Michael Levin

And the establishment of that boundary with its own ability to pursue certain goals, that's the origin of selfhood.

So the first thing to say is that there are way more questions here than than certainties.

OK, so everything I'm telling you is cutting edge developing stuff.

So it's not as if any of us know the answer to this.

But but here's here's here's my opinion on this.

I think what evolution I don't think that evolution produces solutions to specific problems.

In other words, specific environments like here's a frog that can live well in a froggy environment.

I think what evolution produces is problem-solving machines that will solve problems in different spaces.

So not just three-dimensional space.

This goes back to what we were talking about before.

The brain is evolutionarily a late development.

It's a system that is able to pursue goals in three-dimensional space by giving commands to muscles.

Where did that system come from?

That system evolved from a much more ancient evolutionarily, much more ancient system that

where collections of cells gave instructions for cell behaviors, meaning cells move to divide, to die, to change into different cell types, to navigate morphous space, the space of anatomies, the space of all possible anatomies.

And before that, cells were navigating transcriptional space, which is a space of all possible gene expressions, and before that, metabolic space.

So what evolution has done, I think, is produced hardware that is very good at navigating different spaces using a bag of tricks, right, which I'm sure many of them we can steal for autonomous vehicles and robotics and various things.

And what happens is that they navigate these spaces without a whole lot of commitment to what the space is.

In fact, they don't know what the space is, right?

We are all brains in a vat, so to speak.