Michael Levin

There are just things like active inference, minimize surprise, optimize some potential

Yeah, I mean, that's what you just painted is a very good description of our efforts at regenerative medicine as a kind of somatic psychiatry.

So the idea is that you're not trying to micromanage.

I mean, think about the limitations of a lot of the medicines today.

We try to interact down at the level of pathways, right?

So we're trying to micromanage it.

what the what's the problem well one problem is that for almost every medicine other than antibiotics once you stop it the problem comes right back you haven't fixed anything you were addressing symptoms you weren't actually curing anything again except for antibiotics uh that's one problem the other problem is you have massive amount of side effects because you were trying to interact at the lowest level it's right it's like i'm gonna you know i'm gonna i'm gonna try to program this computer by changing the uh the melting point of copper like

Maybe you can do things that way, but my God, it's hard to program at the hardware level.

So what I think we're starting to understand is that, and by the way, this goes back to what you were saying before about that we could have access to our internal state, right?

Those are all the people that uniformly will say things like, well, the body has an intelligence and this and that, right?

Like those two sets overlap perfectly because, because that's exactly right.

Because once you, once you start thinking about it that way, you realize that the better locus of control is not always at the lowest level.

This is why we don't all program with a soldering iron, right?

We, we, we take advantage of, of the high level intelligences that are there, which means trying to figure out, okay, which of your tissues can learn?

What can they learn?

Uh,

Why is it that certain drugs stop working after you take them for a while with this habituation, right?

And so can we understand habituation, sensitization, associative learning, these kinds of things in chemical pathways?

We're going to have a completely different way, I think.

We're going to have a completely different way of using drugs and of medicine in general when we start focusing on the goal states and on the intelligence of our subsystems as opposed to treating everything as if the only path was micromanagement from chemistry upwards.