Michael Levin

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'm not saying that's wrong.

I'm just saying I don't have data for that one, but I'll tell you the stuff that I'm quite certain of.

There are a couple of different formalisms that we have in control theory.

One of those formalisms is open loop complexity.

In other words, I've got a bunch of subunits like a cellular automaton.

They follow certain rules and control.

You turn the crank, time goes forward, whatever happens, happens.

Now, clearly you can get complexity from this.

Clearly you can get some very interesting looking things, right?

So the game of life, all those kinds of cool things, right?

You can get complexity, no problem.

But the idea that that model is going to be sufficient to explain and control things like morphogenesis is a hypothesis.

It's okay to make that hypothesis, but we know it's false, despite the fact that that is what we learn, you know, in...

In basic cell biology and developmental biology classes, when the first time you see something like this, inevitably, especially if you're an engineer in those classes, you raise your hand and go, hey, how does it know to do that?

How does it know, you know, four fingers instead of seven?

What they tell you is it doesn't know anything.

That's very clear.

They all insist.

When we learn these things, they insist.