Michael Levin

And you look at that and you say, okay, this is chemistry and physics.

And then nine months and some years later, you have an organism with high-level cognition and preferences and an inner life and so on.

And what embryogenesis tells us is that that transformation from physics to mind is gradual.

It's smooth.

There is no special place where, you know, a lightning bolt says, boom, now you've gone from physics to true cognition.

That doesn't happen.

And so we can see in this process that the whole mystery, you know, the biggest mystery of the universe, basically, how you get mind from matter.

So one of the things that I think is really important if we're going to bring in DNA into this picture is to think about the fact that what DNA encodes is the hardware of life.

DNA contains the instructions for the kind of micro level hardware that every cell gets to play with.

So all the proteins, all the signaling factors, the ion channels, all the cool little pieces of hardware that cells have, that's what's in the DNA.

The rest of it is in so-called generic laws.

And these are laws of mathematics.

These are laws of computation.

These are laws of physics, of all kinds of interesting things that are not directly in the DNA.

And that process, you know, I think the reason I always put just physics in quotes is because I don't think there is such a thing as just physics.

I think that...

Thinking about these things in binary categories like this is physics, this is true cognition, this is as if, it's only faking, these kinds of things.

I think that's what gets us in trouble.

I think that we really have to understand that it's a continuum and we have to work up the scaling, the laws of scaling, and we can certainly talk about that.

There's a lot of really interesting thoughts to be had there.