Ep 9: Charlie Munford: Being Is For Knowing

The standard theory of biology says organisms are gene-controlled robots, that minds are along for the ride, and that life is fundamentally about survival and reproduction. Charlie Munford thinks the causal arrow points the wrong way.

Charlie Munford runs Banjo Tree Service in southern Vermont. He's also the president of the Agential Biology Institute, a nonprofit he co-founded with researchers at Oxford, Tufts, Tel Aviv, and UVM—including Michael Levin, Denis Noble, and Stuart Kauffman—to challenge one of biology's most foundational assumptions.

We work through the evidence: bacteria editing their own genomes under stress, worms passing inherited memories to offspring across twenty generations, mice transmitting olfactory sensitivities through sperm.

We talk about cancer and autoimmunity as problems of self-recognition, about what it would mean for geopolitics if knowledge—not resources—were the fundamental currency of life.

We also talk about pigs. Specifically: a pot-bellied pig named Mr. T who went to college, and what three radically different human relationships to the same species reveal about where values come from.

Recorded at Quill Nook Farm, Halifax, Vermont.


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Website: http://www.tristanroberts.org

Music: Produced by Turner Andrasz, beat-boxing by Felix Roberts, guitar by Tristan Roberts, drums by Merrill Garbus

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Well, welcome Charlie Munford to the quill Nook Experience. My
name is Tristan Roberts. I'm our host. I like to
ask probing questions of interesting people here on our farm
in Halifax, Vermont. Welcome Charlie to the show. And you're
such an interesting, diverse person. I would just leave you
to introduce yourself. How would what do you say to you?

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Are? Thanks, Tristans. Yeah, it's great to be here in
Halifax on a beautiful rainy afternoon. I am first and
foremost the president of a gential biology institute, but I
also am local arborists here in this part Vermont. I

(01:00):
have a little tree business called Banjo Tree Service. I
recommend them.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Charlie has got down trees for us, and I still
want the doctor him afterward.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, fantastic. So what's on your mind? Charlie? You we
got talking about biology.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
You lead an institute whose aim is to research the
very nature of being and evolution and questions basic principles
of biology, theories that many assume are correct and sattled science.
That's a lot to take on. How did you what's

(01:44):
the thread that got you started telling? Take me back
to the moment you got started in exploring what you
call a gential biology.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, interesting question. Well, I became interested in an agency
in kind of a roundabout way. It would be an
appropriate story for this podcast actually because it involves pigs. Okay,
So when I was when I was in high school,

(02:14):
I had a friend who was having a birthday, and
I don't know, kind of as a joke or kind
of just does an experiment just because I was a
kid and I wanted to do something wild. I answered
a notice in the local farm market bulletin for some
baby pot belly pigs and I got two baby pop
belly pigs and gave one to my friend for her birthday.

(02:40):
She named hers Hamlet, and I'm named mine mister T
because mine had a mohawk. And but Hamlet was way smarter,
so Hamlet. One day, so Hamlet went to live at
Anne's house in a courtyard. She lived in the country club,
so fancy neighborhood, but she had a little courtyard outside
her house. And one night she didn't give Hamlet any water,

(03:05):
and she woke up in the morning and she went
into the kitchen and there was a big sliding glass door,
and Hamlet was standing outside the glass door, and when
he saw her walk up, he went and got the
end of the garden hose and he tapped it against
the glass, and then she went over to the glass

(03:25):
to look at him, and he turned around, took the
end of the garden hose, walked all the way across
the patio and stuck it in his water bowl. And
he turned around and looked at her. That amazing and
so so that was Hamlet. But his brother, mister T
was my pig. And mister T and I became so

(03:48):
close big buddies that I actually when I applied to
go to college in this small college in California, and
it was so small that I went ahead and applied
on mister T's behalf in a petition to the student
body to see if mister T could come to college
with me too, and he was accepted. And so mister
T went out on Delta Airlines as check baggage out

(04:11):
to Deep Springs and he went to college with me.
And then when I was in college, it was a
small college on a ranch, and we had to do
labor on the ranch. And one of the jobs that
we had to do on the ranch was butcher and
I had to as the fond owner of mister T

(04:33):
I had to actually butcher pigs, other pigs, not my pig.
But that was a really traumatic and difficult experience. But
I did it because people eat pork. I mean, I
ate pork not very much anymore, but that time I did.
And that's part of farm life. So fast forward a

(04:53):
few years. I had this farm business, this locally grown
meat business. We were looking for ways to make money
any that would help the environment. And this was in Louisiana,
and they have a lot of feral hogs down there,
and so they're like very destructive to the wildlife and
habitat and they root up pine plantations everything. They're they're

(05:17):
they're not native to North America. They're an invasive species.
And so we hit on the idea of buying these
wild hogs from trappers and making smoke sausage out of them.
It was amazing smoke sausage, really really good, incredible wild
hog sausage. At that point, I was going through a

(05:37):
lot of like just turmoil in my life, and I
was thinking really hard about this situation where like this
incredibly intelligent animal one context, and it's the same species
in one context, our relationship with these pigs is close
enough that me and mister T could be pretty tight
in college, and he actually would sleep keep under my

(06:00):
bed and like wake me up in the morning. In
another context, I would butcher hogs for food. And then
in another context we basically you know, would be eradicating
them as like vermin, you know, as invasive species. And
in each of those contexts, no one was ever like
this is immoral. Everyone's like sees the value, and the

(06:23):
same people would be kind of they would see that
those relationships, those three different relationships that are so incredibly
opposed were all like morally acceptable, and so that really
something about that really didn't sit well with me. It like,
really it puzzled a lot of my intuitions about where

(06:44):
our values come from, where our ideas come from, our intentions,
and how they emerge from biology, because we are biological
creatures and so are pigs. So that's the real way
of introducing how it became obsessed with the problem of agency.
But that's that's a true story. There's a lot here.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
I want to come back to Deep Springs, but agency
is writing the name of your institute. We talk about
agency a lot. I guess I interpret agency as I
can do something for myself.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
I act.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
I am a being who acts. What do you What
does agency mean to you in this context?

Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yeah, that's a great question, fantastic question, and it's not
asked enough. Even though people talk about this kind of
ad infinitum. They talk about free will, they talk about value,
they talk about intention, they talk about mental processes, mind, mindfulness.
All these are kind of synonyms for the concept of agency.

