Michael Levin

And I think it's a real shame, but I see this all the time.

When you have a collective like this, whether it be a group of robots or a collection of cells or neurons or whatever, as soon as we gain some insight into how it works, right?

Meaning that, oh, I see, in order to take this action, here's the information that got processed via this

chemical mechanism or whatever immediately people say oh well then that's not real cognition that's just physics and i think this is this is fundamentally flawed because if you zoom into anything what are you going to see of course you're just going to see physics what else could be underneath right that's not going to be fairy dust it's going to be physics and chemistry but that doesn't take away from the magic of the fact that there are certain ways to arrange that physics and chemistry and in particular the bioelectricity which which i like a lot uh

to give you an emergent collective with goals and preferences and memories and anticipations that do not belong to any of the subunits.

So I think what we're getting into here, and we can talk about how this happens during embryogenesis and so on, what we're getting into is the origin of a self, with a capital S. So we are selves, there are many other kinds of selves, and we can tell some really interesting stories about where selves come from and how they become unified.

We have to grow up past that.

So what I like to do is I'll tell you two quick stories about that.

I like to roll backwards.

So as opposed to so if you start and you say, OK, here's a paramecium and you see it, you know, it's a single cell organism.

You see it doing various things and people will say, OK, I'm sure there's some chemical story to be told about how it's doing it.

So that's not true cognition.

Right.

And people will argue about that.

I like to work it backwards.

I say, let's, let's, let's agree that you and I, as, as we sit here are examples of true cognition, if anything is, if there's anything that's true cognition, we are, we are examples of it.

Now let's just roll back slowly, right?

So you roll back to the time where you're a small child and used to doing whatever, and then just sort of day by day, you roll, you roll back and eventually you become more or less that paramecium.

And then, and then you sort of even below that, right.

As a, as a, as an unfertilized OSI.