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Show Notes
This is an ~1 hour 10 minute conversation with Iain McGilchrist (https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/), on the topic of my recent paper on the Platonic Space (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5g2xj_v3) - forms ingressing into the physical world in biology, causation, evolution, and mind.
CHAPTERS:
(00:04) Panpsychism and cosmic intelligence
(07:24) Solution attractors and search
(15:51) Insight, hemispheres, and emptiness
(24:43) Patterns, machines, and purpose
(33:32) Embodiment, AI, and morphogenesis
(42:12) Morphospace, xenobots, and ethics
(49:10) Memory, regeneration, and brains
(57:22) Division, unification, cosmic cycles
(01:05:53) Myth, duality, and universality
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Transcript
This transcript is automatically generated; we strive for accuracy, but errors in wording or speaker identification may occur. Please verify key details when needed.
[00:04] Iain McGilchrist: There we go. Hello, Mike. Good to see you.
[00:07] Michael Levin: It's so wonderful to see you. How have you been?
[00:10] Iain McGilchrist: I've been pretty good. Gadding around the world too much, but otherwise I'm fine. You've been very busy. You're always very busy. The reason we're talking now is because you sent me that remarkable paper, which, with your permission, I put up on my subset and which I think is going to be the contribution to that book from the conference about my stuff in California last year. I'm very grateful for that and for the ideas. I thought it was very rich and worth talking about.
[00:52] Michael Levin: Absolutely. Thank you so much. I very much value your opinion and your taking the time to read it. So that's great. I'll send you the latest version for your site.
[01:07] Iain McGilchrist: Oh, OK.
[01:08] Michael Levin: I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I had what you had at the time you put it up. I'm not sure if it's the latest one. I'll send you the latest one.
[01:16] Iain McGilchrist: It was version 23, if that's any help.
[01:19] Michael Levin: Yeah, that's pretty good. close enough. close enough.
[01:24] Iain McGilchrist: I'd like to have it, and then I can put that up instead. I saw you did something with my friend Alex Gomez-Marin the other day.
[01:35] Michael Levin: We had a very good discussion.
[01:40] Iain McGilchrist: Yeah, that's great.
[01:41] Michael Levin: I love talking to him. He's great.
[01:44] Iain McGilchrist: No, he's a good man. There are a whole lot of things that would be interesting to talk about, mainly on a philosophical level. I'm glad to say you're not frightened of philosophy, which is completely wonderful, because it's not true of every biologist. I do think that philosophy and science need to walk hand in hand. Either of them is lacking if it doesn't have the other. So what would you say about the idea that intelligence goes all the way down, in everything, not just in life? Is that right? The whole cosmos is imbued with a kind of intelligence.
[02:37] Michael Levin: I think that's fair.
[02:40] Iain McGilchrist: And so would you say you're a panpsychist?
[02:43] Michael Levin: With a little bit of a twist in that I think the typical panpsychist position, which is one thing that gets critiqued a lot for, is this idea that the consciousness or the mind of the collective has to be in some way a sum of, or it's created. I think that's not a thing. I think yes, the parts have it and the whole has it, and it's not an addition problem.
[03:19] Iain McGilchrist: Thank goodness you said that, because a lot of people have said to me, because I think in a way I'm a panpsychist, but what about the combination problem? I said, well, it's only a combination problem if you think about it in the wrong way, if you think about it as having to be the sum of a whole lot of different parts. In fact, it's something that, as you say, both in the whole and in the parts is pregnant with some kind of mind, some kind of intelligence, which I think is also characterized by goal directedness. I certainly don't mean that there is a deterministic outcome, but that there is nonetheless direction and direction doesn't close down possibility at all. It seems to me that we now have to give up the idea given up by physicists some time ago, the idea that really everything is just random and has no sense of order or direction to it.
[04:25] Michael Levin: I think this combination problem comes from two underlying motivations. One is that I think people really want to, as, for example, codified in IIT, they want there to be only one mind in anything. So if you have a system, the parts, show us the one mind it has and then we can forget about what the parts are doing. I think that's a problem. I like a continuous heterarchy of overlapping minds. The other is the even more pervasive thing that we somehow make minds. So the idea is that from these things, we're going to create this thing from scratch. Then you have this combination problem because you have to say, how exactly was this? I think if we avoid those two things, then I don't think there's a combination problem.
[05:23] Iain McGilchrist: No, I completely agree. It's a relief because I hadn't read you saying that. As I say, it's a constant gripe. I have said that this is the thing in my terms, very much as the left hemisphere will construe the world, that it's made up of bits and that everything you find in it can be accounted for by putting these parts together. We put it together in the way that we put machines together. I know you say that effectively there is no difference between the machine and the organism. I don't know whether you would deny that, but I think that there are profound differences between mechanisms and organisms. But I draw the line; I don't say that there is a sharp line that divides what we call inanimate matter from animate matter, in other words, life. I think it is a matter of degree. I think, like you, that there is a holarchy in which things are nested. In that holarchy, we have the inanimate as well as the animate. The difference is that the animate is a billionfold more responsive to what we find: this intelligence, this directional process, this lure towards things. Another important idea is that things are not simply pushed blindly from behind, but are attracted towards things. You say somewhere the important attractor in the morphosphere that draws things towards it. Do you want to say anything about that?
