, not propping up the old categories using terms like “machine understanding” that paper over the problem and delay the inevitable but essential step of going behind composition and provenance of a system and toward its capabilities.
Your article does not delve into debates about the intelligence, reasoning abilities, or theory of mind of large language models (LLMs). Could you elaborate on why this choice was made and share any thoughts on how LLMs relate to your call for conceptual clarity?
LLMs are just one example of a bigger issue. I’d certainly delve into it but the journal had strict length guidelines. I can say the following:
1) I have no strong claims about LLMs – I’m not focused on LLMs because they are one small corner of the space of possible AIs, even among the software agents. Whatever we say about today’s LLM AIs is not definitive about AI as a whole.
2) at first blush, LLMs do not have the features we think are critical for true agency: embodiment, perception-action feedback loops (recurrence), and goal-directedness (homeostatic qualities).
3) BUT things are not so simple:
a) embodiment doesn’t happen only in 3D space with robotic bodies – biologicals exert intelligence and behavior in lots of spaces hard for us to notice – for example our liver lives in physiological state space and embryos traverse anatomical morphospace, both of them solving problems, striving, etc. It’s not at all clear that LLMs don’t traverse some space that’s not obvious for us, just like we can barely notice the spaces within which biologicals solve problems. We’re hyperfocused on medium-sized objects moving in 3D space at medium speeds as the only possible intelligences. It’s the limitation of our evolved firmware.
b) the language model itself may be a feed-forward system, but together with a human and a prompt buffer it becomes a recurrent system – altogether, there is a cycle of input output which does make for loops and becomes a kind of Chinese Room which may have properties the LLM (or the human user for that matter) doesn’t have.
c) one last really controversial point. Our most recent work (paper = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10597123241269740, public explanation = https://thoughtforms.life/what-do-algorithms-want-a-new-paper-on-the-emergence-of-surprising-behavior-in-the-most-unexpected-places/, https://thoughtforms.life/algorithms-redux-finding-unexpected-properties-in-truly-minimal-systems/) suggests that even extremely simple systems have emergent cognition (not emergent complexity or unpredictability – that’s easy; emergent goal-directed problem-solving and competencies like delayed gratification) that is *nowhere* in the explicit algorithm. This tells me that algorithms, like biochemistry, has the part where you know what you have because you see the components and the rules, and then it has the part where you get more than you put in. It’s not just emergent complexity, because there are features of the Platonic space which are not just dumb things like Feigenbaum’s constant, facts about NAND’s universality, and the truths of number theory but also kinds of minds (in Dennett’s sense). No one had noticed this amazing capability of sorting algorithms in the decades that people have been teaching them because of the hubris of thinking we know what something is and what it wants to do just because we made it. If we don’t even know what bubble sort can do, how dare we think we know what LLMs really are? I am not all about LLMs, but I believe strongly that we need a lot of humility in this area, not surety borne out of lack of imagination and knowledge. We have barely begun to explore the Platonic space in biology (Xenobots, Anthrobots, and their competencies which do not derive from evolution – there have never been any such and they weren’t selected for those properties) and we sure as heck don’t understand it and its ingressions into our algorithms in the case of comp sci. For the exact same reason that biochemistry doesn’t tell the story of the human mind, algorithms don’t tell the whole story of “machines”.
Parenthetically: there is a list of about half a dozen things about life that don’t explicitly occur in today’s AI’s but they totally could. I’ve not made the list public (although it can partially be pieced together from my biomedical and philosophy papers) because I’m still working out the ethics of enabling the construction of trillions of beings who matter in a moral sense without having the ability to ensure they are treated well. But these truly bio-inspired (not just neuromorphic) aspects could, I’m pretty sure, be implemented in artificial settings.
Thanks; this was originally recommended to me to prevent whole-sale copying (obviously someone determined can get around it in several ways). I’ve been thinking about turning it off but haven’t decided yet.
This frustrates me to no end as well. Luckily, you can just click the “Reader View” icon in your browser’s address bar (for browsers that have it) and the site renders great and has none of the highlight/copy blocking stuff included.
Was also an issue for me but only because it also prevents searching the page for a keyword. Reader view solves that problem. Understand not wanting people to plagiarize, but I like to use quotes with attribution and hyperlinked citations in my blog. Won’t do that if I have to retype manually. However, you can take a screenshot in iOS and ocr it or PDF the entire page. In other words, there is no real protection for a resourceful person.
Oh come on! There’s plenty of ways around that restriction, particularly for someone who knows about css rules. There’s even an ‘enable right click’ add on you can add to your browser.
This was really cool! Love your views on free will and mind!
The suffering we see in the universe is definitely a big problem to traditional theism. I wonder though as it seems to me that the universe might be inherently creative (Sarah Walker has a cool view on this!) Perphaps then maybe all the suffering we see is a side effect of the universe having this nature. The universe having infinite possibilities of forms and events definitely makes sense to me why we see so much suffering.
