Why TAME is lame ...

Drawings by Marcus Neustetter.

A graveyard of zombie concepts.

---

I’ve done it. I’ve read the entire 43 pages of Mike Levin’s “Technology Approach to Mind Everywhere” (TAME) paper. Carefully. Yes, you may pity me. 

Indeed, I like to suffer. But I also like my suffering to be productive. So I’ve decided to write up a philosophical take-down of the massive theoretical thingamajig that is TAME. 

It’s the ultimate conceptual chimera, packed with plenty of intriguing ideas that are cobbled together in the cubist manner of Levin’s own Picasso creatures. Unfortunately, all of it is built on a metaphysical foundation that amounts to nothing but hot air. A big philosophical smokescreen. I’ve written about it before. Twice, in fact. But never systematically and in depth, like I intend to do here.

Don’t worry: this is going to be a philosophical argument, not some kind of personal vendetta. Yet, to understand the nature of Levin’s approach, you need to know two things about the man and the behavioral patterns he exhibits.

First, he is a prototypical product of our current society and research system, a high-stakes gambler for social capital and reputation. To understand the structure of his thinking, you need to understand the main motivation behind his staggeringly prodigious output: it is not primarily the search for truth, but the maximization of impact that drives him. He is a man on a mission. Levin’s main guiding principle is to be the proponent of ideas that are not only workable and world-changing, but also popular among the right kind of target audience. The two go together, hand in hand, as you will see.

Second, he is beloved by the tech affine. Levin’s primary target audience are those who crave to believe in our upcoming techno-utopian salvation. In a recent article for Noema Magazine, he has explicitly come out as a proponent of transhumanism, stating that the best possible long-term outcome for humanity (our kids!) would be to supplant ourselves with “creative agents with compassion and meaningful lives that transcend [our] limitations in every way.” Not subtle. And more than just a little bit eugenicist. I don’t know about you, but I find this kind of ideology creepy. And delusional as well.

Given this context, let’s dive right into the philosophical gist of the argument. What is TAME? Well. TAME is many things. Whatever you would like it to be, really. The chimera is also a chameleon.

---

THE "I AIN'T GOT NO PHILOSOPHY" PHILOSOPHY

First and foremost, TAME proclaims itself to be a radical form of empiricism. It eschews unnecessary philosophical speculation. It presents itself as hard-nosed, rigorously scientific — putting forward lots of experimentally testable predictions. And most important of all: it purports to focus strictly on “third-person observable” properties. Funnily enough, every single one of these fundamental observations are loaded with metaphysical assumptions. So let’s take a little tour.

TAME’s first underlying observation goes like this: there is no clear distinction between entities in the world that have mind, and those that do not. No “bright line” to be drawn between it knows and it “knows,” as Levin puts it. We can’t tell the difference. He calls this gradualism, like the evolutionary gradualism of Darwin. It doesn’t take much to notice that the man has a way with words. And a knack for grandiose associations.

Levin’s concept of a mind is intimately tied to his notion of a self. Such a self is defined by agency, which is the ability to pursue goals. Selves must also have memories (to remember who they are, presumably, and to allow for learning). And the self is the locus for credit assignment. The self is what is responsible for its actions, an autonomous source of causal influence.

If all this seems a little bit esoteric to you, don’t fret. Levin assures us it’s all pretty down to earth, as long as you consider that “nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of teleonomy.” Teleonomy is what we call the apparent goal-directedness (or teleology) you can observe in the behavior of living systems. Below the surface level of appearances, or so the doctrine goes, it is based on a kind of automated genetic or developmental program which determines growth and behavior of a self. It is this program that gets shaped and adapted by natural selection during evolution.

The self’s goals are defined in terms of feedback regulation, rooted in the concept of homeostasis, and the science of cybernetics. Echoing philosopher Dan McShea, Levin likens a self to some kind of thermostat. Goal-directed behavior is nothing but “upper-directedness:” living systems learn how to optimize their path toward some target state (set, somewhat mysteriously, from a higher level of organization) by minimizing the energy they have to expend to get there. It’s all perfectly mechanistic and scientific, you see.

Well. I’m not so sure about that. For one, it is not quite clear how the self chooses a target to pursue in the first place. But let’s put this issue aside for the moment. What’s important here is that “goal-directed” “agency” can occur in any kind of system, living or nonliving. In fact, Levin claims that it pervades all of physics, as the principle of least action in classical physics and relativity, for example, or the principle of free-energy minimization in living and other far-from-equilibrium systems.

Some people claim that Levin is the savior that will deliver us from reductionism in biology. But it is evident from what I just said that he does his very best to ground his framework in staunchly mechanistic and reductionist conceptions of words like “self,” “agent,” and “goal.” They describe teleonomical appearances that are ultimately governed by evolved deterministic programs. This is a version of what philosopher Dan Dennett called the intentional stance: we talk about selves as if they were pursuing their own goals, as if they had agency, but it’s all just simple mechanics underneath. 

