Michael Levin

So I think what you will be copying is the physical interface and hoping to maintain whatever it is about that interface that was appropriate for that pattern.

We don't really know what that is at this point.

I suspect so, and I think so because of the way we come into being.

So one of the things that I should be working on is this paper called Booting Up the Agent, and it talks about the very earliest steps of becoming a being in this world.

Kind of like you can do this for a computer, right?

And before you switch the power on,

it belongs to the domain of physics, right?

It obeys the laws of physics.

You switch the power on some number of, what, nanoseconds, microseconds, I don't know, later, you have a thing that, oh, look, it's taking instructions off the stack and doing them, right?

So now it's executing an algorithm.

How did you get from physics to executing an algorithm?

Like, what was happening during the boot up exactly before it starts to run code or whatever, right?

And so we can ask that same question in biology.

What are the earliest steps of becoming a being?

Well, I think so.

I think so in two ways.

The first thing is just physically what happens.

So I think that your first task as a being, and again, I don't think this is a binary thing.

I think this is a positive feedback loop that sort of cranks up and up.

Your first task as a being coming into this world is to