Audio Player
✓ Using synced audio (timestamps accurate)
Starting at:
Michael Levin on Morphogenetics, Regeneration, Consciousness, and Xenobots
November 17, 2021
•
1:59:00
•
undefined
Audio:
Download MP3
✓ Synced audio available: Click any timestamp to play from that point. Timestamps are accurate because we're using the original ad-free audio.
Transcript
Enhanced with Timestamps
300 sentences
18,252 words
Method: api-polled
Transcription time: 117m 36s
The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
This is Martian Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, you'll always feel good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from
any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,
All right. Hello, Toll listeners. Kurt here.
That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now.
Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unify field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over
One hundred and seventy countries, your business has global potential and their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Shopify has award winning service and has the Internet's best converting checkout. Sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash theories. All lowercase that's Shopify dot com slash theories.
Today's guest is Professor Michael Levin, a developmental biologist and synthetic biologist at Tufts University. In my opinion, his work is worthy of a Nobel Prize being the equivalent of discovering DNA as the basis of genetic memory, though instead of a biochemical code, he found a bioelectric one. And instead of genetic memory, at the low level, it's large-scale anatomical structures at the high level. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro.
Michael Evans' work has direct implications for cancer research, the regeneration of limbs, the possible regeneration of tissue in general and thus may aid with Alzheimer's research, the creation of engineered life that can scour areas for toxins and remove them,
The creation of an entirely new drug market based on non neuro bioelectric manipulation and even recovering traits that have been in species that have went extinct millions of years ago that live in us via mechanisms we're only now beginning to understand because of Michael and his teams and his collaborators teams work.
Truly, truly groundbreaking. For those new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us.
If you enjoy witnessing and or engaging in real-time conversation with others on the topics of psychology, neurobiology, physics, consciousness, free will, God, and so on, then do visit the Discord and the subreddit. The links for those are in the description.
There's also a link to the Patreon in the description. That is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. It would be near impossible for me to have conversations like this with any fidelity with any depth.
on topics like consciousness, loop quantum gravity, geometric unity that's coming up, string theory, non-neuro-bioelectric manipulation, and so on, if not for the patrons and the sponsors. Thank you, and again, that link is patreon.com slash KurtGymUncle.
Speaking of sponsors, there are two. The first sponsor is Algo. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software that helps business users optimize sales and operations, planning to avoid stockouts, reduce returns and inventory write downs while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI. Headed by Amjad Hussain, who's been a huge supporter of this podcast since near its inception.
Now, Amjad has a podcast on AI and consciousness. And if you'd like to support this channel, that is the Toe channel, then please visit the description and support his channel as doing so supports this indirectly. The second sponsor is Brilliant. Brilliant illuminates the soul of mathematics, science and engineering through these bite sized interactive learning experiences.
Brilliant's courses explore the laws that shape our world. It elevates math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. You can even learn group theory, which is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard model is contingent on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Those are technically called Lie groups and those are local symmetries.
Thank you and enjoy this non-plussing and wondrously eye-opening conversation with Professor Michael Levin. I think what you're doing is Nobel Prize-winning work. Well, thank you so much. That's very kind. Thank you. I'm extremely, very much looking forward to this.
Thank you. When I was researching you about every 10 minutes or so you would say this some offhand comment that would floor me because of its consequences and then you'd move on and then you'd say what trumps what came before and this happened over and over. So why don't you start with what non neuro bioelectric states are their relationship to anatomical results.
And then later we can compare and contrast to standard developmental biology for decades, which is, it's the genome that instructs constructs perhaps what's epigenetic. So we'll start with what are bioelectric non neuro bioelectric states and the relationship to anatomical results. Sure. Uh, okay. Well, so, so non neural bioelectrical states are simply the fact that all cells in your body, not just neurons have the same machinery that's normally associated with neural cells.
So ion channels, electrical synapses, neurotransmitter pathways, all of these things are way older than nervous systems. And every cell in your body is creating an electrical potential across its membrane. Most cells in your body are communicating those states to their neighbors via these electrical synapses. And on the one hand, people are often surprised to hear this. On the other hand, if you ask yourself, where did neurons and brains come from?
They didn't just spring up out of nowhere. Evolution basically speed optimized processes that were already here around the time of bacterial biofilms. They're ancient. These things are ancient. And so if you just sort of track back the phylogeny of nervous systems and neural cells, you find out that all cells have these. And in fact, we've had discussions, very lengthy discussions on some of these basal cognition meetings in terms of what is a neuron.
You know, people will say, well, here are neurons. And I'll say, by the way, what's a neuron? And so they'll write on the board four or five criteria for what they think is a neuron. And then they say, well, every cell does this. And so there are a couple of, there are a couple of differences, but most things are fairly universal. And so then the question becomes, we'll find what are they used, what is this used for? So in the brain, what you have is a system where an electrical network is processing information
to direct muscles that move your body through three-dimensional space. That's behavior, nervous system control of behavior. Prior to that, what these systems were used for were to generate signals that control cell behavior to move your body configuration through anatomical space. That is the space of possible anatomical configurations.
So I think, and I'm working on some more stuff on this now in terms of really broadening this idea, but I think what evolution did was pivot some of the same tricks across different spaces. So electrical,
Electrical networks were used to control, to traverse first in evolution probably first metabolic spaces and then physiological spaces and then transcriptional spaces and then morphospaces and eventually three-dimensional space when muscles came on the scene and animals could run around and do things like that.
But that's what electrical networks used to think about before they thought about behavior in three-dimensional space. They thought about navigating other types of space. Now, how does this compare to the standard view, which is just, it's our DNA that programs us? The standard view is correct in the following sense. What the DNA specifies
is the structure of the micro hardware of your cells. So the DNA gives you the protein level sequence, meaning the structure of the proteins that every cell has. That's the hardware. So the DNA is what specifies the hardware of the cells. Now it turns out that that hardware is awesome. It's amazing in the following way. When you put that hardware together, it not only has specific sort of default behaviors,
But the standard view is that you should be able to
very directly go from what's in the genome to the anatomical structures. And I think what that view is missing is a very important middle layer that sits between the hardware of the anatomy, the hardware of the genome rather, and the final outcome, this anatomical homeostasis that we see in regeneration and development and so on. And that layer is the software, it's the physiological software that links those two things together.
Can you tell me some of the experiments that you've done? Take the audience through a couple of the experiments. So one, you amputate a frog's leg and then you're able to regenerate it. So on and so on. Maybe outline three that you find most flabbergasting. Sure, sure. Okay, let's see. So here's one.
If you use a voltage sensitive fluorescent dye, which basically just reports, you flood your tissue with it and it just reports with different types of fluorescence, it reports where the different voltage values are. If you look at the early embryo as it's putting its face together, for example, you will see something we call the electric face. And this was discovered in work with my colleague, Danny Adams, where
we found this thing called the electric face which is basically that prior to all the genes being turned on that are required to make different face components and so on and certainly prior to the anatomy there is a an electrical pre pattern that you see in that region that
Basically looks like a face. You can see where the eyes are going to be because that's where the voltage is different. You can see where the mouth is going to be. You can see where the placards on the side of the head are going to be. And so you see this electrical face and it raised the obvious question, which is that if that pattern is instructive, then you ought to be able to do two things. You ought to be able to mess it up.
and thus disrupt that electrical pattern and thus get defects in craniofacial patterning. And certainly you can do that. And in fact, there are even human channelopathies where humans have mutations and ion channels that give them craniofacial birth defects and defects of limb and brain and other things. So that's true. But the other thing, the more exciting thing you might be able to do is to take some of those electrical patterns and move them somewhere else.
And you could say, okay, if this is the type of pattern that says to the cells, build an eye here, could we move that electrical state to somewhere else? Not move the cells, but move the electrical pattern, reintroduce that electrical pattern somewhere else and get it to build an eye. And so this is actually, we did this, this is some of our earlier work, you know, around 2007 or so we discovered this.
Basically, you take one ion channel that's able to induce a particular electrical pattern in a region of cells and you inject RNA encoding that ion channel in some other part of the embryo that's going to be gut, let's say, okay, it's going to make endoderm, it's going to make gut cells. And sure enough, and so three things are significant about what happens. The first is that you get an eye and you get an eye in the middle of the gut, you get an eye constructed from cells that were going to be gut.
So this is remarkable because if you look at the developmental biology textbooks, what you will see is that they say that cells outside of the anterior norectoderm are not competent to become eyes. They're not supposed to be able to make eyes. And that's true if you use the biochemical master eye gene PAK6. If you try to re-induce eyes with PAK6, that's true, it doesn't form. You can't get ectopic eyes anywhere outside the head. But by introducing this bioelectric pattern, you can.
And so that's the first thing that you can go beyond the known competency limits by using this very upstream sort of master regulator, this electrical pattern. The second thing that's interesting about it is that
The information content that we provide by putting in this channel is extremely low. We don't micro specify the details of how to make an eye. You know, eye has a dozen cell types all arranged in a particular way. We don't know how to do that. We couldn't possibly do that. In fact, what we do instead is provide a very simple signal that to a programmer basically looks like a subroutine call.
It's a trigger. It's a trigger for a cascade that the animal already knows how to do. It already knows how to make eyes. We're not saying how to make an eye. What we're saying is make an eye here by triggering that eye building module, which includes all the gene expression, everything else that's downstream. So that modularity, that incredible engineering trick that says that you can call up, once you know how to do something, you can reuse it in other places. The fact that these bioelectrical states
our triggers of developmental subroutines. Okay. So that's, that's kind of the second cool thing about it. The third cool thing about it is that if you label the cells that you are injecting the channel RNA into with some with us, with a color, so you can, so you can tell which cells actually got the extra channel. And then you, and then you look at that eye that you've created, what you will see is that often, for example, half the eye will have the channel you put in.
The other half the eye doesn't have it. That means that what the cells that you affected, what they did was they recruited their normal neighbors.
which by themselves were never modified by you. They were completely wild type and yet they got recruited by their neighbors to be part of this thing. So there's two levels of instruction here. There's instruction by us saying to a region, you make an eye. And then there's a secondary instruction by those cells that say, oh, and by the way, I'm going to need more cells that you guys over here, you're going to be part of this lens. And they all come and they, even the ones that we never directly affected. And so this third part is cool because
Well, the second part is cool. The fact that it's modular and a trigger is cool because that means that you can achieve regenerative medicine outcomes, things that are way too complex for us to micromanage by using triggers. If we can identify the triggers of the subroutines that we want, make an eye, make a limb, make a liver, then we can trigger those things long before we actually know all the details about how to micromanage it.
So part of reverse engineering, and I very much see this as a reverse engineering task, part of reverse engineering is finding out all the cool hooks in the system that are already there for you. Not that you have to put them together from scratch, but they're already there for you. What is the trigger that's the build an I subroutine? What other subroutines are there? That's part of our job. The thing that's cool about that third part is that it's non-cell autonomous, meaning
you can exert effects on cells without touching them directly because cells communicate to each other. So by convincing a bunch of cells over here that they should make an eye, you in effect affect a bunch of other cells and cause them to be part of that eye without having to touch them directly. And that comes up. Sorry, that's what you meant when you were talking about recruiting earlier? Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right. Yeah. So that's kind of the first, that's the first example that I would talk about.
The second example I would talk about has to do with has to do with cancer. And so, Michael, is it okay if we hold on that cancer result? Because what you said was so profound, and I want to unpack it? Okay, sure, sure. Yeah, well, we'll hold on. Tell me if this is broadly correct. Let's imagine I'm a frog. Okay, frog is developing. Before an eye or a stomach or a throat or whatever it is, is made, you see some adabration, some adumbration, some electrical adumbration, like a hint of it.
and then what you can do is you can say well there's some pattern let's imagine it's a circle to be simplistic there's some circular voltage gradient and that means i so what if i induce that what if i induce a voltage gradient over here near the heart i know you said something but whatever over here then what will happen
is instead, ordinarily, we would think, well, you need to micro tune that I each molecule, it's extremely difficult to make an eye, we don't actually know how to from the bottom up molecularly make an eye. But we see this pattern, what if we put that pattern on the heart or the stomach? Oh, lo and behold, some time amount later, then an eye is born. Is that correct? Yeah, that's, that's, that's correct. And the only thing I would add to that, first of all, is that the reason I was I was telling you about that electric face pattern,
is because it's kind of the most obvious one in the sense that the electric face pattern actually looks like a face. You can't miss it. It just looks like a face, but not all of them are that simple. Some of them are really kind of, they're encoded more deeply such that by staring at it, you can't tell what it's going to be. So for example, there are other patterns that we've seen where
The only way we know what they are is by watching what they make. You couldn't have guessed. Some of them are very direct, almost a paint by numbers. You can sort of see what's going to happen and others are really complicated and you need computational tools to deconvolve what you're looking at to figure out what it's going to be.
So not all of them are as obvious as the electric phase pattern, right? Yeah, one of the questions I had was, why hasn't this been found out before? Was there a technological limit or did they just not look at cells with the dye that give an indication of voltage gradients or optogenetic technologies and so on? Yeah, so that's an interesting question. Why not before? I mean, on the one hand, everything has to have a beginning at some point, right? So whenever it was, you could have asked, well, like, why not before, right? But hindsight is always obvious, yeah.
You can always say that, but let's kind of dig into that.
On the one hand, there was a conceptual leap that kept this pretty much under, I mean, let's be clear, I am not the first person to talk about the importance of bioelectric signals. People have been studying endogenous bioelectricity since before 1900. So it certainly has occurred to people that maybe electrical signals are important in development regeneration. All of my work, I was incredibly heavily inspired
by work that was done in the 60s, 70s, and 80s by a bunch of people that worked really hard on this stuff. The reason that it hadn't gone far enough was two reasons. Number one, the tools weren't there. So these dyes didn't exist. All they had was traditional electrophysiology. In traditional electrophysiology, you have one electrode and you're poking it into cells. And if you want to have a picture of what's going on, you got to poke all the cells. And that's just completely impractical. These dyes didn't exist.
The conceptual thing was that around the time that this stuff was taking off using electrodes and things like that, biochemistry and molecular biology took off. And the reason molecular biology drew all the attention is because you could do molecular biology and biochemistry in dead fixed tissue.
So you can kill and fix your cells and you can sequence the DNA, you can sequence the RNA, you can get a proteome, you can get all of these kinds of things you can do. None of that is possible with bioelectrics. So the minute your cell is dead, all of it goes away. So none of the typical omics approaches work. It's that much harder.
It really lagged behind because all the interest went into the molecular biochemistry and it had to wait for some of these tools to come up. The third thing is that while people did think about the importance of these bioelectric gradients,
Nobody to my knowledge before we did it really thought about it as the beginnings of the nervous system and to really put that computational spin on it. The fact that this thing really is like a neural network doing computations about development. I think that's new. I will say Harold Burr who was this guy was working in the 30s, 1930s, 40s and 50s.
He wrote an amazing book.
that basically said most of the things that we're discovering now. The guy had a crystal ball. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. So he could clearly see a lot of this stuff. The one thing he did not see because at the time it didn't exist was the computational aspects and really the link to this as a kind of neuroscience done in another space, in more of a space. That I think is new.
But people had already had these ideas and it needed the technology to really prove them out and to really see how it works. I'll be showing people some overlays of some of the cells with the blue and green and red voltage colors. Now voltage is actually fairly abstract for most people, but what's not abstract is something like an electron. People can fathom that that has a certain charge.
When someone is looking at these videos of voltage gradients and they're coloured, what is one seeing? Essentially, I'm asking you to explain what voltage is, simply, but in terms of electrons, in terms of something that people can understand. In order to understand voltage, you have to understand potential and you also have to understand fields, technically, if you want to understand that correctly.
Yeah, it's not so bad. You don't need to really do much with fields in this one, because all of the things that I'm talking about are really not fundamentally fields per se. They're just spatial distributions of voltage gradients. And to understand a voltage gradient, it's pretty simple. Instead of electrons, life uses electrons too, but mostly the kinds of stuff that we're talking about uses a different charged particle. They use potassium,
Chloride, sodium, and protons. But otherwise, same deal. And so any cell has a cell membrane around it, the outer surface, and it has these ion channels, which are these little portals, these little proteins, that can open and close and let specific ions, like potassium or sodium, in and out. So potassium and sodium are both positively charged. So you can imagine that if you're a cell and you let a bunch of your positively charged potassiums out,
You can have an imbalance, more positives out here, less positives inside. So now there's going to be a voltage gradient, basically a battery in effect. That's basically what a battery is, right? It's a membrane with a charge disbalance across it. That's all this is. So every cell is a battery. It achieves that by using energy to pump ions in a particular direction.
and as a result you if you were to take a tiny little voltmeter and put it across and people that's exactly what our electrophysiologists do you put it across that cell membrane you're going to read a voltage of some sort you know it's usually somewhere between i don't know between 20 millivolts and and and and 70 millivolts something like that right that's all it is and so now you imagine doing that for every cell in the tissue that you're looking at and you're just going to color every cell depending on how big that voltage difference is
You're going to color it red if the voltage difference is quite small. That's called being depolarized, meaning there's just not that much imbalance. The ions inside and outside are pretty similar. So you're going to color those red. And then the ones that are really different, where there's a ton of positive charges that have been kicked out, so the cell is really pretty negative compared to the outside space, you're going to color those blue. And that's what you're looking at.
Great. Okay, so now we have some background as to what so DNA calls for proteins and you can think of that as low level and then what you're discovering and you and your teams and the teams that you collaborate with are discovering is that there's these non neuro bioelectric signals and those somewhat like large scale code. Some of the implications are regeneration of limbs barely touched on. That's okay. We touched on generation of actual so generation of eyes not regeneration of eyes and then you were about to get into cancer. So do you mind?
Yeah, so just real quick to say, I think a good analogy is this. The DNA is what encodes the hardware, and the electrical dynamics are the software.
Now, a lot of people get upset at this because they say, ah, living things are not like a computer. So I am certainly not claiming that living things are like the kind of computers that you and I use on a daily basis. This architecture is not what life is using. However, the deeper concept from computer science, which is the idea of reprogrammable hardware and the idea of software, multi-layer software, where you could be programming
at the in the in machine code or you could be looking for higher level subroutines and higher level languages that I think is quite quite realistic and I think what we're looking for here is to understand basically to to to find the the the best the best representation of that software so that we can manipulate it as as as you know to to advantage basically and and to understand how evolution manipulates it.
And so the other, you know, you had asked for three examples. So there are three basic examples I wanted to give. So the electric face was one, there's a cancer example, and then there's a planarian flatworm regeneration example. So the cancer example would look like this. One of the things about cancer, the one way to think about cancer is to ask the question, why is there ever anything but cancer? In other words,
Individual cells like amoebas are extremely competent on their own. They handle single cell level goals quite well. Why do they ever get together to form something like a kidney or a liver?
because when there's a cancer, what you're seeing is a defection from that process. You're seeing cells that normally should be working on making a nice organ or upkeeping a nice organ in an adult. Instead of that, they go off and they basically revert to a single cell kind of existence. They basically become like an amoeba. They treat the rest of the body as just environment. It's like external environment. So you can think of that computational boundary between self and world can shrink.
It can grow when a bunch of amoebas, a bunch of amoeba like cells get together and they build something like an organ or a whole body that that computational boundary grows, but it can also shrink because an individual cell can say, I'm not working on this anymore. I'm just an amoeba and I'm going to do what amoebas do. What do they do? They, they become two amoebas and two amoebas become four and so on. They over proliferate and they go where life is good. So they metastasize to wherever they, wherever they want to go. So that's, so, so that's cancer. So,
So if you think about it that way, that cancer is this like defection from multicellular cooperation, you ask yourself, okay, so what is the process that normally keeps them harnessed towards specific goals? And so if you ask yourself, what do we know that's a process that harnesses individual competent subunits towards larger scale goals, that's very clear. That's the neural-like processing.
