Michael Levin

These are just guesses that, you know, you need to make some guesses to make progress.

I don't think that there are specific or I don't know.

but it doesn't mean that there are going to be specifically tonic patterns for this is the Titanic, and this is the sister of the Titanic, and this is some other kind of boat.

This is not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is in some way that we absolutely need to work out when we make minimal interfaces,

we get more than we put in.

We get behaviors, we get shapes, we get mathematical truths, and we get all kinds of patterns that we did not have to create.

We didn't micromanage them.

We didn't know they were coming.

We didn't have to put any effort into making them.

they come from some distribution that seems to exist that we don't have to create.

And exactly whether that space is sparse or dense, I don't know.

So, for example, if there is, you know, some kind of, you know, a platonic form for the movie The Godfather, if it's surrounded by a bunch of crappy versions and then crappier versions still, I have no idea, right?

I don't know if the space is sparse or not.

You know, I don't know if it's finite or infinite.

These are all things I don't know.

What I do know is that

It seems like physics and for sure biology and cognition are the benefits of ingressions that are free lunches in some sense.

We did not make them.

Calling them emergent does nothing for a research program.