(07:51):
So in terms of the ABI, agency has a very technical,
scientific definition, and you'll find very one's out there in
the literature. But the one that we are focused on
is gold directedness, and in particular, heritable gold directedness that

(08:11):
is contrary to fitness serving, adaptive plasticity. Those are a
lot of buzzwords altogether, but basically, what we're looking for
is ways that an organism might act intentionally in a direct,
directed way, in a learned way, that are contrary to

(08:37):
the interests of its genes, contrary to the interest of
it as a heritable process. If that makes any sense,
keep let's keep going. What maybe give examples of what
you mean by that? Well, there are a lot of
examples from like lab experiments, but just to make it
kind of real for the listener. We're agedential creatures. We

(09:01):
have agency of some sort, biological agency. It's an open
question whether that agency is there because of its evolutionary
value for reproductive fitness, and most people assume that it
is there because of that. But that's a puzzle because
what it's doing at the current moment with the human

(09:22):
species is we're changing our lives in ways that increase
our individual lifespans, but they reduce our fertility. So the
fertility of humans has been declining really rapidly, and now
even countries like India and Mexico are below replacement rate
the fertility. So if we use our biology in ways

(09:48):
that we can't explain by a reference to evolutionary fitness,
then but they seem to be intentional, they seem to
be purposive, they seem to be directed, then we have
the puzzle on our hands of agency. And really this
puzzle is present everywhere you look that you attribute a

(10:12):
mind to the process. So the way I like to
introduce the problem is we say that human begins as
a single cell a zygote, as a fertilized cell like cell,
and as a single cell like all single cells. It
just follows its genetic program. It's a gene controlled robot,

(10:33):
and that's the assumption across the biological sciences. But then
that cell divides and the human gets larger, and then
it's some unspecified point a mind appears, and from that
point on, it's no longer the robotic slave of its genes.
It's something that can learn and can change the way

(10:53):
those genes are interpreted by learning about the environment in
an intentional way and can develop goals and aims and
directions that may have nothing to do with its genetic heritage,
like playing tennis, for example, or even more dangerous things
like downhill skiing, or things that are even more contrary

(11:15):
to your reproductive fitness, like mathematics. Well, can't you say that?

Speaker 1 (11:21):
Isn't it often said that, Okay, if I go out
and ski, well, then sure may be risky, but I'm
I'm being athletic, I'm maybe impressing other people on the slopes.
I'm increasing my sexual attractive lives through mastery of a domain,
whether or not specifically might have risks. Can't a lot

(11:45):
of things be explained by this is a human sort
of being their full self, which is positive for their
life span top positive generally speaking, for their reproduction and
so we're having a family.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean it's incredibly easy to attribute
behaviors to survival and reproduction, like because it's a little
bit of the tautology. And it's also like it's an
unfair comparison because it's really a non sequitur, right, because
natural selection has taken away all the examples that are

(12:22):
not compatible with survival and reproduction. Right, So all we
have is organisms that descend from organisms that have reproduced, right. Yeah,
So naturally there's some there's going to be some way too,
there's going to be some way to connect almost every
behavior to survival and reproduction. But as I mentioned with

(12:46):
the human species, there still if you look at the
human species as a whole, you can say it's clear
that we're not making those choices in the direction of
reproductive fitness because our reproductive fitness is declining as the
world changes. So that's not the only example, and they're like,
I'd like to get into some more interesting examples if

(13:06):
you want, but go for it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Well, my question about the human species is you could
just say in the span of geologic time on Earth.
We've been here for blanket time. We could be gone
in another blinked time and we'd be one of those. Well,
they didn't actually do the things that are good for them,
so they died. So it would a way confirm the

(13:30):
opposite of what you're trying to go for it.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
That's still beIN I want to have more interesting examples. Yeah, okay,
yeah totally, but just to like round out your thought.
I mean, it's certainly like I don't know of any
scientists who challenged the notion of natural selection, because natural
selection is really like an accounting system. It says the

(13:56):
inventory was this, and there are this many debits and
this many credits, and now inventory is that? Right, So
it keeps track of which lineages have reproduced and they've
taken their genes with them as they reproduced. Right, So
no one doubts that that process happens and that that
shapes evolution. Right. I shouldn't say no one doubts it,

(14:16):
but I don't doubt it because natural selection is like
an essential filter that takes away organisms that lineage is
that don't don't have the means to reproduce themselves under
whatever conditions they found themselves in. So yeah, so that's
not really being challenged, and that is ann That is

(14:38):
a partial explanation. But the interesting part is where we
get into the really interesting examples is where that explanation
is not entirely complete. So the paradigm that we're in
is called neo Darwinism, and that's the idea that genes,
in particular DNA, the nuclear tide in DNA, are a

(15:01):
set of instructions. It's a code of instructions for what
to do. It tells the organism how to do what
it's supposed to do and enforces that instruction. So organism
can't help but follow those instructions. Okay, but there are
three problems, three closely related problems with that idea, And

(15:25):
the first one is that before we did before the
really genomics era really took off, like before the human
genome project, everyone assumed, like when we decode the genome,
like it's incredibly long and complicated, right, billions of base
pairs and they're teeny tiny molecules. So it's what took
a long time to develop the technology to read what

(15:45):
was in there. And before they read it, they assumed
scientists biology everyone assumed that there would be a correspondence
between every basically every trait that organisms have and some
part of the genome, because it's supposed to be a
complete set of instructions and there's no other way. There's

(16:05):
nothing else that's specific and accurate and error corrected in
the germline cell other than DNA that could carry those instructions.
So everyone expected there to be a direct correspondence between
genes and traits. They expected the gene for being tall,
and the gene for being gay, and a gene for

(16:26):
being left handed and everything. And it turned out when
we decoded and learned what the genome contains, it underdetermines
the phenotype. So le'll give you an example. So we
have it turns out only about twenty to twenty five
thousand genes. Those are protein coding sequences, okay, but we

(16:49):
have like sometimes up to one hundred thousand proteins. So
how can that be. There's only instructions for twenty five
thousand at the most proteins, but we have like one
hundred thousand four times more. So why is that? It's
because the RNA actually makes choices that sell makes choices

(17:10):
about how to It's called alternate splicing. So it'll take
part of one gene and part of another gene and
splice them together to make a different protein, and then
eighty percent of those proteins actually have disordered regions in them.
So that's another way that what's in the code doesn't

(17:31):
contain enough information to explain what's in the cell and
what the cell does. So that's one problem. Another problem
is that we've learned that organisms, even single cells, can
cut and paste and edit their DNA in really surprising ways,
and they can inherit in ways outside the DNA pathway,

(17:51):
so they can inherit traits even if even if the
DNA is removed. For example, they've done cross cross interspecies
transplants where they take out they take an egg cell
of a goldfish and take out the goldfish DNA and
put in CARP DNA, and the fish can survive that transplant,

(18:16):
and the fish grows up to have some of the
carp trades and some of the goldfish trades, so some
of the trades actually travel without the DNA. And one
of our research partners, they're dead Ri Chavi at Tel
Aviv University, has done experiments where they subject sea Elegan's
worms to starvation, and the sea Elegan's worms then put

(18:41):
small RNAs into their eggs that help their children cope
with starvation, and then that's stably inherited for basically indefinitely,
like up to twenty generations.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
How do they know to do that? Here, I'm going
to pack my RNA differently so my child can survive.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
How right?