But because of this creative nature of the universewe have an opportunityto make a difference. I think it’s definitely time for our species to take responsibility of the suffering we see here on earth and hopefully beyond.
We need to stop telling ourselves stories of nature where other beings above us will stop suffering. It’s time we realized that those beings in the old stories will have to be us. We have to be those beings in those stories for each other and all the other beings who can’t stop/prevent suffering.
I finally read one of your blog articles (which I love doing) rather than just reading the latest need-to-know happenings (which I hate doing but feel like I have to). I’m so glad this one got to me tonight. Nourishment! Thank you for taking the time to put this together!
The 1st book is finished and has been shipped off to the publisher. I await their comments. The second is starting. Unfortunately not enough time to focus on it properly, but it will get done eventually!
Great read, I enjoyed the SETI article particularly.
I really enjoy reading about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of biology, and extraterrestrial intelligence is a great way to explore those ideas. I’m wondering – can you recommend any fiction that touches on those topics? The only example I’m aware of is Blindsight’s intelligent, non conscious aliens, and I’m wondering if there’s anything else in that vein.
This one-minute video provides an intuitive and familiar set of examples about how foolish it is to try to maintain hard categorical lines in the context of food: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EoHpZMlNjFc
Finally, I’ll note that mechanisms *also* dissolve when you look very closely. Abscisic acid, for example, looks like the mechanism of dormancy in trees from a distance, but the more you zoom in, the more complicated that story becomes. Lisa’s work on the brain and emotion also showed that traditional mechanisms of cognition like a fear circuit are definitely wrong when you look more closely.
1- Once we achieve the level of technology and knowledge currently being pursued, what would prevent this knowledge from being exploited by billionaire sociopaths or sadists to transform themselves into physical entities that thrive on human suffering and slavery—becoming semi-immortal beings with superhuman abilities?
For example, as Scott Aaronson works on AI safety, is any consideration being given to a kind of “kill switch” or built-in safeguard to prevent the creation of such super-creatures?
In short, will our compassionate scientists implement measures to ensure that beings akin to Ahriman, Hades, or devils cannot emerge in the real world?
2- If “mortal immortality” is discovered—where death becomes optional, whether by accident or design—will this benefit the working class, or will it remain a privilege accessible only to the wealthy elite?
Thank you again for all the knowledge you’ve shared.
1) can you think of any example where that worked? Starting with the invention of fire, metal, augmentation technology like toothbrushes and reading glasses, workout regimes, education, etc. – all of these inventions have made people more powerful and some have used it for evil while others for good. I know of no example where a safeguard worked to prevent it. People are ingenious and it would be foolish to believe I can invent something that no one could find a way around, if they wanted to. The things we work on are no different; if one wanted to live a Paleolithic life style, fine; but most people don’t, which means they embrace tech (starting with fire) and do their best despite some wanting to use it for harm.
2) the kind of thing I’m working on is likely to be much, much cheaper than a lot of current therapies. However, there are many places in the world where a simple glass of drinkable water is a luxury, so I’m not going to pretend I have control over inequalities like that. Water, air, and pretty much everything else has access issues for some, so no doubt this will, like all therapies, have some disparities too. That needs to be addressed separately, as it does for all food, water, and therapeutics – like malaria solutions by the Gates Foundation etc. The only thing I know is that the way to fix disparities is not by failing to discover things that help people.
I can’t even begin to express how happy I am that you took the time to reply despite how busy you must be.
The other day, during a conversation with friends, someone asked,
‘What would you do if the hospital told you that you only had a few months to live?’
I said, ‘I’d go to Dr. Levin’s laboratory and donate myself while still alive. Let them run as many experiments as they want, both while I’m alive and after I’m dead. One day, he will gift immortality to all of humanity.’
And I still feel the same way.
Thank you Professor Prometheus!
Thanks for putting together this helpful Q&A, putting flesh on the bones of some of your other public statements. But this comment is to report typos (is there a less intrusive way of doing so?), of which three jumped out at me: 1) In part 5 of your answer about the central dogma, “oak left” should be “oak leaf”. 2) The text of the answer that begins “Philosophy is important” is given twice in the same paragraph. 3) I suspect the delightful term “prompt bugger” should actually be “prompt buffer”.
Hey Mike, more great stuff! I’m cheering you on from a distance. For your consideration, I have a couple suggestions for you around the question of free will.
