Michael Levin

I think already there, you have this weird haunting of the physical world by patterns that are not coming from the physical world.

Mm-hmm.

The reason I emphasize this is because now when I amplify this into biology, I don't think it sort of jumps as a new thing.

I think it's just a much more... I think what we call biology is our systems that exploit the hell out of it.

I think physics is constrained by it, but we call biology those things that make use of those kinds of things and run with it.

And so, again, I just think it's a scaling.

I don't think it's a brand new thing that happens.

I think it's a scaling, right?

So what I'm saying is...

We already know from physics that there are non-physical patterns, and these are generally patterns of form, which is why I call them low agency, because they're like fractals that stand still, and they're like prime number distributions.

Although there's a mathematician that's talking in our symposium that's telling me that actually I'm too chauvinistic even there.

Actually, even those things have more oomph than even I gave them credit for, which I love.

So...

So what I'm saying is those kind of static patterns are things that we typically see in physics.

But they're not the full extent of what lives in that space.

That space is also home to some patterns that are very high agency.

And if we give them a body, if we build a body that they can inhabit, then we get to see different behavioral competencies that the behavior scientists say, oh, I know what that looks like.

That's this kind of behavioral, you know, this kind of mind or that kind of mind.

In a certain sense, I mean, yes, what I'm saying is extremely radical.

But it is a very old idea.