We're using a computational model called the GARD model, G-A-R-D. This is a very popular kind of thing that people study. It's a chemical soup of individual molecules that kind of connect to each other and break up, and if you crank that long enough, eventually you get replicators, and then you get Darwinian selection. Okay, so that's, you know, it's a model, a more or less bio-realistic model. What we've seen is the following: if you keep an eye on the soup, what we see is that there is a specific signature that presages the impending arrival of replicators. In other words, you can look at the soup and there's a quantity which bumps and then goes down, bumps and then goes down, bumps and then goes down. And when the bump gets really big, now you know there are replicators coming. And that happens before you get the replicators.
Before. So now the interesting thing about it is that until you get a replicator, there isn't any body to defend. In other words, once you have a replicator, then all of the biology: I have to keep alive, I have to do, you know, this and that. Okay. But all that presumes that you have a physical embodiment that has to be maintained and continued. This is before that. So I think what we're catching is a very minimal model of that kind of pattern pulling itself up by its bootstraps within the material.
This is Dan Felli. You're tuned into The Trajectory, and this is the first episode in our sixth series here on The Trajectory called Stewarding the Flame. My greatest hope in starting this series was that I would have Michael Levin kick it off, and I was very fortunate to have exactly that happen. The focus of this series — we're going to get into Levin, of course. The focus of this series is on understanding and encouraging the flourishing of the living process. The living process is that which started below the single cell and bubbled up to the entire rich biosphere and totality of the human condition that we see today. The goal would be, if everything is a process, to ensure that that process continues to flourish, more new kinds of value and power and experience are conjured into the world. But how would we do that if we don't understand life itself? And in fact, if we do it wrong, maybe we won't steward the flame. Maybe we'll extinguish the flame with some unworthy success or artificial intelligence. We speak with Levin about how to understand and encourage the flourishing of the living process. If you know Mike Levin, you know his work in xenobots, you know his work with flatworms, you know his idea of Platonic spaces, but you might not know his idea about the great unraveling process of life into sort of posthuman futures. And in this episode, we explore a lot of that. So I am going to save all of my reflections for the end of this episode, as usual. But there is literally no one on the face of the earth who's better to kick off the series about the process of life and its greater flourishing than Mike Levin himself. So without further ado, this is Mike Levin here on The Trajectory. So Mike, glad to be able to talk again.
Yeah, great to see you again.
Absolutely. It's going to be a real blast to be able to visit you here in the park today, out in nature, talking about the great processes of nature. We're going to start with this idea of life, of which everybody has assumptions because we don't know what it is. The analogy I'll open with, because it's the theme of the series of which your episode is the kickoff, is that we could think about this: life seems to be this complexifying, unraveling process made up of kind of individual temporary torches that seem to be feeding a greater flame. In other words, like these little developmental things kind of bubble up to me and you. The question that we're sort of opening the series with is: if this more complex stuff you talk about — the cognitive light cone, this opening up of care, concern, power, as Spinoza would say, potentia — if that opening up is something that we like and seems to sort of be beneficial and good, what would we have to understand about what is now called life to know what that kind of underlying flame is? I know you've got some very interesting ideas here with a different analogy. So hit us, I guess, with your high level here, Mike.
Yeah. I guess it's good to go sort of all the way back into a big picture view, and then we can drill down. I think that the Venn diagram of the universe looks very different from how most people do it. So typically you'll have physics or physical things as the big circle, and then you'll have living things inside of that, and you'll have cognitive things inside of that. So I think that's actually backwards. So I think cognition is the biggest circle, and I think the space of physical things is within that, and the space of living things is within that. So what I'm saying is that life is what we call a set of architectures that are exceedingly good at hosting specific patterns, and these patterns span a range from very kind of minimal, low-agency things like that plain mathematicians study — so those kind of patterns — all the way up through the kinds of things recognizable by cybernetics, by behavior science, by psychoanalysis, friendship, love, all that kind of stuff. So biology and life are amazing at building multiscale interfaces that host all kinds of, all manner of patterns at different scales with different agendas operating in different problem spaces. So that's what's going on here: is that these are interfaces.