[07:24] Michael Levin: We can talk about the machine organisms thing, and I completely agree with you that on that spectrum, there are regions which we have named, which have vastly different properties. It makes sense to distinguish these things as large categories of things. I want to talk about the attraction bit. This is very much in progress, I don't have anything concrete yet to show you, although there's other people that have done relevant things. I've been working on this scenario where we view, let's say you have an agent exploring some problem space, they're trying to find a solution. I've been working on a formalization where the solution is basically reaching out to the agent as much as the agent is reaching out to the right. It's symmetry in that, and that's great. The weirdest thing about it is people can almost buy that on a human creativity scale that these things are like drawing you.
[08:41] Iain McGilchrist: Calling to you, yes, Exactly, right.
[08:43] Michael Levin: I think all creative people have this experience: the thing is, the thing that I want to do, as I like to do, is to show what that looks like all the way down. When I say all the way down, I mean, for example, when you have molecular binding. In every cell biology textbook there's a pathway: this protein that's made over here goes and finds its binding partner, and then there's your pathway. I don't know what the latest quantitative models of this are, but I remember some years back Roy Frieden did a calculation at a conference at Arizona State of how long it would take for things in a cell, given realistic diffusion and the constants, to find their binding partner. The problem is that you don't get the reward until you act; the free energy doesn't drop until you get to the thing and bind it. But along the way there's no partial credit, there's no gradient. You throw the tank down until you find what you find. According to that calculation, it would be unsupportable — millions of years for anything to find. We're working on some things to look at what that actually looks like. Synchronicity, another way to think of it, the library angel phenomenon: you're working on some problem, you're walking through a library, a book falls down. What does that look like all the way down? What does that look like on the molecular level? Could we say that there are ways in which the solution to your problem — your binding partner in the case of chemistry, or some other things in AI — are attracting you as much as you're searching for them? These are very early days, but that's some stuff we're working on.
[10:42] Iain McGilchrist: That's fascinating. And for me, it expresses a very important point about existence, which is that everything is relational. The idea that there are just these things, and then either we find they have relations or we make the relations between them is again this very reductive view that I associate with. I'm not just using this metaphorically, this is the way the left hemisphere works. Whereas I think the idea that things are in a kind of partnership, that there is interdependence, which is the title of Kriti Sharma's book on the relationship between an organism and its environment. Not that they just interact serially, the organism affects the environment, the environment affects the organism, but they literally co-create one another. So they're coming into being together. You could apply that view to the idea of the solution arriving much faster than you think, reaching out to the problem. The problem is really a manifestation of a potential solution, and the solution is the manifestation of a potential problem, and they come together. It is extraordinary how these things do appear. I think of a couple of examples. They may well be drawn from your work that I use in "The Matter with Things." One well-known one is if you take eyeless, the eyeless gene out of Drosophila, the offspring have no eyes. If you breed the eyeless flies, their offspring have no eyes. But after 14 generations, without the gene, they have eyes. So something very powerful is going on very rapidly that says, no, eyes need to be had. Simon Conway Morris suggests that eyes have evolved 14 different times in the history of evolution. It's an extraordinary thing that they evolved at all because there's such a complex thing and lots of things have to come together. But the idea that this could have happened separately in different lineages 14 times is extraordinary and suggests that there is definitely something about having an eye that is quite important. When a cell encounters a danger for which it is not in any way prepared, either programmatically or through experience, it can develop an enzyme or it can develop a change in its chemical milieu that will resolve that problem within as little as four days, whereas it would take billions of years if it was just relying on randomness. This is all fascinating.
[13:55] Michael Levin: That last example, we have examples of a planaria challenge with the barium that basically causes their heads to explode. Within about a week's time, they come up with a new solution that enables them to make barium-insensitive heads out of a problem space. It's like a 20,000-dimensional problem space. We're very interested in figuring out how they do it. I wonder what your thoughts are about this. I've been thinking really broadly about this issue of having this relationship with solutions in that space. I want to talk about the terminology, so maybe "platonic" isn't a good term as you pointed out. I think there's something interesting going on. I wonder what you think about this. If you look at the very bottom of the level, you have photons that, with least action principles, find their solution 100% of the time. They don't need complicated internal machinery to calculate which path to take. They effortlessly do it. They're in that flow state all the time. Then you have creatures, when I'm solving a problem, methodically plotting across that space. First I do this, and then what does this mean? It's a lot of effort, and you're very carefully crawling along that space. Then you have people who are creative geniuses; they're back to that initial state. They don't need the step-by-step thing. They say, "I can see it. It's obvious. I'm already there." What do you think about this navigation of that space of ideas — how and why it seems to be a strange U-shape?
