What's the Difference Between Frog Skin and the Human Race?

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I think we have to separate the sort of deep philosophical aspects of versus what actually happens. People with exactly the same anatomical structure kill each other on a daily basis, right? So I think it's clear that simply knowing that something else is equally or maybe more cognitive or conscious than you are is not a guarantee of kind behavior. We are on this planet in some way, incredibly lucky. You could easily imagine that there could be a planet somewhere with more than one equally or maybe near equally intelligent species. But then they may not look anything like each other, right? There may be multiple ecosystems where there are things of similar to human like intelligence and then you'd have all kinds of issues about

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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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