Michael Levin

And the other thing I wanted to do was to find out

uh you know most mostly people assume that you need a lot of complexity for this so when somebody says well the capabilities of my mind are not uh properly um encompassed by the rules of biochemistry everybody's like yeah that makes sense where you know you're very complex and okay you're you know your mind does things that that you can't you could you didn't see that coming from the rules of biochemistry right like we know that

So mostly people think that has to do with complexity.

And what I would like to find out is, as part of understanding what kind of interfaces give rise to what kind of ingressions, is it really about complexity?

How much complexity do you actually need?

Is there some threshold after which this happens?

Is it really specific materials?

Is it biologicals?

Is it something about evolution?

Like, what is it about these kinds of things that allows this surprise, right?

Allows this idea that we are more than the sum of our parts.

And so

And I had a strong intuition that none of those things are actually required, that this kind of magic, so to speak, seeps into pretty much everything.

And so to look at that, I wanted also to have an example that had significant shock value, because the thing with biology is...

There's always more mechanism to be discovered, right?

Like there's infinite depth of what the materials are doing, what the, you know, somebody will always say, well, there's a mechanism, but I just haven't found it yet.

So I wanted an example that was simple, transparent, so you could see all the stuff.

There was nowhere to hide.

I wanted it to be deterministic because I don't want it to be something around unpredictability or stochasticity.

And I want it to be something familiar to people, minimal.