Michael Levin

But I think the most important thing I can say about that question is I don't believe in any such line.

I don't believe any of that exists.

I think it's a continuum.

I think we as humans like to demarcate areas on that continuum and give them names.

because it makes life easier.

And then we have a lot of battles over, you know, so-called category errors when people transgress those categories.

I think most of those categories at this point, they may have done some good service at the beginning of when the scientific method was getting started and so on.

I think at this point, they mostly hold back science.

Many, many categories that we can talk about are at this point very harmful to progress, because what those categories do is they prevent you from porting tools.

If you think that

living things are fundamentally different from non-living things, or if you think that cognitive things are these like advanced brainy things that are very different from other kinds of systems, what you're not going to do is take the tools that are appropriate to these kind of cognitive systems, right?

So the tools that have been developed in behavioral science and so on, you're never going to try them in other contexts because you've already decided that there's a categorical difference, that it would be a

categorical error to apply them.

And people say this to me all the time is that you're making a category error.

And as, as if these categories were given to us, you know, from, from, from on high and we have to, we have to obey them forevermore.

The category should change with the science.

So, um, yeah, I don't believe in any such line.

And I think, I think a physics story is very often a useful part of the story, but for most interesting things, it's not the entire story.

My suggestion is that much better than trying to, in my experience, much better than trying to define any kind of a line, okay?

Because inevitably, I've never found, and people try to, you know, we play this game all the time.