Michael Levin

And so we are probably missing a lot of them.

So I would say we have plenty to start.

We have we have so much to start with.

We could keep, you know, tens of thousands of people busy just testing things now.

But we have to be aware that we're probably missing a lot of important ones.

the human body or like we were talking off mic the amazon jungle like nature natural systems outside of uh like the sophisticated biological systems we're aware of yeah we don't know because it's really hard to do experiments on larger systems it's a lot easier to go down than it is to go up but my suspicion is you know uh like the buddhists say uh innumerable sentient beings i think by the time you get to that degree of infinity it kind of doesn't

matter to compare.

I suspect there's just massive numbers of them.

I'm sure we are.

But one of my favorite things about that kind of work, have you seen, there's at least three or four papers showing that ant colonies fall for the same visual illusions that we fall for?

Not the ants, the colonies.

The colonies, yeah.

So if you lay out food in particular patterns, they'll do things like complete lines that aren't there and like all the same shit that we fall for, they fall for.

So, you know, I don't think it's hopeless, but I do think that we need a lot of work to develop tools.

I think it's essential.

We are so parochial in what we expect to find in terms of life that we are going to be just completely missing a lot of stuff.

If we can't even agree on, never mind definitions of life, but...

you know, uh, what's actually important.

I, I, I, I led a paper recently where I asked, uh, whatever, 65 or so, uh, modern working scientists, um, for a definition of life.

And, and, uh, we had, we had so many different definitions across so many different dimensions.