Michael Levin

Yeah, yeah.

There's a fun experiment that I did.

My son actually came up with this.

We did a biology unit together.

He's homeschooled, and so we did this a couple of years ago.

We did this thing where, imagine, so you got this slime mold, right?

Physarum polycephalum, and it grows on a petri dish of agar, and it sort of spreads out.

And it's a single-cell protist, but it's like this giant thing.

And so you put down a piece of oat and it wants to go get the oat and it sort of grows towards the oat.

So what you do is you take a razor blade and you just separate the piece of the whole culture that's growing towards the oat.

You just kind of separate it.

And so now think about the interesting decision-making calculus for that little piece.

I can go get the oat and therefore I won't have to share those nutrients with this giant mass over there.

So the nutrients per unit volume is going to be amazing.

So I should go eat the oat.

But if I first rejoin, because Fisarum, once you cut it, has the ability to join back up.

If I first rejoin, then that whole calculus becomes impossible because there is no more me anymore.

There's just we, and then we will go eat this thing, right?

So this interesting, you know, you can imagine a kind of game theory where the number of agents isn't fixed and that it's not just cooperate or defect, but it's actually merge and whatever, right?

Yeah, so it's really interesting.