Michael Levin

pattern memories, specifically what I was saying before, goals, anatomical goals.

If you want to persist for 100 plus years, your cells better remember what your correct shape is and where the new cells go, right?

So there are these pattern memories that exist during embryogenesis, during regeneration, during resistance to aging.

We can see them, we can visualize them.

One thing you can imagine is, fine, the physical body, the cells are the agent.

The electrical pattern memories are just data.

And what might happen during aging is that the data might get degraded.

They might get fuzzy.

And so what we need to do is reinforce the data, reinforce the memories, reinforce the pattern memories.

That's one specific research program.

And we're doing that.

But that's not the only research program.

Because the other thing you might imagine is that what if

the patterns are the agent in exactly the same sense as we think in our brains.

It's the patterns of electrophysiological, you know, computations and whatever else that is the agent, right?

And that what they're doing in the brain are the side effects of the patterns working themselves out.

And those side effects might be to fire off some muscles and some glands and some other things.

From that perspective,

maybe what's actually happening is maybe the agent's finding it harder and harder to be embodied in the physical world.

Why?