So it strikes me that sort of, you know, Kant has this notion of, you know, even like space and time are kind of just the way that things are shooting into us. In other words, like we look out and we're like, ah, this must be the noumena, surely this is all real, this is the atoms, and then this bubbles up to me. But it seems like what you're saying is that might be how we perceive, but you suspect obviously there's this broader kind of cognitive undergirding through which the physical and what we call living kind of come in from. And that, like when you say I think about it as a different set of Venn diagrams, my presumption is it ties in some way to that Kantian idea of like we look at this and we say, oh, this is how it is, but this might just be our arbitrary shooting out into that cognitive space.
I mean, that's certainly true, and our ability to form models of the outside world is extremely connected to the embodiment that we have now. Right. So we're obsessed with vision and, you know, large-scale or medium-scale objects
Yeah, right. So that's true. But I'm saying something beyond that. What I'm saying is that the kind — I'm saying a couple things. First of all, that the kinds of phenomena that are studied by behavioral scientists — so that means things around memory, learning, prediction, expectation, preferences, navigational competencies of some kind of problem space, ability to choose new goals or to follow goals and then to choose new goals at some point — like all these, all this scale, that these kinds of things are not unique to biology. They're not unique to life. They are, I think, universal, and there are some very minimal systems that show all of these things, counter to our expectations. I think our mind blindness is pretty severe, for sure.
Right. I think we have a really hard time detecting these things, right, in unconventional embodiment.
And so what that means is that we have to ask the question of what space are these different things drawn from? What's the latent space, right, of these things, and what is it that's special about life? And I do think that the things we call living in biology have some unique features that host particular kinds of patterns, but overall I don't think it's unique to life. And so that's what we need to really think about.
Got it. Got it. Okay. So let me maybe ask this question. This might be somewhat normative, but, you know, we go there here. So there's a version of what you're articulating if someone just heard the ideas for the first time where they might say, okay, so everything's sparklingly intelligent, you know, the galaxies and the black holes and whatnot, in ways that we can't interpret as intelligent or interesting or sentient or whatever, because we only know, you know, this medium stuff. So, okay, cool. It's all awake. Like, even if life as we now know it never emerged, all the same, man, like the same stuff is there normatively in terms of the goodness and the awakeness of the space. Like it's already there, you know, let it be. There's other folks that would say, well, geez, you know, maybe life, like presumably your experience of, you know, enthusiasm and love, etc., etc., is probably richer than that of most oak trees and most dung beetles. And some people would say, well, geez, that's a whole unraveling set of powers and experience and access to nature, which seems valuable. Like it seems like actually the flourishing of that, which again, you're saying life has a bit of arbitrariness to it because it's all these intelligent patterns. But some people say, okay, maybe there's some parts of life or parts of the unfurling that are not biological. They're not limited to that substrate that almost feel like that would be good and they should flourish. But again, there's a way of interpreting what you had stated where it's like it's all sparklingly living. Some things argue, some things don't. We don't understand all of it, yada yada. Like for you, is there a better way the unfolding could occur, or is it almost like, no, man, it's already there. You know, we're just kind of detecting it and looking at it.
Okay. A couple things. First of all, what I want to be clear is that this is not the sort of old-school animist project where you just assume every galaxy is a mind. Every — this is quite different. There are tools that we can rigorously use to kind of adjudicate some of those claims now. And I do think you're absolutely right, there are degrees and levels of experience and capability here. I don't think it's on me to say which are better than which others in that sense, but I do think that there is a distinct — I don't want to say hierarchy, but there is a spectrum. There's a spectrum with differences. I certainly enjoy high-order agentic beings, certainly, you know, more than lowly ones, but that's sort of, you know, I wouldn't say it's better. I would say that it's different and more complex and more interesting to us. And I think that fundamentally, though, I think — and this is a hypothesis. This is not unlike some of these other things that I think we have pretty good evidence for. This is just, you know, my own idea. I think these kinds of patterns are strongly motivated to become enriched over time. I don't hold to Plato's original idea, if we even know what that is, that these things are eternal and unchanging. Yeah, I think some of them might be, you know, like a value of e might just stay how it is, but some of these patterns are absolutely interacting with the physical world because it affords them some kind of opportunity to change and enlarge. And so I think they are the drivers of that. And so I don't know if we can say what's better or worse. But if you ask what's the universe doing, I suspect the answer is it has a primary drive. I don't think it's a drive for survival. I think it's a drive for expansion of exactly the kind that you're interested in.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, and this is actually a very — like the undergirding you're putting here is actually quite optimistic in terms of the likelihood of continued expansion because it's the nature of life. Two things come to mind. One, you bring up William James all the time. Did I — I don't think I've ever asked you if Emerson bumps into your thinking here, because...