[15:51] Iain McGilchrist: That's a very interesting point. And you quote, don't you, Poincaré's thing about, it's not that we have to examine all the possibilities, only a highly selected group of possibilities present themselves for examination. In the most exotic examples of insight by geniuses, they go almost immediately to that solution. Not always, but they do. I think my view is that we are equipped with the ability to follow algorithms because they are extraordinarily helpful in everyday living. The left hemisphere is very much the utilitarian one that does that kind of thinking. For a lot of things in life, problem: what do I do? I do this, I do that and solve. But I think there is something which allows a gestalt to form and to either slowly or rapidly come into focus rather than to have any step-by-step approach. Instead of thinking of arriving at a solution as the end stage of many steps, think of arriving at a solution as the coming into focus of an out-of-focus image, and for some people this image can collapse — I use the word collapse almost advisedly because I think it is something like a waveform making a moment there, now we've got it. That is a process that seems to me, on pretty good neurological evidence, to be the way that the right hemisphere prefers to act. These two processes need one another. But if one's overwedded to the left hemisphere's way of thinking, one actually disattends. We have faculties that by not using them we are allowing to atrophy, as is inevitably the case, and other people and people with atypical brains are able to achieve these things by not getting completely locked into the left hemisphere's preferred procedures. The archetypal case must be Einstein, who was puzzling about something. He wasn't scribbling; he was playing the piano or the violin, and then he'd get up and go, "I've got it." Poincaré himself has this story about the functions and how he went into town, and the very moment he put his foot on the bus to go home, he realized what the answer was, having sweated over it in the logical kind of way for two weeks, staying up at night with lots of coffee.
[18:45] Michael Levin: This is, I think this is a very important area for investigation. I hypothesized in that paper that, because the solutions are... they're reaching out and they're in fact, I say it's positive pressure. They want to ingress into the physical world, but I also think that we could view them as agents as well that have the problem that they're trying to meet. So what is it that makes either certain people or certain systems or the right hemisphere? What distinguishes the cases where you're able to invite in this amazing pattern versus examples when you're not and you have to slowly crawl to it? That's what I'd like to know.
[19:41] Iain McGilchrist: To come crashing down to neuropsychology on that one, all the descriptions involve a not knowing, a letting go of potential space that can be filled. It's often said in Eastern traditions that there is this idea of emptiness, but not emptiness in the Western sense, which is of something negative. It's emptiness, which is the potential space into which something rich and new can grow, rather like a womb has to be empty to begin with in order that life can grow. So I think everybody, the scientists, the artists, the sages, say that there is an important period of fallowness in which one is not striving too hard. But on the other hand, you have to put yourself in the way of it happening. And so it may be necessary to do, as Wordsworth described, that you have to strive, you have to read, you have to think, you have to approach the problem, you won't get it while you're doing that, but you won't get it unless you've done that. And then you drop it, and then the answer comes. Now, why that should be, it seems to me the most logical way to think about that is that the right hemisphere has extremely wide-ranging connective paths and it has a greater facility for making distant connections than the left hemisphere. The more one engages the left hemisphere, the more these connections become tightened down into an area where you're focusing your attention. So that may be what's happening: you need to do that and let it go. It might even be like exercises one can do physically in order to relax, which are to tense one's muscles and then actively let go of the tension.
[22:01] Michael Levin: It makes total sense. I think it's particularly interesting down at the lower levels where we can say you've got particles and molecules. They are not confused about what to do. They don't make mistakes. The chemistry just does what it does, and it chooses the lowest path every single time, and it's great. Then you have a paramecium, and the paramecium is now in the same bind as we are. It has to make decisions rapidly with limited information. It can misperceive, it can make mistakes, all kinds of things. That layer in between — what happens, how do you get to that level? Because we can see in these very simple life forms the molecular events happening. And even some of the things that we're doing in between, like we found the learning capacities in molecular networks. What I'm really interested in is formulating a notion of this, of search, of striving, of navigation in the molecular networks, because we have to have pictures of it all the way down. I think it will be very simple, but I don't think it's crazy to think about problem solving. We know that happens in cells. I don't think it's crazy to think about it in molecular networks, and all of the things that we think of as creative, the creative search for problems and preparing yourself to be in resonance with this download of information that is trying to get to you. I think there's a molecular story to tell about this that I would like to do, and I think it also links to some of these ideas of the mind as a filter. It's an old idea. It's very much my idea too.
[23:49] Iain McGilchrist: Yeah.
[23:50] Michael Levin: There's an element of this where the more computational capacity you have, it's actually preventing you from finding certain things.
[24:03] Iain McGilchrist: But of course, negation. Another point I think is very rich is that in our world, we think of negation as negative. Whereas in fact, negation is highly creative. An example is Michelangelo creating a sculpture. He doesn't put anything together. All he does for several years is throw stone away. At the end of it, it's there. So there is something, and for him, there must have been something calling to him in the stone that enabled him to do this, to find it. So what are your speculations about how this might work at the molecular level? Have you got any thoughts at this stage?