Because you have individual neurons, which are cells, but you connect them together into a network and this amazing computation starts to take place that can do things like plan for the future and have memories and have preferences and goals on a large scale.
You as an organism can have goals and memories that your individual cells don't have. So we know that electrical networks are really good at binding small competent subunits into larger scale computational agents. We take advantage of that in computer science, evolution takes advantage of it in making neurons.
So we asked the following question, could that be the basis of cancer? And now I must say that we're not the first to have this idea. Again, Harold Burr said this in the 30s. So we did three things. We said, okay, first of all, when this process happens, can you see using the voltage dies, can you see the cells defecting from the electrical network?
In fact, you can inject a human oncogene, which is going to form a tumor in a tadpole. You inject that into a tadpole. They make a
They make a tumor and even before that tumor becomes apparent, you can see with a voltage die, you can see that those cells become highly depolarized. They electrically uncouple from the rest of the tissue and they go on their way and they just treat to them. The rest of the animal is just external environment at that point. So they become electrically uncoupled. And that's the first thing that oncogenes do is electrically isolate the cell from its neighbors, from that
collection of signals that normally tell the cell what to do in a larger context. So that's the first thing we did. The second thing we did, we said, well, if that's a potential cause of cancer, could we cause cancer just by disrupting the electrical communication directly? No oncogenes, no carcinogens, no DNA damage, no mutations. Nothing wrong with the cells that any molecular biology test could see.
And could we still could we cause cancer? Because because remember, the standard model in the field for years has been that cancer is the cause of genetic damage, basically, right, that it's that it's a genetic disruption that makes a rogue cell that has other mutations and so on. So we said, fine, no, we're going to take completely normal cells, nothing wrong with them. And we're going to simply prevent them from talking to other cells electrically. Okay, we're just going to manipulate that. And so we did that. And sure enough, we made metastatic metastatic melanoma in tadpoles.
So that tells you that there doesn't have to be anything wrong with the hardware in order to have cancer. It can be a purely physiological phenomenon. It can be caused at the software level, which a lot of people who study stress induced cancers and things like this, they kind of already knew. But really the paradigm has been that there has to be a genetic defect at the root of this somewhere. And then the third thing we found, which is of course the most exciting thing, which is you can go in the opposite direction.
You can inject a really powerful human oncogene, like a P53 mutation. Oncogene, for those who are listening, is just a gene that causes cancer? Yeah, an oncogene is a mutation in the normal gene that is thought to cause a transformation to cancer. So you can inject that, and then if you do that into a tadpole, if you at the same time inject an ion channel,
forces the cell
Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store
Jokes aside Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
Okay, so I was just having an analogy in my head. It's almost like, imagine you have these kids and they're misbehaved. So you can say, well, it's the kids who are the problem and they cause havoc in the house. But if you have an adult who's stern enough, they can override the misbehaved kids. If you leave the kids without the adult, then the house will be in shambles. In this analogy, the adult is like the electrical communication. So you can force that electrical communication, that standard adaptive electrical communication.
Yeah, you can think of it that way. The thing where I think it breaks down a little bit is that we're not introducing an extra element that keeps everybody else in line. We're in effect, it's like you have a bunch of kids that know what to do and you've got one that's wearing
you know,
of this.
Does your work have any implications for what it means to have an identity? So right now you were talking about cancer as if it's dissociating from the larger cell. Yeah. And then there are gap junctions, which you've referenced in your other work. And they effectively make an equivalence class between signals that I generate as a cell or my environment or signals from connected cells. I'm unable to tell the difference between them. Yeah. Because I'm unable to tell the difference between myself and my neighbor. It's as if I'm identified with them.
So it has plenty of bearing, at least I see it has plenty of bearing is for what it means for the eye or the ego in a non pejorative manner. So what are the implications of your work for the concept of identity? Yeah, no, you've put your finger exactly on it. So two years ago, I wrote this paper called On the Boundary of the Self. And it's exactly this idea. It's the way to define what is a self.
at different scales. And how does the boundary, the size of that self change over time? And that's exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about. It's having communication channels that partially wipe the metadata on information so that I no longer know whether it came from you or whether it came from me, right, gives us a partial mind melt because now it's really hard to keep an identity
If I can't tell which are my memories and which are your memories, it's really hard for us to keep distinct identities. We become partially unified and that's exactly the sort of process that evolution exploits to build larger cells out of small competent ones. Another astounding experiment of yours, I'm unsure if I should be calling it an experiment, was where you took skin cells of a frog and then it has locomotion. Can you outline what the heck did you do there and why is that important?
Yeah, no, it's definitely an experiment. So you're talking about our xenobots, I think. And the question that we're interested in addressing is basically this. Where do anatomical goals come from? And in order to illustrate why that's even a good question, I want to talk about planaria for just a moment, and then you'll see why this is important for the xenobots.
We are used to the fact that each species has a specific shape that is associated with it and that frog eggs make frogs and zebrafish eggs make zebrafish and so on. So we're kind of used to that. But the actual question of how do cellular collectives decide what they're going to build and when do they stop building, that's very much an open question.
One way you can see how far we are away from a good understanding of this is in a very simple experiment. Planaria are these flatworms that regenerate when you cut them into pieces. Every piece builds whatever is missing and they regenerate. That's planaria. You can cut them into pieces and every piece regenerates to a normal planaria. There are species of planaria that have round heads.
and those cells are really good at building a round head and then stopping. So they stop when a round head is complete. Okay. Then you got another species of planaria that has a very pointy head, a kind of a triangular head, and those cells are very good at making a triangular head. When you cut it off, it makes a triangular head and then it stops. So I have a simple question. If I take a bunch of the cells from the round headed guy and I stick them into the body of the triangular guy,
And I let them sort of get, you know, get comfortable and sit around for a little while. Then I cut the head off. What head shape are we going to have? Are we going to have, is one of the head shapes dominant to the other? Are we going to have an intermediate shape or are we going to have a planarian that never stops regenerating because neither set of cells is ever happy about the shape. They're never, that stop condition is never set. Okay. So now, so now look, the important thing is not the answer. The important thing is despite all of the
There is not a single model in the field that makes a prediction on this experiment. Why? Because every piece of data out there now addresses the hardware that enables individual cells to do cell things. Fine. But we have no understanding of what happens when the cells join together into a larger scale self.
That makes large scale decisions about head shape, head number, things like that in more for space that navigates more for space by making these large scale decisions. We have absolutely no idea how those algorithms work and the fact that we know how the stem cells work and have lots of molecular biology about that.
Because it's too computationally complex or some other in principle reason?
We haven't found the right way to think about how cellular collectives make decisions. This is a collective intelligence problem. This is not a molecular biology problem. We've been thinking about this as a molecular biology problem. That's not what this is. This is trying to read the mind of a collective intelligence.
Now, people think of collective intelligences as exotic things like anthills and bee colonies and things like this. These are collective intelligences. I want to remind everybody that we are all collective intelligences. We are all bags of cells. There is no cognitive agent that is like this.
single diamond that's that's not made of parts that's even sort of unchanging we're all made of parts any cognitive agent is made of parts and so your goal is to ask how do those parts bind together to make decisions as a collective individual cells don't know what a head is they don't know what round round means they don't know what triangular means right but the collective sure does and so the collective is able to navigate more for space in this way that we don't understand the algorithm so if we don't even we don't even know how to how to think about this okay so
So this is very isomorphic to problems in neuroscience, to problems in artificial intelligence. It's trying to understand the scaling of minds. And in trying to do that, we pose the following problem.
So we asked a simple question, where does the goal of making a frog or tadpole really come from and how hardwired is that?
So what we did was we took some skin that we scraped off of an early frog embryo. We set it aside in a different environment and we said, okay, now you're free to sort of reboot your multicellularity. You're here. We've relieved all of the constraints of the rest of the embryo. You're no longer getting instructive signals from endoderm and from mesoderm and from all these other things. You're no longer subject to all these other signals. What are you going to do?
What do you want to do? And there's a couple of different options that could have happened. The cells could have died. They could have wandered off and sort of went each cell go its own way. They could have made a monolayer of cells in a dish the way you get in cell culture. All kinds of things they could have done. They didn't do any of that. What they did instead was to combine together and to form a little ball that grew cilia, these little motile hairs on the outer surface.
Now, cilia are normally sitting on the outside of embryos and they're there to kind of redistribute the mucus around and to make the pathogens sort of keep moving and not stick to the skin. They're used to keep the surface of the tadpole clean, but instead these cells basically repurposed that
genetically encoded hardware. The cilia themselves are genetically encoded. All the proteins necessary to make a cilium are in the genome. They assembled themselves into a new
into a new kind of a new kind of architecture this this this spherical thing which and and then and then they use the cilia to propel themselves so they started running around they started moving around and so we have these amazing videos of them moving around singly moving around in groups interacting doing going through a maze going back and forth in various configurations they have all kinds of behaviors they have all kinds they they can regenerate if you if you cut them almost entirely in half they will like join back and and and make a
you know, make a xenobot again. And so the coolest thing about them is, and by the way, we don't know their cognitive capacities yet. We're only beginning now to start to see, can they learn? Do they have preferences? All these kinds of things we don't know yet. But the coolest thing about them is that, to my knowledge, they're the only creature on the planet that doesn't really have an evolutionary backstory.
The individual cells do. The cells have a long evolutionary history on Earth, but that genome was selected for the ability of these cells to sit quietly on the outside of the frog and keep out the pathogens. They were not selected specifically to be able to get together and run around in a separate configuration away from the embryo. Where did that all come from? And in fact, one of the things about it is people
Often say, well, you know, when are you going to buy, when are you going to engineer these things, you know, knock in various synthetic biology circuits, right? Make them do things. And we absolutely will do that. But my goal before we do any of that, my goal was to show people what, what can happen while the diversity that can happen from the exact same genome with no manipulations whatsoever.
Because the thing about these xenobots is they just have a normal frog genome. They have no transgenes, no genomic editing. There's nothing different about them. What we're seeing is the plasticity of this collective intelligence that is able to make a new functional proto-organism in a novel way out of the exact same parts.
So there's no genomic editing there. Did you manipulate its morphogenetic code, the electrical signals at all? Not yet. No, we're going to. We're certainly going to. That's all to come. No, at this point we haven't done that. This is, this is, this is purely native plasticity. This is what these cells already know how to do. We, we, we, we scrape them, we scrape them off of the frog and we put them in little holes, little, little, little sort of depressions and we,
I should back up. There are two types of xenobots. The one I'm describing now, we literally did almost nothing. You scrape... Hear that sound?
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone
of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Albers, Rothes, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com
them off the embryo you set them aside and you say fine now liberated from all the signals that would have turned you into various various things. What do you want to do? And this is what they do on their own. There's another type of Zen about which is actually when we started with
where we sculpted them a little bit.
Doug Blackiston did all the microsurgery and everything. We sculpted them a bit to give them legs. It's subtractive sculpting. You just cut away some stuff so that you're left with an ottoman that has four legs. We put in a little bit of muscle and then it learned to walk. The muscle would contract and the thing would basically walk along. That's the first set of xenobots we made. The second one has no muscle. It has no nerve. It's only skin.
Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence.
It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything.
If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. It's important that it was taken off of embryos or it doesn't matter if you took it off of a frog much later in development.
What occurs to me is, I'm wondering,
If this has implications for what it means to be alive in the colloquial sense, so forget about in the biological sense, so we think of our skin as dead and our bones are dead, and perhaps dead isn't the right term, but let's say animated, animated with life with Vim, with Brio, yet you've showed that somehow you can still trigger Vim and Brio not via this electrical manipulation. I thought it was that, but does this have any bearing as to what we consider to be alive or it's unrelated?
I'll tell you that one of the things that this kind of work does is really illustrate the insufficiency of our vocabulary. So people often argue, for example,
I mean, alive is a funny thing. I don't actually know what alive really means. I don't have a good definition. These cells and these organisms are for sure alive in the traditional sense. I mean, the cells are alive. There's no getting around that. But people will often argue, for example, are they robots? Are they organisms? Are they machines? These kinds of things. And Josh Bongard and I wrote a paper addressing this question, basically pointing out that that terminology
is almost useless now. It was great 50 years ago when it was really easy to tell apart machines that were boring, predictable, they were designed and living things which were surprising and interesting and warm and wet and evolved. Those things are now so intermixed
that with modern techniques of digital evolution and bioengineering and synthetic morphology, that distinction does not exist anymore.
and so it used to be that you can sort of like you could knock on something and if you hear a hollow metallic sound and you say ah yeah that that came off a factory that's a machine and i'm you know morally okay with taking it apart and doing whatever i want with it and if you were to do this and and it was sort of soft and squishy then you would say that's evolved and it's living and i better i better be nice to it that right though that easy distinction is just it doesn't exist anymore so we need we need a better vocabulary i mean they're they're alive for sure
But if you want to ask questions about whether they are machines or robots or living organisms, that stretches the vocabulary, which is no longer up to the task.
Is there a relationship between perception and this morphogenetic code? And I know I keep using that word morphogenetic code and yeah, forgive me if I'm abusing the terminology, but is there a relationship between perception and morphogenetic code? I'll give you my reasoning behind it. Right now, what I see is I recognize a monitor, I see a microphone, I see you, you have eyebrows, I see large scale structures. Then the question is, well, is there anything special about your eyebrows? Well, other than you're an attractive man, let's say
Physically speaking, physics would say there's nothing special about this microphone or 10% of the microphone or 10% of the microphone plus the air slightly around it. It's more a pragmatic matter that it's a practical that it matters that I can use this. However, when you're talking about this non neural by electric code,
It's as if these large scale structures that we recognize as salient and significant, such as a low resolution facet, like a child's drawings of eyebrows, nose, head placement, and so on, that those are there in the code. So somehow what we perceive is also what is encoded. And I'm curious, well, is that, is there a confounding factor that influences both? Does the morphogenetic code influence our perceptions? Perhaps I can give a better analogy for a computer science analogy where we have machine code and then you have like
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a lot there in what you just said.
Certainly perception is a part of this whole process because in order to have this kind of anatomical homeostasis where you damage an organism like a salamander which can regenerate most of its organs or a planarian which can regenerate all of its organs, you damage it and then it grows the right thing and then it stops when it's done. That loop, that homeostatic loop has to have a perception component
because it has to be able to recognize when it's done. So it has to be able to perceive, am I a correct planarian or not? And if I'm not, I'm going to keep remodeling until I am. And at that point, so it's an error minimization scheme. And in order to achieve that error minimization, you have to be able to perceive around you in anatomical space and to say, am I in the right region of space here? Is my head in the right size? Do I have the right number of eyes? All of that, you need to perceive that. And people,
People like Grossberg at BU had written years ago about the relationship between retinal information processing and development. And I actually think he was really onto something in the sense that I think most epithelia are basically like a big retina and that what they're doing is they're constantly surveilling the rest of the animal.
the rest of the body and making decisions about large scale features. So not just individual pixels, but things like in the retina, you would be talking about edge detection, motion, things like that. And that's what they're doing. They're looking at large scale features that individual cells cannot detect. So one way to look at this is that we have a precedent for this from neuroscience and from the science of visual processing. Probably the more accurate way to look at it is
Do you believe that the problem of senescence, to the degree it can be called a problem, is largely a disruption of this electrical blueprint rather than oxidative stress and damage to DNA and so on, or telomeric length that people think
I don't have any evidence yet that there's a bioelectric component to this. I mean, I suspect there is, but we don't have any evidence on it. We haven't really worked on aging per se. I will say that I don't think it's anything as fundamental as this kind of like thermodynamic decay or anything like that because the planaria are immortal. They don't have a life span limit. They live forever. And so they are telling us that it's possible to be a complex regenerative organism with
learning capacity and so on and not age. So it's clearly possible. So the rest is details, right? The rest is, I don't think it's anything as fundamental as the theories that say, well, look, when you copy things, you inevitably make mistakes. So eventually stuff wears out. If that were true, you wouldn't have plenary. So I don't think it's anything like that. I think it's something much more contingent, much more specific and thus I'm optimistic that we can overcome it.
So there was some work you were outlining in a previous talk with, as I think it was a couple of years ago, at the time it was an undergraduate, her name was Maya, though I don't recall her last name. And she changed between three types of planaria head, like, I think it was felina, Mediterranean, Doro, I don't recall how to pronounce it. But there were about 10s of millions of years apart, evolutionarily. And that to me, implies that there perhaps are structures that are unfathomably submerged in us from our past. And then I'm
That's a great question. Let's run it backwards.
We have a conception of Jungian archetypes for neuroscience and psychology.
all of neuropsychology comes from earlier somatic bioelectrics, what would that look like then in that case? What would the Jungian archetypes look like in this other pre-neural type of bioelectrics? Because we do this all the time. We ask things like, what does memory look like before it was brain memory? What does bistable visual illusions look like before there were brains?
all of these things that we see in neuroscience you can ask what the what the older somatic equivalent look like so you can do the same thing here it's an interesting question I've never thought about it that way but you can you can ask that question if you ask that question you get to exactly the kind of thing you're talking about it what I would say is well probably in more for space there are these stable attractors corresponding to different types of shapes of heads different numbers of eyes different planarian body plans different all different kinds of things and what you can do is you can dial in those different
Your work is so, it's like, to me, it's like the discovery of DNA. And maybe you're too modest to accept that as a compliment, but I see it as, as that seminal. And I want to, well,
I think it's important to say
On two levels. First of all, none of this came out of thin air. I didn't think of any of this stuff just from nothing. I built these ideas on many other ideas of really pioneering folks that worked for years and many of them didn't get a lot of acceptance from the community. That's important to say is that there's a lot of that out there.
And, of course, the people in our lab, right, the postdocs and PhD students and techs who do the work. I mean, it's certainly not just me doing all this work. There are a lot of people in this field and a lot of people in my group. So lots of people contribute to push this all forward. We'll get to the audience questions. OK, so this one comes from Rupert Sheldrake. How does he think his conception of morphogenetic fields relates to mine, referring to Rupert?
Yeah, interesting question. So basically our morphogenetic fields that we work on are completely physical. In other words, they take place entirely within the body of the organism. They're generated by the cells. We can measure them using current technology. I don't know if that's true of the kinds of things that Rupert is talking about.
I kind of suspect that those would have to have quite a bit different properties, but just to be clear, our fields are, and in fact, the things that we deal with are strictly speaking, not even fields, right? So we work with spatial distributions of resting potentials. So it's not clear to me that these are really fields in the mathematical sense of the word field, but these are distributions of electrical potentials of living cells in a particular body.
Another application that I've heard you mention, though it was, I don't know if it was more on the speculative side or if you've developed this, it was some organism or the potential of creating some organism that spontaneously and temperamentally goes out and cleans up the environment is engineered to remove certain toxins. Can you speak more about that?
Yeah, that probably was referring to our xenobots. So we have this technology where we're creating synthetic living proto-organisms, in this case made of frog skin. So these are frog skin cells that in different environments self-organize to be these little motile creatures.
and at least one of many possible applications in the future is to program them for some sort of collection tasks so that they would go out and maybe collect useful molecules or maybe they would clean up toxins, maybe they would detect various other chemicals in the environment that you would want to know about. So these are all potential applications of the practical sort of use of these kinds of synthetic living machines.
