Morphogenesis, Selfhood, Teleonomy

hello everyone and welcome back to active inference insights I'm your host darus P way and today I feel extremely lucky to be able to interview two exceptional researchers Dr Michael Levan is a distinguished professor of biology at T University serving as director of the Allen Discovery Center at tus and the tus Center for regenerative and developmental biology his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision- making at multiple scales of biological artificial and hybrid systems fr cookling is Mike's postto at toughs with a special interest in the physics of life and how cells adapt to changes in their physical environment guys welcome to the show thank you so much for joining me it's an absolute pleasure and an honor um you're kind of you know everyone in active inference has a foray into theoretical biology but I would say you guys are the first out andout biologist that we've had on the show so I'm super excited to learn um but you may have to excuse some of my more Layman ideas that come from the British schooling system where I wanted to start is probably just putting in some groundwork for the audience uh who might be unaware of certain terms that get used in in the papers that you guys write I wanted to start with morphogenesis what is morphogenesis and in what kind of you talk about moros space what is moros space and how do those two things relate yeah I don't know who want to take it I guess I I'll start and and then France can give his view um so so thanks for having us um it's a pleasure to to be here and to talk to you um uh there there's a there's a fundamental fact of biology which is that uh complex shape and and functional structure are self-assembled so uh let's just think about embryonic development we all Start Life as a single cell and eventually that single cell has to give rise to a a a complex organism of different types and so this not only during development but also during regeneration so for example a salamander loses a limb those cells have to not only uh restore the entire structure but then also know to stop when it's done okay and uh there are other examples of this of course metamorphosis when caterpillar gets to a butterfly or or something like that so there there are numerous examples where the biological Hardware is uh is is basically reconstructing itself and so this is broadly conceived this is the notion of morphogenesis now one way to look at this is as a sort of open loop process meaning that there are a set of rules that are executed and parallel so um lots of molecule cells and so on are are following these rules and then uh there's a process of emergence and something complex comes out the other end you know this is the standard story of cellular atoma or other ways to think about emergent complexity and that's true I mean that does happen and that's certainly part of the story but the more interesting part of the story is that morphogenesis whether developmental regenerative or in the context of cancer suppression or remodeling any of those kinds of um examples one of the amazing things that it can do is get to its get to its Target morphology despite various perturbations so if you want to dig in I'll give you I can give you all kinds of interesting examples where not only the environment changes not only injury but actually the components themselves the the amount of DNA the type of DNA the number of cells the size of cells all of these things can change and certain morphogenetic systems are amazing at getting where they're going despite all of these things in fact they will often take U novel paths to do it which is uh William james' definition of intelligence right same goal by different means so um one way to so so so then so then the question is what what conceptual tools can we bring to bear to understand this process uh and what we have settled on or or at least what what we've been we've been uh pursuing for the last some some years is this idea of navigation that what's…