[24:43] Michael Levin: I think there's a couple of things. One, there's a rich set of findings coming from mesoscale physics and solid-state physics showing how when you vibrate a medium a particular way, things that belong together in the sense that they're going to bind nicely to each other. When you watch the paths, they are like navigating. It doesn't look random anymore. But nobody's guiding it, at least overtly. There's no algorithm or mechanism for it. So there's some stuff coming from physics around that. For me, we need to take seriously the idea that basically what's happening is that there are various kinds of patterns. Some of these are low-agency things that mathematicians deal with, the facts about the prime numbers and such. Other of these patterns are the kinds of things that Patrick Grimm was looking at or beyond that we would recognize as kinds of minds or behavioral propensities. This is part of the discussion about machines versus organisms. We have to acknowledge that the things we call organisms are a completely different type of pattern than the things we call simple machines. Obviously, they're different, but we drastically underestimate the material and the level of complexity that you need for that to start to happen. We've been investigating this, as you know, in the sorting algorithm and some other work that isn't published yet because we're still getting data. There are going to be some wild things coming down the pike on this. We have to be humble about the fact that we are not good at predicting what kinds of simple things are going to serve as pointers to some very sophisticated patterns. Therefore, we have to be careful before we label things as just machines. We just don't know. Figuring out the relationship between the thing you build—whether it's a physical object, an embryo, a biobot, or a computer—and the things that it pulls down, because it pulls down things that you did not expect or make a provision for, is important.
[27:15] Iain McGilchrist: That would come on to the question of ethics, which you raised, and I think it's important, but we can come back to that. But I don't see any reason why there are not just these apparently non-physical forms that ingress into phenomenological experience and cause changes in physical bodies. I'm interested increasingly in the idea of goals and values as being very real parts of the structure of the universe. I think that one way to look at it is that science has quite legitimately and very productively stated that it is going to explore things without reference to direction, purpose or values. That's very useful. But what science cannot say at the end of the day is that it has discovered there is no purpose and there are no values, because it ruled them out and it had no competence to find them. If one gets beyond that, there is nothing anti-scientific. It is complementary to science that the world does have directions and is lured by certain values. I think those values are, and you find them very much in the stories of mathematicians coming to their conclusions, that there is something beautiful in them, that they are beautiful and complex. Generally speaking, the universe has a tendency to produce things that are beautiful and complex. One of the things that I often think, along with Whitehead, who is an influence on me very much, is: why is there life at all? Because if it's all about being able to remain in existence, then the answer is never to have been alive, because you can exist for billions of years as a mountain. But once you start really being alive, your lifespan is limited, but not necessarily that limited because there are these actinobacteria at the base of the ocean, single examples of which are about a million years old. So evolution's purpose doesn't seem to have been to make a single organism last longer. It's been to end up with people like us that stick around for 70 years or so. What is it about? I think what it is about is this drive towards complexity, towards responsiveness, towards the resonance with whatever the source of energy that grounds everything manifests. There is a resonance between us and it. I'm positing that everybody imagines there must be something that grounds being.
[30:24] Iain McGilchrist: We may not ever know what it is, and we may have to say we just leave it at that. But whatever that is, it doesn't seem to be entirely neutral, because the universe that it has ground in is not just a random set of things bumping into one another. It has order, it has beauty, it has complexity. And I think these are drives. I think that what life offers is that interdependence I was talking about before, in which there is a kind of dance between that ground of being and the living, in which the potential that is stored there, that is manifest in this explosive universe, is being realized in certain ways, so that it can bring something about that reflects something back to the origin, the ground of being. The reason why I think that is important is that I see that potential is extremely important and is often thought of as less important than actuality. And here I'm with Heidegger, who said that it's quite possible that potential is more important than actuality. Yes and no, but potential is no good unless it gets actualized. An example I give of that is money. Money is potential. There it is. It's nothing until it's actualized. It is the potential for all kinds of beautiful experiences and things to be made and happen. But it has to be spent in order that those things can come about. So the amount of potential diminishes. The sort of free potential diminishes and becomes an actuated part of experience. I may be misunderstanding Whitehead, but I think that his terminology is an off-putting element for me, and I think that is what he's talking about: when things come into being, they then add to the sum of what there is, so that when new things evolve from this field of potential, those actualities have enriched it and they become more likely to be expressed the next time round. And so I think this explains the continuity and the persistence of certain forms, not the rigid insistence on those forms but the general persistence of those forms over time: they have been precipitated out of potential into actuality, and they now change the nature of the universe ever so slightly if they're small things, but nonetheless they do. What we are seeing is the unfolding of potential into actuality all the time. What do you think?
[33:32] Michael Levin: And especially, I've been playing with models in which if we assume that there is a set of patterns of widely differing complexity and agency that are trying to get into the physical world, then one of the things that happens with evolution is you could easily have this positive feedback loop, where whenever it benefits from access to these free lunches, there are many useful things you get that you don't need to specifically evolve because of these laws of mathematics and computation that are there for you the minute you make a voltage-gated ion channel. Now you have truth tables and all this amazing stuff because they're basically transistors and you don't have to evolve a truth table, you just have to make the protein. But the feedback loop comes because as much as you take advantage of those free lunches, that enables you to build a more sophisticated interface, meaning a better embodiment, which gives you access to other, more sophisticated forms, which then enables you to make another more sophisticated embodiment. As you said, it's a co-creation or a co-evolution of these things that are potentiating each other.