Speaker 1 (19:01):
They can't be choosing that. I wouldn't even know how
to choose that. I have a mind.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
How are they doing this? Yeah? How are they doing that? Right?
Why is that? Why is that a future of biology?
So that's the problem of epigenetic inheritance, and it poses
a big problem for the explanation of life. So people
have heard a lot about epigenetics, and it's almost kind
of hyped right now, and so a lot of sober

(19:27):
minded scientists have been saying, Look, epigenetics is basically a
well known phenomenon. Epigenetics is is is the reason why
starting from one single cell, our cells, as they divide,
they change into muscle cells, blood, bones, and so forth,
all these different structures. That's because the cell turns on

(19:47):
and off different genes, and those the mechanisms, the little
devices that turn the genes on and off.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
That's called epigenetics. Okay, it's like stuff that's packed around
the genome and so forth, chromatin and histones and that
sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
So that's a normal part of biology. What's not normal
is that it was assumed that when the organism makes
the next generation the sex cells, all that stuff that's
been acquired during its lifetime is supposed to be stripped
away because the variation from one generation to the next
is supposed to be random, because otherwise there's a little

(20:24):
bit of mental process or mind or intention or agency
like creeping in. So the theory we have is supposed
to be blind. It's supposed to be blind variation plus
natural selection. And that was the way of defending the
theory against the idea that God controls organisms. Right, But

(20:48):
we don't need to propose that God makes the changes.
There could be a natural process that makes the changes. Right,
But the natural process we're have in mind is called cognition.
So the new idea that that we're interested in is
the idea that all cells might have some universal form
of cognition, even at a single cell level, and that's

(21:10):
a way of changing oneself in response to the world learning.
So that's the third form of evidence is the idea
that even single cells can do some rudimentary learning about
their environments. And so that's that's the really interesting part
of where we are in trying to reimagine what's going

(21:33):
on with life.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
And the key slogan of the Dential Biology Institute is
being is been knowing.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Can you explain, Well, that's that's my slogan. Really, that's
not really the ABI slogan. ABI doesn't really have a
ABI doesn't have a fixed perspective or point of view.
I mean, the reason that we've gathered different scientists in
the ABI is to ask these questions in a rigorous

(22:02):
empirical way. So we're interested not only in agency, but
in the ways the specific ways that agency can be
tested and what that implies about which theories of cognition
become the most plausible and and so it's a it's
it's a research vehicle. I mean, it has deep philosophical implications,

(22:24):
and that's what I'm here to talk about, and that's
what I care about, and that's why being is for
Knowing as my slogan. But the ABI itself is kind
of agnostic about theory, and it's just it's organized in
order to do tests.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
Okay, so thanks for clarifying. Being is for knowing, Charlie,
you've said this to me. I've found this incredibly compelling.
Tell me what does that mean to you?

Speaker 2 (22:51):
Awesome? Yeah, I love it. I love thinking about this
this way. So, so in the in the standard aroadigm theory,
everything in biology is the way it is because of inheritance.
There's been an incredibly long period of time where natural
selection has winnowed every lineage and given us only the

(23:15):
lineuses that work. Right, And so if that were if
that were a result of blind blind variation and natural
selection only, then because of the blind variation part that
they're saying that it's basically purposeless, right, there's no purpose
to life. That's the official theory, believe it or not.

(23:36):
And so that's called teleonomy. It's it's that everything we
think is purposive is illusory. Everything we think of as
as purposive or intentional is just the appearance of purpose
and not the real thing. It's just that our our
physical makeup is such that over time, natural selection has

(24:00):
given us the apparent goal of survival and reproduction. And
that's really the only thing that genes could enforce right,
because blind variation means there's no other agenda, no other agency,
and natural selection only takes away things that don't survive
and reproduce, so the only thing that's left is survival

(24:21):
and reproduction. Okay, so life is about in that theory,
life is about survival and reproduction. That's what it's in
the business of doing.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Right.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
But if we take this basal cognition ida seriously, it
opens the possibility, which is very new, that life could
be about a cognitive process instead, that life could be
formed by a cognitive process from the very beginning, like
at the very basic fundamental level, because you have to
have selves for natural selection to begin. The process of

(24:56):
forming a self is not a trivial process. I've never
been able to do that in the lab with anything
but evolved materials. We've never been able to take raw
chemistry and form a living being. So that's not a
trivial problem, the formation of a self. So the alternate possibility,

(25:17):
which I call this solution, is the idea that the
formation of that self happens because there's a physical process
that we have not understood yet that creates a tiny,
tiny bit of knowledge about the world. And what I
mean by knowledge is causal knowledge, like what moves, what,

(25:38):
what wiggles, what? What causes what to happen in the
environment around you, and that that process is the beginning
of biology. So that's the source of the self that
then may or may not reproduce. Right, So reproduction in
that alternate teleology is unintentional. The intention is to learn,

(26:00):
the intention is to know. But it sometimes happens that
because of the invariance in the world around you, there's
a stable self, and there's a and there's a new
solution to the problems you find yourself in that then
can be carried on to the next generation. So it's
so it's that survival and reproduction is unintentional. Obviously it happens.

(26:24):
If it didn't happen, none of us would be here.
But the idea of a solution is that the more
foundational principle might be cognition. And so that's a testable proposition,
and we're interested in testing that idea. What makes you?

Speaker 1 (26:40):
So we could say that the biological organism reproduces and
exists to reproduce and has a mind. The mind is
along for the ride. We this is interesting I'm learning,
I'm reproducing. You're putting it if I understand it, inverting

(27:01):
that saying cognition just the creation of a mind is
core to being as a self. Yeah, and then of
course reproduction happens that it's it's part of what the
self does in that body. It's not the core thing.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Do I have that right? Yeah? Exactly, yeah, exactly right. Yeah,
it's the question of is the mind just along for
the ride. That was a great way to say it.
That's a really deep way to say it. Actually, the
theories we have today don't connect the mind and the
body in a deep way. They assume that the mind

(27:40):
is sort of an epi phenomenon, like or it's a
or it's somehow it means to an end. It doesn't.
It doesn't really explain. Like, we call this problem different things.
We'll call it we'll call it metabolism, we'll call it
basal cognition, we'll call it nature versus nurture. The question
is where does the mind fit in the theory of biology,

(28:02):
Because there's not supposed to be any purposive trying in biology.
If you follow, if you if you if you take
a rigorous account of the genes. Of the genetic theory,
there's not supposed to be any purposive activities going on,
and yet and yet we find evidence of purposive activities.
And so we've got a serious problem there, not just

(28:26):
not just the appearance of purpose, but it's actual presence.
And so the experiments we'd like to do are ways
of teasing that out and focusing directly on that question.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
Well, okay, before we move on from being as for knowing,
I want to say I think something I really like
about it, which is one of the reasons you're on
the show right now we're having this conversation. Is I
just really if I find it appealing that this way
of looking at things to me puts just natural curiosity
and knowledge and you could say connection in the forefront

(29:01):
of our experience, I think where it actually belongs. We're
taught through d through our understanding of Darwinism, a natural section,
we're taught that reproduction is everything that basically in essence,
the mind is kind of a long for the ride,
but sexual reproduction, making babies, your genes, being the selfish
gene that reproduces itself, This is actually what thing life

(29:24):
is about.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
And that just I don't know. It never really appealed
to me.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
It seems plausible, you see evidence of it often, but
it also seems unappealing.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
It seems reductionist.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
And for myself, I've often grounded myself through curiosity. When
if I, let's say, I get more frozen up, I
get more depressed, I get more anxious. Way through that,
for me, you're sort of back to more open, non
directed state of mind. Where I think I'm more present

(29:57):
is through curiosity. It's central to my day to day
experience of the world in the way that reproduction is
almost more of an afterthought something in many ways. So
does that make sense to you? Does that reflect something
that you're getting at.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah? Absolutely, you know you said it in a really
beautiful way, because it's very nourishing. It's a very nourishing idea,
the idea that we have within ourselves the capacity for change,
even if we find ourselves in difficult circumstances, we have
this intrinsic it's possible that we have this intrinsic capacity

