Michael Levin

You need to understand the space in which they live.

So not just the physical modality, like can they see light?

Can they feel vibration?

I mean, that's important, of course, because that's how you deliver your message.

But

But not just the ideas for a communication medium, not just the physical medium, but saliency, right?

So what are important to this?

What's important to this system?

And systems have all kinds of different levels of sophistication of what you could expect to get back.

And I think what's, what's really important, I call this, um, the, the spectrum of persuadability, which is this, this idea that when you're looking at a system, you can't, you can't assume where on the spectrum it is, you have to do experiments.

And so, so, so, so, uh,

For example, if you look at a gene regulatory network, which is just a bunch of nodes that turn each other on and off at various rates, you might look at that and you say, wow, there's no magic here.

I mean, clearly this thing is as deterministic as it gets.

It's a piece of hardware.

The only way we're going to be able to control it is by rewiring it, which is the way molecular biology works, right?

We can add nodes, remove nodes, whatever.

Well, so we've done simulations and shown that biological, and now we're doing this in the lab, the biological networks like that have associative memory.

So they can actually learn, they can learn from experience, they have habituation, they have sensitization, they have associative memory, which you wouldn't have known if you assumed that they have to be on the left side of that spectrum.

So when you're going to communicate with something, and we've even...

Charles Abramson, I've written a paper on behaviorist approaches to synthetic organisms, meaning that if you're given something, you have no idea what it is or what it can do.