Michael Levin

This is not anything that was given to you by physics or by a history of selection.

It's a free gift from math.

And those two free gifts from math lock together into a spiral that I think causes simultaneously arise in intelligence and arise in collective agency.

And I think that's just, you know, that's been, you know, just amazing to think about.

I think we have to keep in mind that physics and chemistry are not real things.

They are lenses that we put on the world, that they are perspectives where we say we are, for the time being, for the duration of this chemistry class or career or whatever, we are going to put aside all the other levels and we're going to focus on this one level.

And that what is fundamentally going on during that process is an amazing positive feedback loop of collective intelligence for the interface.

It's the physical interface is scaling.

It's the cognitive light cone that it can support.

So it's going from a molecular network.

The molecular network can already do things like Pavlovian conditioning.

You don't start with zero.

When you have a simple molecular network, you are already hosting some patterns from the platonic space that look like Pavlovian conditioning.

You've already got that starting out.

That's just a molecular network.

Then you become a cell and then you're many cells and now you're navigating anatomical morphous space and you're hosting all kinds of other patterns.

And eventually you, and I think again, I think there's, and this is like what, you know, all the stuff that we're trying to work out now, there's a consistent feedback between

the ingressions you get and the ability to have new ones, which again, I think it's this like positive feedback cycle where the more of these free gifts you pull down, they allow you physically to develop to ways where all look now, now, now we're suitable for, for more and higher ones.

And this continuously goes and goes and goes until, you know, until you're able to pull down a full human set of behavioral capacities.

I'll give you two mechanisms that we found.