Michael Levin

So basically the material has agency, meaning that...

It has some level of, obviously not human level, but some level of preferences, goals, memories, ability to remember things, to compute into the future, meaning anticipate.

You know, when you're working with cells, they have all of that to various degrees.

I think it's both, right?

So it raises difficulties because it means that if you're using the old mindset, which is a linear kind of extrapolation of what's going to happen, you're going to be surprised and shocked all the time because biology does not do what we linearly expect materials to do.

On the other hand, it's massively liberating.

And so in the following way, I've argued that advances in regenerative medicine require us to take advantage of this.

Because what it means is that you can get the material to do things that you don't know how to micromanage.

So just as a simple example, right?

If you had a rat...

And you wanted this rat to do a circus trick, put a ball in the little hoop.

You can do it the micromanagement way, which is try to control every neuron and try to play the thing like a puppet, right?

And maybe someday that'll be possible, maybe.

Or you can train the rat.

And this is why humanity for thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience, we had no idea what's between the ears of any animal, we were able to train these animals.

Because once you recognize the level of agency of a certain system,

You can use appropriate techniques if you know the currency of motivation, reward, and punishment, you know how smart it is, you know what kinds of things it likes to do.

You are searching a much smoother, much nicer problem space than if you try to micromanage the thing.

And in regenerative medicine, when you're trying to get, let's say, an arm to grow back or an eye to repair a cell birth defect or something...

Do you really want to be controlling tens of thousands of genes at each point to try to micromanage it?