Engineering Body and Mind with Michael Levin

I think what you can say is there's like a set of developmentally preferred trajectories and there's a lot of different factors. Right. And is there some kind of morphology that you're shooting for, which is equivalent to, you know, a five fingered hand? And can we control that more effectively?

Hello, I'm Dr. Farah White.

And I'm Dr. Grant Brenner.

We're psychiatrists and therapists in private practice in New York. We started this podcast in 2019 to draw attention to a phenomenon called the Doorknob Comet. Doorknob comments are important things we all say from time to time, just as we're leaving the office, sometimes literally hand on the doorknob.

Doorknob comments happen not only during therapy, but also in everyday life. The point is that sometimes we aren't sure how to express the deeply meaningful things we're feeling, thinking, and experiencing. Maybe we're afraid to bring certain things out into the open or are on the fence about wanting to discuss them. Sometimes we know we've got something we're unsure about sharing and are keeping it to ourselves, or and sometimes we surprise ourselves by what comes out. Welcome to the Doorknob comments podcast. It's my distinct pleasure to have Professor Michael Levin here. Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished professor of Biology at Tufts University and associate faculty at Harvard's Weiss Institute and the director of the Allen Discovery center at Tufts. He earned dual undergraduate degrees in computer science and biology and then a PhD in genetics. Michael publishes across developmental biology, computer science, bioengineering, and philosophy of mind. His group works to understand the origin and scaling of embodied minds in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered and hybrid systems. Dr. Levin's work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer. And I want to say you're on my short list for a Nobel Prize. Just from intensively reviewing your work recently, and I was really glad to come across your work through learning about Carl Friston's work as well. So welcome.

Thank you so much. Yeah, it's nice to meet you. Yeah. And he, I think, would be closer to the. To the. To the prize.

Well, they give one a year, I heard, and he might get it in a different area, I'm not really sure. But your work, to unpack the joke, is just mindbogglingly groundbreaking. I think one of the reasons that we wanted to invite you is to introduce your work to a larger population. And I think it's hard to communicate how groundbreaking it is and probably Harder still to explain it without too much technological language. Farrah, you want to say anything? Yeah.

So our audience is generally pretty literary and mostly lay people who are not in the field of mental health, but are very interested in it. And so I'm excited to hear more about what you're doing and what it might mean for what mental health looks like in 10, 15, 20 years. Cool.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. I'm very happy to meet you. And I actually spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like that. Although I have no background in mental health, I do think that the. Our mental health and also the mental health of the unconventional beings that are going to be increasingly populating our world is something that we need to pay a lot of attention to.

Yeah, Yeah. I posted something on the platform formerly known as Twitter the other day, which is. I'm specializing in providing human therapy to artificial and machine intelligence. I don't know if I'm the first person, but I'm taking referrals. If your AI has any foibles, you.

You will be kept busy in the. In the coming years. Not. Not just with standard AI. Everything in between, you know, a biological and. And. And a pure AI, There will be a full. A full spectrum.

I'm a therapist for cyborgs. You can find me on my website. It would be great if you could start with the experiments that you've done, that you've actually shown things in the lab, and give a kind of a thumbnail of why it's important and what it can mean. Does that make sense?

Sure, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a million things, so I'll just. I'll just pick and choose a few things that might be. Might be interesting to you. I think one thing that might be relevant to this audience is the story of cancer as a dissociative identity disorder. And in order to understand this, you have to first ask yourself. A lot of people ask, why do we have cancer? Okay. And the better question is, why isn't it all cancer all the time? Why do we have anything but cancer? Because what happens in cancer is that cells break free from a remarkable. It's a failure mode of a remarkable process that we normally don't think about. So you start off with what you might call an embryo. So you look, there's 100,000 cells at some point, and we say, there's one embryo. Why is there. What are we counting when we say there's one? I mean it's 100,000 cells. What is there one of? Well, what there's One of actually is a story that all of the cells have bought into. They've all convinced, they've all been convinced of the same model of where in anatomical space. And anatomical space just means the range of all the possible shape configurations that you might have a tree, a snake, you know, a camel, whatever. And, and, and they're all going to take the same journey. And that journey leads from being an egg to being a proper, what, you know, whatever it is that, that they're trying to build. And, and, and we can also talk about some interesting detours that they can take that away from that. But, but what's interesting is that they, if you interfere with it, they will do all kinds of things to still get their job done. So for example, you can take an early embryo and cut it into half or quarters and you don't get half bodies, you get perfectly normal monozygotic twins and triplets and so on. And so this system is going to work really hard to get to the goal. And when it gets to its anatomical goal, it will try to maintain for some amount of time and then we could talk about what happens in aging, but it will try to maintain. So this is a goal driven system. And what you have to ask yourself is what are, what are the policies and the mechanisms that allow individual cells to work together towards this very large goal? Right. Because single cells, you know, when, so for example, a salamander, if they get, if, if they, one of them bites off the limb, it will regrow exactly what's needed, make a perfect, perfect limb and then it stops, it stops when a correct salamander limb has been completed.

