Michael Levin

And I'm counting on you as a multi-scale agential material to take care of the chemistry underneath.

Correct.

I don't need, and I don't need physics to convince you.

And I don't need to know how you work.

Like, I don't need to understand all of the steps.

What I do need to have is trust that you are a multi-scale cognitive system that already does that for, for yourself.

And you do like, this is an amazing thing.

I don't, people don't think about this enough.

I think, uh,

When you wake up in the morning and you have social goals, research goals, financial goals, whatever it is that you have, in order for you to act on those goals, sodium and calcium and other ions have to cross your muscle membranes.

Those incredibly abstract goal states ultimately have to make the chemistry dance in a very particular way, right?

Our entire body is a transducer of very abstract things.

And by the way, not just our brains, but other, you know, our organs have...

anatomical goals and other things that we can talk about because all of this plays out in regeneration and development and so on.

But the scaling of all of these things, the way you regulate yourself is not by, oh my God, you don't have to sit there and think, wow, I really have to push some sodiums across this membrane.

All of that happens automatically.

And that's the incredible benefit of these multi-scale materials.

So what I was trying to do in this paper is a couple of things.

All of these were, by the way, drawn by Jeremy Gay, who's this amazing graphic artist that works with me.

First of all, in panel A, which is the spiral I was trying to point out, is that at every level of biological organization, like we all know we're sort of nested dolls of organs and tissues and cells and molecules and whatever.