Michael Levin

I think we have good theories of interfaces, but even the simplest algorithms have these kinds of things going on.

And so that's why I think something like this is significant.

That's my suspicion.

And I think that is extremely important for us as humans to have a research program to learn to recognize and predict and recognize.

We make things, never mind something as simple as this.

We make social structures, financial structures, Internet of Things, robotics, AI.

So we make all this stuff.

And we think that the thing we make it do is the main show.

And I think it is very important for us to learn to recognize the kind of stuff that sneaks in into the spaces.

Mechanism and explanation are both not all they're cracked up to be in the sense that, you know, anything you and I do, we could come up with the most beautiful theory, we paint a painting, anything we do, somebody could say, well, I was watching the biochemistry and

and the Schrodinger equation playing out.

And it totally described everything that was happening.

You didn't break even a single law of biochemistry.

Nothing to see here.

Nothing to see, right?

Like, okay, you know, consistent with the low-level rules, you can do the same thing here.

You can look at the machine code and say, yeah, this thing is just executing machine code.

You can go further and say, oh, it's quantum foam.

It's just doing the thing that quantum foam does.

And I'm not saying they're unaware of that.