Right. And I, I would just chime in and say there's billions of organisms on the planet and if you're a human, if you're, I don't know about salamanders, if you're a champ, if you're a dog, the mammals, even if they have like a hoof, they generally have five digits and somehow all these different organisms like grow an arm with five digits.

Yeah, I mean, so, so that gets into that. That's, that's another issue that we should talk about is, is, is where the goals of these systems come from. And, and, and we can do that. But, but the thing that's critical to the cancer, there needs to be something that I call a cognitive glue, which is just a set of policies that we investigate by which while individual cells have no idea what a finger is or how many you're supposed to have or how long they're supposed to be the collective absolutely knows. And you know they know because if you try to deviate them, they'll do it. So in a certain sense, what happens during cancer is a breakdown of this cognitive glue. What happens. And if you want, I'll go into more details, but basically what happens is that cells disconnect from the electrical network. That allows the collective to have very large scale, grandiose goals, like building a limb. Individual cells have tiny little goals like having enough nutrients and some other things. And that, that cognitive glue allows the scaling of goals. And during cancer, it shrinks back down. So these individual cells are not more selfish. They just have smaller selves and they go back to these ancient tiny little, little goals. And when they do, as far as they're concerned, the rest of the body is just outside environment. Right? The boundary between self and world shrinks. So whereas before the whole, the whole, you know, the whole limb field or the whole em, whatever, depending what you're talking about, is their self. And they will do certain things. But now during carcinogenic transformation, that boundary shrinks and now the cell is just. The rest of the body is just the outside world.

So the cell has kind of an amnesia.

It has a shrinking of. Well, to some extent it's an amnesia. But it's interesting. What you cannot say is that the cell had memories and now it lost them. Because it wasn't the cell that had those memories, it was the collective. So, so this is, this is different. This is. I mean, amnesia is also an interesting thing in this system that we can talk about. But, but it's, it's more, it's more deep than that. It's, it's really the, the scale of the self has, has shrunk. And you are now something that. Something different from, from what you were before. And you can now have thoughts you couldn't have had before. Because the collective actually, it's kind of a mind meld. It prevents you from having certain kinds of thoughts. And it's the, the, the stress or the oncogene or various other things that enables you to have these thoughts about. Because you start to disconnect and you. What if I did leave? You know, and then you can sort of. Right. And so, so that's the dissociative and then aspect of it. And then that leads to therapeutics which we have developed that actually is a kind of integration therapy that doesn't kill the cells, it doesn't fix the genetic damage. What it does is integrates the cells back into the collective. And then despite the damage they continue to do things like build nice skin, nice muscle and so on.

The, the direct electrical connection we know between cells is like a gap junction, which is kind of like a window. And cells can share molecules and that allows them to share a collective identity. Right? That's the basic idea. How do you plug them back into the network in the lab?

Yeah. And so what you can do is, there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can force the connection, so you can basically force the gap junctions open. That's one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is change the voltage state of the cells, which in turn will reconnect them. Because one of the first things that happens when either oncogenes or certain other phenomena cause cells to transform, they depolarize strongly, their voltage gradient drops, and as a result of that, they disconnect. And then all kinds of other things happen. They become much more plastic, they divide. There's a metastasis, basically. So we have tools by which epipharmacological tools, optogenetics and so on, by which you can actually force them back into the electrical network.

So there's a very loose metaphor to mental health where, you know, parts of the self can lose connection with the whole and go off and do things that aren't good for the person's self, destructive behaviors, or get in, get into drugs and alcohol or have difficulty in relationships or work. I'm trying to think of which direction to go because there's so many other things you've done in your lab that are just.

Well, could ask, could I ask a question about what you just said with, with these, these fragments, right, the personality fragments. What would you say? And, and I don't know if this is, if there's an average to it or if it's a very wide spectrum. What would you say is the agentic level of these things? Are they, you know, how much, how much intelligence of their own do they actually have? Are they sort of fixed, fixed patterns? Are they, you know, fleeting or repetitive thoughts? Or are these things that are actually making plans, you know, like how, how far along the, the intelligence spectrum are these, are these fragments?

Yeah, so really quite sophisticated. So in the same way, and I don't know, everything that I've learned about cancer and cancer cells was at least 10 years ago in med school, but we learned how they would recruit sort of blood or lymph pathways to sort of get what they wanted. And that is really how I sort of look at when I'm treating someone and we See that there's something that's not completely integrated. There are defenses that can be quite sophisticated. Right. And they can recruit people, make life decisions and people can end up either through trauma or through genetics, you know, other stressors, we don't know exactly why can end up dysfunctionally functional.

Yeah, so.

