Michael Levin

If there is no space, if you don't want to call it a space, that's okay.

But you can't get away from the fact that as a matter of research, there are patterns that relate to each other in a particular way.

What's, you know, the final step of calling it a space is minimal.

The bigger issue is what the hell is it a map of then if it's not a space?

So that's the first thing.

Now, that's how it plays out, I think, in math and physics.

Now, in biology, here's how we're going to know if this makes any sense.

What we are doing now is trying to map out that space by saying, look, we know that the frog genome maps to one thing, and that's a frog.

Turns out that exact same genome, if you just take the slightest step with the exact same genome, but you just take some cells out of that environment, they can also make xenobots.

with very specific, different transcriptomes, very specific behaviors, very specific shapes.

It's not just, oh, well, you know, they do whatever.

And then they have very specific behaviors, just like the frog had very specific properties.

We can start to map out what all those are, right?

Make that basically try to draw the latent space from which those things are pulled.

And one of two things is going to happen in the future.

And so this is, you know, come back in 20 years and we'll see how this worked out.

One thing that could happen is that we're going to see

oh yeah, just like the map of mathematics, we made a map of the space.

And we know now that if I want a system that acts like this and this, here's the kind of body I need to make for it because those are the patterns that exist.

The anthrobots have four different behaviors, not seven and not one.