Michael Levin

blown up in a way that I didn't realize how much undercurrent of these ideas had already existed that were ready.

Like now, now is the time.

And I think this is like, I've been thinking about these things for, I don't know, 30 plus years.

I never talked about them before.

Because they weren't actionable before.

There wasn't a way to actually make empirical progress with this now.

You know, this is something that Pythagoras and Plato and probably many people before them talked about.

But now we're to the point where we can actually do experiments and they're making a difference in our research program.

The first thing I want to say is that while I'm currently calling it the platonic space,

I'm in no way trying to stick close to the things that Plato actually thought about.

In fact, to whatever extent we even know what that is, I think I depart from that in some ways.

And I'm going to have to change the name at some point.

The reason I'm using the name now is because I wanted to be clear about a particular connection to mathematics, which a lot of mathematicians would call themselves Platonists, because

What they think they're doing is discovering, not inventing as a human construction, but discovering a structured, ordered space of truths.

Let's put it this way.

In biology, as in physics, there's something very curious that happens that if you keep asking why...

then something interesting goes on.

Well, I'll give you two examples.

First of all, imagine cicadas.

So the cicadas come out at 13 years and 17 years, okay?