Michael Levin

Now, now you say, OK, I had one egg and one embryo and there you go.

What else could it be?

Well, the reality is and I used to I did all of this as a grad student.

If you if you take a little needle and you make a scratch in that blastoderm in that in that disc such that the cells can't talk to each other for a while, it heals up.

But for a while, they can't talk to each other.

What will happen is that both regions.

will decide that they can be the embryo and there will be two of them.

And then when they heal up, they become conjoint twins and you can make two, you can make three, you can make lots.

So the question of how many selves are in there cannot be answered until it's actually played all the way through.

It isn't necessarily that there's just one.

There can be many.

So what you have is you have this medium, this undifferentiated – I'm sure there's a psychological version of this somewhere that I don't know the proper terminology – but you have this ocean of potentiality.

You have these thousands of cells and some number of individuals are going to be formed out of it, usually one, sometimes zero, sometimes several.

And they form out of these cells because a region of these cells organizes into a collective that will have goals, goals that individual cells don't have.

For example, make a limb, make an eye.

How many eyes?

Well, exactly two.

So individual cells don't know what an eye is.

They don't know how many eyes you're supposed to have, but the collective does.

The collective has goals and memories and anticipations that the individual cells don't.