You wrote that zoomed into individual events (short time scale), all you see is determinism and randomness. This isn’t necessarily correct. Intelligence is the ability to perceive at least some aspect of the environment and respond to those perceptions in some way. There are certainly scenarios where the responses can be determined. But when the situation is sufficiently complex that there are conflicting perceived data, somehow that data needs to be parsed and ranked prior to responding. Without crediting the decision making ability of an intelligent agent, the responses to conflicting data could certainly look random. But, they could be the result of an internal decision making process that isn’t deterministic. The qualities of decision making can vary, which means the same combination of conflicting data could result in different decisions at different times. And this process becomes even trickier when the intelligent agent is capable of conflicting agendas (such as whether to respond on behalf of itself individually or on behalf of the system as a whole). Then the ranking of agendas combines with the ranking of conflicting data to create a wide variety of possible responses that don’t have to be random.
And since you mention examples of human decision making in daily life, these are magnitudes more complex. We have layers of conflicting agendas combined with access to enormous quantities of conflicting data. We’re capable of metacognition, which means we can consider alternatives and consequences before acting. We’re also equally capable of erroneous conception as we are valid understanding. Freedom, then, comes in degrees and depends on the qualities of our will and willpower (will being subliminal decision making and willpower being deliberate). For example, someone whose intelligence is confused will be less free than someone with clear understanding.
Michael, do you know ways to speed up regeneration? So a limb could regrow in one month instead of 18? You must have thought about this. Thanks for your work!
I don’t know how fast it will be yet, and I doubt a whole limb can regrow in a month, but look at it this way. Worst case scenario, if the limb takes exactly as long to re-grow as it took to grow in the first place, it means that a person who lost a hand at 25 would, by 32, have a hand that is perfectly usable for eating, typing, shaving, etc. and eventually a full-size hand. I’d say that would be considered a huge success by anyone who needed their limb back.
Thanks for the answer. Another question – during frog regeneration, did they manage to grow back a full limb? Or does it differ slightly in size? In the photo it seems like it’s different from the original. If so, what do you think is the reason? Is something missing or did the organism decide to grow a different version this time?
There was variability. Some animals did very well, some less well. I suspect it has to do with how primitive is our understanding of communicating the goal to the cells. It’s like learning a new language – at first your communication is clumsy, people are hard to convince, and sometimes there are comical misunderstandings. We will get better at it. But there may also be some inherent (intrinsic) differences in the animals that require a personalized approach.
How do you think autologous tissue transplants (bone, cartilage skin etc.), that are frequently used in reconstructive medicine, would perform when regeneration through bioelectric signaling is induced?
I’m curious if you’re research has given you any insight into the value of, and exercise of, effective communication more broadly? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what insights might be gleaned with regards to establishing communicative channels at various levels of the agential spectrum and how these techniques scale; or how we might approach seeking and establishing discourse with, at this time, unknown forms of agency? Thanks for your consideration and for the work you do (as well to all those facilitating and assisting you in your explorations!), this line of enquiry you’re on is of tremendous value to humanity and, very likely, intelligent agents of all kinds.
thanks. Yes that is a topic of a talk I’m giving nowadays (and changing all the time) on reducing our mind-blindness and recognizing a much wider spectrum of beings all around us. An early version is https://youtu.be/OD5TOsPZIQY?si=fFmiFX8EcaKhmFeJ but there’s much more coming on this.
E.O. Wilson had recurring dreams which he interpreted as directing him towards gathering samples from particular places before environmental degradation would severely limit their biodiversity.
After he received samples from the initial location, the setting of his recurring dream changed, he was unable to gather samples from this second location, and after a while, the dream stopped occurring. If dreams can be linked through transpersonal psychology to your ideas regarding collective intelligence and ingressing minds, then Wilson (and the rest of us) may be more similar to the insect societies/superorganisms he studied than he realized.
Thank you for your work, Michael. I am looking forward to your book.
We do have a research program on aging in the lab, but I haven’t made any such claims yet and we certainly don’t have data in human subjects. In the end, I do think it will be reversible (by someone’s method, anyway) but the only thing that really matters is the data. Stay tuned.
Are you familiar with Peter Putnam’s work? He was majorly ahead of his time on embodied cognition, and physicists from Einstein to Wheeler considered him to be a genius among geniuses. Wheeler corresponded with Putnam until his tragic early death from a drunk driver. He was convinced that Putnam’s work held the key to finalizing his “It from Bit” theory, but unfortunately, due to his extremely confusing writing style, personal issues, and tragic early death, he was unable to properly communicate his work, and refused to publish. Amanda Gefter uncovered a treasure trove of his private papers after his death (and I think is going to write a book on it, recently wrote this article: https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/), and a lot of his papers are already available here: https://www.peterputnam.org/
After doing my best to understand some of his work, I naively think it is a philosophical bridge that could properly encompass your brilliant work, and maybe could even open up some new ways of looking at your work. I don’t think I’m qualified to suggest how, but hope you enjoy reading if you haven’t seen Putnam’s work yet.
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