Michael Levin

And it seems to me that what they have in common is some degree of competency to pursue a goal.

And so what you can do then is you can draw.

And so what I ended up drawing was this thing that it's kind of like a backwards Minkowski cone diagram where

all of space is collapsed into one axis and then, and then here, and then time is, is this axis.

And then what you can do is you can draw for any creature.

You can, you can semi quantitatively estimate what are the, what are the spatial and temporal parameters,

goals that it can that it's capable of pursuing so for example if you are a tick and all you can uh all you really are able to pursue is maxima or bacterium in maximizing the level of some some chemical in your vicinity right that's all you've got it's a tiny little icon then then you're a simple system like a tick or a bacterium if you are something like a dog well you've got some ability to um

to care about some spatial region, some temporal, you know, you can remember a little bit backwards, you can predict a little bit forwards, but you're never ever going to care about what happens in the next town over four weeks from now.

It's just, as far as we know, it's just impossible for that kind of architecture.

If you're a human,

You might be working towards world peace long after you're dead, right?

So you might have a planetary scale goal that's enormous, right?

And then there may be other greater intelligences somewhere that can care in the linear range about numbers of creatures that, you know, some sort of Buddha-like character that can like care about everybody's welfare, like really care the way that we can't.

And so that – it's not a mapping of what you can sense, how far you can sense, right?

It's not a mapping of how far you can act.

It's a mapping of how big are the goals you are capable of envisioning and working towards.

And I think that enables you to put –

synthetic kinds of constructs, AIs, aliens, swarms, whatever on the same diagram, because because we're not talking about what you're made of, or how you got here, we're talking about what are the what are the the size and complexity of the goals towards which you can work?

I'm trying to remember.

I have a list of them somewhere on my website.