[34:55] Iain McGilchrist: Fascinating. To come back to the machines thing, it seems to me that if these forms exist, and there seems to be very little way of accounting for things unless one accepts that something of this kind is the case, and if they do have values and direction and purpose, then why would they not, for good or ill, get instantiated in machines? Why would it be unreasonable to suppose that a highly complex AI did not actually itself express certain values and directions? As you say, we might get some surprises because we don't know exactly what we're doing there. It's not a reason to be a Luddite, but it is a reason to be quite careful about what it is, to be aware of what it is we don't know. Effectively, that is the most important thing for any scientist to be aware of: what they don't know, not just what they do know.
[36:05] Michael Levin: Exactly. It's funny that both ends of the opinion spectrum are finding it very hard to appreciate that point because you have the people who actually make the things. They say, "I've had people say to me, 'I build these AIs. I know what they do. It's just linear algebra.' " I said, "Well, you're just biochemistry, aren't you?" Yes, of course. But if you don't know what they do, if you don't know what bubble sword is doing, then you sure as heck don't know what this thing is doing. And then there's the opposite side. I had the organicists who are extremely interested in a very sharp distinction between these things. I gave a talk to a group in the Indic philosophy traditions. I thought that some of these things that I was saying would be right up their alley in terms of these impressions that basically come to haunt physical bodies. They were adamant that no kind of AI could have any of this because it was, as they called, the dead matter. I said, "First of all, I don't think there is any dead matter. There are lazy observers, but I'm not sure there is any actually dead matter." Given the overall worldview that you have this non-physical mind that is somehow embodied and physical, who are you to say that if you build a beautiful, synthetic embodiment—some mind—it might not be remotely close to a human mind? It might, probably, be from some weird untapped region of the space of minds. Who are you to say that this thing is not allowed to come in and, in a certain sense, animate this novel embodiment? How, on what basis? They were just completely adamant that wasn't going to happen.
[38:03] Iain McGilchrist: I think one can't be adamant about anything in this area. One has to keep a relatively open mind and be aware of what that means. It is an interesting point. You said somewhere something I'd like you to expand on. I wrote it down. You say the mechanisms by which these anatomical pattern memories are stored, recalled and implemented have been described. I wondered if you could tell me more about that. Where are these anatomical pattern memories stored, recalled and implemented?
[39:04] Michael Levin: I will tell you, but it is not the same as the additional question of where they come from in the first place. That's a whole other thing.
[39:18] Iain McGilchrist: I could see you were separating those questions.
[39:21] Michael Levin: I think they're separate questions. The conventional side of this story is that we can now see both as a matter of biology experiments and also computational modeling, how circuits made up of biorealistic elements, meaning ion channels and gap junctions, so these electrical circuits basically make an excitable medium. This excitable medium can support, as long as it's alive and there's energy to do so, a number of stable modes. You can think about this; it's like Turing patterns in mixed chemicals. When you create the network, it will spontaneously, and evolution does a very good job of fine-tuning the channels, so that, when the system is up and running, embryonic development settles on a reliable pattern. You can see this pattern. When I say pattern, I mean it's a distribution of voltage gradients across a set of cells. It's not a single-cell thing; if you have 1000 by 1000 cells, it's a patch of tissue. The electric face we found is one example of this, where you have this thing and it's spontaneous, and we've now generated a bunch of models that show how exactly this happens. It settles from a homogeneous state. It settles into a state where it's got two spots where the eye is going to be. It's got a spot where the mouth is going to be. It's got some stuff around the outside for the placodes. That thing is stored and maintained within the electrical state of the cells. It's compatible with the biophysical properties of the channels. Then it is read out by other cells which are paying attention to this pattern and using it to determine what genes to express, where to migrate, what to differentiate into. We know these things are instructive because if I recreate that pattern somewhere else, this is how you get an eye on the tail, an extra leg, or repair brain defects. The maintenance and the readout of these things we have a handle on. In planaria, heads all have different shapes: triangular ones, flat ones. When you perturb them, they are extremely robust. A set of genetically encoded hardware elements will spontaneously settle on one attractor for head shape, and it works very reliably. We also know that if you perturb that electrical decision-making process, it will visit head-shape attractors in the space for other species.
[42:12] Iain McGilchrist: I saw your work on that, yeah.
[42:15] Michael Levin: Now we have to ask the question. This is my point about mapping out that space. We have to now understand how many attractors, why these and not others are there. I wanted to ask you about this too, whether you thought the space was sparse or just continuously filled. In other words, there's Michelangelo's statue that was calling to him. Are there an infinite number of almost as good statues or...
[42:45] Iain McGilchrist: I don't know. Not surprisingly, I don't know either. You've suggested that there is a pattern and you can see that there's a place for the eyes. But how does that pattern arise? Is that going too close to the other question? We don't know where these things come from.
[43:13] Michael Levin: We know how. If you want to track, we can track and computationally predict all the steps from zero. In other words, you start with, much like Turing did; one of his genius things is that he was interested in intelligence, but also in the self-assembly of the body. You saw that these were the same problem. In Turing patterns, it's similar. You start with a well-mixed random field of chemicals, and you get tiger stripes or leopard spots. There's a precise mathematical formalism that shows you exactly why that happens. The same thing is true here, except it's electrical: the form of the math for Hodgkin-Huxley and some of the original Turing diffusion stuff is very parallel. We have the model showing when you start with a field where all the voltages are equal, given the properties of the channels, spontaneous symmetry breaking and amplification will give you certain kinds of patterns. Some of them are the kinds of things that we're interested in, such as face. You can watch this happen step by step. The how of it is much like with Turing patterns. The part where we have to understand what the available modes are and what the bi-directional interaction is that pulls some of these planaria and other things into these attractors is a whole other thing. There are some other fascinating things that are not understood, but the how of it we've got now.
[44:58] Iain McGilchrist: That's what I was thinking: that describes the how, but it doesn't describe the why of the thing being like that at all, or at least so it seems to me.
[45:10] Michael Levin: The why — this is exactly when we get into, I think we need to know what we would accept as a proper answer to the question of why, because this is where we get into, for example, those fractal shapes. The why of any piece of mathematical truth is: why is it like that? Because there isn't a fact of physics that's going to give you an answer. There isn't a fact of history, meaning it. There's no evolutionary — what are the other tools in our toolbox for answering why questions? Now we're getting into an area where I don't even know what a good answer to that would be.
[45:50] Iain McGilchrist: There might be an answer of the kind that the reason that the tadpole's head reconfigures completely as a frog's head, and we can explain some of the step by step of how that happens. It's a matter of very clever observation, but it is a matter of observation. Whereas where the information of the having to go from the one head to the other, where is that? And why does it ingress in the way that it does? It seems to me another kind of question.
[46:33] Michael Levin: And one of the reasons why I started talking about this is that I think we now have even more practical tools to start addressing some of these questions. For example, what I'm really interested in are the unexpected patterns that manifest in synthetic bodies that have never been the target of selection specifically, such as anthrobots, xenobots, these weird chimeras that we make. Because we can talk about people who want to have a very minimal ontology, they don't want this as a platonic space; they say, look, when you say "forms," these are just stable evolutionary solutions; these are things that evolution has learned over time. This is a good way to make a frog, this is not a good way to make a frog and that's all there is to it. And so I'm interested now in all of these examples where there is no history of selection to lean on. These things never existed before. There's never been any pressure to be a good xenobot or a good anthrobot or any of this other stuff. And being able to predict and make use of these things for medicine and for bio-robotics requires that we give up this magical notion of emergence as well. It's just a fact that holds about the world. We'll catalog them as they come up and commit to some sort of systematic investigation of what are the patterns in addition to the ones that evolution has found. Where are these patterns? Can we find them? Can we make new patterns that will down the ones we want and avoid the ones we don't want.
[48:18] Iain McGilchrist: It's an overlay. Do you think that there's a worry in it?
[48:23] Michael Levin: I think there's a worry in it because we are now in many ways, and we have been for a long time. We're just not good at recognizing it. We're dipping into a pool of patterns that have never been involved before, certainly not on Earth. There are dangers in it on both ends. There's the obvious thing that people talk about, which is what is it going to do to us? That's one set of things. But equally important is the question, what is its experience going to be? What do we owe novel minds that we're bringing into the world? This is the perennial question.
[49:10] Iain McGilchrist: What would you have to say about the planarian head having the ability to solve a maze? So you can see this form of the head and you can change the form of the head, but where are its memories?
[49:29] Michael Levin: Do you mean behavioral memories?
[49:32] Iain McGilchrist: If a planarian has solved a maze, or even a slime mold has solved a maze, and you've cut bits off it, you can destroy and burn the head of the planarian, and the new head will know how to solve the maze. Have you thoughts about how that comes about?
[49:53] Michael Levin: McConnell found this memory surviving regeneration of the brain back in the 60s. We actually showed this using modern techniques in 2013. We built an automated device that completely automates the training and testing of planaria in that assay, which was important because McConnell's experiments were manual: someone would sit there with a pencil and say "I saw this thing turn right versus left" and write it down. Then people said, "you're just imagining things." We made a device. It's a giant thing that automates the process. We have videos now, so you can't say it's an observer effect anymore. It does work. He was right. One of the things this is showing is that memories can be pointers to patterns. I think there are two kinds of pointers to patterns. Maybe this maps onto your potentiality versus actuality thing. There are some pointers that are connecting us to that pattern. This might be an existing body, it might be an engram in the brain, whatever mechanism; different people study different mechanisms. Those are things that are guiding behavior right now. In those planaria, in the 8 to 10 days during which they're regrowing their brain, when they have no behavior and the tail just sits there doing nothing, they still have access to that information. We know this because the cells have to imprint it onto the new brain, because the behavior will start once the brain is there. The information is moving through the body, the cells are storing it, they're imprinting it on the new brain. Now I think we can say that behavioral memories are patterns in that space, just like morphological memories, and that the engrams in the brain are pointers to that information, and that the rest of the cells are in some way placeholding it, such that when the brain shows up, it'll reconnect to the patterns it had before. We actually have lots of data on moving different kinds of memories, both anatomical and behavioral, into bodies by transplants. One of the striking things is that it takes very little tissue to put a new pattern into a large recipient organism; it really doesn't take very much at all. One of these is still unpublished, but we have work showing that if you cut a tiny piece out of a two-headed worm and stick it into a one-headed worm, not every time but some percentage of the time, that little piece convinces all the other cells. They should be suppressing this aberrant thing, but sometimes the story of being two-headed is compelling and takes over the recipient worm, and you get two-headed worms, which never saw the gap junction blocker; it transfers over. There are some clinical cases of some personality changes coming along with things like stem cell transplants and heart-lung.
