Michael Levin

You have to make a claim.

Competent at what?

And then or if I say if I tell you it has a goal, the question is, what's the goal and how do you know?

And I said, well, because every time I deviated from this particular state, that's what it spends energy to get back to.

That's the goal.

And we can quantify it and we can be objective about it.

So so so the the we're not used to thinking about this.

I give a talk sometimes called Why Don't Robots Get Cancer?

Right.

And the reason robots don't get cancer is because generally speaking, with a few exceptions, our architectures have been you've got a bunch of dumb parts and you hope that if you put them together, the overlying machine will have some intelligence and do something or other.

Right.

But the individual parts don't don't care.

They don't have an agenda.

Biology isn't like that.

Every level has an agenda.

And the final outcome is the result of cooperation and competition both within and across levels.

So, for example, during embryogenesis, your tissues and organs are competing with each other.

And it's actually a really important part of development.

There's a reason they compete with each other.

They're not all just, you know, sort of helping each other.