Is There a Goal in the Brain?

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The brain is a evolutionarily a late development. It's a system that is able to pursue goals in three dimensional space by giving commands to muscles. The very act of them getting together revealed the goal that was always there. There was always that potential for that goal. Every cell does not know some other cell's external environment. So with that border between you and the outside world, you don't really know where that is. every collection of cell has to figure that out from scratch.

Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts University working on novel ways to understand and control complex pattern formation in biological systems. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Michael’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin
Michael’s Website: https://drmichaellevin.org
Michael’s Papers:
Biological Robots: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.00880
Synthetic Organisms: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19420889.2021.2005863
Limb Regeneration: https://science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164

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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(06:40) – Embryogenesis
(14:08) – Xenobots: biological robots
(27:55) – Sense of self
(37:27) – Multi-scale competency architecture
(48:58) – Free will
(58:27) – Bioelectricity
(1:11:44) – Planaria
(1:23:33) – Building xenobots
(1:47:08) – Unconventional cognition
(2:11:39) – Origin of evolution
(2:18:42) – Synthetic organisms
(2:25:27) – Regenerative medicine
(2:29:14) – Cancer suppression
(2:33:15) – Viruses
(2:38:28) – Cognitive light cones
(2:43:03) – Advice for young people
(2:47:47) – Death
(2:57:17) – Meaning of life