Michael Levin

When I say it's an engineering perspective, I don't mean that the standard tools that we use in engineering and this idea of enforced control and steering.

is how we should view all of the world.

I'm not saying that at all.

And I want to be very clear on the, because, because, because people do email me and say that this engineering thing, you're going to drain the, you know, the life and the majesty out of these high end, like human conversation.

My whole, my whole point is not that at all.

It's that of course, at the right side of the spectrum, it doesn't look like engineering anymore, right?

It looks like, it looks like friendship and love and psychoanalysis and all these other tools that we have.

But here's what I want to do.

I want to be very specific to my colleagues in regenerative medicine.

Just imagine if I went to a bioengineering department or a genetics department and I started talking about high-level cognition and psychoanalysis, right?

They don't want to hear that.

So I focus on the engineering approach because I want to say, look...

This is not a philosophical problem.

This is not a linguistics problem.

We are not trying to define terms in different ways to make anybody feel fuzzy.

What I'm telling you is if you want to reach certain capabilities, if you want to reprogram cancer, if you want to regrow new organs, you want to defeat aging, you want to do these specific things.

You are leaving too much on the table by making an unwarranted assumption that the low-level tools that we have—so these are the rules of chemistry and the kind of remolecular rewiring—that those are going to be sufficient to get to where you want to go.

It's an assumption only.

And it's an unwarranted assumption.

And actually, we've done experiments now.