From: Guest Speaker @SCIoI: Michael Levin - Communication With Intelligence in Unconventional Embodiments
Embodiment is critical for intelligence; however, the traditional concept of embodiment as movement in 3-dimensional space covers only a small slice of the way biology exploits embodiment.
In this talk, Levin presents a framework for understanding intelligence more broadly, and shows how the multiscale competency of bodies navigates many different kinds of spaces. He uses his findings in developmental bioelectricity as a case study for how an unconventional intelligence can be recognized and communicated with, for exciting applications in regenerative medicine and cancer. Levin also shows novel multicellular life forms, which highlight the remarkable plasticity of the agential material of life by self-constructing new embodied intelligences from un-modified cells. The emerging field of diverse intelligence merges biophysics, computer science, and cognitive science in a way that helps us relate to current and forthcoming beings, with applications in science, engineering, and ethics.
Highlight for nature being able to adapt to unpredictable/surprising outcomes. Bees might not find flowers in the same place every time of the year, they adapt to find resources from different places. Contrary to the belief that genome/DNA is a strict/rigid “programming code” that leads to specific outcomes it might rather be that just as the animal itself has a goal (i.e. get resource from flowers) the genome also has a goal (i.e. provide visibility) but how it achieves that goal is not rigid at all. This is how a french man was able to live a normal life with only 90% is brain without noticing etc. In the talk there is an example of reprogramming a growing organism to instructing it to make an eye on the back of the body instead at the front and it was able to live and see with the eye.
Nature inherently expects environments and life to be unpredictable and unreliable. Surprise is the foundation of life (Dune)
It has been predicted in cyberpunk literature that computer programs have the potential to become less rigid as they are today into something more adaptable like the genome as it is described in the talk. As the genome can be described less like a program but an adaptable system driven by a goal, so could computer programs become self-changing to achieve/improve at a goal. Like Mike Pondsmith’s DataKrash event for example which stemmed from living breathing programs/AIs developing into something unexpected that led to a internet disaster. Todays LLM/AI research is showing signs of this development today (prompt as a goal → morphing code that humans will not be able to keep up with).