You mentioned quite a few times that it's important when you're dealing with the manipulation of this electric field or voltage gradient that you don't use external electric fields, you actually manipulate the cellular ion channels directly. Yeah. Okay. So then I was wondering, does this mean, you know how some people say 5g, that we should be scared of 5g, because, well, for various reasons,
But then other people say it's non-ionizing and that's all that matters. Well, is that all that matters? Is there some validity to being concerned about 5G?
So I think both of those viewpoints are a little bit off and the truth is somewhere in the middle. So let's just start with the ionizing business. So I think the evidence is quite clear that electromagnetic radiation does not need to be ionizing and in fact it does not to be particularly strong in order to in some way affect living cells, so living things. So living things are sensitive to all sorts of electromagnetic radiation
in many ways that do not require ionization or heat or anything like that. At the same time, I think I don't have any reason to be concerned about 5G. First of all, the kinds of things that we study, so these bioelectric signaling pathways are not particularly affected by external electromagnetic fields.
If they were, we would be using these kinds of things in the lab to manipulate the electrical signaling. It's just not a great way to control bioelectric signaling within tissue. It just doesn't do a very good job of it. So I don't have any particular reason to be worried about 5G. I have a feeling that
For most people that are worried about it, you have far bigger dangers and stressors in your life. If you eat certain things, if you engage in certain behaviors, this is far more of an issue for you statistically than 5G ever will be. So I'm not particularly worried about 5G on a practical level in the grand scheme of things that I worry about and the things that we all do in our life that are sort of not optimal for health. I think 5G is probably way down on the list of things for you to worry about.
However, I think it's it's not true to say that because it's non ionizing we don't need to worry about it. I think that's actually false Okay, speaking about diet you mentioned eating and then and one of your talks you also mentioned there's a connection between the microbiome and this Morphogenetic field, but I didn't hear more elaboration on that. So if you don't mind elaborating, that'd be great Yeah, well the general point is that any sort of
I'm
Those controls to make specific things happen in the body right so so anything including chemical signaling neurotransmitters we already know that the microbiome is affecting mood and behavior and things like that by plugging into the neurotransmitter pathways so there's this gut brain axis and so on.
So the same is true of bioelectrics. So in general, we could certainly assume that various microbes that live in the body and various other kinds of parasites would have ways of tweaking ion channel activities, meaning probably using some sort of chemicals that they would be putting out to manipulate your tissues in ways that would be evolutionarily advantageous to them. Now, it just so happens we have a practical example of this that we studied a couple of years ago in planaria.
where we showed that there are bacteria that live on these planaria, and these bacteria are actually able to manipulate the worms to, for example, alter the structure of their visual system, to have multiple heads, and so on. And that is because these bacteria are able to
tweak the same kinds of controls that the worm tissues are using in the first place to make decisions about how many heads you're supposed to have, what your visual system should look like. So it's on the one hand kind of amazing that these microbes have a say in the structure of this kind of organism that they live in. On the other hand, from an evolutionary point of view, it's completely expected that they would have discovered ways to do that.
Earlier in our talk, you mentioned that when you were looking for these voltage gradients, when you did this die, the voltage die, you saw something that was a conspicuous face on the frog. And then you also mentioned, well, you don't imagine that the code will be that obvious for the majority of what we care about, especially for humans. How is it that you go about finding out or decoding this code?
and also what other factors matter is that the do they pulse the voltage pulses and then so the frequency of pulsing matters does the movement what are the factors that go in to determining the code and then how do you decode it
Yeah, we don't know many of the things about it. So for example, at the moment, it doesn't look like there's pulsing and that the temporal aspects of it are particularly critical. But that's probably more a function of the fact that we haven't really dug into it yet. It's entirely possible that when we dig into the temporal aspects, we will find out that the time dependent changes are really important. It's possible. At the moment, we've been completely occupied with the spatial aspects and it doesn't look at least to our technology doesn't look like it's
In terms of how do you crack the code?
There's a few pieces to this. One piece is simply observation, right? So it's almost everything in science starts with some sort of observation and really just getting a database or a profile of different tissues under different conditions, a bioelectric profile of different tissues under different conditions will be absolutely crucial to decoding this because we need the same way that we currently have databases of gene expression, of proteomics,
all these kind of biochemical and genetic profilings of tissues and health and disease and different cells of the body and so on. We need the exact same thing for bioelectrics, so we need a kind of physiomic profiling where there ought to be a database where we can go and say
This particular tissue under these conditions should have this bioelectric pattern and here are the sort of range of normal and here's our difference between people and between organisms in different states and so on. So that's the first thing. And so we only have that for a very small number of cases. We certainly don't have anything like a full physiomic profiling yet.
Then what you need to do is you need to build computational models that help you explain why the electrical pattern is the way it is, given the various channels and pumps that are expressed in that tissue. And then you begin the hard work of functional experiments. So you open and close some channels, you observe what happens and you build up a theory based on an improved computational model of how that
particular bioelectric
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
Do you think psychedelics have any role to play in in changing or altering the morphogenetic morphological code? What I mean is
I have no idea. I have no expertise in psychedelics whatsoever. I can tell you that much like in the brain,
there's a really nice connection between neurotransmitter activity in the rest of the body and the electrical signals that move these neurotransmitters around. So I would not be at all shocked if there was some connection. And in fact, we've certainly used various compounds that are normally utilized to target brains. And so things like anxiolytics and SSRIs and
I know these questions
going from subject to subject is just how my notes are but well regardless you mentioned one time I think it was to Sean Carroll that you can use Daniel Dennett's way of speaking of intention that is I believe it was give as much intention as you like to a system in order to explain what's happening and when I say intention I mean act as if it's willing to do something and then you also mentioned that when one scales down one's theological projection to smaller particles like panpsychics might do
Then it leads naturally to quantum indeterminacy and the least action principle.
to how much intentionality, cognition, intelligence, whatever you're interested in, the real question of how much of that some particular system has is not to be found by armchair philosophy.
Well, thermostats can't possibly have any intention. This is a decision that somebody has made just by fiat. Dan's point is very important.
It's an empirical question. You can't just decide. And the way that you discover this is simply this. You take a particular stance and you say, here's my system. I think it has this much intelligence, or I think it's capable of learning, or I think it's able to have preferences, or I think it's a goal-directed system, wherever you choose to start on that continuum.
And using that stance, you do empirical experiments to see how well that stance helps you to understand and control whatever you're dealing with. And so the point being that we can't simply assume that something is a non-intelligent system because of how it's made or because of how it looks. You have to actually ask, what is the optimal way of looking at that system? So just to give you a simple
A simple analogy, if you have a ball on top of a hill, you're going to do pretty well using the Newton's laws to ask how it's going to roll down the hill. And if you have additional theories about the hopes and dreams of this ball as it rolls down the hill, they're not going to do you much good. They're not going to give you any improved ability to understand and control what's going to happen.
On the other hand, if you start off with a live mouse at the top of a hill and you think you're going to apply Newton's laws, you're not going to do very well because you're going to need some other laws. And so you might decide that the system is minimally intelligent and see how you do. You might decide that the system is very intelligent and it has memories of what happened when you put it on the hill last week and it might do something different.
The point is, it's an empirical experiment. You can't just decide what it's going to be. You have to choose a level of abstraction of some type of learning agent, maybe very little, maybe quite a lot.
and see how you
experimental context in which you want to examine the system. A human brain is very intelligent in a certain context. It also makes a great paperweight. And if that's how you choose to look at it, then you don't need to attribute much intelligence to it if you're examining the problem space of keeping down some papers in a wind, then it doesn't come up. So that's that. And so where I intersect with this is that I basically point out that
This is a really essential way of looking at things when traditional phylogenetics is not a great guide and this is meaning that when we are confronted with novel creatures, they might be novel bioengineered creatures, they might be chimeras, they might be something that you find in space somewhere, some exobiological agent, they might be artificial intelligences that we create, whatever it is,
When you are confronted with something that you cannot simply place on the familiar evolutionary tree of life and on earth and say, oh yeah, this thing is closely related to a fish. Therefore, I'm going to assume it has roughly the cognition of other fish that I've known. So when you are either creating or reverse engineering novel creatures, the intentional stance becomes completely essential because you can't know a priori what the cognitive capacities of this thing are going to be.
and it might behoove you to really attribute quite a lot of cognition to it, or maybe not at all, depending on how that does for you in terms of empirical success. So having said that, then the natural question might come up, is there a zero on the scale? So if you've got a scale, a continuum of cognition or of intelligence that is a smooth gradient where different types of systems might land,
If somebody had said to me what would the absolute minimum
What would you have to have an absolute minimum in order to be on this scale at all? So to be somewhere on the scale of cognitive creatures, what's the basement? What's the minimal version that you would have to have? I would say probably the minimum you would have to have two things. You would have to have some ability to do goal-directed behavior. So you would have to have some kind of ability to pursue goal states. And you would have to have some kind of
In other words, if I can look at all of the forces impinging on you and know exactly what's going to happen, then you're probably a marble running down some kind of an inclined plane. Otherwise, if you're more complex than that,
Then I would have to take into account things that happened before, things that might happen in the future, all kinds of things that are not immediately what's there. So what that boils down to is some sort of internally initiated action, some quote unquote freedom. And that's a whole other story to really dig into that. But this idea that you would be able to initiate things on your own. You're not just a responding, you're not just a passive responder to forces around you at that time.
And so having said that, having said those two things, you realize that already particles already have those two things because particles already exhibit quantum indeterminacy where they do things that are fundamentally not caused by any of the things around them. It's completely sort of indeterminate and they have the ability to pursue goals in a very
Certainly there's a little bit of truth to that, but there's also the fact that if you were to ask the question
I think even particles should have some degree of goal-directed activity, you might make a prediction of something like least action principles existing and then you would be right. That model actually makes a prediction that's completely not obvious. It isn't obvious that when you have a beam of light passing through a bunch of lenses, it's not obvious that you can actually
forgo the calculations of how the light will interact with the glass at every point along the way and simply say, you know what I think? I think it wants to get where it's going with the least amount of action, right? And so you can make the correct prediction of where it's going to go simply by assuming that the light likes to get where it's going by minimizing and maximizing certain things. And you could predict something like that if you had this idea that even at the very bottom, there would be some type of
some type of goal directed activity. So if we ask what does that look like? What does agency and intelligence look like in the very minimal, the most minimal version possible? I think what you get is something like like particles. So from that perspective, I suspect there is no zero on this scale, because because even particles are already on the scale. Okay, this zero was that the way that I understand that is that that's like an intelligence scale. Do you synonymize that with consciousness?
Right, that's a good question. I will say that in my writing on all of this stuff, I've almost completely avoided consciousness. I almost never talk about consciousness. I talk about cognition and that's kind of on purpose. My views on consciousness are not
fleshed out to the point where I'd be interested in talking about them because I don't think I can add anything yet that a lot of other smart people haven't already chewed over. What I think I have something to contribute is to the questions of cognition and intelligence because those things are empirically measurable, they're publicly observable behaviors, and we can have a research program focused around them that I think is different than what other people have been doing. So that's what I've been talking about.
Consciousness is different in the sense that I think many of the people who say they study consciousness in fact do not study consciousness. What they study at best are correlates of consciousness or oftentimes behaviors and properties that may or may not have anything to do with actual consciousness and so I think it's very difficult to study actual consciousness. You have to
Studying consciousness is a first-person activity. It's not a third-person activity the way that you would study anything in the external world, meaning studying it externally outside of yourself. I think fundamentally studying consciousness requires the subject of meaning you or whoever is studying it to actually change during that process. It's a completely different thing. So I'm working on some things along those lines. It's a little early to talk about it.
Faraz Hanarvar asks, could the mapping and thereby the treatment of the signaling, that is this electric signaling, differ between individuals when we're talking about humans? So does the code, is the code species dependent or can it actually differ based upon people?
Yeah, I don't think it's even species dependent because we've seen that we can induce, let's say one species of flatworm to form a head that belongs to a completely different species simply by changing the distribution of a gap junctional connections. I suspect there are massive conservations in the same way that the biochemical and genetic codes are highly conserved.
Are there going to be individual differences among patients? For sure, and we need to understand what those are. We do not yet know what those are. That's a major area for future research, but I think it's going to be conserved sufficiently that we will be able to have general purpose electroceuticals. However, I think that
Hear that sound?
That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.
There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com
Things are going on in their blood in terms of ion content and so on. In order to perfect some of these treatments, I think it will be very much personalized, but underneath it all is going to be a highly conserved bioelectric code.
You mentioned ElectroCeuticals, which reminds me of your company MorphoCeuticals. If you're allowed to talk about that, what's the state of it? What's the goal of it? MorphoCeuticals Inc. is a new company that I co-founded with David Kaplan, who's head of biomedical engineering at Tufts. He and I are partners in this work. We work very closely together.
And right now, the mission of Morphoceuticals is focused around limb regeneration. So we are taking the things we learned in the frog in terms of how to induce the regeneration of appendages in the frog and trying to move it to mammals so that someday towards humans. And so, you know, I can't really go into details of how it's going, but it's in its very early days. But I'm very optimistic that we will actually have something useful. So that's what we're doing.
Are you seeing more progress than you had hoped? Or are you seeing less?
The need is incredible and unfortunately I have to say to all these people every day that we're working as fast as we can but it's still a basic science.
We are not in clinical trials. We are not dealing with human patients. It is still very basic science. However, it is now to the point where we have commercial investment and it's obvious that at some point it's going to be real for patients. So it's pretty much on track. The idea is quite simple. David's group makes these wearable bioreactors and you wear them on a limb amputation site and they basically produce a kind of
Would be very interested in learning how the actual algorithm works if he's even allowed to share that information.
It's some form of pattern recognition, but the details will be cool to learn. Yeah, I'm not sure which algorithm she's talking about. I think she means the algorithm of when we talked about decoding. Oh, I see. Frog's face means frog's face. Yeah, I see. And then she has a sub question, which may be related. Also, how do we know that we are actually learning the cell's language and not just observing the cause and effect because we only see their behavior on the outside?
Well, I guess to go in order, the algorithm is still very much under development. Part of the problem is that traditional machine learning algorithms require incredible amounts of data, meaning huge numbers of examples to learn from. We don't have those data. So it's very expensive and time consuming to get these images of the electric pattern. So we can't deploy the typical types of algorithms that are used. So a lot of the early work was basically done by hand.
We're still working on these algorithms, so that's still very much a story in progress. With respect to the second question, I guess I'm not sure what the distinction would be. If we understand the bioelectric signals sufficiently that we can
Sam Thompson wants to know, do you think biological self-organization and emergence might be proto-algorithmic? And then what would the implications be for science?
I don't know what proto-algorithmic means in this context. I can take a stab at I think what might be an interesting sense of it, but I'm not sure that captures what he was asking. The kind of thing that I think is important sort of foundationally to think about is where
do the set points of various homeostatic systems come from? So whether you have physiological homeostasis or anatomical homeostasis, the ability of a system to get back to the same state, even though it's perturbed. One might ask, where is that information?
And an easy thing to say is that evolution provides it because certain types of set points are adaptive and other types will not let you survive. And that's okay, except that now what we see with these synthetic organisms is that
For example, with the xenobots, we can take these frog skin cells and put them in a new environment and within 48 hours or so, they self-assemble into a new organism with a new anatomy, a new behavior and various new capabilities.
They never existed before. They have no lengthy history of selection on Earth. The cells themselves evolved for being really good at sitting on the outside of a frog or a tadpole and keeping out the bacteria. They did not evolve for the ability to get together and run around by themselves and do various things.
So that raises the interesting question of where does that actually come from? It's clear that there's incredible plasticity of the hardware that's encoded by the genome. It can do all sorts of novel things, but where do the specific things come from? And I don't know if this is what he meant by proto-algorithmic, but you can sort of think about it. One of my favorite analogies is this thing called a Galton board. I don't know if everybody knows what that is, but imagine a vertical piece of wood like this. It's a vertical piece of wood.
And then you bang a bunch of nails into it at regularly spaced intervals, just bang a bunch of nails into it. You take a bucket of marbles and you dump it into the top and they go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They all go and every marble just sort of bounces stochastically back and forth. If you've got enough marbles, the outcome is always going to be exactly the same. You're going to get this beautiful bell curve.
If you dump a bunch of marbles in, then on average, you're going to get this beautiful bell curve. You can ask a simple question, where is the shape of this bell curve encoded?
Was it in the description of the wood? No. Was it in the layout of the nails? No, you can put the nails almost any which way you want. Was it in the recipe of making this thing? No. Where was it? And so you end up with this idea that much like, and this is certainly, I'm not the first person by far to say this, this is a very old, you know, maybe Pythagoras or Plato had similar ideas where
You would say that somewhere in an important sense, there are laws, laws of mathematics, laws of computation that exist independent of, they have an independent existence. And what happens is that when we build specific kinds of machines,
We couple to those laws and we take advantage of them. So, for example, if you build a machine that looks like a Galton board, you get to couple to the rules of mathematics that give you this beautiful shape. You didn't have to specify the shape ahead of time. You get the shape for free by building a device that can couple to those laws.
If you discover a transistor, which is basically just a voltage-gated current conductance, it's like a little tiny synapse. It's the same as a gap junction or an ion channel. As soon as you've made that little machine, you can couple to these amazing laws of computation that tell you, for example, that if you have a bunch of NAND gates, you can build anything.
Well, where did that fact come from? You know, these truth tables, or if you know two angles of a triangle, you automatically know the third. Where did that come from? So where is that? So maybe that's what he meant by proto-algorithmic, but it's the idea that there are these rules and some of them are physics, some of them are mathematics, and some of them are computation. If you make the right kind of device, you can reap the benefits of some of those laws, and evolution does this all the time.
Evolution discovers certain pieces of hardware that then let you do amazing things because you're leveraging these laws that are out there that are invisible to you until you've built the right hardware. Great, we'll just get to four more questions and hopefully they're quick. Thane, is the evolutionary suppression of regeneration in mammals an advantageous trait for the accumulation of memory?
Wow, I'm not sure about for the accumulation of memory. I doubt it because there are plenty of creatures that can do perfectly well with memory that are highly regenerative. So I don't think it's impossible to have regenerative capacity and memory in the same animal.
However, we can think about why aren't humans, for example, regenerating their limbs. So nobody knows, but I'll tell you a plausible story that may or may not be correct. Imagine that you are the ancestor of mammals, you're the tiny thing that looks a little bit like a mouse, and you're running around the forest and somebody bites your leg off. So the problem is that
Unlike a salamander, which can hang out in water and take a long time to heal, you have a rapid metabolism. You have a rapid heartbeat and blood pressure, and you're going to bleed out long before you get a chance to regenerate. So your job, if you want to survive, is to form a scar and to have an inflammatory response that's going to kill off some of the bacteria. You need to not bleed out, so you need to seal the wound immediately. You need to make a scar.
And by the way, you are going to try to put weight on it because you're walking on it. Unlike a salamander, which has the buoyancy of water to hold you up, you're going to try to put weight on it, which means that as soon as some kind of delicate blastema is formed and these cells are starting to grow, you're going to grind it into the forest floor. So that's not particularly conducive. Also, because you're in dry air instead of water, all of the electrical currents that need to come out of that wound epithelium to drive the electric states, they can't work because the dry air is an insulator.
So you might imagine that at that point you might as well just shift to scarring because the regeneration. Now that story has pros and cons. One nice thing about that story is that, for example, it fits with this really weird fact. Why are deer regenerative on their antlers? Why can deer regenerate massive amounts of bone and vasculature and innervation every year?
