"Nothing in biology makes sense without teleology" by Michael Levin
youtube.comSaved by Bawa and
"Nothing in biology makes sense without teleology" by Michael Levin
Saved by Bawa and
to me the most amazing thing about regeneration is that they know when to stop. Knowing when to stop is because you've rebuilt the same structure, meaning you've gone back to the same region of anatomical space within some small error is basically anatomical homeostasis. It is goal-directed because the system has a set point. If you deviate from
... See moreIf you take any neuroscience paper and you do a find and replace, and every time it says neuron, you just say cell, and every time it says millisecond, you say minutes or hours, you got yourself a developmental biology paper. And it works amazingly well, because there is this deep underlying symmetry between the two.
So I claim that teleology is a subset of the spectrum of intelligence. And what I mean by intelligence is this: William James gave a nice, very cybernetic definition of intelligence. He didn't talk about brains. He didn't talk about what problem space was involved. He said it's the ability to reach the same goal by different means.
Reach the same
... See moreI often think about the example of the electromagnetic spectrum. So prior to having a good theory of electromagnetism, we used to first of all think that static electricity, lightning, magnets, and light were all completely different things. They certainly seemed like different things. We had different words for them. The vocabulary that we used
... See more