outlandishly Ralph Waldo-style stuff going on.
Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of classic thinkers, you know, going back, cosmic process, nature, things. So Emerson is of the lineage of Spinoza, of Heraclitus, of the ever-changing, of the flow of all things becoming, and sort of the natural expansion of these things in Spinoza. A lot of these folks have — if we look at Nietzsche, Spinoza, Emerson, Whitehead — started in a religion, left it, now you're unmoored on what is real and what is good, and they had to surf the unmooredness. They didn't then find a new thing and say, oh, this is real and good, right? They didn't say, oh, medium speeds, medium size, I'm happy here. They just said it's all unfurling. Your thinking is very much along those same lines and is congenial to those things. Spinoza's term here, the conatus for Spinoza, is like that impetus to persist. For him, persisting — there is no static persisting, like, oh, I guess I'll just persist, right? There isn't. The persistence only occurs through the expansion of the total set of powers that permit a thing to persist. For him, the term is potentia. So the total unraveling — like you do not persist by being, you only persist by becoming, and you have to become more. Terrence Deacon says, and you guys have had all your debates and whatnot, you know, like you're dealing with entropy, you always got to do a little extra. You got to do a little extra if you want to persist. And so you're saying that sort of that undergirded cognitiveness that sort of egresses into what you and I are observing has that as its core tendency in some respect. I would say that is quite in line with persistence. You're saying expansion over persistence. I'm almost like it seems like if you want to persist, you have to expand. How do you think of it?
I think that's true. I think there is this paradox of change where even persistence through time is not easy to define. And I'm not sure, you know, so I've written a bunch of this on the whole butterfly-caterpillar thing, right, and the persistence of the being and the persistence of the memory patterns that are inside those beings and what happens to them. You know, you can look at that as the point of view of the memories of the caterpillar and how do they persist into the butterfly? They can persist, but not as caterpillar memories. Those are of no use to the butterfly, right? So if you're going to persist, you have to change. And this, of course, is fundamental to biology because as a biological being, you know, everything's going to change. Your genome is going to be mutated. Your environment is going to change. If you try to persist as is, you're dead. If you try to change to keep up, then are you still you? Have you persisted, or are you not? Like, you know, I think these binary kind of categories are not helping us here, but I think change is the key to all of this.
Yeah, Heraclitus's river, I think, was ignorable and escapable when the great process, so everything interacting with everything, was like slower. In other words, everything was Darwinian, and then we didn't even know of Darwin yet. So it's like, well, oak trees surely have always been oak trees, and like my great-great-great-great-grandchildren will also farm this land as I do. But now the cultural cycles of evolution, the technological cycles of evolution, it's becoming more self-evident that our bodies, as you think of with the cyborg stuff and AGI, that like actually we're going to be in Heraclitus's river and have to deal with it. So change will no longer be so — the great process is a lot to consider, Mike. Everything's changing. We have to adapt to everything. Everything's always shifting, even my own identity. That's cognitively overburdening, but it is about to be foisted on man, I suspect.
