Michael Levin

Every cell does not know, right?

Every cell is some other cell's external environment, right?

So where does that border between you and the outside world, you don't really know where that is, right?

Every collection of cell has to figure that out from scratch, right?

And the fact that evolution requires all of these things to figure out what they are, what effectors they have, what sensors they have, where does it make sense to draw a boundary between me and the outside world?

The fact that you have to build all that from scratch, this autopoiesis, is what defines the border of a self.

Now, biology uses like a multi-scale competency architecture, meaning that every level has goals.

So molecular networks have goals, cells have goals, tissues, organs, colonies.

And it's the interplay of all of those that enable biology to solve problems in new ways, for example, in xenobots and various other things.

This is, you know, it's exactly as you said, in many ways, the cells are discovering new ways of being.

But at the same time, evolution certainly shapes all this.

So evolution is very good at this agential bioengineering, right?

When evolution is discovering a new way of being an animal, an animal or a plant or something,

Sometimes it's by changing the hardware, changing protein structure and so on.

But much of the time, it's not by changing the hardware, it's by changing the signals that the cells give to each other.

It's doing what we as engineers do, which is try to convince the cells to do various things by using signals, experiences, stimuli.

That's what biology does.

It has to, because it's not dealing with a blank slate.

Every time, if you're evolution and you're trying to

make make a make an organism you're not dealing with a passive material that is fresh and you have to specify it already wants to do certain things so the easiest way to do that search to find whatever is going to be adaptive is to find the signals that are going to convince cells to do various things right