I mean, what's interesting about the deer is they're not putting weight on it. They're carrying it around and it never has to worry that it's going to be disrupted while it's trying to grow. So that's one part. That fits. What doesn't fit is questions like, well, OK, that explains why the limbs don't regenerate. How about internal organs? Why don't they regenerate? And we don't know. So no one knows. And we can come up with some ideas that have pros and cons.
Tom Carrick asks, or says, fascinating. Are there overlaps with the field of quantum biology? What about ORC-OR? That is, I'm sure you've heard of Stuart Hameroff's and Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction. Yeah. I don't know. I can't say too many useful things about that, but I will say sort of one thing.
I do agree with Hameroff and Penrose on the idea that anesthesia in general is one of the most profound, maybe the only profound tool we have to study actual consciousness. We don't have a lot of other tools to study consciousness, but anesthesia is a pretty good one. And the interesting thing about anesthesia is that most general anesthetics are gap-junctional disruptors.
Now, like many facts, this has things that are easy to understand and some things that are deeply puzzling. The kind of thing that makes perfect sense is that these electrical networks in the body manifested various cognitive abilities long before they were brains. So these gap junctions that enable body cells to form networks
are critical for these networks to have memories, memories of body shape, to make decisions about what they're going to grow and so on. So the use of gap junctions to make networks that can follow a large scale goals like make a limb and make an organ and so on, that's evolutionarily ancient.
And it's not surprising at all that what evolution did when the nervous systems developed was to use that same trick to create another type of cognitive agent, which lives basically centered in the brain and reuse the exact same hardware for that. So that makes sense. And so it makes total sense that that goes away when those gap generators are disrupted by general anesthetic. It also makes total sense that if we want to turn a planarian
into the head of make its head turn its head into the head of a different species of planarian. Guess what we use a general anesthetic called octanol. It's the exact same thing. It's a gap junctional disruption. So what you're doing is you're basically disrupting that proto cognitive agent, the collective intelligence of the body that normally remembers how to make a particular kind of head.
You're basically disrupting that with this general anesthetic. Now, the amazing thing about general anesthetic is that any of us ever come back from it being the same person. Think about it. You have this brain. You have, right? It supports the cognitive structures of a very complex creature. And then for some number of hours, you simply disconnect most of the cells from being electrically in communication with each other. And then you let the connections reform.
And you just sort of hope that everything comes back to how it was. If I didn't know, you know, if we didn't know that the general anesthetics work, somebody were to tell me that that's their plan. I would say, well, you might get a living, living human out of it at the end, but it's certainly not going to be the patient that walked in. You know, you're going to bear no resemblance. Of course you're going to completely wreck their mental state. And, and so, so one thing that's amazing is that actually most people come out of it being the more or less the same person as they went in.
But the other interesting thing is not everybody. This is why they don't like to give general anesthetic if they can help it because some people have permanent psychosis. In fact, many people have hallucinations on their way out of it that eventually resolve as the brain sort of finds its attractors that were there before. But if you watch, you can go to YouTube and you can watch some really
The planaria is exactly the same thing. When you disrupt their gap junctions,
The first thing they do is they regenerate random heads that belong possibly to other species, right? And then after about 30 days, those heads actually remodel back to the correct species, species specific shape. So they're not permanent. So to me, this looks exactly like what happens when you come out of general anesthesia. Okay. Moflo wants to know, how does he see his work relating to David Sinclair's biological clock?
Yeah, interesting. It's funny, I've been talking a lot. I talked to David recently and people have been asking me a lot about bioelectrics of aging. I don't know what the relationship between bioelectrics and aging really is. I can tell you that planaria, as far as we can tell, don't age.
There's no such thing as an old planarian. They live forever if they're not injured. And so I think what that tells us is that aging would be resolved if we could crank up regenerative capacity to the point where we would constantly be regenerating any cells that aged, right? Senescing cells would just be regenerated the way planaria do. So my strong suspicion is that aging is a
I know many people say that telomere length has to do with aging or the shortened telomere length and you're suggesting well it could be that but it's also related to this
morphogenetic code that you're referring to. Are they interrelated somehow? Probably. I mean, I am not an expert on telomeres. I have no idea what's going on with telomeres in planaria. Assuming somebody studying it, we certainly haven't. I'm assuming somebody must be. All I know is this story of
inevitable aging because you keep making copies of things and fundamentally the information is degrading and eventually you don't have it anymore and it's degrading at the ends because that's where you're eating. That clearly cannot be the whole story because planaria avoided permanently.
The last question, Nate Grundman, can you imagine
referring to you, Michael, can you imagine a mental practice by which a person can influence the goal state of the body? For example, Joe Dispenza has made some claims that he's healed his body in a way that doctors say are impossible. It also a question I had for you earlier, which relates to this is how your work is related to the placebo effect. So whether or not you see the connection there, I'm interested in the placebo effect too. I'm trying to sneak in two questions for the pressure one.
Yeah. Okay, so I don't know anything about Joe Dispenza. I don't know anything about the claims that he's made or any specific kind of healing event. But I'll give you kind of a general thought about this. It is uncontroversial that your thoughts, whatever they may be, whatever you think thinking is,
It is pretty uncontroversial that your thoughts affect the physiological functioning of your body. I mean, that's obvious. If you want to get up and walk around, your thoughts have now activated various electrical pathways. They've triggered a bunch of muscle motion. If you have a tendency to mentally work yourself up into an anxious state, you can certainly, by your thinking, crank up various stress enzyme production in your body. We all know that.
You can do the opposite if you've trained in techniques to calm yourself down under various circumstances. You can reduce the level of cortisol in your blood. You can reduce various fire and flight responses. It's not some weird
We do it every day. If that wasn't true, you couldn't get up in the morning when you wanted to get up and go to work. So that part's completely obvious. So from there, it's a very short hop, skip and a jump to the idea that not only can you give commands to your muscles and your glands to produce various hormones, neurotransmitters and muscle motion,
But you might be able to exert some influence over other cells, for example, skin cells in your, you know, at wounds and your liver and the way that it processes information. I don't find it implausible whatsoever. So I don't, again, I'm not commenting on any particular instance of anybody having healed themselves of anything. I'm just saying that it is not
It is not a stretch to think that not only can you exert influence on your various glands that put out cortisol and adrenaline and various other things, why can't you send commands to other cells? It seems silly to think that that's impossible.
I think that the placebo effect is extremely profound. I think that what it's telling us is that there is a communication across levels. So you have meaning that you have a level of organization that consists of your body cells and that has a degree of cognition and a degree of intelligence. But your body is also home to an additional intelligence, which lives probably largely in the brain. And it appears that those two can can communicate in various ways. And I can imagine that
There are lots of things to be discovered about ways to improve that communication. We know there are certain practices where people extend the amount of time they can sit underwater and change their body temperature and change their pulse rate and things like that. I find it completely plausible that there are ways to communicate in that way to other cells in the body.
There is the field of hypnodermatology where people by hypnosis try to treat various skin diseases, some of which have a neuroimmune component, some of which may not have a neuroimmune component. So the activity of the mind, which is simply the execution of the physiological computations that happen in the brain, affect physiological computations that happen outside the brain.
One of your goals is an anatomical compiler. And then what you just said made me think, well, some of these people who are meditating or on the more meditative side tend to work with
Thoughts to heal oneself.
I don't think it's impossible. There's been work recently on various types of pulsed light stimuli into the retina having some interesting neuro protective effects in the brain and so on.
Yeah, all of this, it's a giant electrical network. All of the cells are communicating with each other. There's absolutely no reason why that couldn't work. But I think that, to be clear, this anatomical compiler isn't just us. The anatomical compiler is a sort of practical
personification of the goal that all of us in the community are going for, which is the ability to control growth and form. And when we have that ability, that's when the anatomical compiler becomes possible. So it's not just something that we in particular are working on. But I think that this is part of all the things you're discussing now are part of the deep reason why
Cognitive science and consciousness and all of those kinds of things are deeply related to developmental biology and physiology. They're absolutely interrelated because they are two sides of the same coin. Information processing in goal-directed hierarchical systems. And the more you understand about one, the better you are at managing the others. This is two sides of the same question. Where can people find out more about you and what's next for you?
Well, they can find out. I have a website at drmike11.org. We have a center website, which is alancenter.tufts.edu. I have a Twitter feed, which is at Dr. Mike 11. And what's next? It's a good question. I don't, you know, I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen next, but I certainly know the things that we are trying to do and that we're working on. And you can go to our website and see all kinds of projects that we're working on.
In the areas of trying to lay a better foundation for understanding basal cognition and understanding morphogenesis and developing applications and birth defects and regeneration and cancer, we're doing some work in machine learning and trying to sort of close that loop and understand how we can use the principles that we learn in biology to make novel and better cognitive
And the links to everything that Michael just mentioned will be in the description, so please check that out. You mentioned two sides of the same coin, but I didn't quite understand that. How is it that developmental biology and consciousness may be two sides? Because you mentioned one is first and third person is the other. So how are they two sides of the same coin? Well, in many ways, first of all, the fact that we all start life as a single cell, and that self-assembles
into
and supported by a collection of competent agencies being cells is very similar to how the body is and the pattern of the body is arranged by the collective intelligence of cells. Morphogenesis is a collective intelligence problem. It is not a chemistry problem or a genetics problem. It's a problem of collective intelligence and those same kinds of issues arise when you're trying to understand any kind of a human or any other centralized intelligence
How does the information processing and the capacities of lots of independent subunits, in the case of brains, those will be neurons, but in the case of the body, it will be other types of cells. How do they work together to pursue goals and plans and have preferences that don't belong to any of the individual subunits themselves? Making a limb is a goal that no individual cell knows what a limb is.
can answer the question of, well, how many fingers are we supposed to have or how long is the finger supposed to be? That is a piece of information that only the cellular collective has, right? So this ability of pursuing large scale goals of having and having collective information that's more than the sum of its parts is exactly the same question of where does intelligence and sort of cognitive capacity come from. Those problems will be answered together. They will not be answered.
If either one of these things remains mysterious, we won't have an answer to the other. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for spending so much time. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for your questions. I want to let everyone know that this, I think, is Nobel Prize-winning work, so I will do my best to promote this and get you some more attention, man. I hope so. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's very kind. Thank you. I appreciate it.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
{
"source": "transcribe.metaboat.io",
"workspace_id": "AXs1igz",
"job_seq": 10820,
"audio_duration_seconds": 7055.71,
"completed_at": "2025-12-01T01:47:04Z",
"segments": [
{
"end_time": 20.896,
"index": 0,
"start_time": 0.009,
"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
},
{
"end_time": 36.067,
"index": 1,
"start_time": 20.896,
"text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
},
{
"end_time": 64.514,
"index": 2,
"start_time": 36.34,
"text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
},
{
"end_time": 94.718,
"index": 3,
"start_time": 66.152,
"text": " This is Martian Beast Mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun. On prize picks, whether you're a football fan, a basketball fan, you'll always feel good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdown to threes. And if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 104.599,
"index": 4,
"start_time": 94.718,
"text": " any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 129.206,
"index": 5,
"start_time": 104.821,
"text": " All right. Hello, Toll listeners. Kurt here."
},
{
"end_time": 136.681,
"index": 6,
"start_time": 130.52,
"text": " That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
},
{
"end_time": 163.439,
"index": 7,
"start_time": 137.398,
"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unify field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over"
},
{
"end_time": 187.705,
"index": 8,
"start_time": 163.439,
"text": " One hundred and seventy countries, your business has global potential and their stellar support is as dependable as a law of physics. So don't wait. Launch your business with Shopify. Shopify has award winning service and has the Internet's best converting checkout. Sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at Shopify dot com slash theories. All lowercase that's Shopify dot com slash theories."
},
{
"end_time": 217.005,
"index": 9,
"start_time": 189.804,
"text": " Today's guest is Professor Michael Levin, a developmental biologist and synthetic biologist at Tufts University. In my opinion, his work is worthy of a Nobel Prize being the equivalent of discovering DNA as the basis of genetic memory, though instead of a biochemical code, he found a bioelectric one. And instead of genetic memory, at the low level, it's large-scale anatomical structures at the high level. Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro."
},
{
"end_time": 232.398,
"index": 10,
"start_time": 217.005,
"text": " Michael Evans' work has direct implications for cancer research, the regeneration of limbs, the possible regeneration of tissue in general and thus may aid with Alzheimer's research, the creation of engineered life that can scour areas for toxins and remove them,"
},
{
"end_time": 250.657,
"index": 11,
"start_time": 232.398,
"text": " The creation of an entirely new drug market based on non neuro bioelectric manipulation and even recovering traits that have been in species that have went extinct millions of years ago that live in us via mechanisms we're only now beginning to understand because of Michael and his teams and his collaborators teams work."
},
{
"end_time": 273.029,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 250.657,
"text": " Truly, truly groundbreaking. For those new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of what are called theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as delineating the possible connection consciousness has to the fundamental laws of nature, provided these laws exist at all and are knowable to us."
},
{
"end_time": 288.78,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 273.029,
"text": " If you enjoy witnessing and or engaging in real-time conversation with others on the topics of psychology, neurobiology, physics, consciousness, free will, God, and so on, then do visit the Discord and the subreddit. The links for those are in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 304.377,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 288.78,
"text": " There's also a link to the Patreon in the description. That is patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reason I'm able to do this full time. It would be near impossible for me to have conversations like this with any fidelity with any depth."
},
{
"end_time": 319.701,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 304.377,
"text": " on topics like consciousness, loop quantum gravity, geometric unity that's coming up, string theory, non-neuro-bioelectric manipulation, and so on, if not for the patrons and the sponsors. Thank you, and again, that link is patreon.com slash KurtGymUncle."
},
{
"end_time": 345.93,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 320.162,
"text": " Speaking of sponsors, there are two. The first sponsor is Algo. Algo is an end-to-end supply chain optimization software company with software that helps business users optimize sales and operations, planning to avoid stockouts, reduce returns and inventory write downs while reducing inventory investment. It's a supply chain AI that drives smart ROI. Headed by Amjad Hussain, who's been a huge supporter of this podcast since near its inception."
},
{
"end_time": 366.084,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 345.93,
"text": " Now, Amjad has a podcast on AI and consciousness. And if you'd like to support this channel, that is the Toe channel, then please visit the description and support his channel as doing so supports this indirectly. The second sponsor is Brilliant. Brilliant illuminates the soul of mathematics, science and engineering through these bite sized interactive learning experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 386.92,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 366.357,
"text": " Brilliant's courses explore the laws that shape our world. It elevates math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. You can even learn group theory, which is what's being referenced when you hear that the standard model is contingent on U1 cross SU2 cross SU3. Those are technically called Lie groups and those are local symmetries."
},
{
"end_time": 414.906,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 386.92,
"text": " Thank you and enjoy this non-plussing and wondrously eye-opening conversation with Professor Michael Levin. I think what you're doing is Nobel Prize-winning work. Well, thank you so much. That's very kind. Thank you. I'm extremely, very much looking forward to this."
},
{
"end_time": 438.677,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 415.845,
"text": " Thank you. When I was researching you about every 10 minutes or so you would say this some offhand comment that would floor me because of its consequences and then you'd move on and then you'd say what trumps what came before and this happened over and over. So why don't you start with what non neuro bioelectric states are their relationship to anatomical results."
},
{
"end_time": 465.486,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 439.036,
"text": " And then later we can compare and contrast to standard developmental biology for decades, which is, it's the genome that instructs constructs perhaps what's epigenetic. So we'll start with what are bioelectric non neuro bioelectric states and the relationship to anatomical results. Sure. Uh, okay. Well, so, so non neural bioelectrical states are simply the fact that all cells in your body, not just neurons have the same machinery that's normally associated with neural cells."
},
{
"end_time": 493.712,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 465.794,
"text": " So ion channels, electrical synapses, neurotransmitter pathways, all of these things are way older than nervous systems. And every cell in your body is creating an electrical potential across its membrane. Most cells in your body are communicating those states to their neighbors via these electrical synapses. And on the one hand, people are often surprised to hear this. On the other hand, if you ask yourself, where did neurons and brains come from?"
},
{
"end_time": 523.439,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 494.087,
"text": " They didn't just spring up out of nowhere. Evolution basically speed optimized processes that were already here around the time of bacterial biofilms. They're ancient. These things are ancient. And so if you just sort of track back the phylogeny of nervous systems and neural cells, you find out that all cells have these. And in fact, we've had discussions, very lengthy discussions on some of these basal cognition meetings in terms of what is a neuron."
},
{
"end_time": 553.097,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 523.677,
"text": " You know, people will say, well, here are neurons. And I'll say, by the way, what's a neuron? And so they'll write on the board four or five criteria for what they think is a neuron. And then they say, well, every cell does this. And so there are a couple of, there are a couple of differences, but most things are fairly universal. And so then the question becomes, we'll find what are they used, what is this used for? So in the brain, what you have is a system where an electrical network is processing information"
},
{
"end_time": 576.015,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 553.387,
"text": " to direct muscles that move your body through three-dimensional space. That's behavior, nervous system control of behavior. Prior to that, what these systems were used for were to generate signals that control cell behavior to move your body configuration through anatomical space. That is the space of possible anatomical configurations."
},
{
"end_time": 589.548,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 576.254,
"text": " So I think, and I'm working on some more stuff on this now in terms of really broadening this idea, but I think what evolution did was pivot some of the same tricks across different spaces. So electrical,"
},
{
"end_time": 610.196,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 590.282,
"text": " Electrical networks were used to control, to traverse first in evolution probably first metabolic spaces and then physiological spaces and then transcriptional spaces and then morphospaces and eventually three-dimensional space when muscles came on the scene and animals could run around and do things like that."
},
{
"end_time": 631.271,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 610.862,
"text": " But that's what electrical networks used to think about before they thought about behavior in three-dimensional space. They thought about navigating other types of space. Now, how does this compare to the standard view, which is just, it's our DNA that programs us? The standard view is correct in the following sense. What the DNA specifies"
},
{
"end_time": 657.739,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 631.664,
"text": " is the structure of the micro hardware of your cells. So the DNA gives you the protein level sequence, meaning the structure of the proteins that every cell has. That's the hardware. So the DNA is what specifies the hardware of the cells. Now it turns out that that hardware is awesome. It's amazing in the following way. When you put that hardware together, it not only has specific sort of default behaviors,"
},
{
"end_time": 672.671,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 658.063,
"text": " But the standard view is that you should be able to"
},
{
"end_time": 702.244,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 673.285,
"text": " very directly go from what's in the genome to the anatomical structures. And I think what that view is missing is a very important middle layer that sits between the hardware of the anatomy, the hardware of the genome rather, and the final outcome, this anatomical homeostasis that we see in regeneration and development and so on. And that layer is the software, it's the physiological software that links those two things together."
},
{
"end_time": 719.838,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 702.756,
"text": " Can you tell me some of the experiments that you've done? Take the audience through a couple of the experiments. So one, you amputate a frog's leg and then you're able to regenerate it. So on and so on. Maybe outline three that you find most flabbergasting. Sure, sure. Okay, let's see. So here's one."
},
{
"end_time": 743.473,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 720.299,
"text": " If you use a voltage sensitive fluorescent dye, which basically just reports, you flood your tissue with it and it just reports with different types of fluorescence, it reports where the different voltage values are. If you look at the early embryo as it's putting its face together, for example, you will see something we call the electric face. And this was discovered in work with my colleague, Danny Adams, where"
},
{
"end_time": 758.66,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 743.882,
"text": " we found this thing called the electric face which is basically that prior to all the genes being turned on that are required to make different face components and so on and certainly prior to the anatomy there is a an electrical pre pattern that you see in that region that"
},
{
"end_time": 779.224,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 759.258,
"text": " Basically looks like a face. You can see where the eyes are going to be because that's where the voltage is different. You can see where the mouth is going to be. You can see where the placards on the side of the head are going to be. And so you see this electrical face and it raised the obvious question, which is that if that pattern is instructive, then you ought to be able to do two things. You ought to be able to mess it up."
},
{
"end_time": 804.172,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 779.462,
"text": " and thus disrupt that electrical pattern and thus get defects in craniofacial patterning. And certainly you can do that. And in fact, there are even human channelopathies where humans have mutations and ion channels that give them craniofacial birth defects and defects of limb and brain and other things. So that's true. But the other thing, the more exciting thing you might be able to do is to take some of those electrical patterns and move them somewhere else."
},
{
"end_time": 827.688,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 804.616,
"text": " And you could say, okay, if this is the type of pattern that says to the cells, build an eye here, could we move that electrical state to somewhere else? Not move the cells, but move the electrical pattern, reintroduce that electrical pattern somewhere else and get it to build an eye. And so this is actually, we did this, this is some of our earlier work, you know, around 2007 or so we discovered this."
},
{
"end_time": 856.203,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 828.183,
"text": " Basically, you take one ion channel that's able to induce a particular electrical pattern in a region of cells and you inject RNA encoding that ion channel in some other part of the embryo that's going to be gut, let's say, okay, it's going to make endoderm, it's going to make gut cells. And sure enough, and so three things are significant about what happens. The first is that you get an eye and you get an eye in the middle of the gut, you get an eye constructed from cells that were going to be gut."
},
{
"end_time": 885.486,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 857.312,
"text": " So this is remarkable because if you look at the developmental biology textbooks, what you will see is that they say that cells outside of the anterior norectoderm are not competent to become eyes. They're not supposed to be able to make eyes. And that's true if you use the biochemical master eye gene PAK6. If you try to re-induce eyes with PAK6, that's true, it doesn't form. You can't get ectopic eyes anywhere outside the head. But by introducing this bioelectric pattern, you can."
},
{
"end_time": 898.592,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 885.674,
"text": " And so that's the first thing that you can go beyond the known competency limits by using this very upstream sort of master regulator, this electrical pattern. The second thing that's interesting about it is that"
},
{
"end_time": 924.07,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 899.155,
"text": " The information content that we provide by putting in this channel is extremely low. We don't micro specify the details of how to make an eye. You know, eye has a dozen cell types all arranged in a particular way. We don't know how to do that. We couldn't possibly do that. In fact, what we do instead is provide a very simple signal that to a programmer basically looks like a subroutine call."
},
{
"end_time": 952.432,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 924.411,
"text": " It's a trigger. It's a trigger for a cascade that the animal already knows how to do. It already knows how to make eyes. We're not saying how to make an eye. What we're saying is make an eye here by triggering that eye building module, which includes all the gene expression, everything else that's downstream. So that modularity, that incredible engineering trick that says that you can call up, once you know how to do something, you can reuse it in other places. The fact that these bioelectrical states"
},
{
"end_time": 981.561,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 952.79,
"text": " our triggers of developmental subroutines. Okay. So that's, that's kind of the second cool thing about it. The third cool thing about it is that if you label the cells that you are injecting the channel RNA into with some with us, with a color, so you can, so you can tell which cells actually got the extra channel. And then you, and then you look at that eye that you've created, what you will see is that often, for example, half the eye will have the channel you put in."
},
{
"end_time": 988.37,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 981.869,
"text": " The other half the eye doesn't have it. That means that what the cells that you affected, what they did was they recruited their normal neighbors."
},
{
"end_time": 1016.135,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 988.848,
"text": " which by themselves were never modified by you. They were completely wild type and yet they got recruited by their neighbors to be part of this thing. So there's two levels of instruction here. There's instruction by us saying to a region, you make an eye. And then there's a secondary instruction by those cells that say, oh, and by the way, I'm going to need more cells that you guys over here, you're going to be part of this lens. And they all come and they, even the ones that we never directly affected. And so this third part is cool because"
},
{
"end_time": 1042.398,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1016.834,
"text": " Well, the second part is cool. The fact that it's modular and a trigger is cool because that means that you can achieve regenerative medicine outcomes, things that are way too complex for us to micromanage by using triggers. If we can identify the triggers of the subroutines that we want, make an eye, make a limb, make a liver, then we can trigger those things long before we actually know all the details about how to micromanage it."
},
{
"end_time": 1068.524,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1042.773,
"text": " So part of reverse engineering, and I very much see this as a reverse engineering task, part of reverse engineering is finding out all the cool hooks in the system that are already there for you. Not that you have to put them together from scratch, but they're already there for you. What is the trigger that's the build an I subroutine? What other subroutines are there? That's part of our job. The thing that's cool about that third part is that it's non-cell autonomous, meaning"
},
{
"end_time": 1096.817,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1069.053,
"text": " you can exert effects on cells without touching them directly because cells communicate to each other. So by convincing a bunch of cells over here that they should make an eye, you in effect affect a bunch of other cells and cause them to be part of that eye without having to touch them directly. And that comes up. Sorry, that's what you meant when you were talking about recruiting earlier? Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Exactly right. Yeah. So that's kind of the first, that's the first example that I would talk about."
},
{
"end_time": 1123.439,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1097.159,
"text": " The second example I would talk about has to do with has to do with cancer. And so, Michael, is it okay if we hold on that cancer result? Because what you said was so profound, and I want to unpack it? Okay, sure, sure. Yeah, well, we'll hold on. Tell me if this is broadly correct. Let's imagine I'm a frog. Okay, frog is developing. Before an eye or a stomach or a throat or whatever it is, is made, you see some adabration, some adumbration, some electrical adumbration, like a hint of it."
},
{
"end_time": 1139.326,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1123.746,
"text": " and then what you can do is you can say well there's some pattern let's imagine it's a circle to be simplistic there's some circular voltage gradient and that means i so what if i induce that what if i induce a voltage gradient over here near the heart i know you said something but whatever over here then what will happen"
},
{
"end_time": 1165.828,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1139.633,
"text": " is instead, ordinarily, we would think, well, you need to micro tune that I each molecule, it's extremely difficult to make an eye, we don't actually know how to from the bottom up molecularly make an eye. But we see this pattern, what if we put that pattern on the heart or the stomach? Oh, lo and behold, some time amount later, then an eye is born. Is that correct? Yeah, that's, that's, that's correct. And the only thing I would add to that, first of all, is that the reason I was I was telling you about that electric face pattern,"
},
{
"end_time": 1189.872,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1166.118,
"text": " is because it's kind of the most obvious one in the sense that the electric face pattern actually looks like a face. You can't miss it. It just looks like a face, but not all of them are that simple. Some of them are really kind of, they're encoded more deeply such that by staring at it, you can't tell what it's going to be. So for example, there are other patterns that we've seen where"
},
{
"end_time": 1208.558,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1189.872,
"text": " The only way we know what they are is by watching what they make. You couldn't have guessed. Some of them are very direct, almost a paint by numbers. You can sort of see what's going to happen and others are really complicated and you need computational tools to deconvolve what you're looking at to figure out what it's going to be."
},
{
"end_time": 1237.773,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1208.848,
"text": " So not all of them are as obvious as the electric phase pattern, right? Yeah, one of the questions I had was, why hasn't this been found out before? Was there a technological limit or did they just not look at cells with the dye that give an indication of voltage gradients or optogenetic technologies and so on? Yeah, so that's an interesting question. Why not before? I mean, on the one hand, everything has to have a beginning at some point, right? So whenever it was, you could have asked, well, like, why not before, right? But hindsight is always obvious, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 1241.596,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1237.773,
"text": " You can always say that, but let's kind of dig into that."
},
{
"end_time": 1268.353,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1241.903,
"text": " On the one hand, there was a conceptual leap that kept this pretty much under, I mean, let's be clear, I am not the first person to talk about the importance of bioelectric signals. People have been studying endogenous bioelectricity since before 1900. So it certainly has occurred to people that maybe electrical signals are important in development regeneration. All of my work, I was incredibly heavily inspired"
},
{
"end_time": 1296.032,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1268.916,
"text": " by work that was done in the 60s, 70s, and 80s by a bunch of people that worked really hard on this stuff. The reason that it hadn't gone far enough was two reasons. Number one, the tools weren't there. So these dyes didn't exist. All they had was traditional electrophysiology. In traditional electrophysiology, you have one electrode and you're poking it into cells. And if you want to have a picture of what's going on, you got to poke all the cells. And that's just completely impractical. These dyes didn't exist."
},
{
"end_time": 1316.357,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1296.476,
"text": " The conceptual thing was that around the time that this stuff was taking off using electrodes and things like that, biochemistry and molecular biology took off. And the reason molecular biology drew all the attention is because you could do molecular biology and biochemistry in dead fixed tissue."
},
{
"end_time": 1338.422,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1316.988,
"text": " So you can kill and fix your cells and you can sequence the DNA, you can sequence the RNA, you can get a proteome, you can get all of these kinds of things you can do. None of that is possible with bioelectrics. So the minute your cell is dead, all of it goes away. So none of the typical omics approaches work. It's that much harder."
},
{
"end_time": 1360.162,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1338.66,
"text": " It really lagged behind because all the interest went into the molecular biochemistry and it had to wait for some of these tools to come up. The third thing is that while people did think about the importance of these bioelectric gradients,"
},
{
"end_time": 1385.145,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1360.452,
"text": " Nobody to my knowledge before we did it really thought about it as the beginnings of the nervous system and to really put that computational spin on it. The fact that this thing really is like a neural network doing computations about development. I think that's new. I will say Harold Burr who was this guy was working in the 30s, 1930s, 40s and 50s."
},
{
"end_time": 1399.377,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1385.486,
"text": " He wrote an amazing book."
},
{
"end_time": 1422.995,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1399.701,
"text": " that basically said most of the things that we're discovering now. The guy had a crystal ball. It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. So he could clearly see a lot of this stuff. The one thing he did not see because at the time it didn't exist was the computational aspects and really the link to this as a kind of neuroscience done in another space, in more of a space. That I think is new."
},
{
"end_time": 1448.131,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1423.217,
"text": " But people had already had these ideas and it needed the technology to really prove them out and to really see how it works. I'll be showing people some overlays of some of the cells with the blue and green and red voltage colors. Now voltage is actually fairly abstract for most people, but what's not abstract is something like an electron. People can fathom that that has a certain charge."
},
{
"end_time": 1465.503,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1448.575,
"text": " When someone is looking at these videos of voltage gradients and they're coloured, what is one seeing? Essentially, I'm asking you to explain what voltage is, simply, but in terms of electrons, in terms of something that people can understand. In order to understand voltage, you have to understand potential and you also have to understand fields, technically, if you want to understand that correctly."
},
{
"end_time": 1491.869,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1466.032,
"text": " Yeah, it's not so bad. You don't need to really do much with fields in this one, because all of the things that I'm talking about are really not fundamentally fields per se. They're just spatial distributions of voltage gradients. And to understand a voltage gradient, it's pretty simple. Instead of electrons, life uses electrons too, but mostly the kinds of stuff that we're talking about uses a different charged particle. They use potassium,"
},
{
"end_time": 1520.64,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1492.227,
"text": " Chloride, sodium, and protons. But otherwise, same deal. And so any cell has a cell membrane around it, the outer surface, and it has these ion channels, which are these little portals, these little proteins, that can open and close and let specific ions, like potassium or sodium, in and out. So potassium and sodium are both positively charged. So you can imagine that if you're a cell and you let a bunch of your positively charged potassiums out,"
},
{
"end_time": 1541.51,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1520.947,
"text": " You can have an imbalance, more positives out here, less positives inside. So now there's going to be a voltage gradient, basically a battery in effect. That's basically what a battery is, right? It's a membrane with a charge disbalance across it. That's all this is. So every cell is a battery. It achieves that by using energy to pump ions in a particular direction."
},
{
"end_time": 1567.073,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1541.51,
"text": " and as a result you if you were to take a tiny little voltmeter and put it across and people that's exactly what our electrophysiologists do you put it across that cell membrane you're going to read a voltage of some sort you know it's usually somewhere between i don't know between 20 millivolts and and and and 70 millivolts something like that right that's all it is and so now you imagine doing that for every cell in the tissue that you're looking at and you're just going to color every cell depending on how big that voltage difference is"
},
{
"end_time": 1594.616,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1567.381,
"text": " You're going to color it red if the voltage difference is quite small. That's called being depolarized, meaning there's just not that much imbalance. The ions inside and outside are pretty similar. So you're going to color those red. And then the ones that are really different, where there's a ton of positive charges that have been kicked out, so the cell is really pretty negative compared to the outside space, you're going to color those blue. And that's what you're looking at."
},
{
"end_time": 1621.254,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1595.469,
"text": " Great. Okay, so now we have some background as to what so DNA calls for proteins and you can think of that as low level and then what you're discovering and you and your teams and the teams that you collaborate with are discovering is that there's these non neuro bioelectric signals and those somewhat like large scale code. Some of the implications are regeneration of limbs barely touched on. That's okay. We touched on generation of actual so generation of eyes not regeneration of eyes and then you were about to get into cancer. So do you mind?"
},
{
"end_time": 1637.602,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1622.108,
"text": " Yeah, so just real quick to say, I think a good analogy is this. The DNA is what encodes the hardware, and the electrical dynamics are the software."
},
{
"end_time": 1660.64,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1637.944,
"text": " Now, a lot of people get upset at this because they say, ah, living things are not like a computer. So I am certainly not claiming that living things are like the kind of computers that you and I use on a daily basis. This architecture is not what life is using. However, the deeper concept from computer science, which is the idea of reprogrammable hardware and the idea of software, multi-layer software, where you could be programming"
},
{
"end_time": 1686.442,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1661.186,
"text": " at the in the in machine code or you could be looking for higher level subroutines and higher level languages that I think is quite quite realistic and I think what we're looking for here is to understand basically to to to find the the the best the best representation of that software so that we can manipulate it as as as you know to to advantage basically and and to understand how evolution manipulates it."
},
{
"end_time": 1712.858,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1686.971,
"text": " And so the other, you know, you had asked for three examples. So there are three basic examples I wanted to give. So the electric face was one, there's a cancer example, and then there's a planarian flatworm regeneration example. So the cancer example would look like this. One of the things about cancer, the one way to think about cancer is to ask the question, why is there ever anything but cancer? In other words,"
},
{
"end_time": 1723.37,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1713.387,
"text": " Individual cells like amoebas are extremely competent on their own. They handle single cell level goals quite well. Why do they ever get together to form something like a kidney or a liver?"
},
{
"end_time": 1751.391,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1723.712,
"text": " because when there's a cancer, what you're seeing is a defection from that process. You're seeing cells that normally should be working on making a nice organ or upkeeping a nice organ in an adult. Instead of that, they go off and they basically revert to a single cell kind of existence. They basically become like an amoeba. They treat the rest of the body as just environment. It's like external environment. So you can think of that computational boundary between self and world can shrink."
},
{
"end_time": 1778.899,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1751.903,
"text": " It can grow when a bunch of amoebas, a bunch of amoeba like cells get together and they build something like an organ or a whole body that that computational boundary grows, but it can also shrink because an individual cell can say, I'm not working on this anymore. I'm just an amoeba and I'm going to do what amoebas do. What do they do? They, they become two amoebas and two amoebas become four and so on. They over proliferate and they go where life is good. So they metastasize to wherever they, wherever they want to go. So that's, so, so that's cancer. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 1807.108,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1779.565,
"text": " So if you think about it that way, that cancer is this like defection from multicellular cooperation, you ask yourself, okay, so what is the process that normally keeps them harnessed towards specific goals? And so if you ask yourself, what do we know that's a process that harnesses individual competent subunits towards larger scale goals, that's very clear. That's the neural-like processing."
},
{
"end_time": 1821.254,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1807.449,
"text": " Because you have individual neurons, which are cells, but you connect them together into a network and this amazing computation starts to take place that can do things like plan for the future and have memories and have preferences and goals on a large scale."
},
{
"end_time": 1841.015,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1821.647,
"text": " You as an organism can have goals and memories that your individual cells don't have. So we know that electrical networks are really good at binding small competent subunits into larger scale computational agents. We take advantage of that in computer science, evolution takes advantage of it in making neurons."
},
{
"end_time": 1864.855,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1841.903,
"text": " So we asked the following question, could that be the basis of cancer? And now I must say that we're not the first to have this idea. Again, Harold Burr said this in the 30s. So we did three things. We said, okay, first of all, when this process happens, can you see using the voltage dies, can you see the cells defecting from the electrical network?"
},
{
"end_time": 1882.346,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1865.367,
"text": " In fact, you can inject a human oncogene, which is going to form a tumor in a tadpole. You inject that into a tadpole. They make a"
},
{
"end_time": 1910.128,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1882.927,
"text": " They make a tumor and even before that tumor becomes apparent, you can see with a voltage die, you can see that those cells become highly depolarized. They electrically uncouple from the rest of the tissue and they go on their way and they just treat to them. The rest of the animal is just external environment at that point. So they become electrically uncoupled. And that's the first thing that oncogenes do is electrically isolate the cell from its neighbors, from that"
},
{
"end_time": 1938.575,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1910.128,
"text": " collection of signals that normally tell the cell what to do in a larger context. So that's the first thing we did. The second thing we did, we said, well, if that's a potential cause of cancer, could we cause cancer just by disrupting the electrical communication directly? No oncogenes, no carcinogens, no DNA damage, no mutations. Nothing wrong with the cells that any molecular biology test could see."
},
{
"end_time": 1965.691,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 1939.309,
"text": " And could we still could we cause cancer? Because because remember, the standard model in the field for years has been that cancer is the cause of genetic damage, basically, right, that it's that it's a genetic disruption that makes a rogue cell that has other mutations and so on. So we said, fine, no, we're going to take completely normal cells, nothing wrong with them. And we're going to simply prevent them from talking to other cells electrically. Okay, we're just going to manipulate that. And so we did that. And sure enough, we made metastatic metastatic melanoma in tadpoles."
},
{
"end_time": 1991.51,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 1965.964,
"text": " So that tells you that there doesn't have to be anything wrong with the hardware in order to have cancer. It can be a purely physiological phenomenon. It can be caused at the software level, which a lot of people who study stress induced cancers and things like this, they kind of already knew. But really the paradigm has been that there has to be a genetic defect at the root of this somewhere. And then the third thing we found, which is of course the most exciting thing, which is you can go in the opposite direction."
},
{
"end_time": 2019.121,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 1991.886,
"text": " You can inject a really powerful human oncogene, like a P53 mutation. Oncogene, for those who are listening, is just a gene that causes cancer? Yeah, an oncogene is a mutation in the normal gene that is thought to cause a transformation to cancer. So you can inject that, and then if you do that into a tadpole, if you at the same time inject an ion channel,"
},
{
"end_time": 2036.92,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2019.65,
"text": " forces the cell"
},
{
"end_time": 2055.998,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2037.159,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store"
},
{
"end_time": 2080.282,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2060.828,
"text": " Jokes aside Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 2106.101,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2083.626,
"text": " Okay, so I was just having an analogy in my head. It's almost like, imagine you have these kids and they're misbehaved. So you can say, well, it's the kids who are the problem and they cause havoc in the house. But if you have an adult who's stern enough, they can override the misbehaved kids. If you leave the kids without the adult, then the house will be in shambles. In this analogy, the adult is like the electrical communication. So you can force that electrical communication, that standard adaptive electrical communication."
