Michael Levin

Yeah, there is no generic rule that tells you when do you need to stop.

We make those up.

Those are completely made up.

You have to do the science and find out.

Well, yeah, because you see, the thing to remember is we don't have a magic sense or really good intuition for what the mapping is between the embodiment of something and the degree of intelligence it has.

We think we do because we have an N of one example on Earth and we kind of know what to expect from cells, snakes, primates, whatever.

But we really don't.

We don't have, and this is, we'll get into more of the stuff on the platonic space, but our intuitions around that stuff is so bad that to really think that we know enough not to try things at this point is, I think, really short-sighted.

So this is the version 1.0, and there's a kind of update at 2.0 that I'm writing at the moment, trying to formalize in a careful way all the things that we've been talking about here.

And in particular, this notion of having to do experiments to figure out where any given system is on a continuum.

And let's just start with figure two maybe for a second, and then we'll come back to figure one.

And first, just to unpack the acronym, I like the idea that it spells out TAME because the central focus of this is interactions and how do you interact with a system to have a productive interaction with it.

And the idea is that cognitive claims are really protocol claims.

When you tell me that something has some degree of intelligence, what you're really saying is this is the set of tools I'm going to deploy and we can all find out how that worked out for you.

And so technological, because I wanted to be clear with my colleagues that technology

This was not a project in just philosophy.

This had very specific empirical implications that are going to play out in engineering and regenerative medicine and so on.

Technological approach to mind everywhere, this idea that we don't know yet where different kinds of minds are to be found, and we have to empirically figure that out.

And so what you see here in figure two is basically this idea that there is a spectrum, and I'm just showing four waypoints along that spectrum here.

And as you move to the right of that spectrum, a couple of things happen.