Michael Levin

There are some goals in transcriptional space, some goals in metabolic space, some goals in physiological state space, but they're generally very tiny goals.

One thing evolution did was to provide a kind of cognitive glue, which we can also talk about, that ties them together into a multicellular system, and those systems have

grandiose goals.

They're making limbs.

And if you're a salamander limb and you chop it off, they will regrow that limb with the right number of fingers.

Then they'll stop when it's done.

The goal has been achieved.

No individual cell knows what a finger is or how many fingers you're supposed to have, but the collective absolutely does.

And that process of growing that cognitive light cone from a single cell to something much bigger.

And of course, the

failure mode of that process so cancer right when cells disconnect they physiologically disconnect from the other cells their cognitive lycone shrinks the boundary between self and world which is what the cognitive lycone defines uh shrinks now they're back to an amoeba as far as they're concerned the rest of the body is just an external environment and they do what amoebas do they go where life is good they reproduce as much as they can right so that that cognitive lycone that that that is the thing that i'm talking about that scales and so when we're looking for life

I don't think we're looking for specific materials.

I don't think we're looking for specific metabolic states.

I think we're looking for scales of cognitive glycan.

We're looking for alignment of parts towards bigger goals in spaces that the parts could not comprehend.

No, I didn't.

Sorry, I didn't mean that.

First of all, the goal necessarily is often removed in time.

So in other words, when you're pursuing a goal, it means that you have a separation between current state and target state at minimum.

Your thermostat, right?