Michael Levin

Well, the fundamental tension is in both the first person, the second person, and third person descriptions of mind.

So in third person, we want to understand how do we recognize them and how do we know looking out into the world what degree of agency there is and how best to relate to the different systems that we find.

And are our intuitions any good when we look at something and it looks really stupid and mechanical versus it really looks like there's something cognitive going on there?

How do we get good at recognizing them?

Then there's the second person, which is the control.

And that's both for engineering, but also for regenerative medicine.

When you want to tell the system to do something, right?

What kind of tools are you going to use?

And this is a major part of my framework is that all of these kinds of things are operational claims that you're going to use.

The tools of hardware rewiring, of control theory and cybernetics, of behavior science, of psychoanalysis and love and friendship, like what are the interaction protocols that you bring, right?

And then in first person, it's this notion of having an inner perspective and being a system that has valence and cares about the outcome of things, makes decisions and has memories and tells a story about itself and the outside world.

And how can all of that exist and still be consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry and various other things that we see around us?

So that I find to be maybe the most interesting and the most important mystery for all of us on the science and also on the personal level.

So that's what I'm interested in.

Yeah, although actually I would turn that upside down.

I think that pyramid is backwards.

And I think it's behavior science at the bottom.

I think it's behavior science all the way.

I think in certain ways, even math is the behavior of a certain kind of

being that lives in a latent space.