Science fiction, eat your heart out: Michael Levin redefining the rules of life
"there are things that can be said now that really couldn't before, and I think partly it's because the data are now there and the applications are coming..." - Michael Levin
Day one of biology class you learn the rules. Genes are the blueprint. Cells are tiny machines. Whatever happens in your body, physics and chemistry explain the whole thing.
Michael's claim is that every one of those is an assumption. When dropped and put to the test, biology might start doing things that no one expected, and put most science fiction to shame.
- Cells could be 'conditioned' to respond to placebos like drugs
- Robots generate new forms of life
- Ageing cells forget what species you are
- Causality emerges from beyond the physical realm
Michael has been challenging convention for quite some time. Increasingly, he's has the data to back this up.
"We had a paper recently in the journal Trends in Genetics, which is a top, mainstream genetics journal... talking about the genome as a set of prompts that need to be interpreted by the literal intelligence of cellular morphogenesis. I don't know that that could have been published even a couple of years ago."
Life: the genome is a prompt, not a blueprint
Read your genome and you'll find no fingers, no eyes, no face. Only a list of proteins. So how do cells know what to build, and when to stop?
The old answer is chemistry. But frankly, that doesn't add up.
Michael's answer: the cells interpret the genome, the way a mind interprets a prompt. The proof is that when disrupted, they reach the same goal by creative means. Or the same genes produce different things depending on the situation.
Cut an embryo in four and you get quadruplets, not four quarter-bodies. Take human cells out of a body and they become a creature that has never existed, with no evolutionary history at all.
He now has a machine, MomBot, that runs its own experiments on living cells to learn how to talk to them.
Intelligence is not in the brain, and not in the genes
Where does the know-how live, if not in DNA?
Michael says: the same place the truths of mathematics live. Nobody invented prime numbers and no experiment can change them. Cells tap into patterns of that kind, and so does everything else that solves problems.
He's already testing this. If cells can learn like Pavlov's dog, you could pair a drug with a harmless substance until the body responds to the placebo alone.
Causality: the physical world is not closed
The bedrock of physicalism is that physics explains everything that happens. Michael and Bernardo both reject it.
In plain terms: some of what happens in the physical world is caused by something that isn't physical.
Michael's argument is a child's game. Keep asking "why?". Why do cicadas emerge every 13 and 17 years? To dodge predators. Why those numbers? They're prime. Why are they prime? Ask a mathematician. You've just walked out of physics, and there is no way back in.
Bernardo adds that we don't have a complete physical model of anything bigger than a small molecule, and never will. So the idea that everything that happens in the physical world can be explained by other things in the physical world is a belief, not a finding.
Bored to death?
His lab modelled cells growing a body. No wear, no damage, no programmed death. It aged anyway. The cells reached their goal, held it a while, and then simply disbanded.
Give them a new challenge and they live longer.
Bernardo's take: perhaps ageing isn't a disease to cure but an archetype written into nature itself.
We also discussed:
- Memory as a gateway
- Minds without bodies: Jung's "semi-autonomous complexes" and tulpas
- Is the platonic space a real separate realm, or a convenient fiction?
This conversation was enthralling, and we hope to have Michael back as soon as his schedule will allow.
Keep an eye on the schedule, and meanwhile, enjoy the recording!
Amir
