Michael Levin

Well, I think that's a critical point that you brought up because how you relate to something

is really what this is all about right as an engineer how do i control it but maybe i shouldn't be controlling it maybe i should be you know can i have a relationship with it should i be listening to its advice like like all the way from you know i need to take it apart all the way to uh i better do what it says because it seems to be pretty smart and everything in between right that's really what we're asking about yeah we need to understand our relationship to it we're searching for that relationship even in the most trivial senses

This will get some people ticked off, I think.

But I don't think... I think the whole notion of anthropomorphizing is a holdover from a pre-scientific age where humans were magic and everything else wasn't magic.

And you were anthropomorphizing when you dared suggest that something else has some features of humans.

And I think we need to be way beyond that.

And...

This issue of anthropomorphizing, I think it's a cheap charge.

I don't think it holds any water at all other than when somebody makes a cognitive claim.

I think all cognitive claims are engineering claims, really.

So when somebody says this thing knows or this thing hopes or this thing wants or this thing predicts,

All you can say is, fabulous, give me the engineering protocol that you've derived using that hypothesis, and we will see if this thing helps us or not.

And then we can make a rational decision.

it's a little different than than options it's it's really focused on so so so back in uh this this i i first came up with this but back in 2018 i want to say we had a there was a conference um a templeton conference where they challenged us to come up with frameworks i think actually it's the here it's the diverse intelligence uh community that summer institute yeah they had a summer institute but um the logo is the b with some circuits

Yeah, it's got different different life forms.

And, you know, so the whole the whole program is called diverse intelligence.

And they sort of they challenged us to come up with a framework that was suitable for analyzing different kinds of intelligence together.

Right.

Because because the kinds of things you do to a human are not good with an octopus, not good with a plant and so on.

So I started thinking about this and I asked myself, what do all cognitive agents, no matter what their provenance, no matter what their architecture is, what do cognitive agents have in common?