Michael Levin

And when you share memories like this, it's harder to say that I'm separate from you.

If we share the same memories, we're kind of... And I don't mean every single memories, right?

So they still have some identity.

But to a large extent, they have a little bit of a mind meld.

And there's many complexities you can lean on top of it.

But what it means is that if you have a large group of cells...

they now have joint memories of what happened to us, as opposed to, you know what happened to you and I know what happened to me.

And that enables a higher cognitive light cone because you have greater computational capacity.

You have a greater area of concern of things you want to manage.

I don't just want to manage my tiny little memory states because I'm getting your memories.

Now I know I got to manage this, this whole thing.

So, so both of these things end up scaling the size of things you care about.

And that is a major ladder for cognition is this,

the size of concern that you have.

Yeah, we have some collaborators in a company called Softmax that we're working with to do some of that stuff.

In biology, that's our cancer therapeutic, which is that what you see in cancer, literally, is cells electrically disconnect from their neighbors.

When they were part of a giant memory that was working on making a nice organ, well, now they can't remember any of that.

Now they're just amoebas and the rest of the body is just external environment.

And what we found is if you then...

physically reconnect them to the network.