(30:40):
for change because the theory of inheritance is about resisting
change at all costs. Right, If you're a heritable program,
you're organized by the incentive not to change yourself except
for blind variations, which are accidental adaptations. So the existing
theory makes everything that you do that's smart or adaptive

(31:02):
or really nourishing in terms of growing as a person
or growing as a species accidental. But this other possibility
is that there's there's something we haven't uncovered yet about
biology that could make that non accidental. It makes it
makes it agential, it makes it purposive, intentional. And you

(31:25):
know that that changes what we mean by self, because
we've assumed for so long that the self is all
about protecting what's in me from outside forces and destroying
things that threaten what's in me. But this possibility, a pistolution,

(31:48):
is about what's in me being malleable, being adaptive, being
being changeable. It can change based on other people and
based on other circumstances, new circumstances that have never arisen
for can be coped with. And that's because all we
are is a reflection of the causal forces around us

(32:08):
that we're trying to learn about. And that's what's stable
about us is the way that we hold knowledge about
the world. It's not that we hold something particular to
ourselves that have to be defended at all costs. It's
actually that we're an open system, that we're a system
that accepts instructions, that learns, and I find that to

(32:29):
be really incredibly powerfully optimistic and nourishing.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
Tell me about you you're looking for the institute is
looking for funding right now because you want to run
experiments and do some basic science. What's your top experiment
that you're wanting to run right out of test your ideas?

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah. The first thing is it's about testing agency in
multiple ways. So it's not as if there's just like
my theory and there's ways to test my theory. It's
it's really a group that has been our research partners.
Each of them have labs, they have postdocs, they have

(33:11):
institutional support, and they also have a long track record
of studying this question in different domains. So Richard Watson,
for example, does computational modeling and evolutionary models, and Mike
Levin does mostly wet lab work. He does novel organisms, cenobots,
he does bioelectricity and plenaria. Josh Boningart does does swarm robotics,

(33:38):
oded Richavi, who I mentioned earlier, he does he does
epigenetic inheritance and C. Elegans and Eli Kamprusci and Joanna
Javier do chemistry of origin of life. So what the
ABI is doing is is kind of trying to unite
those different domains of questioning agency and do some critical experiments.

(34:01):
So one of the one of the starting points is
just can we separate agency, which I'm saying is goal
directedness that's non fitness serving. Can we separate that from
adaptive plasticity that is fitness serving. So so the experiment
there is you know, basically a mutation accumulation experiment, which

(34:23):
is that's a design where you try to take away
natural selection as much as possible and show what happens
to a lineage over time with no natural selection. So
just a mother creates a daughter, and she becomes a mother,
it creates a new daughter, she becomes a mother, it
creates a new daughter, and there's no new genetic mixing
if possible, and there's no taking away some of the daughters,

(34:47):
or if you do, it has to be randomized, so
you're not you're not introducing any kind of selection bias.
And so that experiment looks at what happens to a
lineage over many many generations with that out natural selection
under stress or not under stress. Right, say of control
condition and a stress condition, and they say, okay, if

(35:09):
variation is truly blind, then there should be no adaptation
to the stress condition at all. It should be no
more than random. If agency is fitness serving, then there
should be adaptation to the to the stress condition that
helps the organism live longer and reproduce better in that
stress condition. Right, let's see igniting.

Speaker 4 (35:31):
Yeah, okay, but if the fundamental principle is agency at
the individual level cognition, then it should help it and
that's the source of the self. Then it should help
the organism resist the stress and maybe become more resilient
to the stress.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Say it's a novel poison, it's some poison that's never
been experienced by that lineage, and a plausible evolutionary scenario,
and so that the individuals should become more resilient to
the stress. But it should be no better than random
at reproduction, because cognition happens at the individual level, not
at the level of the lineage. So do you follow that?

(36:13):
So that's one way of experimentally teasing out whether you're
looking at something that's just an adaptation that might plausibly
have been put there by natural selection, or whether you're
looking at a cognitive process that's actually discriminating about the
world institute in real time as an individual and changing
oneself for the purpose of understanding the world rather than

(36:38):
for the purpose of reproduction.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
We're talking like a single cell organism here, or is
this a theoretical bot that sort of is in a
great question designed environment and great question.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
That's a great question. So if we did it with
and there are some experiments you can do with artificial
life or robots, but that's way down the road and
different because what we're looking at is things that we
all agree are alive, right, so we have to to
start with that. So yeah, so it can be single cells,
but it also you know, like Ecola. But we have

(37:12):
a great model organism with C. Elegance, which is a
tiny little worm nematode kind of worm that I did
a jobb he works with. And the reason why that's
a great model is that you can have basically genetic invariability.
You can really control the genetics really tightly, and you
can have a lineage that is parthenogenic, which means the

(37:35):
mothers impregnate themselves basically.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Okay, yeah, right, no comment, that sounds yeah. So let
me follow this through. Let's say you've got some single
cell organism, as there's a lot of mothers out there,
probably they're being exposed to a novel poison that you're
putting the environment. Let's say just by one, and there's

(38:00):
one organism that starts modifying its cell wall in a
certain way that repels the poison.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
And then you see another organism next.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
To that doing the same thing, and then they die,
and then that behavior shows up again. We could be thinking, well,
they learn something and then encoded that and their genes
to pass it to the next generation. We could be thinking,
or what I'm thinking is there's also cultural heritage. Is

(38:32):
this an environment where there could be we don't just
pass on our genes, We pass on books, teachings, all
our digital and so to have other ways of providing
fitness to the next generation. And we haven't even talked
about culture and what is that in your world? But
I don't know if I understood experiment properly. No, that

(38:53):
was so insightful. That's a really insightful question because I
think you have understood it. Correctly.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
But you've also uncovered a deeper mystery in the theory
of life, which is that the things that an organism
does or not contained within its skin, the things that
it does, the effect it has on the world. It
sometimes has a great effect at long range with other organisms,
and so things like cultures do emerge. And so the

(39:25):
question that we're testing is not whether cultures emerge and
whether nematodes have culture, which they may for all I know,
I mean, I'm not sure, but that's not the question
we're testing. We're testing is whatever it's doing, however it's
interacting with its environment and with itself, is that serving

(39:46):
the purpose of adaptive fitness for the lineage or is
it serving the purpose only of building a self for
the individual? And by building a self, I mean literally
building physically a self that can persist in the world
as an individual, not as a lineage. So we're testing

(40:07):
the level of intentionality. Is this something that's happening at
the level of the lineage or is this something happening
at the level of the individual.

Speaker 3 (40:16):
And the hypothesis is the novel hypothesis, is that it
may just be at the level of the individual, and
that the lineage level effect may be unintentional, it may
be no better than random.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Okay, yeah, what would what's falsifiable by your hypothesis?

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Right? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (40:35):
What would show you your wrong and coll evolution of
vationing theory the way to go?

