Michael Levin

That just seems like that would have such a strong pressure against it, you know?

Just imagine a population with a lower, if you were a mutant in a population that had less of a survival imperative, would your genes outperform the others?

It seems not.

Yeah, that's a really, you know, population level selection is a kind of a deep controversial area, but it's tough because on the face of it, if that was your genome, it wouldn't get propagated because you would die and then your neighbor who didn't have that would have all the kids.

To be honest, I'm more concerned with, especially now getting older and having helped a couple of people pass.

I think about what's a...

What's a good way to go?

Basically, like nowadays, I don't know what that is.

I, you know, sitting in a, you know, a facility that sort of tries to stretch you out as long as you can.

That doesn't seem that doesn't seem good.

And there's not a lot of opportunities to sort of, I don't know, sacrifice yourself for something useful.

Right.

There's not terribly many opportunities.

opportunities for that in modern society so i don't know i that's that's that's more of i'm not i'm not particularly worried about uh death itself but uh i've i've seen it happen uh and and uh it's not it's not pretty and i don't know what what a better what a better alternative is so the existential aspect of it does not worry you deeply the fact that this ride ends

No, it began.

I mean, the ride began, right?

So there was, I don't know how many billions of years before that I wasn't around.

So that's okay.

yeah it's a little bit like the people who say they don't believe in free will right i mean you can say that but but when you go to a restaurant you still have to pick a soup and stuff so right so so i don't know if i know i've i've actually seen that that happened at lunch with a with a well-known philosopher and he didn't believe in free will and you know the waitress came around and he was like well let me see i was like what are you doing here you're gonna choose a sandwich right so um it's i think it's one of those things i think you you can know that you know you're not gonna live forever but

you can't, you can't, it's not practical to live that way unless, you know, so you buy insurance and then you do some stuff like that.