So the different parts of the self can be very agentic. It varies a great deal depending on the severity of the dissociation. We were talking right. Right before hopping on. There's something called the structural theory of dissociation of the personality. And there's three levels of severity, primary, secondary and tertiary. And they talk about having an apparently normal part of the personality, ANP or world facing an emotional part or parts of the personality. And in the most basic form the emotions are mainly dissociated. And there's one coherent world facing part of the personality. So agency is more coherent and there tends to be more goal directedness and people are more functional. You start to see breakdown in secondary. There's one apparently normal part of the personality and so there's still more coherence, there's more cognitive glue. But the emotional parts of the personality exert causal impact on the organism and on the person and often lead to conflict. Right. Like I didn't want to do that, why did I do that? Or I want to do this, why can't I do that? When you get to tertiary, there's multiple world facing parts of the personality and so there's much more tension behaviorally though the emotional parts of the personality continue to exert this kind of in the background influence that the person isn't typically conscious of or they're partially conscious of. So in the treatment of dissociative disorders they talk about either looking for integration or also co consciousness. So a lot of times those parts of the self are afraid of being lost and they kind of don't want to become integrated is how it feels. And so I would say though, there's also a division along what are usually talked about as psychobiological lines. So it can get very granular. So fight flight might be like a big way. It's organized because these are mainly for survival. And so the emotional parts get locked into these survival things. And when you break down into, into the more granular dissociation of the world facing parts, they tend to pair off. And so it's, it can be very circumscribed what the agency is for a particular part. And they also tend to be correlated with developmental traumatic experiences. And so they get stuck at different Ages. So if you talk to someone, they'll have a part of the self that's a kid that is protecting things or keeping secrets, or they'll have a part that's very critical and trying to keep people in line. And what happens is the person's conscious self has less and less agency the more severe it gets. And part of the treatment is to restore agency through a variety of means as well as cohesion, whether through integration or, you know, better teamwork or both.

Very interesting. You know, I mean, the part about, the part about not wanting to be integrated makes perfect sense. There are traditions that will say, well, don't worry when you die, you'll be, you know, sort of integrated into the universal consciousness. Maybe, but, you know, how do we feel about that? But, but another question I have to follow up is, is there, is there a, an issue here or not with respect to the math? And what I mean is this. Under normal circumstances, the, the integrated human is exerting some amount, whatever that is, however we measured of computational power, right? It's, it's supported by the brain and the rest of the body and there's some, some amount of computation that a single human is doing and they can't really, you know, do. Under normal circumstances, there's some limit to what they can do. If somebody presents with N fragments, the sum total of what all the different fragments are doing, is it still equal to a single human or is there actually more going on? Do you see what I'm saying? Because, because you might think that if I only have a total pool to play with, then each one of these personalities is only going to get some, some amount of that. Or do you say, wow, you know, they're all doing like if we were to total up everything that they were doing, that's actually more than a single human can do. What's your feeling about that?

I think on average, you lose computational power. The ability to work with reality is impaired. Especially for us. We see people who have problems. There are people who are multiple, who are highly functional. So you might imagine an actor who's really good at switching self states, but they do it in an adaptive way. And the thing I would say is that those different self states, they also, as Farrow was implying, they create a different ecosystem around them because of the way they carve through the world. But on average, I think it reduces efficiency. But sometimes there are parts of the self that have savant like abilities. So if you look at something like the dissociative experiences scale, it will say how often do you find that you have an amazing ability to do something without any effort at all? So it's really, I think it's complicated and it varies a great deal, but it says something about the potential for the human mind if you're able to, you know, break into pieces and come back together in a dynamically adaptive way. I think you get more done than someone who is kind of singular but rigid.

Interesting.

Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think one other important piece of this, and you know, the sort of psychiatric language can, can be really pathologizing. So one thing that I try to look at is yes, there are self states that are healthier or make, you know, probably safer decisions for the overall, for the collective and self states that don't. But to really say, well, what purpose is each, is each state serving? And until we really see that, like with any behavior, with addiction, sort of dopamine seeking behaviors, like they, they serve a purpose and until we have an awareness of that, it's really, really hard to work with them.

Right.

Awareness is part of the cognitive glue. So I'm curious what this is percolating in you.

Well, and, and do you think that the, the mechanisms that enable these things to be integrated under, you know, sort of optimum circumstances would extend to agential prosthetics and things? You know, once, once you've got an AI whispering in your ear and things like this, and you've got different, different appliances and things that are sort of augmenting, are these things going to be, do you think they can get comfortably folded in or do you think they're always going to be, you know, kind of dissociated?

I, I think, I think those things will help a great deal. But there's a basic problem which is until the person is actually working therapeutically, then there's going to be parts of the self that sabotage anything that will help. So it's hard to have positivistic fixes until there's enough of a motivational state.

Yeah. So I think the first thing that gets folded in is really their healthiest, most protective version of themselves. Right. Or sort of. We say that people should be internalizing the therapist or a loved one who was supportive and kind and gentle. So I don't know what it's going to mean when we have other devices and other modalities. But right now it's sort of people learning how to function, to think, to see themselves. Really. That's what therapy does through the eyes of someone who's caring and kind and gentle.

Well, In DID therapy, there are internal protectors, and the eternal protectors maintain the status quo. And they reduce certain types of risk that are organized around safety, but they also prevent the person from taking chances that would allow them to change. And so you can look at phased steps. And usually the therapist has to form an alliance with those internal protectors and gain their trust. And that's kind of part of the beginning. There's a popular model called internal family systems theory. And they talk about the different parts as the manager, the firefighter, the exiled child. And then they posit that there's like a true self of some sort, which is like the repository of healthy impulses. I don't necessarily see it that way. But regardless, any kind of cognitive prosthesis would have to be synchronized to match with whatever the developmental step is required at that stage of the process. Right. And I think that could really be helpful if you look at treatment approaches, there's one called finding solid ground that came out of Bethany Brand and Ruth Lanius's group for working with people with trauma related dissociation. And they really spell out a sequence from working with patients. There's some clinical studies, and establishing basic safety and a therapeutic alliance are usually the first order of business. And overcoming what they call phobias of one's own mental contents. Right. There's an avoidance of what you need to know by virtue of the trauma.

That's very interesting. I mean, that's super interesting. I wasn't even thinking about yet in the therapeutic context. I just meant like widely for, for everybody who otherwise has no, you know, no complaints or whatever. But you now have these various additional, perhaps, you know, significantly agentic inputs into your cognition. And I'm wondering whether our, when they are working well, the mechanisms that integrate all this stuff will just say, all right, come on, you know, you're, you're part of this too now. And, and, and it will just, it will stop seeming like another voice in your head. It will just be more thoughts you have, you know.

Right. There's treatments like virtual reality therapy for psychotic illnesses that kind of match speeds and then can change those processes. I think the problem we would run into in traditional terms is conflict. So, you know, a good idea is not always readily accepted. So there could be a kind of a power struggle. Like, I know that's what I should do. Right. I'm supposed to finish writing my notes, but I'd rather listen to Mike talk on a webinar.

Yeah, so, so, so all of this is very, very interesting. And it, and it Connects to some other stuff that I've been thinking about. And I can give another example of. You said other examples of things that we do in the lab. I'll give you another example, which. And you'll see how it comes around to all of this. One of the things that we have been studying is if groups of cells in a body are, in effect, a collective intelligence that is solving specific problems such as how do I get from being an egg to being a whatever, Then one thing we would want to do is be able to read the mind of this collective intelligence. Just like scientists try to do neural decoding and read the physiology of the brain and try to infer what are the thoughts and memories and all of that, we should be able to do that to the rest of the body. We should be able to say, here's a group of cells. What are they thinking? What's their plan of what they're working on? So we've basically extended some tools of neuroscience to be able to do that. And so we've developed molecular tools to read and write these electrical patterns in the network that actually serve to represent the goals of the system. So in some cases, very few still. But this is an emerging to actually read out the memories that. That the collective has, because those memories guide what it is that they're building. And so, for example, we can see the electric face, which is the electrical pattern that says, what should your face look like? Long before the genes that are important for making the face turn.

Like a frog embryo.

Right, for example. Yeah, we've done a number of things. We've done for, you know, frogs and worms and human cells and culture and things like that. So, so, so there are these. These electrical pattern memories. And then the next thing you can do is you can start to rewrite them. So, in effect, incept false memories. And the reason you want to do that is for regenerative medical medicine purposes. So if there's a birth defect or if there's a failure to regenerate after some kind of traumatic injury, you want to go ahead and put in some new memories so that the cells now are building, whatever you want them to build. So one thing you can do is, here's an experiment. You get your frog embryo, and you take some RNA encoding a particular ion channel, and this is the thing that's going to set up the voltage that is necessary to form a voltage pattern that says, build an eye here. And we know what that is because we can see it in the native face. So we inject this RNA into A part of the embryo that's going to be, let's say, the gut or the flank or the tail or something like that. And it establishes a little voltage pattern. And the surrounding cells read and interpret that pattern because that is their memory of what they should be building. And when they see that pattern, they go ahead and they build an eye. So that's how you end up with frogs with eyes on their tails or.

Whatever, and they can detect light.

Yeah, that's actually true. They can see. That's a whole other thing. But yes, they can see out of these eyes. Yeah.

And just. Just for listeners, you're using rna, which is like a messenger and not DNA, and you're using the RNA just to control the bioelectric field.

Correct. This is not about genomic editing. This isn't about changing the genome at all. And there's a. There's a million other ways to do it. You can do it with drugs, you can do it with light. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. It's not about the genetics at all. So you set up this pattern. And so now here's an interesting thing. Imagine that we've only injected a small number of cells. In that case, when you get an eye, you take a section through that eye, and what you see is that only a few of those cells were actually injected by us. And we know because there's a layout, there's a lineage label, like a tag that we put in the rest of the cells. Why are they making an eye? Well, they're making an eye because the cells we did inject, they can tell that there's not enough of them to make an eye. And they recruit their neighbors to go ahead and they build this eye, kind of like another collective intelligence ants. If they find something heavy, they'll recruit other ants. Right?