},
{
"end_time": 2128.063,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2107.227,
"text": " Yeah, you can think of it that way. The thing where I think it breaks down a little bit is that we're not introducing an extra element that keeps everybody else in line. We're in effect, it's like you have a bunch of kids that know what to do and you've got one that's wearing"
},
{
"end_time": 2146.971,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2128.387,
"text": " you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 2164.241,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2147.739,
"text": " of this."
},
{
"end_time": 2192.159,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2165.265,
"text": " Does your work have any implications for what it means to have an identity? So right now you were talking about cancer as if it's dissociating from the larger cell. Yeah. And then there are gap junctions, which you've referenced in your other work. And they effectively make an equivalence class between signals that I generate as a cell or my environment or signals from connected cells. I'm unable to tell the difference between them. Yeah. Because I'm unable to tell the difference between myself and my neighbor. It's as if I'm identified with them."
},
{
"end_time": 2217.21,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2192.432,
"text": " So it has plenty of bearing, at least I see it has plenty of bearing is for what it means for the eye or the ego in a non pejorative manner. So what are the implications of your work for the concept of identity? Yeah, no, you've put your finger exactly on it. So two years ago, I wrote this paper called On the Boundary of the Self. And it's exactly this idea. It's the way to define what is a self."
},
{
"end_time": 2242.466,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2217.432,
"text": " at different scales. And how does the boundary, the size of that self change over time? And that's exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about. It's having communication channels that partially wipe the metadata on information so that I no longer know whether it came from you or whether it came from me, right, gives us a partial mind melt because now it's really hard to keep an identity"
},
{
"end_time": 2270.145,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2242.466,
"text": " If I can't tell which are my memories and which are your memories, it's really hard for us to keep distinct identities. We become partially unified and that's exactly the sort of process that evolution exploits to build larger cells out of small competent ones. Another astounding experiment of yours, I'm unsure if I should be calling it an experiment, was where you took skin cells of a frog and then it has locomotion. Can you outline what the heck did you do there and why is that important?"
},
{
"end_time": 2296.271,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2270.811,
"text": " Yeah, no, it's definitely an experiment. So you're talking about our xenobots, I think. And the question that we're interested in addressing is basically this. Where do anatomical goals come from? And in order to illustrate why that's even a good question, I want to talk about planaria for just a moment, and then you'll see why this is important for the xenobots."
},
{
"end_time": 2322.09,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2296.732,
"text": " We are used to the fact that each species has a specific shape that is associated with it and that frog eggs make frogs and zebrafish eggs make zebrafish and so on. So we're kind of used to that. But the actual question of how do cellular collectives decide what they're going to build and when do they stop building, that's very much an open question."
},
{
"end_time": 2347.995,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2322.432,
"text": " One way you can see how far we are away from a good understanding of this is in a very simple experiment. Planaria are these flatworms that regenerate when you cut them into pieces. Every piece builds whatever is missing and they regenerate. That's planaria. You can cut them into pieces and every piece regenerates to a normal planaria. There are species of planaria that have round heads."
},
{
"end_time": 2375.401,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2348.404,
"text": " and those cells are really good at building a round head and then stopping. So they stop when a round head is complete. Okay. Then you got another species of planaria that has a very pointy head, a kind of a triangular head, and those cells are very good at making a triangular head. When you cut it off, it makes a triangular head and then it stops. So I have a simple question. If I take a bunch of the cells from the round headed guy and I stick them into the body of the triangular guy,"
},
{
"end_time": 2402.654,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2375.589,
"text": " And I let them sort of get, you know, get comfortable and sit around for a little while. Then I cut the head off. What head shape are we going to have? Are we going to have, is one of the head shapes dominant to the other? Are we going to have an intermediate shape or are we going to have a planarian that never stops regenerating because neither set of cells is ever happy about the shape. They're never, that stop condition is never set. Okay. So now, so now look, the important thing is not the answer. The important thing is despite all of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2431.664,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2403.063,
"text": " There is not a single model in the field that makes a prediction on this experiment. Why? Because every piece of data out there now addresses the hardware that enables individual cells to do cell things. Fine. But we have no understanding of what happens when the cells join together into a larger scale self."
},
{
"end_time": 2448.387,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2431.92,
"text": " That makes large scale decisions about head shape, head number, things like that in more for space that navigates more for space by making these large scale decisions. We have absolutely no idea how those algorithms work and the fact that we know how the stem cells work and have lots of molecular biology about that."
},
{
"end_time": 2467.312,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2449.002,
"text": " Because it's too computationally complex or some other in principle reason?"
},
{
"end_time": 2483.951,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2467.875,
"text": " We haven't found the right way to think about how cellular collectives make decisions. This is a collective intelligence problem. This is not a molecular biology problem. We've been thinking about this as a molecular biology problem. That's not what this is. This is trying to read the mind of a collective intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 2501.561,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2484.275,
"text": " Now, people think of collective intelligences as exotic things like anthills and bee colonies and things like this. These are collective intelligences. I want to remind everybody that we are all collective intelligences. We are all bags of cells. There is no cognitive agent that is like this."
},
{
"end_time": 2530.384,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2501.681,
"text": " single diamond that's that's not made of parts that's even sort of unchanging we're all made of parts any cognitive agent is made of parts and so your goal is to ask how do those parts bind together to make decisions as a collective individual cells don't know what a head is they don't know what round round means they don't know what triangular means right but the collective sure does and so the collective is able to navigate more for space in this way that we don't understand the algorithm so if we don't even we don't even know how to how to think about this okay so"
},
{
"end_time": 2548.933,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2530.947,
"text": " So this is very isomorphic to problems in neuroscience, to problems in artificial intelligence. It's trying to understand the scaling of minds. And in trying to do that, we pose the following problem."
},
{
"end_time": 2578.404,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2549.462,
"text": " So we asked a simple question, where does the goal of making a frog or tadpole really come from and how hardwired is that?"
},
{
"end_time": 2605.93,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2578.404,
"text": " So what we did was we took some skin that we scraped off of an early frog embryo. We set it aside in a different environment and we said, okay, now you're free to sort of reboot your multicellularity. You're here. We've relieved all of the constraints of the rest of the embryo. You're no longer getting instructive signals from endoderm and from mesoderm and from all these other things. You're no longer subject to all these other signals. What are you going to do?"
},
{
"end_time": 2635.93,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2606.152,
"text": " What do you want to do? And there's a couple of different options that could have happened. The cells could have died. They could have wandered off and sort of went each cell go its own way. They could have made a monolayer of cells in a dish the way you get in cell culture. All kinds of things they could have done. They didn't do any of that. What they did instead was to combine together and to form a little ball that grew cilia, these little motile hairs on the outer surface."
},
{
"end_time": 2657.773,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2636.323,
"text": " Now, cilia are normally sitting on the outside of embryos and they're there to kind of redistribute the mucus around and to make the pathogens sort of keep moving and not stick to the skin. They're used to keep the surface of the tadpole clean, but instead these cells basically repurposed that"
},
{
"end_time": 2672.244,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2657.978,
"text": " genetically encoded hardware. The cilia themselves are genetically encoded. All the proteins necessary to make a cilium are in the genome. They assembled themselves into a new"
},
{
"end_time": 2701.852,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2672.91,
"text": " into a new kind of a new kind of architecture this this this spherical thing which and and then and then they use the cilia to propel themselves so they started running around they started moving around and so we have these amazing videos of them moving around singly moving around in groups interacting doing going through a maze going back and forth in various configurations they have all kinds of behaviors they have all kinds they they can regenerate if you if you cut them almost entirely in half they will like join back and and and make a"
},
{
"end_time": 2731.596,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2702.517,
"text": " you know, make a xenobot again. And so the coolest thing about them is, and by the way, we don't know their cognitive capacities yet. We're only beginning now to start to see, can they learn? Do they have preferences? All these kinds of things we don't know yet. But the coolest thing about them is that, to my knowledge, they're the only creature on the planet that doesn't really have an evolutionary backstory."
},
{
"end_time": 2756.34,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2732.056,
"text": " The individual cells do. The cells have a long evolutionary history on Earth, but that genome was selected for the ability of these cells to sit quietly on the outside of the frog and keep out the pathogens. They were not selected specifically to be able to get together and run around in a separate configuration away from the embryo. Where did that all come from? And in fact, one of the things about it is people"
},
{
"end_time": 2776.34,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2756.783,
"text": " Often say, well, you know, when are you going to buy, when are you going to engineer these things, you know, knock in various synthetic biology circuits, right? Make them do things. And we absolutely will do that. But my goal before we do any of that, my goal was to show people what, what can happen while the diversity that can happen from the exact same genome with no manipulations whatsoever."
},
{
"end_time": 2796.647,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2777.108,
"text": " Because the thing about these xenobots is they just have a normal frog genome. They have no transgenes, no genomic editing. There's nothing different about them. What we're seeing is the plasticity of this collective intelligence that is able to make a new functional proto-organism in a novel way out of the exact same parts."
},
{
"end_time": 2822.807,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2797.295,
"text": " So there's no genomic editing there. Did you manipulate its morphogenetic code, the electrical signals at all? Not yet. No, we're going to. We're certainly going to. That's all to come. No, at this point we haven't done that. This is, this is, this is purely native plasticity. This is what these cells already know how to do. We, we, we, we scrape them, we scrape them off of the frog and we put them in little holes, little, little, little sort of depressions and we,"
},
{
"end_time": 2830.623,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2823.114,
"text": " I should back up. There are two types of xenobots. The one I'm describing now, we literally did almost nothing. You scrape... Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2857.654,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2831.544,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the Internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2883.78,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2857.654,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone"
},
{
"end_time": 2907.125,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 2883.78,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Albers, Rothes, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 2934.872,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 2907.125,
"text": " them off the embryo you set them aside and you say fine now liberated from all the signals that would have turned you into various various things. What do you want to do? And this is what they do on their own. There's another type of Zen about which is actually when we started with"
},
{
"end_time": 2947.602,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 2935.128,
"text": " where we sculpted them a little bit."
},
{
"end_time": 2976.323,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 2947.841,
"text": " Doug Blackiston did all the microsurgery and everything. We sculpted them a bit to give them legs. It's subtractive sculpting. You just cut away some stuff so that you're left with an ottoman that has four legs. We put in a little bit of muscle and then it learned to walk. The muscle would contract and the thing would basically walk along. That's the first set of xenobots we made. The second one has no muscle. It has no nerve. It's only skin."
},
{
"end_time": 3001.817,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 2976.698,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 3030.299,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3001.817,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 3046.647,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3030.299,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 3071.032,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3046.647,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. It's important that it was taken off of embryos or it doesn't matter if you took it off of a frog much later in development."
},
{
"end_time": 3093.592,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3071.783,
"text": " What occurs to me is, I'm wondering,"
},
{
"end_time": 3120.64,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3093.831,
"text": " If this has implications for what it means to be alive in the colloquial sense, so forget about in the biological sense, so we think of our skin as dead and our bones are dead, and perhaps dead isn't the right term, but let's say animated, animated with life with Vim, with Brio, yet you've showed that somehow you can still trigger Vim and Brio not via this electrical manipulation. I thought it was that, but does this have any bearing as to what we consider to be alive or it's unrelated?"
},
{
"end_time": 3133.319,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3121.647,
"text": " I'll tell you that one of the things that this kind of work does is really illustrate the insufficiency of our vocabulary. So people often argue, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 3162.995,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3133.507,
"text": " I mean, alive is a funny thing. I don't actually know what alive really means. I don't have a good definition. These cells and these organisms are for sure alive in the traditional sense. I mean, the cells are alive. There's no getting around that. But people will often argue, for example, are they robots? Are they organisms? Are they machines? These kinds of things. And Josh Bongard and I wrote a paper addressing this question, basically pointing out that that terminology"
},
{
"end_time": 3186.169,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3163.302,
"text": " is almost useless now. It was great 50 years ago when it was really easy to tell apart machines that were boring, predictable, they were designed and living things which were surprising and interesting and warm and wet and evolved. Those things are now so intermixed"
},
{
"end_time": 3195.282,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3186.596,
"text": " that with modern techniques of digital evolution and bioengineering and synthetic morphology, that distinction does not exist anymore."
},
{
"end_time": 3223.456,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3195.572,
"text": " and so it used to be that you can sort of like you could knock on something and if you hear a hollow metallic sound and you say ah yeah that that came off a factory that's a machine and i'm you know morally okay with taking it apart and doing whatever i want with it and if you were to do this and and it was sort of soft and squishy then you would say that's evolved and it's living and i better i better be nice to it that right though that easy distinction is just it doesn't exist anymore so we need we need a better vocabulary i mean they're they're alive for sure"
},
{
"end_time": 3233.336,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3223.456,
"text": " But if you want to ask questions about whether they are machines or robots or living organisms, that stretches the vocabulary, which is no longer up to the task."
},
{
"end_time": 3262.585,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3234.206,
"text": " Is there a relationship between perception and this morphogenetic code? And I know I keep using that word morphogenetic code and yeah, forgive me if I'm abusing the terminology, but is there a relationship between perception and morphogenetic code? I'll give you my reasoning behind it. Right now, what I see is I recognize a monitor, I see a microphone, I see you, you have eyebrows, I see large scale structures. Then the question is, well, is there anything special about your eyebrows? Well, other than you're an attractive man, let's say"
},
{
"end_time": 3282.108,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3263.046,
"text": " Physically speaking, physics would say there's nothing special about this microphone or 10% of the microphone or 10% of the microphone plus the air slightly around it. It's more a pragmatic matter that it's a practical that it matters that I can use this. However, when you're talking about this non neural by electric code,"
},
{
"end_time": 3310.503,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3282.637,
"text": " It's as if these large scale structures that we recognize as salient and significant, such as a low resolution facet, like a child's drawings of eyebrows, nose, head placement, and so on, that those are there in the code. So somehow what we perceive is also what is encoded. And I'm curious, well, is that, is there a confounding factor that influences both? Does the morphogenetic code influence our perceptions? Perhaps I can give a better analogy for a computer science analogy where we have machine code and then you have like"
},
{
"end_time": 3338.968,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3310.981,
"text": " Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a lot there in what you just said."
},
{
"end_time": 3368.848,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3339.428,
"text": " Certainly perception is a part of this whole process because in order to have this kind of anatomical homeostasis where you damage an organism like a salamander which can regenerate most of its organs or a planarian which can regenerate all of its organs, you damage it and then it grows the right thing and then it stops when it's done. That loop, that homeostatic loop has to have a perception component"
},
{
"end_time": 3397.21,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3369.087,
"text": " because it has to be able to recognize when it's done. So it has to be able to perceive, am I a correct planarian or not? And if I'm not, I'm going to keep remodeling until I am. And at that point, so it's an error minimization scheme. And in order to achieve that error minimization, you have to be able to perceive around you in anatomical space and to say, am I in the right region of space here? Is my head in the right size? Do I have the right number of eyes? All of that, you need to perceive that. And people,"
},
{
"end_time": 3418.592,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3397.824,
"text": " People like Grossberg at BU had written years ago about the relationship between retinal information processing and development. And I actually think he was really onto something in the sense that I think most epithelia are basically like a big retina and that what they're doing is they're constantly surveilling the rest of the animal."
},
{
"end_time": 3445.879,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3419.121,
"text": " the rest of the body and making decisions about large scale features. So not just individual pixels, but things like in the retina, you would be talking about edge detection, motion, things like that. And that's what they're doing. They're looking at large scale features that individual cells cannot detect. So one way to look at this is that we have a precedent for this from neuroscience and from the science of visual processing. Probably the more accurate way to look at it is"
},
{
"end_time": 3475.725,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3446.032,
"text": " Do you believe that the problem of senescence, to the degree it can be called a problem, is largely a disruption of this electrical blueprint rather than oxidative stress and damage to DNA and so on, or telomeric length that people think"
},
{
"end_time": 3506.937,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3477.346,
"text": " I don't have any evidence yet that there's a bioelectric component to this. I mean, I suspect there is, but we don't have any evidence on it. We haven't really worked on aging per se. I will say that I don't think it's anything as fundamental as this kind of like thermodynamic decay or anything like that because the planaria are immortal. They don't have a life span limit. They live forever. And so they are telling us that it's possible to be a complex regenerative organism with"
},
{
"end_time": 3535.35,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3507.244,
"text": " learning capacity and so on and not age. So it's clearly possible. So the rest is details, right? The rest is, I don't think it's anything as fundamental as the theories that say, well, look, when you copy things, you inevitably make mistakes. So eventually stuff wears out. If that were true, you wouldn't have plenary. So I don't think it's anything like that. I think it's something much more contingent, much more specific and thus I'm optimistic that we can overcome it."
},
{
"end_time": 3564.445,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3535.776,
"text": " So there was some work you were outlining in a previous talk with, as I think it was a couple of years ago, at the time it was an undergraduate, her name was Maya, though I don't recall her last name. And she changed between three types of planaria head, like, I think it was felina, Mediterranean, Doro, I don't recall how to pronounce it. But there were about 10s of millions of years apart, evolutionarily. And that to me, implies that there perhaps are structures that are unfathomably submerged in us from our past. And then I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 3591.288,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3565.094,
"text": " That's a great question. Let's run it backwards."
},
{
"end_time": 3601.886,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3591.817,
"text": " We have a conception of Jungian archetypes for neuroscience and psychology."
},
{
"end_time": 3630.162,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3602.176,
"text": " all of neuropsychology comes from earlier somatic bioelectrics, what would that look like then in that case? What would the Jungian archetypes look like in this other pre-neural type of bioelectrics? Because we do this all the time. We ask things like, what does memory look like before it was brain memory? What does bistable visual illusions look like before there were brains?"
},
{
"end_time": 3659.991,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3630.162,
"text": " all of these things that we see in neuroscience you can ask what the what the older somatic equivalent look like so you can do the same thing here it's an interesting question I've never thought about it that way but you can you can ask that question if you ask that question you get to exactly the kind of thing you're talking about it what I would say is well probably in more for space there are these stable attractors corresponding to different types of shapes of heads different numbers of eyes different planarian body plans different all different kinds of things and what you can do is you can dial in those different"
},
{
"end_time": 3689.753,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3660.623,
"text": " Your work is so, it's like, to me, it's like the discovery of DNA. And maybe you're too modest to accept that as a compliment, but I see it as, as that seminal. And I want to, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 3704.667,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3690.401,
"text": " I think it's important to say"
},
{
"end_time": 3733.712,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3705.094,
"text": " On two levels. First of all, none of this came out of thin air. I didn't think of any of this stuff just from nothing. I built these ideas on many other ideas of really pioneering folks that worked for years and many of them didn't get a lot of acceptance from the community. That's important to say is that there's a lot of that out there."
},
{
"end_time": 3761.903,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3734.155,
"text": " And, of course, the people in our lab, right, the postdocs and PhD students and techs who do the work. I mean, it's certainly not just me doing all this work. There are a lot of people in this field and a lot of people in my group. So lots of people contribute to push this all forward. We'll get to the audience questions. OK, so this one comes from Rupert Sheldrake. How does he think his conception of morphogenetic fields relates to mine, referring to Rupert?"
},
{
"end_time": 3788.763,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3762.654,
"text": " Yeah, interesting question. So basically our morphogenetic fields that we work on are completely physical. In other words, they take place entirely within the body of the organism. They're generated by the cells. We can measure them using current technology. I don't know if that's true of the kinds of things that Rupert is talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 3818.951,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3789.104,
"text": " I kind of suspect that those would have to have quite a bit different properties, but just to be clear, our fields are, and in fact, the things that we deal with are strictly speaking, not even fields, right? So we work with spatial distributions of resting potentials. So it's not clear to me that these are really fields in the mathematical sense of the word field, but these are distributions of electrical potentials of living cells in a particular body."
