Michael Levin

So there are cells, there are molecular networks, there are materials, there are organs and tissues and synthetic beings and biobots and whatever.

And so the idea is if I want your cells to regrow a limb, for example, if you're injured and I want your cells to regrow a limb,

I have many options.

Some of those options are I'm going to micromanage all of the molecular events that have to happen.

Right.

And there's an incredible number of those.

Or maybe I just have to micromanage the cells and the stem cell kinds of signaling factors.

Or maybe actually I can give the cells a very high level signal.

prompt that says you really should build the limb and convince them to do it, right?

And so where, which of those is possible?

I mean, clearly people have a lot of intuitions about that.

If you ask standard people in regenerative medicine and molecular biology, they're going to say, well, that convincing thing is crazy.

What we really should be doing is talking to the cells or better yet, the molecular networks.

And in fact, all the excitement of the biological sciences today are at single molecule approaches and big data and genomics and all of that.

The assumption is that going down is where the action is going to be, going down in scale.

And I think that's wrong.

But the thing that we can say for sure is that you can't guess that.

You have to do experiments and you have to see because you don't know where any given system is on that spectrum of persuadability.

And it turns out that every time we look and we take tools from behavioral science, so learning, different kinds of training, different kinds of

that are used in active inference and surprise minimization and perceptual multi-stability and visual illusions and all these kinds of interesting things, you know, stress perception and memory, active memory reconstruction, all these interesting things, when we apply them outside the brain to other kinds of living systems, we find novel discoveries and novel capabilities actually being able to get the material to do new things that nobody had ever found before.