Michael Levin

And the reason that's me is because I have more control over this than I have over any of this other stuff.

And so now you can begin to, right?

So that's self-construction, that figuring out making models of the outside world and then turning that inwards and starting to make a model of yourself, right?

Which immediately starts to get into issues of agency and control because...

In order to – if you are under metabolic constraints, meaning you don't have the energy, right, all the energy in the world, you have to be efficient, that immediately forces you to start telling stories about coarse-grained agents that do things, right?

You don't have the energy to, like Laplace's demon, you know, calculate every –

Every possible state that's going to happen, you have to you have to coarse grain and you have to say that is the kind of creature that does things, either things that I avoid or things that I will go towards as a mate or food or whatever it's going to be.

And so right at the base of simple, very simple organisms starting to make.

models of agents doing things, that is the origin of models of free will, basically, right?

Because you see the world around you as having agency, and then you turn that on yourself and you say, wait, I have agency too.

I do things, right?

And then you make decisions about what you're going to do.

So all of this one model is to view all of those kinds of things as

being driven by that early need to determine what you are and to do so and to then take actions in the most energetically efficient space possible, right?

I think that's very plausible, yeah.

Well, I'll say two things.

The first thing is I think it's very plausible to say that any organism or any agent, whether it's biological or not, any agent that self-constructs under energy constraints is going to believe in free will.

We'll get to whether it has free will momentarily.

But I think what it definitely drives is a view of yourself and the outside world as an agential view.

I think that's inescapable.