},
{
"end_time": 3844.821,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3818.951,
"text": " Another application that I've heard you mention, though it was, I don't know if it was more on the speculative side or if you've developed this, it was some organism or the potential of creating some organism that spontaneously and temperamentally goes out and cleans up the environment is engineered to remove certain toxins. Can you speak more about that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3865.128,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3845.964,
"text": " Yeah, that probably was referring to our xenobots. So we have this technology where we're creating synthetic living proto-organisms, in this case made of frog skin. So these are frog skin cells that in different environments self-organize to be these little motile creatures."
},
{
"end_time": 3892.688,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3865.282,
"text": " and at least one of many possible applications in the future is to program them for some sort of collection tasks so that they would go out and maybe collect useful molecules or maybe they would clean up toxins, maybe they would detect various other chemicals in the environment that you would want to know about. So these are all potential applications of the practical sort of use of these kinds of synthetic living machines."
},
{
"end_time": 3917.125,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 3893.302,
"text": " You mentioned quite a few times that it's important when you're dealing with the manipulation of this electric field or voltage gradient that you don't use external electric fields, you actually manipulate the cellular ion channels directly. Yeah. Okay. So then I was wondering, does this mean, you know how some people say 5g, that we should be scared of 5g, because, well, for various reasons,"
},
{
"end_time": 3926.715,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 3917.824,
"text": " But then other people say it's non-ionizing and that's all that matters. Well, is that all that matters? Is there some validity to being concerned about 5G?"
},
{
"end_time": 3955.23,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 3928.251,
"text": " So I think both of those viewpoints are a little bit off and the truth is somewhere in the middle. So let's just start with the ionizing business. So I think the evidence is quite clear that electromagnetic radiation does not need to be ionizing and in fact it does not to be particularly strong in order to in some way affect living cells, so living things. So living things are sensitive to all sorts of electromagnetic radiation"
},
{
"end_time": 3974.77,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 3955.23,
"text": " in many ways that do not require ionization or heat or anything like that. At the same time, I think I don't have any reason to be concerned about 5G. First of all, the kinds of things that we study, so these bioelectric signaling pathways are not particularly affected by external electromagnetic fields."
},
{
"end_time": 3992.056,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 3974.77,
"text": " If they were, we would be using these kinds of things in the lab to manipulate the electrical signaling. It's just not a great way to control bioelectric signaling within tissue. It just doesn't do a very good job of it. So I don't have any particular reason to be worried about 5G. I have a feeling that"
},
{
"end_time": 4020.759,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 3992.056,
"text": " For most people that are worried about it, you have far bigger dangers and stressors in your life. If you eat certain things, if you engage in certain behaviors, this is far more of an issue for you statistically than 5G ever will be. So I'm not particularly worried about 5G on a practical level in the grand scheme of things that I worry about and the things that we all do in our life that are sort of not optimal for health. I think 5G is probably way down on the list of things for you to worry about."
},
{
"end_time": 4046.237,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4020.759,
"text": " However, I think it's it's not true to say that because it's non ionizing we don't need to worry about it. I think that's actually false Okay, speaking about diet you mentioned eating and then and one of your talks you also mentioned there's a connection between the microbiome and this Morphogenetic field, but I didn't hear more elaboration on that. So if you don't mind elaborating, that'd be great Yeah, well the general point is that any sort of"
},
{
"end_time": 4063.08,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4046.715,
"text": " I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 4079.923,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4063.08,
"text": " Those controls to make specific things happen in the body right so so anything including chemical signaling neurotransmitters we already know that the microbiome is affecting mood and behavior and things like that by plugging into the neurotransmitter pathways so there's this gut brain axis and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 4107.159,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4080.367,
"text": " So the same is true of bioelectrics. So in general, we could certainly assume that various microbes that live in the body and various other kinds of parasites would have ways of tweaking ion channel activities, meaning probably using some sort of chemicals that they would be putting out to manipulate your tissues in ways that would be evolutionarily advantageous to them. Now, it just so happens we have a practical example of this that we studied a couple of years ago in planaria."
},
{
"end_time": 4128.49,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4107.739,
"text": " where we showed that there are bacteria that live on these planaria, and these bacteria are actually able to manipulate the worms to, for example, alter the structure of their visual system, to have multiple heads, and so on. And that is because these bacteria are able to"
},
{
"end_time": 4151.22,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4129.053,
"text": " tweak the same kinds of controls that the worm tissues are using in the first place to make decisions about how many heads you're supposed to have, what your visual system should look like. So it's on the one hand kind of amazing that these microbes have a say in the structure of this kind of organism that they live in. On the other hand, from an evolutionary point of view, it's completely expected that they would have discovered ways to do that."
},
{
"end_time": 4172.807,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4152.415,
"text": " Earlier in our talk, you mentioned that when you were looking for these voltage gradients, when you did this die, the voltage die, you saw something that was a conspicuous face on the frog. And then you also mentioned, well, you don't imagine that the code will be that obvious for the majority of what we care about, especially for humans. How is it that you go about finding out or decoding this code?"
},
{
"end_time": 4184.65,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4173.183,
"text": " and also what other factors matter is that the do they pulse the voltage pulses and then so the frequency of pulsing matters does the movement what are the factors that go in to determining the code and then how do you decode it"
},
{
"end_time": 4214.565,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4185.299,
"text": " Yeah, we don't know many of the things about it. So for example, at the moment, it doesn't look like there's pulsing and that the temporal aspects of it are particularly critical. But that's probably more a function of the fact that we haven't really dug into it yet. It's entirely possible that when we dig into the temporal aspects, we will find out that the time dependent changes are really important. It's possible. At the moment, we've been completely occupied with the spatial aspects and it doesn't look at least to our technology doesn't look like it's"
},
{
"end_time": 4223.626,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4214.565,
"text": " In terms of how do you crack the code?"
},
{
"end_time": 4251.22,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4224.326,
"text": " There's a few pieces to this. One piece is simply observation, right? So it's almost everything in science starts with some sort of observation and really just getting a database or a profile of different tissues under different conditions, a bioelectric profile of different tissues under different conditions will be absolutely crucial to decoding this because we need the same way that we currently have databases of gene expression, of proteomics,"
},
{
"end_time": 4267.415,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4251.834,
"text": " all these kind of biochemical and genetic profilings of tissues and health and disease and different cells of the body and so on. We need the exact same thing for bioelectrics, so we need a kind of physiomic profiling where there ought to be a database where we can go and say"
},
{
"end_time": 4290.708,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4267.415,
"text": " This particular tissue under these conditions should have this bioelectric pattern and here are the sort of range of normal and here's our difference between people and between organisms in different states and so on. So that's the first thing. And so we only have that for a very small number of cases. We certainly don't have anything like a full physiomic profiling yet."
},
{
"end_time": 4315.435,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4290.964,
"text": " Then what you need to do is you need to build computational models that help you explain why the electrical pattern is the way it is, given the various channels and pumps that are expressed in that tissue. And then you begin the hard work of functional experiments. So you open and close some channels, you observe what happens and you build up a theory based on an improved computational model of how that"
},
{
"end_time": 4339.172,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4315.947,
"text": " particular bioelectric"
},
{
"end_time": 4368.2,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4339.753,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 4392.722,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4368.814,
"text": " Do you think psychedelics have any role to play in in changing or altering the morphogenetic morphological code? What I mean is"
},
{
"end_time": 4412.841,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4393.148,
"text": " I have no idea. I have no expertise in psychedelics whatsoever. I can tell you that much like in the brain,"
},
{
"end_time": 4438.319,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4413.319,
"text": " there's a really nice connection between neurotransmitter activity in the rest of the body and the electrical signals that move these neurotransmitters around. So I would not be at all shocked if there was some connection. And in fact, we've certainly used various compounds that are normally utilized to target brains. And so things like anxiolytics and SSRIs and"
},
{
"end_time": 4460.384,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4438.677,
"text": " I know these questions"
},
{
"end_time": 4489.633,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4461.084,
"text": " going from subject to subject is just how my notes are but well regardless you mentioned one time I think it was to Sean Carroll that you can use Daniel Dennett's way of speaking of intention that is I believe it was give as much intention as you like to a system in order to explain what's happening and when I say intention I mean act as if it's willing to do something and then you also mentioned that when one scales down one's theological projection to smaller particles like panpsychics might do"
},
{
"end_time": 4504.991,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4489.991,
"text": " Then it leads naturally to quantum indeterminacy and the least action principle."
},
{
"end_time": 4526.357,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4505.401,
"text": " to how much intentionality, cognition, intelligence, whatever you're interested in, the real question of how much of that some particular system has is not to be found by armchair philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 4539.582,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4526.357,
"text": " Well, thermostats can't possibly have any intention. This is a decision that somebody has made just by fiat. Dan's point is very important."
},
{
"end_time": 4562.568,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4539.906,
"text": " It's an empirical question. You can't just decide. And the way that you discover this is simply this. You take a particular stance and you say, here's my system. I think it has this much intelligence, or I think it's capable of learning, or I think it's able to have preferences, or I think it's a goal-directed system, wherever you choose to start on that continuum."
},
{
"end_time": 4588.916,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4563.097,
"text": " And using that stance, you do empirical experiments to see how well that stance helps you to understand and control whatever you're dealing with. And so the point being that we can't simply assume that something is a non-intelligent system because of how it's made or because of how it looks. You have to actually ask, what is the optimal way of looking at that system? So just to give you a simple"
},
{
"end_time": 4614.036,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4589.428,
"text": " A simple analogy, if you have a ball on top of a hill, you're going to do pretty well using the Newton's laws to ask how it's going to roll down the hill. And if you have additional theories about the hopes and dreams of this ball as it rolls down the hill, they're not going to do you much good. They're not going to give you any improved ability to understand and control what's going to happen."
},
{
"end_time": 4636.937,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4614.428,
"text": " On the other hand, if you start off with a live mouse at the top of a hill and you think you're going to apply Newton's laws, you're not going to do very well because you're going to need some other laws. And so you might decide that the system is minimally intelligent and see how you do. You might decide that the system is very intelligent and it has memories of what happened when you put it on the hill last week and it might do something different."
},
{
"end_time": 4650.691,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4636.937,
"text": " The point is, it's an empirical experiment. You can't just decide what it's going to be. You have to choose a level of abstraction of some type of learning agent, maybe very little, maybe quite a lot."
},
{
"end_time": 4668.882,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4650.93,
"text": " and see how you"
},
{
"end_time": 4697.176,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4668.882,
"text": " experimental context in which you want to examine the system. A human brain is very intelligent in a certain context. It also makes a great paperweight. And if that's how you choose to look at it, then you don't need to attribute much intelligence to it if you're examining the problem space of keeping down some papers in a wind, then it doesn't come up. So that's that. And so where I intersect with this is that I basically point out that"
},
{
"end_time": 4724.462,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4697.381,
"text": " This is a really essential way of looking at things when traditional phylogenetics is not a great guide and this is meaning that when we are confronted with novel creatures, they might be novel bioengineered creatures, they might be chimeras, they might be something that you find in space somewhere, some exobiological agent, they might be artificial intelligences that we create, whatever it is,"
},
{
"end_time": 4753.814,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4724.616,
"text": " When you are confronted with something that you cannot simply place on the familiar evolutionary tree of life and on earth and say, oh yeah, this thing is closely related to a fish. Therefore, I'm going to assume it has roughly the cognition of other fish that I've known. So when you are either creating or reverse engineering novel creatures, the intentional stance becomes completely essential because you can't know a priori what the cognitive capacities of this thing are going to be."
},
{
"end_time": 4780.145,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 4754.036,
"text": " and it might behoove you to really attribute quite a lot of cognition to it, or maybe not at all, depending on how that does for you in terms of empirical success. So having said that, then the natural question might come up, is there a zero on the scale? So if you've got a scale, a continuum of cognition or of intelligence that is a smooth gradient where different types of systems might land,"
},
{
"end_time": 4794.019,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 4780.145,
"text": " If somebody had said to me what would the absolute minimum"
},
{
"end_time": 4821.766,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 4794.838,
"text": " What would you have to have an absolute minimum in order to be on this scale at all? So to be somewhere on the scale of cognitive creatures, what's the basement? What's the minimal version that you would have to have? I would say probably the minimum you would have to have two things. You would have to have some ability to do goal-directed behavior. So you would have to have some kind of ability to pursue goal states. And you would have to have some kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 4851.357,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 4821.766,
"text": " In other words, if I can look at all of the forces impinging on you and know exactly what's going to happen, then you're probably a marble running down some kind of an inclined plane. Otherwise, if you're more complex than that,"
},
{
"end_time": 4878.404,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 4851.817,
"text": " Then I would have to take into account things that happened before, things that might happen in the future, all kinds of things that are not immediately what's there. So what that boils down to is some sort of internally initiated action, some quote unquote freedom. And that's a whole other story to really dig into that. But this idea that you would be able to initiate things on your own. You're not just a responding, you're not just a passive responder to forces around you at that time."
},
{
"end_time": 4902.568,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 4878.592,
"text": " And so having said that, having said those two things, you realize that already particles already have those two things because particles already exhibit quantum indeterminacy where they do things that are fundamentally not caused by any of the things around them. It's completely sort of indeterminate and they have the ability to pursue goals in a very"
},
{
"end_time": 4929.002,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 4902.841,
"text": " Certainly there's a little bit of truth to that, but there's also the fact that if you were to ask the question"
},
{
"end_time": 4958.387,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 4929.531,
"text": " I think even particles should have some degree of goal-directed activity, you might make a prediction of something like least action principles existing and then you would be right. That model actually makes a prediction that's completely not obvious. It isn't obvious that when you have a beam of light passing through a bunch of lenses, it's not obvious that you can actually"
},
{
"end_time": 4986.954,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 4958.814,
"text": " forgo the calculations of how the light will interact with the glass at every point along the way and simply say, you know what I think? I think it wants to get where it's going with the least amount of action, right? And so you can make the correct prediction of where it's going to go simply by assuming that the light likes to get where it's going by minimizing and maximizing certain things. And you could predict something like that if you had this idea that even at the very bottom, there would be some type of"
},
{
"end_time": 5015.879,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 4987.585,
"text": " some type of goal directed activity. So if we ask what does that look like? What does agency and intelligence look like in the very minimal, the most minimal version possible? I think what you get is something like like particles. So from that perspective, I suspect there is no zero on this scale, because because even particles are already on the scale. Okay, this zero was that the way that I understand that is that that's like an intelligence scale. Do you synonymize that with consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 5038.558,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5016.323,
"text": " Right, that's a good question. I will say that in my writing on all of this stuff, I've almost completely avoided consciousness. I almost never talk about consciousness. I talk about cognition and that's kind of on purpose. My views on consciousness are not"
},
{
"end_time": 5066.578,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5038.746,
"text": " fleshed out to the point where I'd be interested in talking about them because I don't think I can add anything yet that a lot of other smart people haven't already chewed over. What I think I have something to contribute is to the questions of cognition and intelligence because those things are empirically measurable, they're publicly observable behaviors, and we can have a research program focused around them that I think is different than what other people have been doing. So that's what I've been talking about."
},
{
"end_time": 5092.312,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5066.869,
"text": " Consciousness is different in the sense that I think many of the people who say they study consciousness in fact do not study consciousness. What they study at best are correlates of consciousness or oftentimes behaviors and properties that may or may not have anything to do with actual consciousness and so I think it's very difficult to study actual consciousness. You have to"
},
{
"end_time": 5122.09,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5093.626,
"text": " Studying consciousness is a first-person activity. It's not a third-person activity the way that you would study anything in the external world, meaning studying it externally outside of yourself. I think fundamentally studying consciousness requires the subject of meaning you or whoever is studying it to actually change during that process. It's a completely different thing. So I'm working on some things along those lines. It's a little early to talk about it."
},
{
"end_time": 5137.637,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5122.722,
"text": " Faraz Hanarvar asks, could the mapping and thereby the treatment of the signaling, that is this electric signaling, differ between individuals when we're talking about humans? So does the code, is the code species dependent or can it actually differ based upon people?"
},
{
"end_time": 5164.053,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5139.172,
"text": " Yeah, I don't think it's even species dependent because we've seen that we can induce, let's say one species of flatworm to form a head that belongs to a completely different species simply by changing the distribution of a gap junctional connections. I suspect there are massive conservations in the same way that the biochemical and genetic codes are highly conserved."
},
{
"end_time": 5185.435,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5164.531,
"text": " Are there going to be individual differences among patients? For sure, and we need to understand what those are. We do not yet know what those are. That's a major area for future research, but I think it's going to be conserved sufficiently that we will be able to have general purpose electroceuticals. However, I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 5205.009,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5185.691,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 5232.056,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5205.93,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5251.886,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5232.056,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 5281.51,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5251.886,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 5305.828,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5281.51,
"text": " Things are going on in their blood in terms of ion content and so on. In order to perfect some of these treatments, I think it will be very much personalized, but underneath it all is going to be a highly conserved bioelectric code."
},
{
"end_time": 5329.957,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5306.732,
"text": " You mentioned ElectroCeuticals, which reminds me of your company MorphoCeuticals. If you're allowed to talk about that, what's the state of it? What's the goal of it? MorphoCeuticals Inc. is a new company that I co-founded with David Kaplan, who's head of biomedical engineering at Tufts. He and I are partners in this work. We work very closely together."
},
{
"end_time": 5358.456,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5330.452,
"text": " And right now, the mission of Morphoceuticals is focused around limb regeneration. So we are taking the things we learned in the frog in terms of how to induce the regeneration of appendages in the frog and trying to move it to mammals so that someday towards humans. And so, you know, I can't really go into details of how it's going, but it's in its very early days. But I'm very optimistic that we will actually have something useful. So that's what we're doing."
},
{
"end_time": 5361.664,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5358.677,
"text": " Are you seeing more progress than you had hoped? Or are you seeing less?"
},
{
"end_time": 5391.476,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5362.483,
"text": " The need is incredible and unfortunately I have to say to all these people every day that we're working as fast as we can but it's still a basic science."
},
{
"end_time": 5419.428,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5391.476,
"text": " We are not in clinical trials. We are not dealing with human patients. It is still very basic science. However, it is now to the point where we have commercial investment and it's obvious that at some point it's going to be real for patients. So it's pretty much on track. The idea is quite simple. David's group makes these wearable bioreactors and you wear them on a limb amputation site and they basically produce a kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 5449.241,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5419.889,
"text": " Would be very interested in learning how the actual algorithm works if he's even allowed to share that information."
},
{
"end_time": 5479.121,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5449.65,
"text": " It's some form of pattern recognition, but the details will be cool to learn. Yeah, I'm not sure which algorithm she's talking about. I think she means the algorithm of when we talked about decoding. Oh, I see. Frog's face means frog's face. Yeah, I see. And then she has a sub question, which may be related. Also, how do we know that we are actually learning the cell's language and not just observing the cause and effect because we only see their behavior on the outside?"
},
{
"end_time": 5508.729,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5479.599,
"text": " Well, I guess to go in order, the algorithm is still very much under development. Part of the problem is that traditional machine learning algorithms require incredible amounts of data, meaning huge numbers of examples to learn from. We don't have those data. So it's very expensive and time consuming to get these images of the electric pattern. So we can't deploy the typical types of algorithms that are used. So a lot of the early work was basically done by hand."