In sum: Levin’s terms suggest something very different than what they actually represent. You will see that this is a pervasive feature of everything he does or says. Bait-and-switch, is what it’s called.

The axis of persuadability.

---

WHERE IS MY MIND?

TAME’s second basic observation is that selves have no privileged material substrate. Levin calls this “mind-as-can-be.” And also: what defines something as a self does not depend on that self’s evolutionary origin or history. (Wait, what!?) Yes: anything can be a self! TAME, as a philosophy, is a form of panpsychism. Levin explicitly states this, here and also elsewhere. 

He talks about living and nonliving “intelligences” that can manifest in societies, swarms, colonies, organisms (from humans to bacteria), but also in weather patterns, or rocks. Yes, rocks. Levin believes rocks are in some minimal way intelligent. And also: fundamental particles.

You find this hard to believe? Bear with us. Levin can explain everything. He’s good at that, actually. The presentation is always crystal clear and easily accessible. Not just his writing style, but also the elaborate design of the figures stand out. Kudos for that. I mean it. Shame it’s not put to better use…

Here’s the basic idea: every particle in the universe has some kind of proto-intelligence (and not even less so than a rock). What Levin means by this is that such particles follow “teleological” principles (e.g., the principle of least action, as mentioned above). And also: they exhibit what he calls “persuadability.” 

Persuadability is probably his most unfamiliar and counterintuitive concept, so it’s worth examining it in a bit more detail: it represents the degree to which one can come up with tools to “rationally modify” an entity’s behavior. This is tightly connected to Levin’s simplistic concept of “intelligence.” Both are grounded in a philosophy called pancomputationalism. I criticize this worldview at length in my book.

Be that as it may, Levin is a died-in-the-wool panpsychist pancomputationalist. I know, it does not exactly flow off the tongue. And panpsychism and pancomputationalism are often seen as diametrically opposed. Yet, the extremes of this spectrum do touch, bending the axis around to form a circle which closes at the point where Levin’s approach is located. You can have your cake and eat it!

He, like many fellow (pan)computationalists, simply equates “intelligence” with problem-solving capacity — nothing more, nothing less. Intelligence is the ability to explore a well-defined search space. And that’s that.

The more persuadable a self is (the more it can be coaxed to exhibit different behaviors), the larger the search space it can explore and the more flexible its ways of moving around within this space of possibilities. This is why Levin thinks the weather is intelligent to some degree: we can make it behave in many different ways. In principle, at least. We’re certainly not very good at it yet in practice.

So, there is an “axis of persuadability,” according to Levin. On one end, particles and rocks are not very persuadable. On the other end, people are very much so! That’s why we are more intelligent than a rock. Now that, at least, is good news! Levin has a clever way to show just how much more intelligent we are: he uses what he calls cognitive cones to classify different intelligences according to their sophistication.

These cones, inspired by relativity diagrams in physics, show how far the concern of a self extends in space and time, both into the future and into the past. A tall cone means you’re in it for the long run. A wide cone means you’re concerned about many things that are happening around you in the present.

What remains to be explained, however, is how we got to be so much smarter than rocks. Levin’s surprisingly simple answer to this is collectivity: every higher self is a collective intelligence and, therefore, also a collective self. We are literally legions. Higher-level agents are made of lower-level ones and so on. 

And just like a parallel computer can solve problems more efficiently, you become more intelligent by scaling up and binding together several individual intelligences. This is the basis of Levin’s gradualism: the more intelligences in a collective, the more intelligent the resulting higher-level self. Simple.

What results from all this are a plethora of diverse intelligences: selves that exist at multiple scales, are made of various material substrates, take various forms, and manifest in various behaviors, with the one common denominator that they all solve problems. And because there is intelligence everywhere, it is okay to say that there is cognition, and even some form of consciousness in every self that is persuadable.

What a powerful vision! A mindful panpsychist world, alive and filled with conscious experience everywhere. Or so it seems. In reality, it’s all based on universal computation underneath. And in truth, it is nothing but a shiny package for a rather sinister ideology. We’ll get to that in due time.

Bioelectricity is everything!

---

THE BODY ELECTRIC

There’s a lot more in this monumental paper. Go check it out for yourself! It’s a true treasure trove.

As I said, the whole framework is packed with ideas, and many of them are not uninteresting, I admit. But instead of going into more detail, I’d like to illustrate the core concepts introduced above with some concrete examples. Levin himself dedicates a good part of the paper to a particular case study: TAME applied to morphogenesis in organisms — the kind of growth processes that shape the organism’s form. Or “somatic cognition,” as he likes to call it. 

This case study reveals just how weird Levin’s view really is. He sees organismic development (or ontogenesis, as I’d call it) as a fundamentally teleological process, oriented towards the final goal of attaining the organism’s adult form.

As evidence for this controversial view, he uses regenerative processes in flatworms and frogs, which can regrow amputated heads and legs, respectively. The pathways by which such regeneration is achieved are very different from those of normal ontogenesis. And many pathways mapped to one single outcome implies teleology, to Levin at least. (To me, it implies the presence of an attractor, nothing more… but never mind: Levin would also see that as some form of teleology.)