[53:42] Iain McGilchrist: I don't know.
[53:44] Michael Levin: It's super fascinating. I don't know if the data set is big enough to make firm conclusions yet.
[53:52] Iain McGilchrist: Yeah.
Michael Levin: That's my suspicion on this: I think these memories are patterns just like the morphological patterns.
[54:02] Iain McGilchrist: I'm sure you're right to point outside of the mere bounds of the brain that these things can be stored, as you say, in heart, lungs, other places. Quite how or what it is that's stored, I don't know. But the literature is certainly not dismissible on these changes that happen. What do you think of hydranencephalic individuals? This is not just hydrocephalus where a lot of the brain space is filled with fluid; it's extraordinary that you get people with very little brain compared to most people who nonetheless function normally, have a perhaps high IQ, and can do mathematics to a high level. With hydranencephalic individuals, there aren't that many who survive, but they have nothing in the brain space: they stop at the brain stem and have vestigial or no cerebral tissue. And yet they can, in some form, see things. They can interact with people in an emotionally intelligent way. They can have favorite toys, they can appreciate music. How the hell is this happening? What is going on? Have you any thoughts about that?
[55:24] Michael Levin: This is a real problem. Karina Kaufman and I just put out a review of some of the famous cases. To me, the problem is I'm not super shocked that it's possible, just in the sense that I've already committed to this idea that a lot of the processing happens offline, outside the physical environment. But what is a problem, and what I don't have a good explanation for, is if it is apparently possible to have proper function without as much brain as we think. If one can access all that with much reduced architecture, why is that not more? My understanding is that there's pressure against having a brain that's too big because of childbirth and all this. The brain eats up a tremendous amount of our daily energy rations. If it's possible to do with less, why don't we do with less? Is that right? These examples are showing that it can be done with a lot less. Why is it?
[56:42] Iain McGilchrist: Can be done, but of course, these are not, by contrast with hydrocephalic subjects, fully functioning human beings.
[56:52] Michael Levin: This is true. I was talking more about the hydrocephalic ones where some of them don't even know there's an issue until they have a head scan. They do a scan. Those cases are very weird. I don't understand why, if that's possible, it isn't that way all the time.
[57:22] Iain McGilchrist: No, you must tell me when you've got to go, Mike, but if you've got time, I'd like to put an idea to you.
[57:31] Michael Levin: Please, yeah, keep going.
[57:32] Iain McGilchrist: One way of thinking about this potential versus actual thing is even more fundamental, which is Goethe's extraordinary insight that he said, "dividing the united, uniting the divided is the whole business of nature." And then he goes on to talk about things in other metaphors. But the point is there, that the whole business of nature is dividing what is united and then uniting what has been divided. To me, that is also a phenomenal echo of the right versus left thing, because the right hemisphere sees something as a whole. The left hemisphere takes it to pieces, analyzes it, which literally means breaking it up. And then the right hemisphere takes back what has been analyzed and recomposes it into a now enriched whole. So that is an important journey from wholeness to a divided wholeness back to an increased integrity of wholeness. I suspect that this is actually part of the way that creation in general happens. If you think about the potential and the actual, what is happening there is that the potential is collapsed into the actual. And it has very specific pin-downable qualities, that those qualities, having been created in that way, are present in a way they never were before. So they now get taken back into the whole in a way that enriches the whole. The reason I'm saying this is that it seems to me that when we talk about the being of forms, and in my case, I'm not including you unless you want to be included in the idea that there are drives, purposes, directions to evolution, not just biological evolution, but the evolution of the cosmos in general. If that is the case, it may well be that there are analogues of the force for division and the force for union at very, very low levels. So going down to single cells, not just their reproduction, and the whole process is interesting in reproduction where the dance of the chromosomes, where they get to fight it and recompose it in a new form. But the whole business of the drives that are for good or ill as part of life can be seen. It's a step, it's a large step, and it may be a step too far. I'm perfectly happy to be told that. It seems to me that there might be some value in reflecting on that as resonating with or actually being present at different levels in the cosmos, both the living cosmos and perhaps the non-living. I don't know if you have any immediate reaction to that.
