Michael Levin

I definitely think they're going to be systematic laws.

I don't think they're going to look anything like physics.

You can call it physics if you want, but I think it's going to be so different that that probably just cracks the word.

And whether information is going to survive that, I'm not sure.

But I definitely think that there are going to be laws.

But I think they're going to look a lot more like...

aspects of psychology and cognitive science than they're going to look like physics.

That's my guess.

So what does it look like to prove that world exists?

What it looks like is a successful research program that explains how you pull particular patterns when you need them and why some patterns come and others don't and show that they come from an ordered space.

Well, it's not just organisms.

I mean, I think it's going to end up, and I mean, you can talk to the machine learning people about how they got to this point, again, because this is not just me.

There are a bunch of different disciplines that are converging on this now simultaneously.

You're going to find, again, just like in mathematics, where from different directions, everybody sort of is looking at different things.

Oh, my God, this is one underlying structure that seems to like inform all of this.

So in physics, in mathematics, in computer science, machine learning, possibly in economics, certainly in biology, possibly in cognitive science, we're going to find these structures.

It was already obvious in Pythagoras' time that there are these patterns.

The only remaining question is,

Are they part of an ordered, structured space?

And are we up to the task of mapping out the relationship between what we build and the patterns that come through it?