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I highly recommend this video from Levin. It was my introduction to his work. What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - Ne

I highly recommend this video from Levin. It was my introduction to his work. What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

carapace 5y ago
Pretty much the most important thing happening right now, IMO. The real information revolution (don't get me wrong, silicon transistors are nice, but life considered as a technology is far far beyond that, eh? It's four billion-year-old self-improving nanotech.) One fascinating thing about this work is that we have a subjective "interface" to the "technology" already. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that one can engender e.g. limb regrowth or bone-shaping using some kind of guided meditation. Recall that the "3-Minute Mile" was a psychological, not physical, barrier. I think we're faced with a similar situation here: the only thing preventing us from learning to regrow limbs is the common belief that it's impossible. I find it curious that the very idea of researching limb and organ regeneration is obscure in the first place. Why is that so unthinkably far out but e.g. self-driving cars are taken seriously?
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I'd expect the main issues with regrowing limbs are their heterogeneity. Your liver can generate its complex structure via the local communication of cells, but your limbs did that only once. The mechanisms in the body that grew out your more complicated macro qualities are finely tuned to do all of it at once. Maybe we could micromanage it ourselves, but the actual body doesn't know how to do it itself.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    > The mechanisms in the body that grew out your more complicated macro qualities are finely tuned to do all of it at once. Maybe we could micromanage it ourselves, but the actual body doesn't know how to do it itself. The linked video in the grandparent post argues pretty convincingly that the body might know exactly that, actually.
    - ravi-delia 5y ago
      My reading of the article, admittedly not a professional one, was that there is definitely still some micromanaging to do. That being said, yeah I'm definitely not confident in my position here. Every single damn thing I learn about biology makes it all the more incredible.
      - intergalplan 5y ago
        The work seemed to pointedly avoid micromanaging, by instead finding out how to open up the correct pathways between cells in a region and instruct them to become something else. No need to say "OK, these cells need to become a retina, these need to become a cornea" or to figure out how to change the body plan of the creature at the DNA level—just place a "become an eye" marker in the right spot, and boom, the cells self-organize to become an eye, and may even manage to connect themselves to the CNS such that it becomes a functioning eye! The key insight seems to be that you can hack the (as the research put it, by analogy) software of a set of cells and let the hardware (DNA, cell mechanisms) worry about exactly how to do what you told them to do, so rather than, say, figuring out how to read DNA and tell what kind of organism will come out of it such that we can start adding or removing bits here and there (very, very hard), you can instead screw around with inter-cell signaling to hijack functionality that the cells already have, but just aren't using, to get them to do new things. I thought there were several "holy shit" moments in the video. The cancer thing—yikes. Reconnect genetically-broken, actively dangerous cells to the inter-cell communication network and they stop acting crazy, while still having messed-up DNA? That's a surprising result, and a powerful demonstration of what the technique can accomplish (may not be therapeutically useful for a bunch of reasons I can think up, but it still seems like a notable, surprising result) Another was the sticky "memory" of a modified organism, that is, the worm that'd had its tail cut off then been instructed to make a second head there instead, and then had that cut off and... grew a head again, without further prompting, demonstrating that body layout and gene expression is some combination of DNA and a kind of cell-memory or cell-state across the whole organism, not something driven entirely deterministically by DNA alone. The part about tricking worms into growing heads for 100-150 million-year separated evolutionary relatives, complete with the correct-for-the-other-species brain, was nuts. The "instructions" are still there, just dormant, and if you confuse the cell-memory (if you will) of what it's supposed to be it'll sometimes decide to be the wrong species. WTF.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  Had the thought before. I think it's self delusion to think this would be true unless we think of humans being designed/modified machines and dreams/meditation are the console.
  - carapace 5y ago
    Well, FWIW, I think one of the straightforward but mind-blowing implications of Levin et. al.'s work is that living organisms are designed, by them themselves. Cells think. There's no a prior reason (I can see) to disallow that humans and other multicellular life forms are the "art" of microbes. (We are Solaris) It seems to me that we are the products of intelligent design, not (necessarily) of the intelligence of God, but of the intelligence of the biosphere itself.
flobosg 5y ago
Here’s a newer talk from him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43-XE1uwWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43-XE1uwWc
desperate 5y ago
Thanks for this, incredibly informative.

