Key points that stuck out to me (the Youtube description does not do it justice - would highly recommend actually watching it):
- Intelligence is the way something solves a problem, and is multi-dimensional, and things that we usually wouldn't think of as "intelligent" like frog skin (xenobots) or bacteria are in their own way
- It's much harder to reverse engineer genes than electrical patterns and what are we but those charges ... so what happens when we manipulate them (with some comp neuro) without changing the genes? We can cause the desired changes! The example given was giving a worm 2 heads instead of 1 by just changing its voltage map.
- There are *so many* opportunities for this technology - we can make a huge variety of "intelligences" by combining electrical impulses and base cells. We can use it to cure cancer and regenerate limbs (research is currently being done on both and looks promising!)
- This tech is in its fledgling stages - the ultimate goal is to wholly reverse engineer the communication patterns of organisms and abstract away manual manipulation to something as simple as "give me a newt with 3 heads". A wonderful analogy was made to manually soldering whenever you want to switch from Word to Photoshop - that's what we're trying to do with genes at the moment. *my own personal analogy here is reversing the code of something vs reversing the API. One gets you somewhere faster and offers a much more convenient way to change behavior.
- The entire human body functions similarly to the brain with electrical channels and inter-cell communication. And if communication is all that matters, you can add an eye to the tail of a newt, for example, by just changing the message the initial cells communicate between each other, not the underlying gene causing that message. (and quirk of neuroscience, the brain interprets that visual data in the same way as if it were on the head as it was "evolutionarily evolved" to be - see https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?language=en)
The idea that intelligence is problem solving is quite limited. It's like trying to frame every problem as an economic problem (with a single profit/loss dimension).
> The entire human body functions similarly to the brain
Nick Lane is another interesting person who is exploring alternative ideas related to cells. Although their work is not exactly the same, I find it interesting to ponder these ideas together.
Michael Levin recently appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast*, and here he goes over much of the same amazing material, but along with a visual presentation.
He gets good guests and asks interesting questions. His interview of Demis Hassabis was great for example, and Yann LeCun was good too. He went extremely deep with John Carmack.
Some of his interviews seem to skew a bit more religious / alien theory and I just skip those.
Personally I can't stand him. So much so that I can't bring myself to watch his interviews, even if the topic is interesting and the questions well asked.
As far as electrical fields changing things, anyone looked into any current research related to Andrew Crosse's work in 1837?
"Andrew CROSSE
Abiogenesis of Acari
Introduction:
In 1837, Andrew Crosse reported to the London electrical Society concerning the accidental spontaneous generation of life in the form of Acurus genus insects while he was conducting experiments on the formation of artificial crystals by means of prolonged exposure to weak electric current. Throughout numerous strict experiments under a wide variety of conditions utterly inimical to life as we know it, the insects continued to manifest. The great Michael Faraday also reported to the Royal Institute that he had replicated the experiment. Soon afterwards, all notice of this phenomenon ceased to be reported, and the matter has not been resolved since then.
I have not yet watched the full video but it looks similar to the talk I heard Michael Levin give (titled "Robot Cancer") at ALIFE 2020, and it was fascinating. I posted some hastily taken notes on my blog at the time[0] and still think about this talk often.
The examples shown of manipulation of the regeneration of worms were especially interesting. He showed how it was possible to have a planarian of one species grow the head of a planarian of another species without touching DNA at all. He posited that DNA is the "hardware", but that anatomy itself is controlled by modular software that we can take advantage of manipulating in an easier way than trying to pick apart and modify the hardware (DNA).
Developmental biology in multicellular organisms is one of the more difficult research subjects, even in apparently simple 'non-intelligent' systems like plant roots and worms. Anyone claiming they have some in-depth understanding of how nervous system development in humans gives rise to the relatively unique features of human intelligence (or elephant/dolphin/chimp intelligence) at this point should be regarded with some skepticism, particularly when flaunting terms like 'bioelectricity'. A complete absence of any discussion of the genes involved in orchestrating the developmental process is also a huge red flag.
For comparison, take a look at an actual scientific talk on development to get a flavor of current research: (Sept 2022, Genomics and Development)
Flaunting? Bioelectricity is very much a measurable thing and Levin has been studying electrical communication among cells for more than 20 years.
" A complete absence of any discussion of the genes involved"
That is sort-of his point. He isn't very interested in genome, but rather the actual growth and differentation processes. Much like you can discuss algorithms and software patterns while abstracting away the underlying hardware.
Levin is neither a quack nor a fraud. He has his own lab at Harvard and published many extraordinary results. No one else but him and his students can produce five-legged frogs, tadpoles with seeing eyes on their tails, frogs that regrow lost limbs even if they never do so in the wild etc.
You seem to have completely ignored his actual results, which are a huge green flag.
Or possibly you are dissing someone's work without actually getting acquainted with it.
He seems to say his lab has created worms with eyes on their tails that can see out of those eyes and two headed worms and other constructs. I don't know much about biology, but, assuming these aren't things that other approaches can construct, and that he actually has made them, don't his creations lend credence to his theories?
So maybe its useful to think of a starting point for intelligence as being a group of related microorganisms navigating a surface looking for food and water. The group will conserve energy if it can work together.
Suppose there is a certain path on the surface that leads more directly back to the food or water by going around a few distracting or dangerous areas. So what they really want is to work together to create a map and communicate it to the entire colony.
So by some means they integrate information about their local area, or maybe they can just consult their neighbors each step of the way to find out if they are going the right way. So if the colony is spread out and neighboring the junction points, maybe each one only needs to remember the direction to the next waypoint rather than the full map.
This even seems related to computer vision for 3d reconstruction of a scene, in a way. Because I have been thinking about ways to recognize points, lines, curves, shadows, combine that into surfaces and into shapes. Then recognizing objects based on combinations of shapes.
Say the different types of straight and curved, short and long lines, surfaces and shapes were stored as patterns, similar to the way that the microorganisms supposedly make their map. Maybe its a matter of connecting up a group of units, each of which stores something like a gradient. But the groups can be combined to form higher levels.
Maybe its something like, part of the colony finds food, and then sends a signal out saying "okay, remember this configuration, it leads to food". And then each organism makes some type of record of its own position relative to others in the colony or environmental landmarks, indexed by "food". Or something.
Like a bunch of chains of fuzzy gradients of different dimensions and levels of abstraction, indexed by activity or state.
All of the units index their own subsets of many different pieces of information at the same time.
> Maybe its something like, part of the colony finds food, and then sends a signal out saying "okay, remember this configuration, it leads to food". And then each organism makes some type of record of its own position relative to others in the colony or environmental landmarks, indexed by "food". Or something.
There are many submissions of videos of Michael Levin on HN.
Levin's claims are certainly extremely interesting, I want to know more about that stuff, but some claims are outlandish like "how to cure cancer" [0] or about alien bots [1].
Transcranial direct current stimulation has been around for around 20 years, and it directly employs the concept he is experimenting with. Being able to more granularly map electrical activity to actions will greatly improve it as a non-invasive method of controlling the brain (which should be exciting but concerning ...)