So people are like raising a barn, and there's a few carpenters. They can still direct the other people to help.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a resource, you know, scaling the resources to the task that you have. Right. So now here's an interesting thing. Sometimes you get an eye, exactly as I just said, with. With a few cells that we injected and then all these other stuff. But sometimes you get no eye at all. And what happens there is this. There are a bunch of cells that are saying to their neighbors, we should make an eye here. So go ahead and, like, help you. You know, you need to make an eye. But the other cells, because this is a cancer suppression mechanism, are saying, your voltage is weird. You should Be like us and be skin or gut or whatever. And so they kind of, they kind of fight back and forth. And there's two ways to look at this. One way to look at this is from the perspective of the cells and what kind of pattern they're going to, you know, land on. But the other way to look at it is from the perspective of the patterns themselves. So what you really have here is a kind of a battle of worldview, so to speak. There's, there's a pattern that's, that's, that says you, we should, you, you should all work towards this particular outcome. There's another pattern that says you should work towards a very different outcome. And, and everything that you said about these, these, these personalities or these fragments being self protective and sometimes being in conflict with each other, that's exactly, that's exactly what we see. Yeah, they have their own agendas. And so the conventional story of all this stuff is from the perspective of the machine of the matter and saying that, well, it's the cells doing things and then there's these passive data patterns that they may or may not take up. But, but there's a, there's another, there's a flip perspective which says the cells and everything they're doing is just the scratch pad. The real action is in the, and the competition is actually between the patterns and. Absolutely, they might, they might have ideas about not wanting to be wiped out and, and you know, and whatever.

You could scale it up to politics very easily. It reminds me of how zebra stripes form that there's like inhibition and, and potentiation and there's a balance and the way it's tuned lands on whether it's stripes for a zebra or spots for a leopard. And it's like very mathy. It also reminds me of catastrophe theory and complexity where you can have these bifurcations. It's either going to be skin or eye. Under those circumstances.

It's. Yeah, it's a good point. I mean some of these patterns are only compelling in a, in, in a certain, in the, in the, in their totality. So, so half eye, half gut is not compelling to anybody and it never happens and the cells will never choose that. But the eye is a powerful, stable story about what we should be doing and so is gut and so are these other things.

When we think about how that might apply to, how that might apply to working with patients. I think a lot of times in life we're faced with these types of conditions and Mike where you can go one way or the other way. And with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, kind of small steps lead to these cascades.

And then.

So maybe you end up in a relationship that you didn't. Really shouldn't have ended up in if you'd been slower or something, or you end up in a profession of some sort. So. So how do you work with that? Right.

Yeah, I think, or just like Mike was saying, you know, it's not really that compelling to be sort of conflicted. Right. And a lot of our work is around sort of ambivalence, decision making. Of course, people don't want to make the wrong decision, but sometimes they can't make any decision for fear that, you know, it's not. The outcome is not going to be what they hope.

Yeah, well, if you think about it like, okay, so if those eye cells recruit other ones and you get an eye, or if the skin cells or the gut cells prevail, you know, obviously that might have implications for cancer. If the eye is analogous to cancer, how does the skin, you know, win in that circumstance? But in life, like, conflict can be stable, even if it's very unpleasant. And then I think the question is, like, well, what are the environmental factors and the developmental factors that lead conflict to destabilize? And that's usually what we're trying to help people, is to resolve, quote, unquote, resolve conflict. But until they come to treatment, at least in states of psychopathology, they live with stable conflict for many, many, many years. And that must be reflected in electrical patterns in the brain. So I've treated people with tms, and we directly stimulate the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And you can see on functional network neuroimaging studies that their central executive networks, like the CEO of the brain, get stronger, and this starts to lead to integration or at least internal communication. And it suggests that there are certain areas of the brain that. That may be more agential when it comes to generating this cognitive glue and essentially, you know, getting the different areas of the brain on the level of, you know, nodes in a network, you know, like airports in a hub of flight patterns to kind of work together smoothly.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, you know, this, this. This thing about conflict. So. So we. We have an example of that, too, which is we got these. We've got these flatworms, but these planaria, and they've got a head and a tail, and you can cut them into pieces, and every piece regrows of a perfect worm. So you can ask, how does a piece know how many heads it's supposed to have and which one is supposed to be a head. So it turns out that if you look each, each of these worms has a little voltage pattern across it that says how many heads. And what you can do is you can, you can do one of two things. You can rewrite that pattern to say two heads. And from then on when you cut it, the pieces will continue to make two heads. So it's a very, it's a very long term memory. You can, you can reset it, but until you reset it, it will stay two headed forever. So again, no changes to the genome. So that's not where this information it is, is, is. It is not a genetically determined hardware state. It is, it is. The physiology actually determines that. And, but there's another, there's another version of this which, which took us much longer to, to realize that's what, that's what we had, which is this. You can make a kind of it. We call it a cryptic worm. And it's cryptic because when you look at the anatomy it's normal. One head, one tail. What you don't know is that that worm is deeply confused and it doesn't matter until it gets injured. It'll sit there being normal one headed until it gets injured. When you cut it, you find out that every fragment is actually not sure at all whether it should be one head or two head. And they flip a coin. And so pieces from the same worm, some of them will make one head, some of them will make two head because it's a, we, we've analyzed that as a kind of a perceptual by stability illusion. Like a necker cube. Right? You look at it this way, that way it's, it's kind of both, both patterns are sort of equally compelling actually not equal because there's a ratio, there's a 70:30 ratio. But, but, but, but they're both, they're both sort of, sort of compelling patterns. And you know what's, what's interesting is that while the chunks of an individual worm are, are randomized, they'll either be one head or two. All of the cells within any fragment are 100% on the same page. So they flip a coin, but all the cells within a chunk are flipping the same coin. So what you speckled worms, where one cell is trying to be an eye and the neighbor is trying to be a tail cell, you never get that everybody within the fragment is completely in agreement about what we're doing. But across fragments they're, they've got this conflict of which way, which Way they should go.

