Michael Levin

But what I was trying to point out is that this is not just structural.

Every one of those layers...

is competent and is doing problem solving in different spaces and spaces that are very hard for us to imagine.

We humans are, because of our own evolutionary history, we are so obsessed with movement in three-dimensional space that even in AI, you see this all the time.

They say, well, this thing doesn't have a robotic body.

It's not embodied.

Yeah, it's not embodied by moving around in 3D space, but biology has embodiments in all kinds of spaces that are hard for us to imagine, right?

that we do in 3D space, when we think about robots wandering around your kitchen, they're doing those loops in these other spaces.

And so the first thing I was trying to point out is that, yeah, every layer of your body has its own ability to solve problems in those spaces.

And then on the right, what I was saying is that this distinction between, you know, people say, well, there are living beings and then there are engineered machines, and then they often follow up with all the things machines are never going to be able to do and whatever.

And so what I was trying to point out here is that it is very difficult to maintain those kind of distinctions because life is incredibly interoperable.

Life doesn't really care if the thing it's working with was evolved through a random trial and error or was engineered with a higher degree of agency.

Because at every level within the cell, within the tissue, within the organism, within the collective, you can replace and substitute things.

engineered systems with the naturally evolved systems.

And that question of, is it really, you know, is it biology or is it technology?

I don't think it's a useful question anymore.

So I was trying to warm people up with this idea that what we're going to do now is talk about minds in general, regardless of their history or their composition.

It doesn't matter what you're made of.

It doesn't matter how you got here.

Let's talk about what you're able to do and what your inner world looks like.