Michael Levin

I'm going to get somewhere even weirder than that.

There's something else that's even more interesting than that.

It's not just that you have to retain the memory.

You have to remap that memory onto a completely new context because guess what?

The butterfly doesn't move the way the caterpillar moves and it doesn't care about leaves.

It wants nectar from flowers.

And so if that memory is going to survive, it can't just persist.

It has to be remapped into a novel context.

Now, here's where things get weird.

We can take a couple of different perspectives here.

We can take the perspective of the caterpillar facing some sort of crazy singularity and say, my God, I'm going to cease to exist, but I'll sort of be reborn in this new higher dimensional world where I'll fly.

Okay, so that's one thing.

We can take the perspective of the butterfly and say that, well, here I am.

But, you know, I seem to be saddled with some tendencies and some memories.

And I don't know where the hell they came from.

And I don't remember exactly how I got them.

And they seem to be a core part of my psychological makeup.

And, you know, they come from somewhere.

I don't know where they come from.

So you can take that perspective.