Michael Levin

You can ask, for example, well, how does it remember what the correct shape is?

And can we mess with that memory?

Can we give it a false memory of what the shape should be and let the cells build something else?

Or can we mess with the measurement apparatus, right?

So it gives you those kinds of... So the idea is to...

basically uh appropriate a lot of the um approaches and concepts from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral science into things that uh previously were taken to be dumb materials and you know you get yelled at in class if you if for being anthropomorphic if you said well my cells want to do this and my cells want to do that and i think i think that's a that's a major mistake that leaves a ton of capabilities on the table so thinking about biologic systems as things that have memory have almost something like cognitive ability but

so the first thing to think about, I think is that there are no examples anywhere of, of a central dictator because in, in this, in this kind of science, because everything is made of parts.

And so we, we, even though we, we feel as a unified central sort of intelligence and kind of point of, of cognition, we are a bag of neurons, right?

We, all intelligence is collective intelligence.

There's this, this is important to, to kind of, um,

Because a lot of people think, okay, there's real intelligence, like me, and then there's collective intelligence, which is ants and flocks of birds and termites and things like that.

And maybe it's appropriate to think of them as an individual, and maybe it's not.

And a lot of people are skeptical about that and so on.

But you've got to realize that there's no such thing as this indivisible diamond of intelligence that's like this one central thing that's not made of parts.

We are all made of parts.

And so if you believe, which I think is hard to get around, that we in fact have a centralized set of goals and preferences and we plan and we do things and so on, you are already committed to the fact that a collection of cells is able to do this because we are a collection of cells.

There's no getting around that.

In our case, what we do is we navigate the three-dimensional world and we have behavior.

Yeah.

Well, even the central nervous system is misleadingly named because it isn't really central.