The Ends Justify the Means

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The act of bending the option space, that's really profound. Every system has some degree of intelligence in its own problem domain. Biology constructs this from scratch. The world that built us is the one we reject in some sense when we construct human societies. We have to construct ethical systems under which we don't take seriously the full mechanism of biology and apply it to the way the world functions. And somehow that allows you to have turtles on top of turtles, literally, dump systems on top of dump systems that as a whole creates something incredibly smart.

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