Michael Levin

They're also competing for information, for metabolic, for limited metabolic constraints.

But to get back to your other point, which is this seems like really efficient and good and so on compared to some of our human efforts, we also have to keep in mind that what happens here is that each level bends the option space for the level beneath so that your parts, basically, they don't see the geometry.

So I'm using...

And I think I take this seriously, terminology from like relativity, right?

Where the space is literally bent.

So the option space is deformed by the higher level so that the lower levels, all they really have to do is go down their concentration gradient.

They don't have to, in fact, they don't, they can't know what the big picture is.

But if you bend the space just right, if they do what locally seems right, they end up doing your bidding.

They end up doing things that are optimal in the higher space.

Conversely,

Because the components are good at getting their job done, you as the higher level don't need to try to compute all the low-level controls.

All you're doing is bending the space.

You don't know or care how they're going to do it.

I'll give you a super simple example.

In the tadpole, we found that, OK, so tadpoles need to become frogs.

And to go from a tadpole head to a frog head, you have to rearrange the face.

So the eyes have to move forward.

The jaws have to come out.

The nostrils move.

Everything moves.