Michael Levin: prediction

Transcript context

…In fact, all the other tools are a distraction to those folks. If you want to understand fundamentally anything, you have to start at physics to them. And you’re saying, “No, physics is not enough.” Here’s the issue. Everything here hangs on what it means to understand. For me, understand doesn’t just mean have some sort of pleasing model that seems to capture some important aspect of what’s going on. It also means that you have to be generative and creative in terms of capabilities. And so for me, that means if I tell you this is what I think about cognition in cells and tissues, it means, for example, that I think we’re going to be able to take those ideas and use them to produce new regenerative medicine that actually helps people in various ways, right? It’s just an example. So if you think as a physicist you’re going to have a complete understanding of what’s going on from that perspective of fields and particles and, you know, who knows what else is at the bottom there. Does that mean then that when somebody is missing a finger or has a psychological problem or has these other high-level issues, that you have something for them, that you’re going to be able to do something? Because my claim is that you’re not going to, and even if you have some theory of physics that is completely compatible with everything that’s going on, that is… it’s not enough. That’s not specific enough to enable you to solve the problems you need to solve. In the end, when you need to solve those problems, the person you’re going to go to is not a physicist. It’s going to be either a biologist or a psychiatrist, or who knows, but it’s not going to be a physicist. And the simple example is this: let’s say someone comes in here and tells you a beautiful mathematical proof, okay? It’s just really, you know, deep and beautiful. And there’s a physicist nearby, and he says, “Well, I know exactly what happened. There were some air particles that moved from that guy’s mouth to your ear. I see what goes on. It moved the cilia in your ear and the electrical signals went up to your brain.” I mean, we have a complete accounting of what happened, done and done. But if you want to understand what’s the more important aspect of that interaction, it’s not going to be found in the physics department. It’s going to be found in the math department. So that’s my only claim is that physics is an amazing lens with which to view the world, but you’re capturing certain things, and if you want to stretch to sort of encompass these other things, we just don’t call that physics anymore, right? We call that something else. 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?…

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