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yeah, Well, like I said, there are two, there are
two other possible results, like the one I expect is
the epistolusion result, which would which would show a very
unusual effect that most scientists would not expect to happen,
which is that individual level resilience goes up while reproductive

(41:02):
fitness goes down.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
So that's unusual. That's the result I would expect most
of the time.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Sometimes reproductive fit it's going to go up because it
has to find good solutions sometimes otherwise we wouldn't be here, right,
So sometimes it's gonna find a good reproductive strategy, but
usually not. But we do expect that it's predictable that
they'll that they'll find they'll change themselves in ways that

(41:27):
increase their individual resilience. Okay, that's one. That's one possible result.
That's the one I expect. But the whole idea of
being as for knowing of a solution, basal cognition would
be falsified if all we ever find is that it
serves the fitness of the lineage, If it only ever
usually serves, if it goes directly for reproductive fitness, then

(41:54):
then that shows that maybe there is no individual agency.
Actually maybe it is an illusion. Now if it goes
random with respect to both individual resilience and reproductive fitness,
then we're back to the genes first. You know, Richard
Dawkins self is gene world, and we're thinking, okay, maybe
variation is blind. But in that case, if that, if

(42:15):
that result happens, we still have a hard time explaining
epigenetic inheritance in other cases, and we have a hard
time explaining the problems I mentioned under determination of the phenotype.
We have a hard time explaining activities like crisper, where
bacteria cut and paste their own genomes. We have a
hard time explaining horizontal gene transfer, which is where bacteria

(42:39):
trade packages of DNA with one another when they're not related.
So those two other results would open up deeper problems
that are that are already problems that need to be investigated.
But either one of them would falsify this idea that
I've been talking about about basal cognition.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Okay, basil cognition B A, S A L. What does
this term mean?

Speaker 2 (43:04):
But that just means cognition at the level of every
single individual cell.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
And I want to say, Charlie, another thing that appealed
to me when I first talked to you about epistolation
is this thing that it really bugged me when I
was in at Marlborough College here in Vermont and studied
cognitive science, studied the philosophy of mind, and the course
of my I studied a lot of Emmanuel Kant Critique

(43:33):
of Purities, and I was really focused on the question of, Okay,
where does a mind come from? And can we can
we make a mind, as we sometimes called it, can
we make artificial intelligence? And if we could, how would
we know? How would you know when you have a mind?
And the more I went down these paths and riddles

(43:53):
and questions, the less it made sense to me that
there's some cutoff point or Okay, you and I have mind.
We can agree that there are two minds here sitting
at this table, and that pencil sharpener over there does
not have one. The plant on my desk does not
have a mind. By most people's standards, But I would

(44:15):
say it's probably got something in there. Where does this
come from? The old poem about the wind? Where does
it come from?

Speaker 2 (44:25):
Where does it go? No one knows.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
So it just doesn't seem consistent that minds just somehow appear.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
Out of nowhere. When we're made.

Speaker 1 (44:35):
Of the same stuff that the plant is made of,
that the pencil sharpener is made of. It started to
make sense to me that just a mind, whatever we
think of this, a mind or some essential conscious essence
of consciousness, would just be present everywhere and perhaps become
concentrated or developed different nuances in different contexts. But it

(44:56):
started to make sense to me, well, of course it's
just everywhere, because it doesn't seem.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Rational to just have it pop up. Does this?

Speaker 1 (45:06):
So this is Tristan's kind of view of the mind
and where it comes from. Does this mesh with your
theories of a pistolation?

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Well, in some ways it does. I would just start
by saying that most people I know that have thought
deeply about these questions, I agree with you. I would
say that, I mean, I'm not sure that I agree
with you, but I do. But I but you're in
very very good company with some sort of panpsychism. I mean,

(45:39):
there's certainly like, Okay, well, the assumptions we have at
the moment are that we're made out of chemistry, and
so is everything else, right, So whatever it is in
us that's conscious happens because of chemistry. And as far
as we know that, the laws of physics are the
same in our bodies as they are elsewhere. So there's

(46:01):
that mystery. There's also this problem of agency, which we've
been discussing, and there's also the problem of just explanation
on the level of the organism. I mean, we haven't
talked about the microbiome, which is sort of organ that
lives in and around our bodies that's coordinated. It's also

(46:24):
kind of imprinted by our bodies and imprinted onto our bodies.
It has a cognitive effect on us, and it's composed
entirely of prokaryotic microbes that are not related to us
at all and have no genetic lineage in common with ours,
although there's certainly similar. Microbiomes have been acquired from the

(46:48):
environments of our ancestors by our ancestors, but ours was
acquired during our lifetimes from the things that we ate
and came in contact with including our mother's birth, canal well,
and so if you're born vaginally. But the whole question
of what is a mind in our discourse is warped

(47:10):
by I would say it's warped by two really problematic assumptions.
One is that consciousness in mind are the same thing.
So we're conscious in different ways when we are on
drugs or drunk, or asleep, or under different physical conditions,

(47:32):
including being unconscious in a coma, and we're alive under
all those conditions. So consciousness comes and goes while life remains.
And so I can't help but drawing a conclusion from
that that consciousness is sort of a subsidiary of life.
And since we don't know, we've been talking about how

(47:53):
we don't know the basic rules of life, we definitely
don't know the basic rules of this subsidiary of life,
which is conscious The other thing that really pervades all
these discussions and warps them is that the idea that
consciousness is a tool that's used for survival and reproduction.
And so that leads our entire discourse of our culture,

(48:14):
the whole huge discussion that's going on about intelligence and
AI and what is that the basic assumption is that
a mind is a computer and the purpose of the
program we're running is survival and reproduction. And it's all
a functionalist explanation this idea we've been talking about about

(48:34):
knowledge that really isn't functional. It's not about it's not
about achieving the end of survival and reproduction. It's about
changing oneself and awareness of the world. And so that's
a totally different process that would entail a totally different
cognitive theory, and it would entail a totally different criteria

(48:57):
and ways to approach the problem of consciousness. So I
kind of drifted from your question about panpsychism about like
whether inanimate things might be conscious, But that's because I
think it's really hard to say anything about that problem
until we say something meaningful about agency. And so that's
the reason why I'm not I really don't. I don't

(49:21):
propose any theories of consciousness to speak of myself.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
I guess I was conflating agency and consciousness and minds
and putting them all sort of in a similar bundle
of things, and they are related but different, So I'll
I'm back off of that. But I think that yeah, agency,
you could really see something like agency being present in

(49:46):
every kind of organism, the way the plants bend towards
the sun. Phototropism. It's is that a form of agency?
You could You could see this everywhere if you start
to open up to it. I want to kind of
zoom out back.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
To you, Charlie.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
You're you operate at Tree Service here in vermon and
you're the president of a biological research institute that you're
rubbing shoulders with folks from Oxford and prestigious institutions. Haws
that happened, Like I almost want to, like say, tongue

(50:26):
in cheek.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Are you allowed to do that?

Speaker 1 (50:27):
This science is supposed to just happen in these and
these expensive labs.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
At these big research places.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
You seem to be tapping into something through your own
own agency, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Yeah, well yeah, or incorrigibility. I mean, I'm a very
stubborn person, and so when this problem started to bother me,
I started to work on it. And working on that
means search for the answer. I mean searching among the

(51:03):
people in the world who know the most about it,
asking them questions and listening to their answers, and then
working trying to work it out right. And that means writing,
but you know what, it didn't mean getting a PhD
in this subject because in some respects, it's actually hard

(51:24):
to work on a problem like this within traditional academia
because it's a little bit too big. It's a little
bit too big of a question for a PhD, Like
you really have to you really have to zero in
on something that's a little more tractable, and so and
so there's a bit of a structural limitation ta academia.

