Michael Levin

They can get into stable states that are hard to pull them out of, right?

So that becomes, once they get in, that's a memory, a permanent memory or a semi-permanent memory of something that's happened.

There are cytoskeletal structures, right, that are physically, they store memories in physical configuration.

There are electrical memories like flip-flops where there is no physical, right?

So if you look, I show my students this example.

There's a flip-flop.

And the reason that it stores a zero or one is not because some piece of the hardware moved.

It's because there's a cycling of the current in one side of the thing.

If I come over and I hold the other side to a high voltage for a brief period of time, it flips over and now it's here.

but the heart none of the hardware moved the information is in a stable dynamical sense and if you were to x-ray the thing you couldn't tell me if it was zero or one because all you would see is where the hardware is you wouldn't see the the energetic state of the system so there are also so there are bioelectrical um states that are held in that exact way like like like volatile ram basically like in the in the electrical state it's very akin to the different ways the memory stored in the computer

You can make that mapping, right?

So I think the interesting thing is that based on the biology, we can have a more sophisticated... I think we can revise some of our computer engineering methods because there are some interesting things that biology does we haven't done yet.

But that mapping is not bad.

I mean, I think it works in many ways.

I think that the thing about biology is all about making really important decisions really quickly on very limited information.

I mean, that's what biology is all about.

You have to act.

You have to act now.

The stakes are very high and you don't know most of what you need to know to be perfect.

And so there's not even an attempt to be perfect or to get it right in any sense.