Context: “For example, it is now easy to radically modify bodies in a time-scale that is much faster than evolutionary change, to study the inherent plasticity of minds without eons of selection to shape them to fit specific body architectures. When tadpoles are created to have eyes on their tails, instead of their heads, they are still readily able to perform visual learning tasks. Planaria can readily be made with two (or more) brains in the same body, and human patients are now routinely augmented with novel inputs such as sensory substitution or novel effectors, such as instrumentized interfaces allowing thought to control engineered devices such as wheelchairs in addition to the default muscle-driven peripherals of their own bodies. The central phenomenon here is plasticity: minds are not tightly bound to one specific underlying architecture (as most of our software is today), but readily mold to changes of genomic defaults. The logical extension of this progress is a focus on self-modifying living beings and the creation of new agents in which the mind:body system is simplified by entirely replacing one side of the equation with an engineered construct. The benefit would be that at least one half of the system is now well-understood.”
Context: “For example, it is now easy to radically modify bodies in a time-scale that is much faster than evolutionary change, to study the inherent plasticity of minds without eons of selection to shape them to fit specific body architectures. When tadpoles are created to have eyes on their tails, instead of their heads, they are still readily able to perform visual learning tasks. Planaria can readily be made with two (or more) brains in the same body, and human patients are now routinely augmented with novel inputs such as sensory substitution or novel effectors, such as instrumentized interfaces allowing thought to control engineered devices such as wheelchairs in addition to the default muscle-driven peripherals of their own bodies. The central phenomenon here is plasticity: minds are not tightly bound to one specific underlying architecture (as most of our software is today), but readily mold to changes of genomic defaults. The logical extension of this progress is a focus on self-modifying living beings and the creation of new agents in which the mind:body system is simplified by entirely replacing one side of the equation with an engineered construct. The benefit would be that at least one half of the system is now well-understood.”
Levin, 2022