Michael Levin

So it's not philosophy, but real experiments that if you take these other tools, you can, in fact, persuade the system in ways that has never been done before.

And we can unpack all of that.

But it is absolutely correlated with intelligence.

So let me flesh that out a little bit.

What I think is scaling in all of these things, right, because I keep talking about the scaling.

So what is it that's scaling?

What I think is scaling is something I call the cognitive light cone.

And the cognitive light cone is the size of the biggest goal state that you can pursue.

This doesn't mean how far do your senses reach.

This doesn't mean how far can you affect it.

So the James Webb Telescope has enormous sensory reach, but that doesn't mean that's the size of its cognitive lichen.

The size of the cognitive lichen is the scale of the biggest goal you can actively pursue.

But I do think it's a useful concept to enable us to think about very different types of agents of different composition, different provenance, engineered, evolved, hybrid, whatever, all in the same framework.

And by the way, the reason I use light cone is that it has this idea from physics that you're putting space and time kind of in the same diagram, which I like here.

So if you tell me that all your goals revolve around maximizing the amount of sugar in this, you know, 10, 20 micron radius of space time, and that you have, you know, 20 minutes memory going back and maybe five minutes predictive capacity going forward, that tiny little cognitive light cone, I'm going to see probably a bacterium.

And if you say to me that, well, I'm able to care about several hundred yards sort of scale, I could never care about what happens three weeks from now, two towns over.

It's just impossible.

I'm saying, you might be a dog.

And if you say to me, okay, I care about really what happens, you know, the financial markets on earth, you know, long after I'm dead and this and that.

I say, you're probably a human.