Michael Levin

If you have a developmental system and you put barriers between... So I'm going to give you two pieces of evidence that suggest that there is a goal.

One piece of evidence is that if you try to block these things from the outcome that they normally have...

they will do some amazing things, uh, sometimes very clever things, sometimes not at all the way that they normally do it, right?

So this is William James's definition by different means, by following different trajectories, they will go around various local maxima and minima to get to where they need to go.

It is navigation of a space.

It is not blind, turn the crank and wherever we end up is where we end up.

That is not what we see experimentally.

And more importantly, I think what we've shown, and this is, this is, um,

This is something I'm particularly happy with in our lab.

Over the last 20 years, we've shown the following.

We can actually rewrite the goal states because we found them.

We have shown through our work on bioelectric imaging and bioelectric reprogramming, we have actually shown how those goal memories are encoded, at least in some cases.

We certainly haven't got them all, but we have some.

If you can find where the goal state is encoded, read it out, reset it, and the system will now implement a new goal based on what you just reset, that is the ultimate evidence that your goal-directed model is working.

Because if there was no goal, that shouldn't be possible.

Once you can find it, read it, interpret it, and rewrite it, it means that by any engineering standard, it means that you're dealing with a homeostatic mechanism.

So through lots and lots of hard work.

The barrier thing tells you that you should be looking for a goal.

you start to build an intuition about exactly which goal is pursuing yes the first couple of steps are all imagination you have to ask yourself what space is this thing even working in and and you really have to stretch your mind because because we can't imagine all the spaces that systems work in right so so step one is what space is it step two what do i think the goal is and let's not mistake step two you're not done just because you haven't made a hypothesis that doesn't mean you can say well there i see it doing this therefore that's the goal you don't know that

You have to actually do experiments.