Well how did the two headed worms get, get, get around?

They, I have videos on my, in my various talks of two headed worms moving around. So, so sometimes the two heads cooperate, sometimes they don't. So if they cooperate you can imagine that. So, so you've got this, you've got this two headed worm and it bends into a U and then it just sort of, you know, rolls around that way. Sometimes the two heads, sometimes the two heads fight and they sort of, you know, don't, don't cooperate. It depends.

So I wanted to ask you sort of how you got into all this stuff. Getting a little bit into the personal and then maybe coming back around to some more of the science and speculation. I'm getting a Star Trek vibe, but I'm not sure I mean stuff. But is that from Spock or. No, which is what the mind meld, you know, in Star Trek.

No doubt. The original, the original though, right? The, the original, the 80s tos.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I, I read a massive amount of science fiction when I was, when I was younger. I mean where it all came from for me was as a very young kid I was interested in engineering in particular electrical things, building things, and then seeing that happen on its own in the living world. Going outside and seeing an egg self assemble into a caterpillar which then rips up its brain and self assembles into a butterfly and asking what is the difference here? Why does the one have preferences about what happens next and the other one either doesn't or we can't tell and which is it? And, and how would we, and then, and then the sci fi and the saying okay, so, so if we do meet unconventional beings that are, no, are not on the tree of life with us so that we don't actually know what's, you know, what's going on then, then being, it being very clear then that we actually don't understand, don't know what the right criteria is of behavioralism materials. Is it like what is it? How do you know what, what, what you're really dealing with and, and, and then, and then later on. Well, for first, first really wanting to work in AI on the theory that to really understand something you have to be able to, you know, you have to be able to make one. And then seeing that we're, we don't have anything like that, that we, that we understand how to build and then going back to embryonic development as this, this incredible example where right in front of your eyes you go from a little blob of chemistry to something with a mind. And you can see it slowly and gradually. There's no magic lightning flash that kind of converts physics into psychology. And it just, it just sort of slowly and gradually scales up its competencies. And so, so that's how, so that, that's, that's how I got into this. And my goal in our group is to transition whatever progress we can make on these very deep issues into therapeutics because that's. That I think, is how you know whether you're actually onto something. So. Meaning that, meaning that I firmly believe that good ideas on the philosophical end should translate into practical. And I don't mean widgets, you know, for your, for your house or anything. That too, but, but they should translate into advances that make a positive difference to people that were not possible before you made that, that conceptual leap. So that's what we try very hard to do is to, is to, is to fill out that, that middle step from like philosophical insights that other people may have said, you know, maybe thousands of years ago and say, yeah, but how, how is that actually true in a way that we can, we can make progress with it.

You see, you see, you seem to have a really interesting contrast between being very, very, very imaginative, obviously very smart and very, very, very goal directed at the same time. I remember you had told a story with Mark Solmes, I think about your TV wasn't working and so you were trying to understand the inside of the tv.

It's what it was. Yeah, that story. So when I was a little kid, I was probably five or six at the time that that happened, I had asthma. I had really bad asthma. And where, you know, where we lived, there was, we, we didn't have access to any kind of medication. And so what my dad would do, the TV worked fine, but what he would do is he would. It was one of these ancient things with vacuum tubes. The screen was like, was like this, and then the whole thing was like this. And there's a lot of vacuum, these vacuum tubes in the back. And so what he would do is take the back off the TV and he would turn it around and he'd say, look at all this stuff. And I would sit there. And the point of it was that if you kind of get your attention off of it, your breathing kind of calms down and the stress of not being able to breathe makes it worse. Right. So it's a distraction. He was trying to distract me and it worked. And I was looking. I remember we would do this a lot and I Remember looking at this stuff just going, this is clearly a miracle because all of these things somehow work together to make the collective farming channel or whatever was coming out the other end. You know, this is, you know, this is, you know, 1976, USSR, right. So, so it's pretty much just collective farming all day every day. But, but whatever's coming out the front of it in this. But, but magic, but also, also not magic because somebody knew how to put all those things together. It didn't just show up. This wasn't a secret. You could, I asked, in fact, I asked my dad, I said so, so, so can anybody learn this? He said yeah, it's engineering. You can go study this. Well that, that's incredible. That means that, that anybody can learn to do this. And so there must be some rhyme or reason to, to how this is, you know, this is happening. And so that, that was completely transformative for me. You know, he would bring home all these, these parts, the electrical parts and things from the, the place he worked and I would build stuff. And, and so, so yeah, that's, that's, that's the, the point of the TV is that there's a, there's a rational order to something really profound, that there's information and things coming out the other end that wasn't generated by these pieces, but it was somehow transduced from information that is, you know, bathing us at all time and, and we're completely unaware of it except for this amazing interface through which, through which this stuff comes. Which is, which is how I, I see, you know, life in mind as well.