It is. And it's not just the technological AI stuff. It's also the regenerative medicine angle. Yeah. It's the idea that the thing that keeps you alive and embodied is this Ship of Theseus kind of thing where your individual cells siss and die, but the collective moves on because there is a set of information patterns that are propagating through the tissue that guide new molecules, new cells, new whatever, right? And the real Ship of Theseus isn't the wooden boat, it's the plan in the mind of the workers, right? As it is in our bodies, it's that, right? Your actual target morphology is the pattern memory in the collective of cells, and the hardware comes and goes. Hopefully the memory structures stay. Now this also connects strongly to the whole longevity thing because, for example, one of the recent — this is the work of Leo Pio-Lopez in my lab and I, where we're looking into a new kind of theory of aging as to why we age. And one of the things that we've been studying is the possibility that what's actually happening — you can call it in the simple way, you can call it the boredom theory of aging, which is basically given that the body morphogenesis is a cognitive system that meets anatomical goals, the question is, what does a cognitive system do long after it's met all of its goals, right? And we actually have data to show that even very simple cognitive systems, after they've met their goals, they maintain for a while, but they're not like thermostats, which are perfectly happy to do a single homeostatic loop, you know, for as long as it takes. There's a kind of a metacognitive process that basically causes them to disband after a while. So if that's true, the solution to that might be — the answer might turn out to be that if you want to live for thousands of years or maybe forever, you can't do it in the same embodiment. You can do it maybe for a couple hundred years, but after that you have to switch up some stuff. And maybe that means, you know, minimal change as planarians do. They, you know, they fission, they regenerate, and that's good enough to keep them basically going forever. Or it might be that you're going to have to make some more significant changes and have a different embodiment to continue. So we're — and this is not a far-off sci-fi thing. It's like soon. So that's another — yeah, like change. Change and how do you — there's no question as to whether you're going to change. The question is, how do you want to change?
100%. So, well, the whole premise of the worthy successor stuff and stewarding the flame is like torches are temporary. I don't make the rules. I don't even make the rules. They're just temporary. Substrates are temporary. Individuals are temporary. Identities are temporary. Planets are temporary. The whole thing. And so if that be true, attenuation or transformation, that's all you got. That's what you got. And so defining a good transformation, we must be manful enough to do that. Now, right now, most longevity research, you're well aware of this, is very, very torch morality. That is to say, how can we keep the eternal hominid kingdom going for billions of years? How can apes as they are now, speaking with their vocal cords, continue to steer the totality of the great process as we presume they do now? This is what longevity research is for you. It is a flame-oriented thing. In other words, how do we participate in becoming, you know, in a way that isn't appreciably thumbnail-associated or, you know, armpit-associated, but is part of the necessity of change and kind of the expanding patterns that for you is so natural in the great system.
For sure. Yeah. Leo and I just wrote a chapter on this for a book on longevity and aging, talking about how longevity of the body has to be considered in the context of longevity of the species. And that doesn't mean how can we stay exactly the same for as long as we can. It means what does it mean to guide the change in the ways that we want.
If we think about senescence, I mean, we have Salty here right now. It seems to me — you tell me if I'm wrong — it seems to me that what nature does with its fecundity, like you or me or, you know, the tree, is like, yeah, it's not so we're going to do that pattern for an eternal thing. It's sort of throwing that pattern forth maybe for the sake of its interaction with and unfolding with the whole system that sort of it's participating with. Like you and I will do some things and some other people will learn from you and then they'll do some other things and whatnot. And so it seems like nature doesn't bring up a pattern to be like, no, no, this one for good. It brings it up and it has it maybe the hope that it will sort of add to the unraveling in some way. But even in its senescence, its parts will contribute. You're almost forced to contribute to the great process. Even if you don't, it will use your parts. Your parts will still be contributing.
I think that's true. And I think that's true even beyond the kind of biological, ecological nature that most people are thinking of. I think — and this is, I don't know this right now, but this is my hypothesis. We're testing it. This is actually testable. So we're doing this in the lab. I think that there is a feedback loop, a functional feedback loop between the patterns that might be able to ingress in a particular interface and the development of those interfaces. What I'm saying is that it is not the case — I suspect that there is a fixed set of patterns that biology or engineers provide and then whatever shows up shows up. I actually think that it's a much longer, continual, drawn-out process where over time what's happening is that the patterns are contributing to future opportunities for their ingression. And so I think the driver of this is in fact the oomph that these patterns have for taking over specific physical interfaces. And they're going to keep pushing that no matter what happens in the physical world. There's going to be a pressure to do that.
