Viral Topic: Neurons as Biological Transistors: "One is that the ion channels that regulate the voltage can be themselves voltage sensitive, which means that what you really have is a voltage sensitive current conductance, AKA a transistor. And you can imagine that once you have that, you can do all sorts of cool computations."

Viral Topic: The Physics of Cellular Injury

Quote: "if you have a system like this and you poke it, let's say it gets injured, right? It runs into something that injures and pokes a hole through the membrane, immediately that you're going to have an injury current that's going to try to go through that location to try to equalize the voltage gradient. And so for free now, without having to evolve any kind of additional mechanisms, you now have a vector to the damage. You know exactly where your damage was and you know that you've been injured because now your voltage is dropping, so you're depolarizing."

Viral Topic: Embryo Symmetry Breaking
"There is a voltage gradient between the left and the right sides and it arises there consistently because this little, little nucleating molecule allows the ion channels to, to be different on side than the other."

Viral Topic: How Cognitive Networks Expand Our Reality: "when we see things like that, that have a multi scale architecture where the cognitive light cone of the parts becomes expanded and projected into new problem spaces, we say that that's, that's life."

Viral Topic: Simple Chemical Networks Can Learn
Quote: "just a small group of chemicals that turn each other on and off already was able to do six different kinds of learning. They can do habituation, sensitization, and they can do Pavlovian conditioning. They can do associative learning so that you get long before evolution kicks in."

Viral Topic: Quantifying Causal Emergence
Quote: "there's been a branch of mathematics developed that can actually quantify that in, in certain systems you can literally do the calculation and you can say, okay, yeah, the parts are doing all the work or the, actually there is a higher level that's doing something that the parts aren't doing."

Viral Topic: Rebooting Multicellularity
Quote: "All we have done at this point is liberate them from the influences that they normally get, then you can ask the question, what, what do they, what, what else do they want to do? It's kind of a reboot of their multicellularity and they could do many things."

Viral Topic: Self-Replicating Xenobots
"They do this other crazy thing we call kinematic self replication, which is if you sprinkle a bunch of loose epithelial cells into the dish, they do the kind of von Neumann's dream of a robot that goes around and find and makes copies of itself from parts, from materials it finds in the environment. They will literally both singly and as a collective, they will go around, they will collect the cells into little balls. And because the cells themselves are an essential material, just like the ones we started with, the little balls mature and become the next generation of xenobots. And guess what they do. They do exactly the same thing. They run around, they make the next generation."

Viral Topic: The Rise of Novel Beings
"Where do the properties of novel beings come from if they don't have an evolutionary history? This is something that we are now confronting as a society with AIs and with cyborgs and hybrids and all these weird things that we're all making."