Michael Levin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. But you’re kind of speaking about super complex organisms. Can we go to the simplest possible thing where you first take a step over the line, the Cartesian cut as you’ve called it, from the non-mind to mind, from the non-living to living? The simplest possible thing, isn’t that in the realm of physics to understand? How do we understand that first step where you’re like, that thing is no mind, probably non-living, and here’s a living thing that has a mind. That line. I think that’s a really interesting line. Maybe you can speak to the line as well, and can physics help us understand it? Yeah, let’s talk about it. Well, first of all, of course it can. I mean, it can help, meaning that I’m not saying physics is not helpful. Of course it’s helpful. It’s a very important lens on one slice of what’s going on in any of these systems. But I think the most important thing I can say about that question is I don’t believe in any such line. I don’t believe any of that exists. I think there is a continuum. I think we as humans like to demarcate areas on that continuum and give them names because it makes life easier, and then we have a lot of battles over, you know, so-called category errors when people transgress those categories. I think most of those categories at this point, they may have done some good service at the beginning of when the scientific method was getting started and so on. I think at this point they mostly hold back science. Many, many categories that we can talk about are at this point very harmful to progress, because what those categories do is they prevent you from hoarding tools. If you think that living things are fundamentally different from non-living things, or if you think that cognitive things are these like advanced brainy things that are very different from other kinds of systems, what you’re not going to do is take the tools that are appropriate to these kind of cognitive systems, right? So the tools that have been developed in behavioral science and so on, you’re never going to try them in other contexts because you’ve already decided that there’s a categorical difference, that it would be a categorical error to apply them. And people say this to me all the time, that you’re making a category error, as if these categories were given to us, you know, from on high, and we have to obey them forevermore. The categories should change with the science. So yeah, I don’t believe in any such line, and I think a physics story is very often a useful part of the story, but for most interesting things, it’s not the entire story. Okay. So if there’s no line, is it still useful to talk about things like the origin of life? That’s one of the big open mysteries before us as a human civilization, as scientifically minded curious homo sapiens. How did this whole thing start? Are you saying there is no start? Is there a point where you could say that invention right there was the start of it all on Earth?…

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