carapace 5y ago

Pretty much the most important thing happening right now, IMO. The real information revolution (don't get me wrong, silicon transistors are nice, but life considered as a technology is far far beyond that, eh? It's four billion-year-old self-improving nanotech.) One fascinating thing about this work is that we have a subjective "interface" to the "technology" already. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that one can engender e.g. limb regrowth or bone-shaping using some kind of guided meditation. Recall that the "3-Minute Mile" was a psychological, not physical, barrier. I think we're faced with a similar situation here: the only thing preventing us from learning to regrow limbs is the common belief that it's impossible. I find it curious that the very idea of researching limb and organ regeneration is obscure in the first place. Why is that so unthinkably far out but e.g. self-driving cars are taken seriously?

ravi-delia 5y ago
I'd expect the main issues with regrowing limbs are their heterogeneity. Your liver can generate its complex structure via the local communication of cells, but your limbs did that only once. The mechanisms in the body that grew out your more complicated macro qualities are finely tuned to do all of it at once. Maybe we could micromanage it ourselves, but the actual body doesn't know how to do it itself.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  > The mechanisms in the body that grew out your more complicated macro qualities are finely tuned to do all of it at once. Maybe we could micromanage it ourselves, but the actual body doesn't know how to do it itself. The linked video in the grandparent post argues pretty convincingly that the body might know exactly that, actually.
  - ravi-delia 5y ago
    My reading of the article, admittedly not a professional one, was that there is definitely still some micromanaging to do. That being said, yeah I'm definitely not confident in my position here. Every single damn thing I learn about biology makes it all the more incredible.
    - intergalplan 5y ago
      The work seemed to pointedly avoid micromanaging, by instead finding out how to open up the correct pathways between cells in a region and instruct them to become something else. No need to say "OK, these cells need to become a retina, these need to become a cornea" or to figure out how to change the body plan of the creature at the DNA level—just place a "become an eye" marker in the right spot, and boom, the cells self-organize to become an eye, and may even manage to connect themselves to the CNS such that it becomes a functioning eye! The key insight seems to be that you can hack the (as the research put it, by analogy) software of a set of cells and let the hardware (DNA, cell mechanisms) worry about exactly how to do what you told them to do, so rather than, say, figuring out how to read DNA and tell what kind of organism will come out of it such that we can start adding or removing bits here and there (very, very hard), you can instead screw around with inter-cell signaling to hijack functionality that the cells already have, but just aren't using, to get them to do new things. I thought there were several "holy shit" moments in the video. The cancer thing—yikes. Reconnect genetically-broken, actively dangerous cells to the inter-cell communication network and they stop acting crazy, while still having messed-up DNA? That's a surprising result, and a powerful demonstration of what the technique can accomplish (may not be therapeutically useful for a bunch of reasons I can think up, but it still seems like a notable, surprising result) Another was the sticky "memory" of a modified organism, that is, the worm that'd had its tail cut off then been instructed to make a second head there instead, and then had that cut off and... grew a head again, without further prompting, demonstrating that body layout and gene expression is some combination of DNA and a kind of cell-memory or cell-state across the whole organism, not something driven entirely deterministically by DNA alone. The part about tricking worms into growing heads for 100-150 million-year separated evolutionary relatives, complete with the correct-for-the-other-species brain, was nuts. The "instructions" are still there, just dormant, and if you confuse the cell-memory (if you will) of what it's supposed to be it'll sometimes decide to be the wrong species. WTF.
throw1234651234 5y ago
Had the thought before. I think it's self delusion to think this would be true unless we think of humans being designed/modified machines and dreams/meditation are the console.
- carapace 5y ago
  Well, FWIW, I think one of the straightforward but mind-blowing implications of Levin et. al.'s work is that living organisms are designed, by them themselves. Cells think. There's no a prior reason (I can see) to disallow that humans and other multicellular life forms are the "art" of microbes. (We are Solaris) It seems to me that we are the products of intelligent design, not (necessarily) of the intelligence of God, but of the intelligence of the biosphere itself.

flobosg 5y ago

Here’s a newer talk from him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43-XE1uwWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43-XE1uwWc

desperate 5y ago

Thanks for this, incredibly informative.