},
{
"end_time": 5529.616,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 5509.087,
"text": " We're still working on these algorithms, so that's still very much a story in progress. With respect to the second question, I guess I'm not sure what the distinction would be. If we understand the bioelectric signals sufficiently that we can"
},
{
"end_time": 5558.422,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 5529.872,
"text": " Sam Thompson wants to know, do you think biological self-organization and emergence might be proto-algorithmic? And then what would the implications be for science?"
},
{
"end_time": 5579.087,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 5559.718,
"text": " I don't know what proto-algorithmic means in this context. I can take a stab at I think what might be an interesting sense of it, but I'm not sure that captures what he was asking. The kind of thing that I think is important sort of foundationally to think about is where"
},
{
"end_time": 5597.79,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 5579.599,
"text": " do the set points of various homeostatic systems come from? So whether you have physiological homeostasis or anatomical homeostasis, the ability of a system to get back to the same state, even though it's perturbed. One might ask, where is that information?"
},
{
"end_time": 5615.486,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 5598.08,
"text": " And an easy thing to say is that evolution provides it because certain types of set points are adaptive and other types will not let you survive. And that's okay, except that now what we see with these synthetic organisms is that"
},
{
"end_time": 5630.265,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 5616.169,
"text": " For example, with the xenobots, we can take these frog skin cells and put them in a new environment and within 48 hours or so, they self-assemble into a new organism with a new anatomy, a new behavior and various new capabilities."
},
{
"end_time": 5647.654,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 5630.947,
"text": " They never existed before. They have no lengthy history of selection on Earth. The cells themselves evolved for being really good at sitting on the outside of a frog or a tadpole and keeping out the bacteria. They did not evolve for the ability to get together and run around by themselves and do various things."
},
{
"end_time": 5675.316,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 5647.824,
"text": " So that raises the interesting question of where does that actually come from? It's clear that there's incredible plasticity of the hardware that's encoded by the genome. It can do all sorts of novel things, but where do the specific things come from? And I don't know if this is what he meant by proto-algorithmic, but you can sort of think about it. One of my favorite analogies is this thing called a Galton board. I don't know if everybody knows what that is, but imagine a vertical piece of wood like this. It's a vertical piece of wood."
},
{
"end_time": 5695.196,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 5675.691,
"text": " And then you bang a bunch of nails into it at regularly spaced intervals, just bang a bunch of nails into it. You take a bucket of marbles and you dump it into the top and they go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. They all go and every marble just sort of bounces stochastically back and forth. If you've got enough marbles, the outcome is always going to be exactly the same. You're going to get this beautiful bell curve."
},
{
"end_time": 5715.452,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 5696.118,
"text": " If you dump a bunch of marbles in, then on average, you're going to get this beautiful bell curve. You can ask a simple question, where is the shape of this bell curve encoded?"
},
{
"end_time": 5739.872,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 5715.981,
"text": " Was it in the description of the wood? No. Was it in the layout of the nails? No, you can put the nails almost any which way you want. Was it in the recipe of making this thing? No. Where was it? And so you end up with this idea that much like, and this is certainly, I'm not the first person by far to say this, this is a very old, you know, maybe Pythagoras or Plato had similar ideas where"
},
{
"end_time": 5757.654,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 5740.759,
"text": " You would say that somewhere in an important sense, there are laws, laws of mathematics, laws of computation that exist independent of, they have an independent existence. And what happens is that when we build specific kinds of machines,"
},
{
"end_time": 5777.551,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 5757.654,
"text": " We couple to those laws and we take advantage of them. So, for example, if you build a machine that looks like a Galton board, you get to couple to the rules of mathematics that give you this beautiful shape. You didn't have to specify the shape ahead of time. You get the shape for free by building a device that can couple to those laws."
},
{
"end_time": 5797.807,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 5777.756,
"text": " If you discover a transistor, which is basically just a voltage-gated current conductance, it's like a little tiny synapse. It's the same as a gap junction or an ion channel. As soon as you've made that little machine, you can couple to these amazing laws of computation that tell you, for example, that if you have a bunch of NAND gates, you can build anything."
},
{
"end_time": 5823.456,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 5797.807,
"text": " Well, where did that fact come from? You know, these truth tables, or if you know two angles of a triangle, you automatically know the third. Where did that come from? So where is that? So maybe that's what he meant by proto-algorithmic, but it's the idea that there are these rules and some of them are physics, some of them are mathematics, and some of them are computation. If you make the right kind of device, you can reap the benefits of some of those laws, and evolution does this all the time."
},
{
"end_time": 5846.749,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 5823.746,
"text": " Evolution discovers certain pieces of hardware that then let you do amazing things because you're leveraging these laws that are out there that are invisible to you until you've built the right hardware. Great, we'll just get to four more questions and hopefully they're quick. Thane, is the evolutionary suppression of regeneration in mammals an advantageous trait for the accumulation of memory?"
},
{
"end_time": 5868.422,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 5848.695,
"text": " Wow, I'm not sure about for the accumulation of memory. I doubt it because there are plenty of creatures that can do perfectly well with memory that are highly regenerative. So I don't think it's impossible to have regenerative capacity and memory in the same animal."
},
{
"end_time": 5892.5,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 5868.422,
"text": " However, we can think about why aren't humans, for example, regenerating their limbs. So nobody knows, but I'll tell you a plausible story that may or may not be correct. Imagine that you are the ancestor of mammals, you're the tiny thing that looks a little bit like a mouse, and you're running around the forest and somebody bites your leg off. So the problem is that"
},
{
"end_time": 5922.773,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 5892.807,
"text": " Unlike a salamander, which can hang out in water and take a long time to heal, you have a rapid metabolism. You have a rapid heartbeat and blood pressure, and you're going to bleed out long before you get a chance to regenerate. So your job, if you want to survive, is to form a scar and to have an inflammatory response that's going to kill off some of the bacteria. You need to not bleed out, so you need to seal the wound immediately. You need to make a scar."
},
{
"end_time": 5952.654,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 5922.773,
"text": " And by the way, you are going to try to put weight on it because you're walking on it. Unlike a salamander, which has the buoyancy of water to hold you up, you're going to try to put weight on it, which means that as soon as some kind of delicate blastema is formed and these cells are starting to grow, you're going to grind it into the forest floor. So that's not particularly conducive. Also, because you're in dry air instead of water, all of the electrical currents that need to come out of that wound epithelium to drive the electric states, they can't work because the dry air is an insulator."
},
{
"end_time": 5976.954,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 5953.029,
"text": " So you might imagine that at that point you might as well just shift to scarring because the regeneration. Now that story has pros and cons. One nice thing about that story is that, for example, it fits with this really weird fact. Why are deer regenerative on their antlers? Why can deer regenerate massive amounts of bone and vasculature and innervation every year?"
},
{
"end_time": 6002.961,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 5977.534,
"text": " I mean, what's interesting about the deer is they're not putting weight on it. They're carrying it around and it never has to worry that it's going to be disrupted while it's trying to grow. So that's one part. That fits. What doesn't fit is questions like, well, OK, that explains why the limbs don't regenerate. How about internal organs? Why don't they regenerate? And we don't know. So no one knows. And we can come up with some ideas that have pros and cons."
},
{
"end_time": 6028.558,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6003.882,
"text": " Tom Carrick asks, or says, fascinating. Are there overlaps with the field of quantum biology? What about ORC-OR? That is, I'm sure you've heard of Stuart Hameroff's and Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction. Yeah. I don't know. I can't say too many useful things about that, but I will say sort of one thing."
},
{
"end_time": 6055.981,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6028.916,
"text": " I do agree with Hameroff and Penrose on the idea that anesthesia in general is one of the most profound, maybe the only profound tool we have to study actual consciousness. We don't have a lot of other tools to study consciousness, but anesthesia is a pretty good one. And the interesting thing about anesthesia is that most general anesthetics are gap-junctional disruptors."
},
{
"end_time": 6082.534,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6056.357,
"text": " Now, like many facts, this has things that are easy to understand and some things that are deeply puzzling. The kind of thing that makes perfect sense is that these electrical networks in the body manifested various cognitive abilities long before they were brains. So these gap junctions that enable body cells to form networks"
},
{
"end_time": 6099.684,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6082.927,
"text": " are critical for these networks to have memories, memories of body shape, to make decisions about what they're going to grow and so on. So the use of gap junctions to make networks that can follow a large scale goals like make a limb and make an organ and so on, that's evolutionarily ancient."
},
{
"end_time": 6128.865,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6099.94,
"text": " And it's not surprising at all that what evolution did when the nervous systems developed was to use that same trick to create another type of cognitive agent, which lives basically centered in the brain and reuse the exact same hardware for that. So that makes sense. And so it makes total sense that that goes away when those gap generators are disrupted by general anesthetic. It also makes total sense that if we want to turn a planarian"
},
{
"end_time": 6149.838,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6129.138,
"text": " into the head of make its head turn its head into the head of a different species of planarian. Guess what we use a general anesthetic called octanol. It's the exact same thing. It's a gap junctional disruption. So what you're doing is you're basically disrupting that proto cognitive agent, the collective intelligence of the body that normally remembers how to make a particular kind of head."
},
{
"end_time": 6177.466,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6150.179,
"text": " You're basically disrupting that with this general anesthetic. Now, the amazing thing about general anesthetic is that any of us ever come back from it being the same person. Think about it. You have this brain. You have, right? It supports the cognitive structures of a very complex creature. And then for some number of hours, you simply disconnect most of the cells from being electrically in communication with each other. And then you let the connections reform."
},
{
"end_time": 6206.015,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6177.807,
"text": " And you just sort of hope that everything comes back to how it was. If I didn't know, you know, if we didn't know that the general anesthetics work, somebody were to tell me that that's their plan. I would say, well, you might get a living, living human out of it at the end, but it's certainly not going to be the patient that walked in. You know, you're going to bear no resemblance. Of course you're going to completely wreck their mental state. And, and so, so one thing that's amazing is that actually most people come out of it being the more or less the same person as they went in."
},
{
"end_time": 6230.776,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6206.527,
"text": " But the other interesting thing is not everybody. This is why they don't like to give general anesthetic if they can help it because some people have permanent psychosis. In fact, many people have hallucinations on their way out of it that eventually resolve as the brain sort of finds its attractors that were there before. But if you watch, you can go to YouTube and you can watch some really"
},
{
"end_time": 6257.193,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6231.271,
"text": " The planaria is exactly the same thing. When you disrupt their gap junctions,"
},
{
"end_time": 6285.708,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6257.602,
"text": " The first thing they do is they regenerate random heads that belong possibly to other species, right? And then after about 30 days, those heads actually remodel back to the correct species, species specific shape. So they're not permanent. So to me, this looks exactly like what happens when you come out of general anesthesia. Okay. Moflo wants to know, how does he see his work relating to David Sinclair's biological clock?"
},
{
"end_time": 6310.179,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6287.654,
"text": " Yeah, interesting. It's funny, I've been talking a lot. I talked to David recently and people have been asking me a lot about bioelectrics of aging. I don't know what the relationship between bioelectrics and aging really is. I can tell you that planaria, as far as we can tell, don't age."
},
{
"end_time": 6339.497,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6310.589,
"text": " There's no such thing as an old planarian. They live forever if they're not injured. And so I think what that tells us is that aging would be resolved if we could crank up regenerative capacity to the point where we would constantly be regenerating any cells that aged, right? Senescing cells would just be regenerated the way planaria do. So my strong suspicion is that aging is a"
},
{
"end_time": 6369.616,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6340.06,
"text": " I know many people say that telomere length has to do with aging or the shortened telomere length and you're suggesting well it could be that but it's also related to this"
},
{
"end_time": 6390.862,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6370.145,
"text": " morphogenetic code that you're referring to. Are they interrelated somehow? Probably. I mean, I am not an expert on telomeres. I have no idea what's going on with telomeres in planaria. Assuming somebody studying it, we certainly haven't. I'm assuming somebody must be. All I know is this story of"
},
{
"end_time": 6407.329,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6391.152,
"text": " inevitable aging because you keep making copies of things and fundamentally the information is degrading and eventually you don't have it anymore and it's degrading at the ends because that's where you're eating. That clearly cannot be the whole story because planaria avoided permanently."
},
{
"end_time": 6432.807,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6407.568,
"text": " The last question, Nate Grundman, can you imagine"
},
{
"end_time": 6461.442,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 6433.251,
"text": " referring to you, Michael, can you imagine a mental practice by which a person can influence the goal state of the body? For example, Joe Dispenza has made some claims that he's healed his body in a way that doctors say are impossible. It also a question I had for you earlier, which relates to this is how your work is related to the placebo effect. So whether or not you see the connection there, I'm interested in the placebo effect too. I'm trying to sneak in two questions for the pressure one."
},
{
"end_time": 6488.848,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 6462.21,
"text": " Yeah. Okay, so I don't know anything about Joe Dispenza. I don't know anything about the claims that he's made or any specific kind of healing event. But I'll give you kind of a general thought about this. It is uncontroversial that your thoughts, whatever they may be, whatever you think thinking is,"
},
{
"end_time": 6518.234,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 6489.104,
"text": " It is pretty uncontroversial that your thoughts affect the physiological functioning of your body. I mean, that's obvious. If you want to get up and walk around, your thoughts have now activated various electrical pathways. They've triggered a bunch of muscle motion. If you have a tendency to mentally work yourself up into an anxious state, you can certainly, by your thinking, crank up various stress enzyme production in your body. We all know that."
},
{
"end_time": 6535.23,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 6518.234,
"text": " You can do the opposite if you've trained in techniques to calm yourself down under various circumstances. You can reduce the level of cortisol in your blood. You can reduce various fire and flight responses. It's not some weird"
},
{
"end_time": 6561.817,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 6535.23,
"text": " We do it every day. If that wasn't true, you couldn't get up in the morning when you wanted to get up and go to work. So that part's completely obvious. So from there, it's a very short hop, skip and a jump to the idea that not only can you give commands to your muscles and your glands to produce various hormones, neurotransmitters and muscle motion,"
},
{
"end_time": 6586.357,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 6562.244,
"text": " But you might be able to exert some influence over other cells, for example, skin cells in your, you know, at wounds and your liver and the way that it processes information. I don't find it implausible whatsoever. So I don't, again, I'm not commenting on any particular instance of anybody having healed themselves of anything. I'm just saying that it is not"
},
{
"end_time": 6611.254,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 6587.005,
"text": " It is not a stretch to think that not only can you exert influence on your various glands that put out cortisol and adrenaline and various other things, why can't you send commands to other cells? It seems silly to think that that's impossible."
},
{
"end_time": 6638.643,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 6611.544,
"text": " I think that the placebo effect is extremely profound. I think that what it's telling us is that there is a communication across levels. So you have meaning that you have a level of organization that consists of your body cells and that has a degree of cognition and a degree of intelligence. But your body is also home to an additional intelligence, which lives probably largely in the brain. And it appears that those two can can communicate in various ways. And I can imagine that"
},
{
"end_time": 6664.036,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 6638.968,
"text": " There are lots of things to be discovered about ways to improve that communication. We know there are certain practices where people extend the amount of time they can sit underwater and change their body temperature and change their pulse rate and things like that. I find it completely plausible that there are ways to communicate in that way to other cells in the body."
},
{
"end_time": 6691.988,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 6665.196,
"text": " There is the field of hypnodermatology where people by hypnosis try to treat various skin diseases, some of which have a neuroimmune component, some of which may not have a neuroimmune component. So the activity of the mind, which is simply the execution of the physiological computations that happen in the brain, affect physiological computations that happen outside the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 6705.776,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 6692.312,
"text": " One of your goals is an anatomical compiler. And then what you just said made me think, well, some of these people who are meditating or on the more meditative side tend to work with"
},
{
"end_time": 6726.015,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 6706.852,
"text": " Thoughts to heal oneself."
},
{
"end_time": 6749.753,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 6727.329,
"text": " I don't think it's impossible. There's been work recently on various types of pulsed light stimuli into the retina having some interesting neuro protective effects in the brain and so on."
},
{
"end_time": 6768.626,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 6749.974,
"text": " Yeah, all of this, it's a giant electrical network. All of the cells are communicating with each other. There's absolutely no reason why that couldn't work. But I think that, to be clear, this anatomical compiler isn't just us. The anatomical compiler is a sort of practical"
},
{
"end_time": 6789.002,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 6769.019,
"text": " personification of the goal that all of us in the community are going for, which is the ability to control growth and form. And when we have that ability, that's when the anatomical compiler becomes possible. So it's not just something that we in particular are working on. But I think that this is part of all the things you're discussing now are part of the deep reason why"
},
{
"end_time": 6817.022,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 6789.377,
"text": " Cognitive science and consciousness and all of those kinds of things are deeply related to developmental biology and physiology. They're absolutely interrelated because they are two sides of the same coin. Information processing in goal-directed hierarchical systems. And the more you understand about one, the better you are at managing the others. This is two sides of the same question. Where can people find out more about you and what's next for you?"
},
{
"end_time": 6847.602,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 6818.473,
"text": " Well, they can find out. I have a website at drmike11.org. We have a center website, which is alancenter.tufts.edu. I have a Twitter feed, which is at Dr. Mike 11. And what's next? It's a good question. I don't, you know, I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen next, but I certainly know the things that we are trying to do and that we're working on. And you can go to our website and see all kinds of projects that we're working on."
},
{
"end_time": 6877.722,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 6848.217,
"text": " In the areas of trying to lay a better foundation for understanding basal cognition and understanding morphogenesis and developing applications and birth defects and regeneration and cancer, we're doing some work in machine learning and trying to sort of close that loop and understand how we can use the principles that we learn in biology to make novel and better cognitive"
},
{
"end_time": 6907.671,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 6877.927,
"text": " And the links to everything that Michael just mentioned will be in the description, so please check that out. You mentioned two sides of the same coin, but I didn't quite understand that. How is it that developmental biology and consciousness may be two sides? Because you mentioned one is first and third person is the other. So how are they two sides of the same coin? Well, in many ways, first of all, the fact that we all start life as a single cell, and that self-assembles"
},
{
"end_time": 6926.118,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 6907.91,
"text": " into"
},
{
"end_time": 6955.589,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 6926.408,
"text": " and supported by a collection of competent agencies being cells is very similar to how the body is and the pattern of the body is arranged by the collective intelligence of cells. Morphogenesis is a collective intelligence problem. It is not a chemistry problem or a genetics problem. It's a problem of collective intelligence and those same kinds of issues arise when you're trying to understand any kind of a human or any other centralized intelligence"
},
{
"end_time": 6981.852,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 6955.913,
"text": " How does the information processing and the capacities of lots of independent subunits, in the case of brains, those will be neurons, but in the case of the body, it will be other types of cells. How do they work together to pursue goals and plans and have preferences that don't belong to any of the individual subunits themselves? Making a limb is a goal that no individual cell knows what a limb is."
},
{
"end_time": 7011.101,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 6982.415,
"text": " can answer the question of, well, how many fingers are we supposed to have or how long is the finger supposed to be? That is a piece of information that only the cellular collective has, right? So this ability of pursuing large scale goals of having and having collective information that's more than the sum of its parts is exactly the same question of where does intelligence and sort of cognitive capacity come from. Those problems will be answered together. They will not be answered."
},
{
"end_time": 7035.009,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7011.34,
"text": " If either one of these things remains mysterious, we won't have an answer to the other. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for spending so much time. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for your questions. I want to let everyone know that this, I think, is Nobel Prize-winning work, so I will do my best to promote this and get you some more attention, man. I hope so. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's very kind. Thank you. I appreciate it."
},
{
"end_time": 7055.708,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7036.544,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.