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https://iai.tv/articles/michael-levin-me..._auid=2020
INTRO: For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.
EXCERPTS: And one of the things that we’re very interested in is: Where do pattern-memories normally come from, and what kind of pattern-memories can cells actually build to? One idea that’s out there is that these patterns come from evolution, and this is all that they can build. So, for example, the oak genome builds oak leaves, and the human genome builds humans, and so on. But what we’ve been studying is the plasticity of this process.
First of all, finding out that, yes, you can put in patterns that are not natural patterns. Anthrobots and xenobots are living constructs that we make from genetically completely normal tissue. So we don’t edit the genome. We don’t put in synthetic biology circuits. We liberate the cells from their in vivo environment, and we find out that they make novel living substrates that have new behaviors, new capabilities, new forms, new gene expression, and so on, and these things have never been around before.
There is no long history of evolutionary selection to be a good xenobot or to be a good anthrobot, and so that forces us to ask some very interesting questions about where their pattern-memories come from. What is the plasticity of cells, and what can they build besides the normal standard thing that they build?
[...] Do you see a challenge here for a neo-Darwinian explanation of behavior? Is there something about the behavior of these biobots that can’t be explained just by appealing to genetics and environment?
Well, I want to be clear about a couple of things. First of all, the things that I’m about to say are not driven just by the data from anthrobots and xenobots. This is from a very large amount of other work. What is true about the xenobots and anthrobots, like with any other system, is that if you insist on looking at the lowest molecular level, what you’re going to see is what you always see, which is chemistry doing what chemistry does.
And so, if you look down at the lowest level, you say, well, there is no challenge because we see there’s plausible chemistry and physics occurring. Of course, there is. This is not magic. This is exactly the same thing that’s inside of all of us: chemistry and physics.
[...] So is your preferred explanation to appeal to the idea that these are minds, and does this connect to your idea that there are minds everywhere?
Yeah, let’s separate those things. So we have not yet made any specific claims about xenobots or anthrobots in terms of their cognitive capacities. This is very important. When you have a system, you cannot decide whether it has a mind based on your philosophy or definitions or your feelings about things. You have to do experiments, because you don’t know, until you’ve tested a system’s intelligence, what it actually has.
When I talk about mind being everywhere, what I mean is that the tools that we use in behavioral science and neuroscience—the way that we study memory, learning, problem solving, goal-directed activity, all these kinds of things—those same tools are potentially applicable to a very wide range of substrates. You can’t just say, “Well, this thing isn’t a brain, it’s a cell, so it certainly can’t know anything.”
What we’ve found is that if you look for memory, if you look for problem solving, if you look for goal-directed navigation of difficult problem spaces, you find them in all kinds of other substrates and cells and tissues. And when you find them, that gives you a new way to reprogram that system, and interact and try to communicate with it, which is much better than simply assuming that everything has to be done at the molecular level and that nothing knows what it’s doing.
You broaden this out quite a lot, right? You talk about finding minds in lots of strange places…
Yeah. So one crucial thing is that when I say “minds,” I don’t mean that we can assume that there’s a spirit in every rock that has the same kinds of thoughts that you have. What I’m saying is that intelligence or cognitive capacity is an extremely wide and diverse spectrum... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.
EXCERPTS: And one of the things that we’re very interested in is: Where do pattern-memories normally come from, and what kind of pattern-memories can cells actually build to? One idea that’s out there is that these patterns come from evolution, and this is all that they can build. So, for example, the oak genome builds oak leaves, and the human genome builds humans, and so on. But what we’ve been studying is the plasticity of this process.
First of all, finding out that, yes, you can put in patterns that are not natural patterns. Anthrobots and xenobots are living constructs that we make from genetically completely normal tissue. So we don’t edit the genome. We don’t put in synthetic biology circuits. We liberate the cells from their in vivo environment, and we find out that they make novel living substrates that have new behaviors, new capabilities, new forms, new gene expression, and so on, and these things have never been around before.
There is no long history of evolutionary selection to be a good xenobot or to be a good anthrobot, and so that forces us to ask some very interesting questions about where their pattern-memories come from. What is the plasticity of cells, and what can they build besides the normal standard thing that they build?
[...] Do you see a challenge here for a neo-Darwinian explanation of behavior? Is there something about the behavior of these biobots that can’t be explained just by appealing to genetics and environment?
Well, I want to be clear about a couple of things. First of all, the things that I’m about to say are not driven just by the data from anthrobots and xenobots. This is from a very large amount of other work. What is true about the xenobots and anthrobots, like with any other system, is that if you insist on looking at the lowest molecular level, what you’re going to see is what you always see, which is chemistry doing what chemistry does.
And so, if you look down at the lowest level, you say, well, there is no challenge because we see there’s plausible chemistry and physics occurring. Of course, there is. This is not magic. This is exactly the same thing that’s inside of all of us: chemistry and physics.
[...] So is your preferred explanation to appeal to the idea that these are minds, and does this connect to your idea that there are minds everywhere?
Yeah, let’s separate those things. So we have not yet made any specific claims about xenobots or anthrobots in terms of their cognitive capacities. This is very important. When you have a system, you cannot decide whether it has a mind based on your philosophy or definitions or your feelings about things. You have to do experiments, because you don’t know, until you’ve tested a system’s intelligence, what it actually has.
When I talk about mind being everywhere, what I mean is that the tools that we use in behavioral science and neuroscience—the way that we study memory, learning, problem solving, goal-directed activity, all these kinds of things—those same tools are potentially applicable to a very wide range of substrates. You can’t just say, “Well, this thing isn’t a brain, it’s a cell, so it certainly can’t know anything.”
What we’ve found is that if you look for memory, if you look for problem solving, if you look for goal-directed navigation of difficult problem spaces, you find them in all kinds of other substrates and cells and tissues. And when you find them, that gives you a new way to reprogram that system, and interact and try to communicate with it, which is much better than simply assuming that everything has to be done at the molecular level and that nothing knows what it’s doing.
You broaden this out quite a lot, right? You talk about finding minds in lots of strange places…
Yeah. So one crucial thing is that when I say “minds,” I don’t mean that we can assume that there’s a spirit in every rock that has the same kinds of thoughts that you have. What I’m saying is that intelligence or cognitive capacity is an extremely wide and diverse spectrum... (MORE - missing details)