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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
he told me that he was writing, and unfortunately, he passed away, and I think this book never got
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
written. He was writing a book on gap junctions and consciousness. And I think it would have been
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
an incredible book, because gap junctions are magic. I'll explain why in a minute.
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
What happens is that, just imagine, the thing about both these ion channels and these gap
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
junctions is that many of them are themselves voltage sensitive. So that's a voltage sensitive
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
current conductance. That's a transistor. And as soon as you've invented one, immediately,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
you now get access to, from this platonic space of mathematical truths, you get access to all of the
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
cool things that transistors do. So now, when you have a network of cells, not only do they talk to
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
each other, but they can send messages to each other, and the differences of voltage can propagate.
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
Now, to neuroscientists, this is old hat, because you see this in the brain, right? This action
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
potentials, the electricity. They have these awesome movies where you can take a zebra,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
like a transparent animal, like a zebrafish, and you can literally look down, and you can see all
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
the firings as the fish is making decisions about what to eat and things like this. It's amazing.
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
Well, your whole body is doing that all the time, just much slower. So there are very few things
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
that neurons do that all the cells in your body don't do. They all do very similar things, just
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
on a much slower timescale. And whereas your brain is thinking about how to solve problems in
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
three dimensional space, the cells in an embryo are thinking about how to solve problems in
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
anatomical space. They're trying to have memories like, hey, how many fingers are we supposed to
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
have? Well, how many do we have now? What do we do to get from here to there? That's the kind of
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
problems they're thinking about. And the reason that gap junctions are magic is, imagine, right,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
from the earliest time. Here are two cells. This cell, how can they communicate? Well,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
the simple version is this cell could send a chemical signal, it floats over, and it hits
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
a receptor on this cell, right? Because it comes from outside, this cell can very easily tell that
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
that came from outside. Whatever information is coming, that's not my information. That information
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
is coming from the outside. So I can trust it, I can ignore it, I can do various things with it,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
I can do various things with it, whatever, but I know it comes from the outside. Now imagine
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
instead that you have two cells with a gap junction between them. Something happens,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
let's say this cell gets poked, there's a calcium spike, the calcium spike or whatever small
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
molecule signal propagates through the gap junction to this cell. There's no ownership
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
metadata on that signal. This cell does not know now that it came from outside because it looks
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
exactly like its own memories would have looked like of whatever had happened, right? So gap
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
junctions to some extent wipe ownership information on data, which means that if I can't, if you and
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
I are sharing memories and we can't quite tell who the memories belong to, that's the beginning of a
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
mind melt. That's the beginning of a scale up of cognition from here's me and here's you to no,
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
now there's just us. So they enforce a collective intelligence gap junctions. That's right. It
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
helps. It's the beginning. It's not the whole story by any means, but it's the start.
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
Where's state stored of the system? Is it in part in the gap junctions themselves? Is it in the
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
cells? There are many, many layers to this as always in biology. So there are chemical networks.
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Michael Levin
Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots
So for example, gene regulatory networks, right? Which, or basically any kind of chemical pathway
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