Kind of like the Force. Well, you know, when I heard that story I thought, well, I, I had a childhood illness, but more to the point, my mother had cancer and was dying for most of my upbringing and our TV worked and the original Star Trek was coming out of the front of it. But I think when people are exposed to adversity or mortality at an early age, what I find is they also often become very goal directed. There's something about it that kind of lights a fire under you or under one.

Yeah, yeah. I mean the, the, the, the, the sort of mix and the tension that, that you know, that you were talking about is. Yeah, I mean I try very hard to preserve the creativity, but I also think that the point is not just to sit there and have creative thoughts. I mean that's great and it's very enjoyable, but if you want to make an impact and you want other people to join you in that creativity, you need to offer something that is Obviously improving life. So it's not enough to be, you know, we have another book on the new age shelf to talk about these, you know, grandiose, cosmic things which have been said by much smarter people many thousands of years ago. All of that, that is true. But, but, but now in order to move this forward, you have to actually, you have to make it practical. It is not enough to, you know, to say, well, it could be this and it could be that. I mean, could be, but which is it? And, and so, and so that's, that's why I try, you know, there's, there's parts of the lab that are extremely focused, and I say, look, this, this is what we're going to do. We're going to make this thing do this. And, and, but, but what, what people may or may not realize is the reason we got there and the reason we do these things because, is because of the, some of the conceptual advances that were made on the, you know, sort of the philosophy side or the computational side. And it comes up, people, people will sometimes, I'll give a talk sometimes about some of the, some of the, you know, the, let's say, birth defects or regeneration or aging, whatever, and people will say, well, but these are, these, these are great data, but, but I wish you'd stop talking about all this philosophical stuff. You know, you don't need it. Just, just, just, you know, just do the experiments. And like, well, you don't understand. Why is it that these experiments hadn't been done before we did them Specifically because the theory wasn't there to allow you to do it. You can't, you can't. Right. I feel strongly about that. You can't just get rid of the, the conceptual stuff and still do the same experiments.

Well, it's a paradigm shift. I think Renee, Tom talked about that. Like physicists, you know, many, many years ago, mathematicians didn't have any way to model the foam on a wave, so they just crossed it off the equation. And now we have complexity theory. And once you have complexity theory, you can, like, understand and you happen. It brings me back around, I think, first to therapy. I want to ask Farah to kind of reconnect it. And then I'd also like to talk to us to talk a little bit about the future and especially this kind of ethical piece with AI and all this technology could obviously sort of like the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear energy could be used for great good or great, great evil.

You know, I do think that there's something about developmental in this Right. That our early childhood experiences inform, you know, we know that and treat the sort of parts that don't get developed. Right. But that there's this other idea that things develop in a certain way or they get certain. Our identity, our psyches, get certain messages about how to be in the world. And I think that those early connections, sometimes because we grow up in a society. Grant and I both treat people in New York very, very high achieving and goal oriented, which can be a great thing. But if we lose sight of the conceptual or of what, what sort of drew us to these things in the first place, it can, it can kind of be become demoralizing because it's just what can be just continuously, you know, trying to achieve and moving forward if, if we're not in touch with the part of the self or that piece in our development that either motivated us, excited us, whatever it was. So I think it's, it is important to hold on to.

So some kind of more basic need gets sort of cut off from the whole and then it may not develop as fully and then people put all their energies into something.

Yeah, we always do a sort of trauma like inventory and we have scales, aces scale. But if I tell people what was the first time, you know, that you felt excited or when was the last time you felt really happy? A lot of people do sort of lose that, that thread in their life.

What's yours? What do you think about? Like pretty much this is totally amateur, but from what I see, fairly normal, commonplace. I don't just mean horrific childhoods with trauma and all that, but like, like fairly normally, at least ubiquitous. If not, I don't know what normal is, but at least ubiquitous childhood experiences then end up with things that people need to work through and all this. What is the best case scenario? Like is it possible? So, so let's say future, you know, future science. We understand the, you know, the mind, we understand, you know, trauma, we understand all that stuff. Is it even possible to have a growing up experience that does not end up in, with things that you need to then somehow fix later? Like is it even possible to have, you know, to just like, you know, get there fully healthy? Or is it always some, you know, there's always going to be some kind of issue?

Well, I would say for sure it's possible to not have a bad outcome.