Yeah. Yeah. I think, well, Spinoza's nature naturing — I think for him it was a little bit more static, but it seems to be what nature naturing seems to be is like it fills spaces. Well, this is the Kauffman kind of stuff, right? Like the pattern emerges, unravels, it creates a new environment and a new set of affordances that can spin up new things that do totally different things that we couldn't have imagined at the lower strata. Is there some overlap with Kauffman?
I think that's — yeah, I think that's reasonable. Well, I mean, I think I go sort of a little more extreme than what Stu would agree with, but I think that's true. I mean, one of the models that I have, I call universal steganography. So, you know, steganography is this trick where when you have a piece of digital information, it might be a picture or a book or, you know, text or whatever, there are bits in there that if you were to change the bits, the large-scale pattern doesn't change. And so what that means is that you can hide information in the bits. So people do this when they do steganography in images, for example, when you hide your signature. If you're an artist, you can hide your, like, a watermark, and it's not visible physically because there are bits that if you flip the bits, they don't make any change to the image, right? But you can hide stuff in there. And, you know, spies would hide things in newspaper articles and stuff like that, right? So the main point of the steganography is that you're not allowed to change the object itself. In other words, you can't mess with — you know, you got the image of a cat and you want to hide a bunch of information and it still has to look like the same cat, otherwise it doesn't. So I think what's going on is described. I think that's a fair rendition of what's happening because I think these patterns sort of soak into all the degrees of freedom inside anything you build, be they algorithms, be they mechanisms, be they living things, be they any combination of all of those things. There are places where these patterns can fit in. And this is stuff we're actually studying. This is empirical work from our lab. They will soak into anywhere that they can. We don't need to exert any kind of a pull. They already do this. We may have the opportunity to guide which kind of patterns you get. I certainly hope so because I think that's going to be of existential importance to us. But I think that's the thing, is that they will over time not only do they ingress into the interfaces that are present now, there is — I suspect that this — we don't know, but I suspect it's actually a kind of a smooth, continuous feedback loop where they also guide the future development of these interfaces for more opportunities.
Well, I guess, and there's different ways to think about this. I'm going to ask — I'm going to get into thermodynamics in a second, but to touch on what you just said. The way I've sometimes thought about this or heard people talk about it without necessarily conjuring the Platonic spaces would be like, okay, well, there was some autocatalytic thing that occurred and, you know, who knows, abiogenesis, like good luck, but, you know, I think people should work on it. But whatever it was, that there was some thing that was thinging and wanted to keep thinging, and by doing its thing, it perpetuated more of that thing, and then somehow that loop got looped into bigger loops, and there was a bunch of wiggling stuff before there was a cell, and then somehow that stuff closed, and then whatever, the mitochondria and whatever. And it seems as though this filling of space, as you talk about, could be seen on some level as like that spinning opening up into bigger circles. Whatever it touches, like it has to fill in in some way. Like in other words, if it's spinning here and there's like blank space here, whatever this gets filled with will be the stuff that's best at persisting into that space. You know, Stuart Kauffman talks about like whatever, like the gut of a fish where, you know, the swim bladder where new bacteria can grow, like couldn't exist until the swim bladder exists or whatever. It's sort of like new space is open. The things that are there are the things that can persist there. For you though, it's not this unfolding of maybe the living cyclical patterns bubbling into that space. It's almost like that empty space already has in it all this latent cognitive sparkle and sort of the stuff that egresses will naturally fill it with new complexity. I'm trying to put in your words compared to a normal maybe expansion of life kind of terms. How would you analogize?
Let me give you one example that kind of illustrates the distinction between those. And you said this will be out 40 days, 45 days. All right. By then this will be — so this isn't published yet, but by then this will be at least a preprint.
