Michael Levin

And physics is what we call systems that at least look to be amenable to a very simple, low agency kind of model and so on.

But that's what I'm interested in is understanding that and developing applications, because it's very important to me that what we do is transition deep ideas and philosophy into actual practical applications that not only make it clear whether we're making any progress or not,

but also allow us to relieve suffering and make life better for all sentient beings and enable us and others to reach their full potential.

So these are very practical things, I think.

The idea basically is that where something is on that spectrum, and I've called it the spectrum of persuadability, you could call it the spectrum of intelligence or agency or something like that.

I like the notion of the spectrum of persuadability because it's an engineering approach.

It means that these are not things you can...

decide or have feelings about from a philosophical armchair.

You have to make a hypothesis about which tools, which interaction protocols you're going to bring to a given system.

And then we all get to find out how that worked out for you, right?

So you could be wrong in many ways.

In both directions, you can guess too high or too low or wrong in various ways.

And then we can all find out how that's working out.

And so I do think that the behavior of certain objects

well described by specific formal rules.

And we call those things the subject of mathematics.

And then there are some other things whose behavior really requires the kinds of tools that we use in behavioral cognitive neuroscience.

And those are other kinds of minds that we think we study in biology or in psychology or other sciences.

Yeah, the beginning of my work is very much in regenerative medicine, in bioengineering, things like that.

So for those kinds of systems, the question is always, how do you get the system to do what you want it to do?