Michael Levin

that we now care about a much smaller set of people.

That's what I mean by linear range.

Well, no.

How do you know what the cognitive icon of something is?

Because as you've said, it could be almost anything.

The key is you have to do experiments.

And the way you do experiments is you have to do interventional experiments.

You have to put barriers between it and its goal.

And you have to ask what happens.

And intelligence is the degree of ingenuity that it has in overcoming barriers between it and its goal.

Now, if it were to be that now this is this this is, I think, a totally doable but but impractical and very expensive experiment.

But you could imagine setting up a scenario where the bacteria were blocked from becoming more complex.

And you can ask if they would try to find ways around it.

Or whether it's actually, nah, their goals are actually metabolic.

And as long as those goals are met, they're not going to actually get around your barrier.

This business of putting barriers between things and their goals is actually extremely powerful because we've deployed it in all kinds of, and I'm sure we'll get to this later, but we've deployed it in all kinds of weird systems that you wouldn't think are goal-driven systems.

And what it allows us to do is to get beyond just what you call anthropomorphizing claims of saying, oh, yeah, I think this thing is trying to do this or that.

The question is, well, let's do the experiment.

And one other thing I want to say about anthropomorphizing is people say this to me all the time.

I don't think that exists.