Federico Pigozzi is a postdoc in my lab, and I have been studying the informatics of the origin of life. So what happens before there are replicators? So life really gets cracking once you have replicators because then you can have differential reproduction, then Darwin takes over. That we know that story more or less. The question is what happens before that? And there are lots of people, of course, that work on origin of life. So let me tell you one of the things that we've seen. We're using a computational model called the GARD model, G-A-R-D. This is a very popular kind of thing that people study. It's a chemical soup of individual molecules that kind of connect to each other and break up, and if you crank that long enough, eventually you get replicators, and then you get Darwinian selection. Okay, so that's, you know, it's a model, a more or less bio-realistic model. What we've seen is the following: if you keep an eye on the soup, what we see is that there is a specific signature that presages the impending arrival of replicators. In other words, you can look at the soup and there's a quantity which bumps and then goes down, bumps and then goes down, bumps and then goes down. And when the bump gets really big, now you know there are replicators coming. And that happens before you get the replicators. Exactly. Before. Now the — right. And so now the interesting thing about it is that until you get a replicator, there isn't any body to defend. In other words, once you have a replicator, then all of the biology: I have to keep alive, I have to do, you know, this and that. Okay. But all that presumes that you have a physical embodiment that has to be maintained and continued. This is before that. So I think what we're catching is a very minimal model of that kind of pattern pulling itself up by its bootstraps within the material. And what we've actually shown is that if we come in as a, you know, kind of an external omniscient, you know, kind of influence and start specifically moving things around to optimize — nothing to do with replication or anything like that. All we optimize is this one feature from causal information theory. If you do that, you greatly accelerate the appearance of these replicators. So it's functional. It's not just an empty phenomenon. It's actually functional. So I think we can develop these minimal models of something bootstrapping itself before it has a physical embodiment that you can point to. And I suspect that that's not just happening there. It's happening everywhere. And so that process of physical evolution that's happening here with the gene frequencies and all this stuff is tightly coupled to a dynamic that, much like the computational stuff we study, whatever the things that impinge on it are not just physical things, right? The accounting of the forces that cause something to happen is not fully done by a physicalist account.
I guess there's a lot of ways to word it, like, or at least physical in any appreciable way we can detect. Like my presumption is maybe there are physical things for which we have not the tools or the granularity of access or whatever, but again, it could just be this total other dimension of which you speak. This brings us to the point of like, when does the conatus — some people, oh, when it's a single cell, then it wants to persist. It's like by the time you got to cell, by the time you're there, left the barn long ago. But if you keep rolling it back to your point, it's like, well, does the guanine want to be guanine? But if you keep rolling it back, like is there something in the atoms which wants them to wake up?
So luckily all of this is an empirical question and it needs to be experimented. So here's what we've seen. What we've seen is that even very small molecular networks, the smallest one I think had four nodes, are already capable of things like Pavlovian conditioning. So the protocognitive competencies of which larger minds are built are present at least as far back as chemistry. What happens before that? I don't know. But we can do experiments on that. And I actually gave a talk recently at an evolution conference where I said, well, and it goes down to the, you know, the molecular level, whatever. And then somebody said afterwards, why'd you stop there? And I said, well, you're right. Of course, I just don't know. I haven't done any experiments below that, but you could imagine things like — and maybe this is — I actually asked this question once in an online community, and I got several different answers which suggest that we actually don't know the answer. I said, okay, you've got a proton sitting there and you hit it with an electric field and it jumps and you let it come back. Then you do it again and then you do it again and then you do it again, and the question is, over time, is there any sense of habituation or sensitization? Does it have a historicity to it? Like in these very simple kinds of systems, are you going to see some kind of — even though the thing is supposedly featureless and all of that, has anybody looked? And so I got answers ranging from it's impossible to it's possible and nobody's looked to well, we would have seen this in the data if it existed. And I don't know which of the three is correct, but I do know that up until now, everywhere we've looked in those kinds of minimal systems where the standard assumption is that they're dumb, they don't know anything, they don't have any goals, they're just amenable to the lowest level of the cybernetic hierarchy where things are just passive — everywhere we've looked, we found that not to be the case.
