Michael Levin

Now, once you've made those hypotheses, now you do the experiments.

You say, okay, if I want to block it from reaching its goal, how do I do that?

And this, by the way, is exactly the approach we took with the sorting algorithms and with everything else.

You hypothesize the goal, you put a barrier in, and then...

you get to find out what level of ingenuity it has.

Maybe what you see is, well, that derailed everything, so probably this thing isn't very smart.

Or you see, wow, it can go around and do these things.

Or you might see, wow, it's taking a completely different approach, using its affordances in novel ways.

That's a high level of intelligence.

You will find out what the answer is.

Yeah.

Okay, if you want to get really weird, we can get really weird here.

Think about the caterpillar-butterfly transition, okay?

So you got a caterpillar, soft-bodied kind of creature, has a particular controller that's suitable for running a soft-bodied, you know, kind of robot.

It has a brain for that task, and then it has to become this butterfly, hard-bodied creature, flies around, okay?

During the process of metamorphosis, its brain is basically ripped up and rebuilt from scratch.

Now, what's been found is that if you train the caterpillar, so you give it a new memory, meaning that if the caterpillar sees this color disc, then it crawls over and eats some leaves.

Turns out the butterfly retains that memory.

Now, the obvious question is how the hell do you retain memories when the medium is being refactored like that?

Let's put that aside.