I think a lot of it is not in exactly what happens. So let's use childhood bullying as an example because that's a big one. It happens all the time, right? Kids bully each other and we think, well, you know, they'll just have to get over it. Why is it so damaging? Well, we know now that it is really, really damaging. One of the most damaging things that can happen. And it doesn't mean that, that the bullying is going to necessarily stop, but how we respond to it and what that child, you know, who feels picked on is told about himself or what it means about himself, whether it's like, well, what are you doing to sort of invite this kind of, you know, ridiculing versus an adult saying, hey, that's really not acceptable and I'm sorry that happened to you and I'm going to do something to like make it right. So all of those things actually we know because there's a lot of research that says that it profoundly impacts how they see themselves in the world.

Well, there's a handful of different inputs. There's adverse childhood experiences and there's positive childhood experiences. And then there's intrinsic resilience, which some of that is biological kind of levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor. And then, you know, resilient kids will seek out a mentor who gives them that better input. And then there's also like, do you fight back or not? So certainly not all childhood adversity leads to post traumatic clinical outcomes or dissociation. In fact, it's really a small percentage of people, even with trauma, who develop ptsd. So, you know, it's really important not to presume anything about developmental trajectory. By the same token, you know, culture and environment play a lot of factors, as do intrinsic things. You know, like I was bullied and it wasn't great for me, but I also fought back. I didn't particularly have a mentor to tell me it wasn't acceptable, but I kind of knew. I also discovered psychoanalysis at a young age. It was probably the equivalent of the back of the tv. I found books on psychoanalysis in the mall. My family saw psychoanalysts. So I kind of latched onto that. I think what you can say is there's like a set of developmentally preferred trajector and there's a lot of different factors. Right. And is there some kind of morphology that you're shooting for which is equivalent to, you know, a five fingered hand and can we control that more effectively?

Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I was thinking about this in the context of there are, there are certain ideas in the, you know, the scope of philosophy and whatever that are pretty disturbing. And, and so I had thought about this a lot because I was so, I was we homeschooled a part of. Part of their childhood. We homeschool our two kids. And so I was in charge of some of the science and the philosophy stuff as, you know, part of a kind of a la carte education. And I spent a lot of time thinking about this because some of the ideas are pretty disturbing, they're pretty disruptive. And it's not like you can go your whole life without hearing these ideas because at some point you need to be aware. But, but, but then, yeah, you know, the. There I. It's not good, at least as I. It didn't look to me like it was positive for your. For your, you know, mental well being. And so is it even possible? So that that's what brought on the question is like, yeah, normal experiences, like the first time you find out that not everybody likes your. Loves you. You know, the first time you run into that person, that's just mean, right? And I mean that, you know that that is going to happen. And the first time you find out this idea, somebody says, oh yeah, you know, the universe is this like cold, meaningless void and nothing you do matters. Right.

Those ideas can kind of, they can settle in or they can kind of slide off. And there's kind of maybe a developmental window in, in Herman Hess's story of, of the Buddha Siddarth. The idea is that you protect kids from all these death, disease, poverty until they're old enough to make sense of it. So in, in traumatology and we would talk about. Precocious experience can be potentially negative for me. Like, I went to Hebrew school as a kid and I was exposed to horrific imagery at a very young age while my mother was dying of cancer. And it was hard to make sense of. And so it took work later on, probably more work, and certainly changed the way I see things. And this is a huge problem just culturally, right? Especially with the Internet and with AI, right. Kids can get on AI and who the heck knows what is going to happen? Come up. So that's our like, last question I guess for today is where do you see this? I know it's inevitable that all these things are going to happen. Do you have any thoughts about how we can prep for it as a culture? I know that's not your wheelhouse, but.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, a lot of the. And I'm sorry, I apologize. I have about two minutes before I gotta go. A lot of what's actually going to happen and what should we do? Like that. That stuff is above my pay grade. I can't even Pretend I know the answers to it.

You're a par though, so you're an expert.

This is true. You, you pretend right? And so so but, but this is what I think. The only the, the the way. The the only way forward that I see and, and, and it's necessary for our survival as a mature species. I don't know if it's sufficient, but it's certainly necessary is a full development of, of an emerging field called diverse intelligence. Basically to, to really understand beyond the ancient binary categories of humans and machines and this other stuff that's basically was, was never really good but now is completely useless. That we need to go beyond this and we need to understand how we are going to ethically relate to minds that are not like ours. Humans have a big problem with this maybe because of our evolution and the importance of in group out group dynamics but, but to learn to, to have an ethical synth biosis so to speak with, with beings that are really not like, like really not like you at all. And, and, and, and to understand to be able to detect other minds that are in unfamiliar embodiments to go beyond what do you look like and how did you get here? And, and, and work up once once we can do if, if we're, if we get better at that, then I think a lot of other things we, you know, we can, we can maybe avoid some horrific, you know, ethical lapses and things like that.

That's good advice. Thanks so much for talking with us.

Well, drmike11.org, one word. That's my official lab website and Thoughtforms Life is my blog where I put my personal opinions on what this stuff means.

And you're an amazing photographer. Too far. You want to finish your sign off, Farrah?

All right. Thanks so much for joining us today on Doorknob Comments and please let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks very much. I appreciate it a lot. It was good to meet you.

Yeah, likewise for your time.

Take care.

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