If your conceptual feathers are ruffled already, just wait for what’s coming next: Levin claims the goal-orientedness of morphogenesis means it must be cognitive in nature. His reasoning goes as follows, as already mentioned above: cognition is what underlies intelligence which, in turn, is what allows you to optimize the path towards your goal. Thus ontogenesis is cognitive and intelligent, because it optimizes the organism’s path towards its goal, that is, its adult form.

Are you still with me? I’m not sure I am. What do we gain, you may rightfully ask, from treating morphogenesis as the expression of an intelligent goal-oriented self? It sounds a little crazy. But some of the implications are actually quite down to earth: one conclusion, for instance, is that a higher-level “intelligence” like morphogenesis in multicellular organisms must be a collective phenomenon. It is happening across many levels of organization. Fair enough, and very likely true!

This, by the way, is why Levin is widely seen as an anti-reductionist messiah of some kind: he correctly and prominently makes the point that ontogenesis cannot simply be reduced to the genetic level.

Instead, he proposes, the intelligence of morphogenesis is coordinated through bioelectric fields. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that he has established his career as an experimental researcher working on such fields. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And Levin is the master hammerer.

Of course, he has evidence that bioelectricity is of fundamental importance: it does not only occur in our nervous system, in the form of signals transmitted between neurons, but the same action potentials that are found in nerve cells can also be detected in other somatic tissues, and even in plants, amoeba, and bacteria. Voilà! Here we have our basal cognition: bioelectric fields established in non-neural tissues.

Admittedly, these fields are much simpler and operate at much slower rates than the electric signaling networks in our brains. Less persuadability, perhaps, but not unintelligent either! They achieve what Levin calls morphological coordination. In particular, Levin is fascinated with cells that undergo “mind meld.” Yes, he uses this as a technical term. Cells in many tissues interconnect their cytoplasm directly via organelles that are called gap junctions. And gap junctions are everywhere, once you start looking.

Now, here’s the thing: Levin’s experimental work on bioelectric fields is actually quite interesting, and I have no immediate reason to doubt that it is technically and methodologically sound. It is certainly original. It would really stand on its own merit, you’d think. But, apparently, this is not enough for Levin. He needs a fancy wrapper to boost his megalomaniac message.

Hence the talk about “intelligent development” and Levin’s rather outsized claims, often promulgated through press releases, podcasts, and online videos, rather than his numerous peer-reviewed publications: bioelectricity is elevated from an interesting mechanism among many, to the substrate of all ontogenetic selves. Nay, a unifying principle for all of biology!

Genes go home! Also: forget about tissue biophysics. Bioelectricity cures cancer, it means cells can think, and motile cell cultures become “biobots” built from “agential materials,” a new kind of “synthetic machine.” The hyperbole knows no limits: we now can engineer life, the weather, and, ultimately, the fundamental particles of the universe too! A brave new world awaits, with us as masters of our own destiny. Who would not want to buy into a narrative like this?

Well. I don’t want to. I’ll tell you why in a minute. But before I get to that, let me dismantle the whole  cobbled-together intellectual contraption that Levin has constructed. This is one of the six impossible things I can accomplish before breakfast. Let’s go!

---

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

So what is wrong with TAME? At first sight, it seems to hold together pretty well, don’t you think? Maybe in a slightly eccentric way, with all its talk about intelligences and engineering. But eccentricity — that of the reclusive genius — is a central (and highly cultivated) part of Levin’s shtick. He really wants you to appreciate that he thinks differently — his own version of a diverse mind. Zarathustra coming down his mountain. Atlas shrugging. I fought the law and I won. You get the point. It’s very romantic.

I have nothing against eccentricity, or mavericks, or romanticism. Quite the contrary, I’m into all three of these, big time! TAME’s revolutionary spirit in itself is not the problem. It is a novel perspective, no doubt. And it does manage to attract quite some interest from inside and outside science.

Instead, the problem is that the revolutionary is not really with the rebellion. He is no underdog going against an evil empire. Instead, he is backed by powerful forces and shitloads of funding. He is the emperor! But an emperor that is wearing no clothes.

There is no philosophical substance to TAME. None, whatsoever. There, I said it: TAME is an exemplar of whateverism. It means whatever you want it to mean. And that’s a feature of the whole thing, not a bug. I have principles, but if you don’t like them, I have others.

Levin openly admits this himself: after presenting his fanciful panpsychist musings, he claims that you don’t actually have to buy into any of it to follow through on TAME’s empirical promise. The whole philosophy, apparently, is just decoration. Why present it at such length, you may wonder? I surely do.

The reason, of course, is simple. The philosophy is there to feign sophistication, to look smart, and to attract other people who think of themselves as genius mavericks. It’s a public-relations gimmick.

Levin’s preferred tactic is the motte-and-bailey: make some outrageous claims to get everybody’s attention and then, once you get a little pushback, immediately retreat to a more defensible position. