Michael Levin

tell a very compelling story to your parts as a biological you are made of a gentle parts those parts need to be aligned literally into a goal they have no comprehension of they if you're going to move through anatomical space by means of a bunch of cells which only know physiological and um you know metabolic spaces and things like that you are going to have to develop a model

and give them, bend their action space.

You're gonna have to deform their option space with signals, with behavior shaping cues, with rewards and punishments, whatever you got.

Your job as an agent is ownership of your parts, is alignment of your parts.

I think that fundamentally is gonna give rise to this ability.

Now, that also means having a boundary saying, okay, this is the stuff I control.

This is me.

This other stuff over here is outside world.

I have to figure out, you don't know where that is, by the way, you have to figure it out.

And in embryogenesis, it's really cool.

You can, as a grad student, I used to do this experiment with duck embryos.

It's a flat blasted disc.

You can take a needle and put some scratches into it.

And every island you make for a while until they heal up thinks it's the only embryo.

There's nothing else around, so it becomes an embryo.

And eventually you get twins and triplets and quadruplets and things like that.

But each one of them at the border...

you know, they're joined.

Well, where do I end?

And where does, where does he begin?