Michael Levin

evolutionarily the most, um, adaptive way of being is that you go, you, you, you, you fight as long as you physically can.

And then when you can't, you can't.

And there's in, there's this photograph, there's some videos you can find of insects crawling around where like, you know, like, like most of it is already gone and it's still sort of crawling, you know, like, um, um, uh, Terminator style, right?

Like as far as, as long as you physically can, you keep going.

mammals don't do that so so a lot of mammals including rats have this thing where when when they think it's it's a hopeless situation they literally give up and die when physically they could have kept going i mean humans certainly do this and there's there's some like really unpleasant experiments that the this guy forget his name did with um drowning rats where if he where where rats normally drown after a couple of minutes but if you teach them that if you just tread water for a couple of minutes you'll get rescued they can tread water for like an hour

Right.

And so they literally just give up and die.

And so evolutionarily, that doesn't seem like a good strategy at all.

Evolutionarily, why would you like what's the benefit ever of giving up?

You just do what you can.

And, you know, one time out of a thousand, you'll actually get rescued.

Right.

But this issue of actually giving up suggests some very interesting metacognitive controls where you've now gotten to the point where survival actually isn't the top drive.

Right.

And that for whatever, you know, there are other considerations that have like taken over.

And I, I think that's uniquely a mammalian thing, but I don't know.

And what was the first, and that's the other thing, like what is the simplest system, whether evolved or natural or whatever, that is able to do that, right?

Like you can think, you know, what other animals are actually able to do that?

Maybe.

I don't know how evolutionarily how that gets off the ground.