(51:50):
And also, like when I discovered this problem, just personally,
I wasn't in I wasn't in a place where I
could go into academia. I had a family, I had
a job, I had kids to support. I couldn't just
move to whatever university in the world would would give
me the best PhD track. So I'm a big believer
in This is gonna sound kind of funky, But when

(52:14):
I was a kid, I really love Davy Crockett. Yeah,
and you know, Davy Crockett's motto was be sure you're right,
then go ahead. You know, it's been about five years
on to be sure You're right part, you know, before
I did, before I did finally form this group. But

(52:39):
the success of all this is only because of the
timeliness of the question, and like pursuing something with your
whole heart when you believe that it's important. That's the
thing that I'm doing, like just holding this question and
taking it seriously and not deviating from it, like trying

(52:59):
to really trying to get to the answer, which means
I don't have the answer. I don't have all the
answers to these questions. Like I'm like incredibly open to
people proposing solutions because we desperately need better ideas about
this problem. And so that's motivated me to have a
sort of like deep curiosity and engage with people that

(53:22):
are very serious. And so I think that comes across.
I think the purpose purposeful search. That's a serious it's
a serious mission. I think that comes across, and that's
sometimes hard to mix. It's sometimes hard to mix that
with a professional ambition or an academic appointment. To be honest,

(53:45):
that those things don't tend to travel together. I mean,
entrepreneurs often have that type of focus and like drive
for one particular thing, you know, but when it's a
question like this, a scientific question, it really well it
needs its own institute. I mean, that's why that's what
we's that's why we that's why we need we need

(54:06):
this vehicle.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
So I just I learned something earlier in this conversation
that can ACTSSS. I I was looking up on my
shelf for my book written by ll Nune that Deep Springs,
and I also applied to Deep Springs, and I did
get brought out there and interview, had spent a couple

(54:31):
of days. I had an amazing grip, We'll always remember it,
and then did not get accepted. If listeners don't you know,
Deep Springs is a college with two dozen students. At
the time I applied, and think you applied, it was
all male. That's changed they were accepting twelve students a year.

(54:52):
So but it just seemed to me like a ll
None created it because he he basically he was trying
to get guys to run his power company, and the
sort of college graduate he was getting from the Eastern
Ivy League colleges was just too book smart for him.

(55:13):
I understanding he wanted people that could really lead and
search and be resilient. So that's my speech about Deep Springs.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
I don't know you. I didn't know you went there.
What was your experience like, yeah, well, yeah, awesome, that's
so awesome. Yeah, I didn't realize that either. Well I
can say about Deep Springs that you know, the student
body is in charge of the application process, which means
that it's very haphazard. There's no question in my mind

(55:43):
that you would have been an amazing Deep Bringer. So
you know, you can arrest this year that was that
was some nineteen year old not knowing what they're doing.
They didn't accept you. But but yeah, it's a totally
fascinating place and and a wonderful Yeah, it was a
wonderful training. I mean, yeah, Deep Springs is kind of

(56:05):
set up to encourage you to do things that you
seem impossible and you never would have been put in
the position to do them at a normal in a
normal institution. You're never qualified for what you are doing.
And so yeah, I actually hadn't like totally self reflected

(56:25):
that much about that, but but I do think and
and part of it was I wanted to go there
because of that kind of place, you know, But but
I definitely could learn learn a lot about taking Yeah,
I mean I would just call it taking problems seriously
and believing that you're you can have an impact, but

(56:45):
it's like it takes a lot of work.

Speaker 3 (56:47):
I mean, it takes a long time. Like that's one
of the kind of realities of deep springs is like
nothing is easy.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
You know.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah, you're literally running a ranch while going to college.
You know, you wake me up at for am to
milk the cows and then going to class. It's it's
life is work, work is life? Study? Beterious. Yeah, So
let's do some like intellectual ticklers. Can you point out

(57:16):
I think you've done a really good good job in
past conversations of pointing out some of the things that
are flawed or odd or you know, unsolved about current
evolutionary theory consensus. What are some of your favorite of
these that could spark in the listener some questioning of
of what their understanding is of biology.

Speaker 2 (57:36):
Do you mean like examples of okay, so like horizontal okay,
I thought you might, yeah, I thought you might be okay, Right,
let me kind of run through some examples in like
ascending order of complexity.

Speaker 3 (57:55):
So procarios do amazing stuff. They actually are really complicated.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
That these are just bacteria what we call microbes, right,
they're just single cells, but they can cut and paste
and edit their genomes to solve problems like so that's
how we discovered crisper, is that bacteria actually have ways
of editing their own genomes when they encounter viruses to
carry then templates that can help them defend against those viruses.

(58:24):
So it's really hard to imagine a robot controlled by
a program that the robot then edits right, So that's
incredibly strange. And then another thing that's against the rules
is inheriting in ways that are outside that the error
corrected genome. So we talked about some of those with
the small RNA inheritance in cl eGames and the goldfish

(58:48):
experiment with a cross species nuclear transplant. So those are
really hard to explain in the conventional way. And bacterial
konjig is unrelated bacteria just trading bits of DNA, like
giving it away to each other, and that's that's a

(59:09):
big problem in hospitals that is caused is causing incredible
trouble with antibacterial with bacterial resistance, right, antibiotic resistant bacteria,
So you know that's a case where the bacteria are trading,
they're treating their DNA like a toolbox or really like

(59:34):
a symbolic language, like they're really treating it in the
way that we treat languages. But but for simplicity's sake,
we could say a toolbox, right, so that the toolbox
of tools that the carpenter carries to the job site,
those same tools could be used to make a house,
or a bridge, or a hospital or a treasure chest,

(59:57):
many different structures, right. And that's the the genome seems
to behave in organisms, and so so that all doesn't
fit with the genes or instructions that there are a
complete set of instructions that none of that fits. And
as we rise up the tree of life to greater
and greater complexity, we have more and more interesting examples

(01:00:20):
of those sort of agential processes. These have all been
laid at the feet of like the evolution of complexity
for survival's sake. But as we've mentioned, I think that
fundamental premises flawed to some degree, and say we have
this situation where as I was saying that the acquisition

(01:00:41):
of new traits is sometimes heritable and so like. For example,
there's this famous study in mice where male mice were
subject to a chemical and then electrocuted. Sadly not to death,
but they were given a shock so that they had

(01:01:01):
a very unpleasant experience with this chemical that they could detect,
and the neurons that were responsible for detecting this chemical
or in a certain portion of the brain. So the
semen from these male mice was taken to a different
lab and impregnated female mice in a different lab that
had never undergone the smell, and the children born from

(01:01:25):
that union of baby mice had enlarged regions in that
part of the brain that detects that chemical. Okay, so
they'd become more sensitive to it, and that was a
robust finding. And so that kind of adding to the
program is an illegal move. That's not supposed to happen.

(01:01:46):
It's supposed to be blind variation. So that begs this
whole question.

Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
And the blind variation meaning if one mouse has a
large region has a better chance of detecting chemical, it
might survive and pass on it, but it's it's just
accident that that one did and not another one wasn't
because of exposure to something. And then the sort of
high occurrence of large region in the next generation, right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Exactly, Yeah, you got it, you got it. There, there's
supposed to be by chance that the offspring were born
with in large region. But it's something that's acquired, it's
been it's been put there by the experimenters, it's been
induced by the experiment and so that's totally different. That's
called lamarkism. It's the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And that

(01:02:37):
was supposed to not be a part of biology, but
it turns out to be a part of biology. So yeah.
So the next the next set of puzzles is the
microbiome that we talked about, where it's this acquired community
of microbes that cooperate with us and seem to be
essential for our cognition and for our metabolism, and they

(01:02:59):
are are deeply influential in our cognition and our metabolism.
So that's a whole mystery because that's all acquired. None
of that is none of that is inherited directly, and
so yeah, so that's another set of of problems. And
then you just have the mystery of learning itself, right,

(01:03:24):
I mean, learning is intrinsically taking novel experiences in novel
situations that physically have never happened before in the world
and making sense of them. And they have relevance to us.
They have significance. I mean, we've had some meanings where

(01:03:44):
people have discussed telepathy and the idea that patterns can
be transmitted between humans in against the normal like without speaking,
without knowledge, can be transmitted without the normal communication pathway. Okay,
but the normal communication pathway is itself a miracle. It's

(01:04:07):
already a miracle that someone can specify something in auditory
or visual symbols and then another organism can accept those
symbols and know what they are. I mean, there's a dog.
You don't know if you followed this, but there's this
dog who his own is very loving, very incredibly patient owner.

(01:04:28):
He's taught him to identify I think five hundred different words,
and there he can identify, like he uses a great
big pile of stuffed animals, and he'll say. They'll give
him a verb like either sniff this animal and he'll
find that animal and he'll sniff it. Or he'll say, Paul,
you know this other animal and he'll find that stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
And so.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
The ability for another species to learn that and the
ability for our species to learn that is an unplumbed mystery.
It's part of biology. Mental processes are clearly causally influential,
but we don't have an explanation for them. And just
to make put a finer point on that, we have

(01:05:11):
we have induced hyper functioning with cognition sometimes like so
you've heard of We're gonna have to look this up
and change the audio to fix this part, but acause
I can't remember it's I was just listening to. It's
something that a savant like when you have brain damage
and you become a savant. It's very rare, right, an

(01:05:34):
idiot svant, not an idiot's evant. This is actual. This
is this evant that is induced by traumatic brain injury.
So you're not a savant and then you become a savant,
but by brain damage.

Speaker 1 (01:05:46):
Yeah, these incredible examples of someone that can suddenly play
the piano at a virtuoso levels, never touched it before,
after having a TPI exactly. It's just a made up example.
But there's real man and real stories like this.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Yeah, there's incredibly rare, but it does happen, and even
one example of that is very difficult to explain. There
are also patients with like virtually ninety percent of their
brain mass missing that are perfectly normal. So like there's
not the there's not the the mechanistic explanation and the

(01:06:22):
inheritance explanation implies the sort of mapping between the body
and the functions of the body in the mental process
that isn't there. So if the part of the brain
that's supposed to be responsible for some mental function is damaged,
often other parts of the brain compensate and take up
that function where they didn't do it before. So the

(01:06:45):
local so the whole thing doesn't match, it doesn't match.
The the hardware gives rise to these effects when it's
if anything is the it's the effects giving rise to
the hardware. So it's like, it's very it's very different
when you see an organism is a regenerative thing, right, Yeah,
that's how I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
As I get older and my brain cognition gets worse,
I've been asking my gut to pick up the slack and.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
Guys are doing a great job down there. Exactly, Yeah, exactly.
It's very It's a much deeper mystery, and it's right
in plain sight than we often pretend because our ways
of talking about bodies and minds are so deeply dualistic.
It's like, I'm sure familiar to you, this idea of

(01:07:37):
Cartesian dualism, which is basically, the mind is a ghost
and the machine is a machine, right, and the two things,
there's a non physical mind and a physical body, and
the two things aren't really integrated. They're not they travel together.
We can see that they travel together in the scientific way,
but we can't. We don't have a theory of how

(01:08:00):
they travel together.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
Yeah, de cart It's often translated I think therefore I am,
I believe the original French, and the more native meaning
of it is I in the context is I doubt?

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
Therefore I am?

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
You know, he starts to the car is basically like
drinking wine and looking in a mirror is like who
am I?

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Anyway?

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
And it's the doubting of who he is that leads
into that realization of there is an I here. And
it's a not sort of anxious anxious approach. But at
the base of that, isn't it a curiosity like what
is this? Who is this guy? And it's curiosity and
learning that I hear you coming back to that. There's

(01:08:42):
something fundamental about that. In our very approach to the world,
our very approach to being, has in its core this searching,
this curiosity, this wanting to know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:57):
Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, exactly. And I mean this is
not like an armchair problem, you know. I mean people
think people it is a philosophical problem. But people think
philosophy is only for problems that are useless, that are
like not practically important. Right, but the question of where

(01:09:18):
is the eye? But that is the problem of cancer.
The problem of cancer is that you have cells that
don't believe that they're part of your body. They don't
believe you're part of Tristan Roberts or Charlie Munford, Right,
these cells, and we all have millions of them for
whatever reason, for a reason of agency. Because of this
problem of agency, they're not integrated to the self, and

(01:09:42):
so they have their own self, which means they act
in ways that can sometimes result in our death. They
can make us sick and we can die. And the
other set of huge impractical problems that arise from this
misunderstanding is autoimmunity. So our immune system is just the
name we have for the suite of biological functions that

(01:10:06):
distinguish the self from the non self. And we have
reaction to non self, and we have acceptance of self
that's baked into the idea of biology. And so autoimmunity
is this cases where for whatever reason we're inflamed with
our own self or like we were treating our own

(01:10:26):
self like an enemy in some respect, and that's autoimmunity.
That's Crohn's disease and asthma, autism, allergies, food allergies. So
these problems are not like this isn't just like a
biological theory problem. These are like urgent medical problems and
not to mention mental illness, right, yeah, So I mean

(01:10:49):
all of these, you know, they really nest home in
an incredibly powerful way for me when when I think
about the implications of working on these working on these
fundamental mechanisms, it's just it's just one step away from
working on these practical applied problems. And the practical applied

(01:11:09):
problems can't be approached without the fundamental solutions. So there's
truly a blocker in our understanding of agency. And so
people working way downstream on cancer are at an extreme disadvantage.
I'm not saying they're wasting their time, but it's at
a disadvantage where we don't know what is causing agency

(01:11:31):
to work on the effects and the prevention and the
treatment of cancer when the fundamental idea hasn't been hasn't
been clarified.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
So if you could run some experiments and get at
the basis of agency and even communication in single cells,
could you start to talk to cancer cells and say, hey,
let's work together.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Yeah. I mean, in principle, all cells are persuadable.

Speaker 1 (01:11:59):
Like.

Speaker 2 (01:11:59):
We know that because we are multicellular organisms, which means
that we're composed of cells that started out in the
lineage that became you or me. The cells that began
our lineage looked nothing like us, right, they were totally different.
There were stem cells in a developing fetus, and they
gradually differentiated into these different structures that make up our bodies.

(01:12:23):
So yes, in principle, all of our cells are not
only that, but they're they're ageless. I mean, we actually
even know the Yamanaka factors that can be turned on
to turn an adult cell back into a stem cell,
back into an embryonic cell. And so in principle, all
of the changes that have happened in your body are reversible.

