Michael Levin: evaluation

Transcript context

…In this context. Yeah, the beginning of my work is very much in regenerative medicine, in bioengineering, things like that. So for those kinds of systems, the question is always, how do you get the system to do what you want it to do? So there are cells, there are molecular networks, there are materials, there are organs and tissues and synthetic beings and biobots and whatever. And so the idea is, if I want your cells to regrow a limb, for example, if you’re injured and I want your cells to regrow a limb, I have many options. Some of those options are, I’m going to micromanage all of the molecular events that have to happen, right? And there’s an incredible number of those. Or maybe I just have to micromanage the cells and the stem cell kinds of signaling factors. Or maybe actually I can give the cells a very high-level prompt that says, “You really should build a limb,” and convince them to do it, right? And so which of those is possible? I mean, clearly people have a lot of intuitions about that. If you ask standard people in regenerative medicine and molecular biology, they’re going to say, “Well, that convincing thing is crazy. What we really should be doing is talking to the cells, or better yet, the molecular networks.” And in fact, all the excitement of the biological sciences today are at single molecule approaches and big data and genomics and all of that. The assumption is that going down is where the action’s going to be, going down in scale. And I think that’s wrong. But the thing that we can say for sure is that you can’t guess that. You have to do experiments and you have to see, because you don’t know where any given system is on that spectrum of persuadability. And it turns out that every time we look and we take tools from behavioral science, so learning different kinds of training, different kinds of models that are used in active inference and surprise minimization and perceptual multi-stability and visual illusions and all these kinds of interesting things, you know, stress perception and active memory reconstruction, all these interesting things. When we apply them outside the brain to other kinds of living systems, we find novel discoveries and novel capabilities, actually being able to get the material to do new things that nobody had ever found before. And precisely because I think that people didn’t look at it from those perspectives, they assumed that it was a low-level kind of thing. So when I say persuadability, I mean different types of approaches, right? And we all know if you want to persuade your wind-up clock to do something, you’re not going to argue with it or make it feel guilty or anything. You’re going to have to get in there with a wrench and you’re going to have to, you know, tune it up and do whatever. o something, you’re not going to argue with it or make it feel guilty or anything. You’re going to have to get in there with a wrench and you’re going to have to, you know, tune it up and do whatever. If you want to do that same thing to a cell or a thermostat or an animal or a human, you’re going to be using other sets of tools that we’ve given other names to. And so that’s… Now, of course, that spectrum, the important thing is that as you get to the right of that spectrum, whereas the agency of the system goes up, it is no longer just about persuading it to do things. It’s a bidirectional relationship, what Richard Watson would call a mutual vulnerable knowing. So the idea is that on the right side of that spectrum, when systems reach the higher levels of agency, the idea is that you are willing to let that system persuade you of things as well. You know, in molecular biology, you do things, hopefully the system does what you want it to do, but you haven’t changed. You’re still exactly the way you came in. But on the right side of that spectrum, if you’re having interactions with even cells, but certainly, you know, dogs, other animals, maybe other creatures soon, you’re not the same at the end of that interaction as you were going in. It’s a mutual bidirectional relationship. So it’s not just you persuading something else, it’s not you pushing things. It’s a mutual bidirectional set of persuasions, whether those are purely intellectual or of other kinds.…

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