#486 – Michael Levin: Hidden Reality of Alien Intelligence & Biological Life

Michael Levin: Here's the issue. Everything here hangs on what it means to understand, okay? For me, because understand doesn't just mean have some sort of pleasing model that seems to capture some important aspect of what's going on. It also means that you have to be generative and creative in terms of capabilities. And so for me, that means if I tell you this is what I think about cognition in cells and tissues, it means, for example, that I think we're going to be able to take those ideas and use them to produce new regenerative medicine that actually helps people in various ways, right? It's just an example. So if you think as a physicist, you're going to have a complete understanding of what's going on from that perspective of fields and particles and who knows what else is at the bottom there, what does that mean then, that when somebody is missing a finger or has a psychological problem or has these other high-level issues, that you have something for them, that you're going to be able to do something? Because my claim is that you're not going to. And even if you have some theory of physics that is completely compatible with everything that's going on, it's not enough. That's not specific enough to enable you to solve the problems you need to solve. In the end, when you need to solve those problems, the person you're going to go to is not a physicist. It's going to be either a biologist or a psychiatrist or who knows, but it's not going to be a physicist. And the simple example is this. let's say someone comes in here and tells you a beautiful mathematical proof. Okay, it's just really, you know, deep and beautiful. And there's a physicist nearby and he says, well, I know exactly what happened. There were some air particles that moved from that guy's mouth to your ear. I see what goes on. It moved the cilia in your ear and the electrical signals went up to your brain. I mean, we have a complete accounting of what happened, done and done. But if you want to understand what's the more important aspect of that interaction, it's not going to be found in the physics department, it's going to be found in the math department. So that's my only claim is that physics is an amazing lens with which to view the world, but you're capturing certain things.

Michael Levin: What I think is scaling is something I call the cognitive light cone. And the cognitive light cone is the size of the biggest goal state that you can pursue. This doesn't mean how far do your senses reach. This doesn't mean how far can you affect it. So the James Webb telescope has enormous sensory reach, but that doesn't mean that's the size of its cognitive light cone. The size of the cognitive light cone is the scale of the biggest goal you can actively pursue. But I do think it's a useful concept to enable us to think about very different types of agents of different composition, different provenance, you know, engineered, evolved, hybrid, whatever, all in the same framework. And by the way, the reason I use light cone is that it has this idea from physics that you're putting space and time kind of in the same diagram, which I like here. So if you tell me that all your goals revolve around maximizing the amount of sugar in this 10, 20 micron radius of space-time, and that you have 20 minutes memory going back and maybe 5 minutes predictive capacity going forward, that tiny little cognitive light cone, I'm going to see probably a bacterium. And if you say to me that, well, I'm able to care about several 100 yards sort of scale, I could never care about what happens 3 weeks from now, two towns over. It's just impossible. I'm saying, you might be a dog. And if you say to me, okay, I care about really what happens, you know, the financial markets on earth, you know, long after I'm dead and this and that, I'd say, you're probably a human. And if you say to me, I care in the linear range. I actively, I'm not just saying that I can actively care in the linear range about all the living beings on this planet. I'm going to say, well, you're not a standard human. You must be something else because humans, I don't know, these standard humans today, I don't think can do that. You must be some kind of a bodhisattva or some other thing that has these massive cognitive icons.

Michael Levin: What I mean is we can take epithelial cells off of an early frog embryo and we don't change the DNA. No synthetic biology circuits, no material scaffolds, no nanomaterials, no weird drugs, none of that. What we're mostly doing is liberating them from the instructive influences of the rest of the cells that they were in their bodies. And so when you do that, right, normally these cells are bullied by their neighboring cells into having a very boring life. They become a two-dimensional outer covering for the embryo, and they keep out the bacteria, and that's that. So you might ask, well, what are these cells capable of when you take them away from that influence? So when you do that, they form another little life form we call a xenobot. And it's this self-motile little thing that has cilia covering its surface. The cilia are coordinated, so they row against the water and then the thing starts to move and has all kinds of amazing properties. It has different gene expression, so it has its own novel transcriptome. It's able to do things like kinematic self-replication, meaning make copies of itself from loose cells that you put in its environment. It has the ability to respond to sound, which normal embryos don't do. It has these novel capacities. And we did that and we said, look, here are some amazing features of this novel system. Let's try to understand where they came from. And some people said, well, maybe it's a frog specific thing. You know, maybe this is just something unique to frog cells. And so we said, okay, what's the furthest you can get from frog embryonic cells? How about human adult cells? And so we took cells from adult human patients who were donating tracheal epithelia for biopsies and things like that. And those cells in, again, no genetic change, nothing like that. They self-organize into something we call anthropots, again, self-motile little creature, 9,000 different gene expressions, so about half the genome is now different. And they have interesting abilities. For example, they can heal human neural wounds. So in vitro, if you plate some neurons and you put a big scratch through it so you damage them, Anthrobots can sit down and they will try, they will spontaneously, without us having to teach them to do it, they will spontaneously try to knit the neurons across.

Michael Levin: One of the things that we've been trying to dissolve, and this is like some work that I've done with Chris Fields and others, is this distinction between thoughts and thinkers. So all agents are patterns within some excitable medium. We could talk about what that is. And they can spawn off others. And now you can have a really interesting spectrum. Here's the spectrum. You can have fleeting thoughts, which are like waves in the ocean when you throw a rock in. You know, they sort of go through the excitable medium and then they're gone. They pass through and they're gone, right? So those are kind of fleeting thoughts. Then you can have patterns that have a degree of persistence. So they might be hurricanes or solitons or persistent thoughts or earworms or depressive thoughts. Those are harder to get rid of. They stick around for a little while. They often do a little bit of niche construction, so they change the actual brain to make it easier to have more of those thoughts, right? Like that's a thing. And so they stay around longer. Now, what's further than that? Well, fragments, personality fragments of a dissociative personality disorder, they're more stable, and they're not just on autopilot. They have goals and they can do things. And then past that is a full-blown human personality. And who the hell knows what's past that? Maybe some sort of transhuman, you know, transpersonal, like, I don't know, right? But this idea, again, I'm back to this notion of a spectrum. There is not a sharp distinction between, you know, we are real agents and then we have these thoughts.