Michael Levin

You get more out than you put in, in a certain way, because you make very minimal assumptions.

And then certain facts are thrust upon you.

For example, the value of Feigenbaum's constant, the value of natural algorithm E. These things you sort of discover, right?

And the salient fact is this.

If those facts were different, then biology and physics would be different, right?

So they matter.

They impact instructively, functionally.

They impact the physical world.

If the distribution of primes was something else, well, then the cicadas would have been coming out at different times.

But the reverse isn't true.

What I mean is there is nothing you can do in the physical world

to change E, as far as I know, to change E or to change Feigenbaum's constant.

You could have swapped out all the constants at the Big Bang, right?

You can change all the different things.

You are not going to change those things.

So this, I think, Plato and Pythagoras understood very clearly that there is a set of truths which impact the physical world, but they themselves are not defined by and determined by what happens in the physical world.

You can't change them by things you do in the physical world.

Right.

And so I'll make a couple of claims about that.

One claim is I think we call physics those things that are constrained by those patterns.