[1:00:55] Michael Levin: I don't think that's crazy at all because this is something we think about a lot in terms of how collectives form and what happens when parts join to be a collective, which in our case oftentimes is a pathology we try to deal with when there are breakdowns and things are breaking up. That cycling back and forth probably does go all the way down and is very interesting. We came across this. Lakshman Srisha, a student that I work with, was doing this model of an iterated prisoner's dilemma that is spatialized. This will be up online shortly. You have a bunch of agents; they're all playing prisoner's dilemma against each other. There's a twist. Normally, in all of the analyses that we have ever seen, the number of agents is fixed. They all play against each other. There's a payoff table and then things happen. We added two things. We added that you can cooperate or defect, but you can also merge and split. What that means is that two agents might become one, and then the whole calculus immediately changes. What happens is it's this recursive thing where your decisions change how many individuals there are, and it changes the border between you and the world. All the math that normally goes along with it doesn't work anymore because it's all recursive. One of the things that happens is that eventually you get bigger and bigger regions. I didn't foresee this at the beginning, and it took us some time to figure out what was happening. We noticed that the energy level of these things goes up as they get bigger. So we can see there's a drive towards multicellularity. But then it reaches a cliff and falls off. When these agents merge to the point where there's one big agent, there's no one for them to play with or against. We imagine three scenarios that can happen after that. The first scenario matches scenarios envisioned for the end of the universe: a kind of heat death where you've gotten to your world, you've eaten all the food, that's it. Now everything dies; there's nothing more to do. Another possibility is this: as you get big and your energy level starts to drop because there are no more games to benefit from, stress builds up. When stress builds up, you fragment, like trauma causing a dissociative state. You fragment into pieces. As soon as you fragment into pieces, you can start to climb back again. There's this big bang/big crunch cycle where you start off as individuals, you join together into this thing, you fragment back, and you pulse back and forth. A third version, which we haven't implemented yet, is that once you join together, it allows you to project yourself into a new space that was not accessible before. In biology, we know this happens because individual cells navigating physiological and transcriptional spaces get together and now anatomical, amorphous space lets them do things they couldn't do before. Maybe they can escape. In our system, there was no way for them to escape the world because we coded it that way. If we were smarter, we would have multiple layers where this thing can escape the universe it has explored to the edges and go further. I think thinking about this kind of basal joining and splitting is fundamental. I remember Bernardo Castrop and Rupert Spear saying in one of their talks that they thought we are all dissociative alters of God.
[1:05:53] Iain McGilchrist: I love all of that. Very resonant with my own thinking. And although I wouldn't say that we're all "dissociated altars of God," I think the point is this: in every creation myth there is the idea of this founding being, the ground of being, and it needs an other. First of all, because, like all existence, it is relational, so it has to have something to relate to. And also, the otherness is creative. The otherness, which seems like resistance or negation of the wholeness and beauty of the original, is also the path from which the manifest latent beauty and complexity can be unpacked. So it's part of the creative process. It's really a very fine idea. I came across the extraordinary wisdom of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. In the Lurianic Kabbalah there is this primal being called Ein Sof, which is the ground of being. It wants to create, as all these beings do. Its first act is a negation of itself: to withdraw in order to make space for there to be something other than Ein Sof at all, which is an extraordinarily imaginative idea that actually needs the negation to be creative. Then in the space that is now vacant there are placed these urns, which are the sephirot. One spark of fire comes out of Ein Sof and falls on the vessels and shatters most of them. That's the second phase of creation called the shattering of the vessels. Then comes this third phase, tikkun, which is that it's humanity's job to take back these fragments that now have sparks of divine fire in them and put them together to make urns that are more beautiful, more living, and have divine life in them than the original urns had. So that is slightly like this progression from the left to the right to the left, and the incorporation of this new element that may seem like a negation or a breaking makes something even more whole and more beautiful than was before. I just put it forward because I think it's intuitive. I think these really profound images and myths are not just nothing. They are ways in which our minds contact the shapes, the forms, and see something that means something, not because we add meaning, but because we find the meaning that is that. Anyway, that's what I'd say.
[1:09:11] Michael Levin: Do you think this view predicts that, with the wide potential variety of beings out there in the universe, we are going to find that they necessarily contain some component that is like the left hemisphere in its job and some component like the right? Is this a general architecture, do you think?
[1:09:38] Iain McGilchrist: That would be my supposition. That this is so fundamental to the structure of everything, living and non-living, that it would have to be reflected in some way. Quite probably things like goodness, beauty and truth would also be elements in this story. There could be good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood.
[1:10:12] Michael Levin: I'll say this gives me an interesting idea: we have now the ability to collect calcium signaling data from xenobots and soon from anthrobots. I'm going to start looking for a lateralization of function. I wonder if in these things — we have neurobots now that have neurons we put into them; they don't have a standard architecture, they have some kind of great novel architecture. Maybe we can find examples of processing that's associated with integration versus reductive analysis. We'll take a look.
[1:10:56] Iain McGilchrist: I think that would be fascinating. I can't wait to hear what you find. What I love about your work is that you have, for a very long time, not dismissed the idea that asymmetry is extremely important, as well as that there needs to be something beyond the simply mechanistic vision. Thank you very much for your time and your wisdom.
[1:11:20] Michael Levin: Thank you so much. Likewise. This has been amazing. I took a bunch of notes as we were talking, thank you. I'll keep you apprised. There was some stuff coming that should be quite relevant to this.
[1:11:34] Iain McGilchrist: That's fabulous. Thank you very much, Mike. Will you send the tape to my people? Thanks very much. Tape, how old I am.
[1:11:48] Michael Levin: Tape. I say it all the time too. From the tape.
[1:11:52] Iain McGilchrist: Thank you very much.
[1:11:54] Michael Levin: We'll see you.
Iain McGilchrist: Bye.