(01:12:45):
In principle, it's just that we don't know the rules
for how to manipulate and how to cause those changes
to happen. So, yeah, anything that can be made out
of human cells can be made by your human cells,
know so, I mean in principle, right, yeah, But we
have to have the language to talk to the cells

(01:13:05):
and figure out what they want. Could we take this
up to them?

Speaker 1 (01:13:11):
I'm thinking I want to go all the way to
geopolitical level, where it just it makes no sense to me.
We take, you know, explosive devices and throw them at
another country. They throw their explosive dice devices back at us.
We blow each other up, We blow each other's stuff up,
We burn precious resources, we waste our stuff, we're wasting

(01:13:32):
the other person's stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
It makes no sense.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
We're degrading the fitness our fitness, we're degrading the planetary fitness.
We're degrading the fitness of other people across the world.

Speaker 2 (01:13:45):
All out of some theory of organization.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
Where our country, if we organize ourselves right and do
these things, it's going to be better for us.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Overall if we beat up the other guy.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
But it just is there are we operating under the
wrong metaphor or understanding of biology here where if if
we could let go of the scarcity principle. Let go
of oh there's not enough to reproduce. All we want
is curiosity. We want to share knowledge, We want to cooperate.
Could we break down these very barriers of scarcity and

(01:14:23):
the sense of not enough on our planet that makes
us become violent and cause these world problems?

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):
Now you got the right idea totally. Yes, I mean, yes,
I think we can. I mean, like, the way I
think about it is that survival and reproduction is a
game in which, to some degree, if I win, you lose.
If you went, I lose. Right, there's this competition for resources,

(01:14:55):
and everybody's trying to In theory, they're trying to make
their progeny take over the world. Everybody else's progeny is
a competition to that. And so that's a theory of
selfishness and selfish behavior, and it's also justification for selfish behavior.
But knowledge, the teleology of knowledge, is a game in

(01:15:18):
which if I win, you win too, and vice versa.
If you gain knowledge, it's communicable to me, even to
some tiny degree that benefits me. There's no cost to
exchanging knowledge, and there's a mutual benefit. And so if
we were serious about that, as a teleology as a

(01:15:39):
purpose of life, I think we would approach our relationships
with one another and with other species really differently. Subjectivity
is often seen as a kind of like misfortune, like
we're kind of it's seen as like a barrier to community,
like we're trapped in our own world, you know, and

(01:16:01):
we might as well just watch TV, you know, because
because the apps are going to feed us things that
appeal to us, and all that matters is our own subjectivity.
But if you think about being as for knowing, then
you realize that subjectivity is a blessing because trying to
understand someone who sees the world in a totally different

(01:16:22):
way is incredibly enriching. And like, let alone another human,
but let alone you know something a precious creature like
an octopus, you know, which is incredibly brilliant, probably more
more intelligent than humans because they only live it for
a year. I mean, you've seen a one year old,

(01:16:43):
I know, because I've seen your one year old. You know,
one year old humans are not very impressive. One year
old octopuses are amazing. They can solve incredible problems after
just one year on this earth. So you've got organisms
like that, where like they're so alien, and yet they
can understand so much. And I think our like our

(01:17:05):
approach to our approach to life, you know, looks really
different if we think of ourselves as as mechanisms for
gaining knowledge, and that's our purpose on this earth. And
so not only does that make us want to preserve
nature and preserve other species, but it makes it I
think it should make us trust one another and trust

(01:17:25):
people of the future to solve problems and be satisfied
that knowledge is increasing and people are using it for
moral purposes. On the whole.

Speaker 1 (01:17:38):
We can learn, we can grow, we can do things
better or or at least differently. If you you give
me some knowledge and I might not fully believe it,
but I might test it out and I might say, well,
I like this knowledge.

Speaker 2 (01:17:52):
I'm going to keep it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:53):
Or I might say, well, I don't like exactly how
this knowledge is taught to me, but I found something's
useful about it. I'm gonna keep it and then tweak
it this way. And I think you make an interesting
point where we've been led into this narrative in society
where kind of the ideal American life is it's, you know,

(01:18:14):
three or four people sitting in the living room and
each one has their own different device that they're on
getting their perfect content, ordering their food for delivery.

Speaker 2 (01:18:26):
That's exactly what they want.

Speaker 1 (01:18:29):
And you know, it's the wally version of life. I
think a lot of people are finding the limits of
that in terms of that's not really the most satisfying.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
Life there is.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
Life is more when there's engagement and interchange of ideas
and being this and curiosity.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
So we're meant to discover, we're.

Speaker 1 (01:18:50):
Mental learning, and we're meant to share, and that's you
bring that to the forefront from me.

Speaker 3 (01:18:57):
Yeah, And also like we're meant to challenge ourselves, you know,
like challenge is not trauma, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:19:03):
I mean that's like another thing about this that I
think of, like deep deep optimism, you know, is people
like basically sometimes these days seem to seem to assume
that any kind of like difficult experience they go through
leaves this irrevocable mark on them and they're sort of

(01:19:25):
poisoned by it. And it's trauma, and it's even like
intergenerational trauma and like you know, it'll it'll be there forever,
Like if you face depression or alcoholism or violence, or
or you just got bad grades. It's a it's an
unmitigated disaster and like your parents need to call the
school and you know, correct that, correct the trauma before

(01:19:49):
it harms you. But it's this view of what organisms
are is they're they're they're problem solvers, like they're they're
reframing of the world that happens when you're under severe
stress is often the most powerful engine for positive change.

(01:20:11):
I mean, I think it's no like in our country,
I think it's no coincidence that the people who went
through World War Two, which was the world's most intense
trauma that has ever happened, we're also the most life
affirming generation we've ever had. I mean, it was a
totally unexplained baby boom right after World War Two, and

(01:20:37):
this just like surge of optimism that was like measurable
in terms of reproduction I mean globally, and it was
totally otherwise unexplained because birth rates were declining before then,
and they searched and then they started to decline again.
But I think it was I think that this is
just my pet idea, but I think it really was

(01:21:01):
the confrontation with such a titanic bitter struggle on a
global level that really caused people to reframe their purpose
on this earth and then come up with good reasons
to live and good reasons to be to be positive
about their lives.

Speaker 1 (01:21:22):
Thank you, Charlie Montefredford coming on my show and talking
about your life and your ideas. Is there anything you
want to leave listeners with action they can take something
they can go and learn. I just want to point
to your if you could point to resources to learn more.
There's been a lot of concepts you've dropped here that

(01:21:44):
you're going to take it years to understand.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
And read about. What would you invite people to do totally? Yeah, thanks,
Well they can get definitely go to Agential Biology dot
org and learn a little bit more about ABI. Yeah,
they can follow our progress on Agential Topics, which is
a private meeting that's posted on YouTube where we discuss

(01:22:09):
these matters and there'll be more content coming out from
me in the future and from the Agential Biology Institute.
So thanks so much, and it's been a big pleasure.

Speaker 3 (01:22:21):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:22:21):
I really appreciate this conversation and this is just such
a great place to have it here at your farm
and it's in a beautiful part of the world and
this is a great time. So thanks a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:22:33):
Yeah, you're welcome, Charlie, Charlie Mumford, thanks for coming on
the show.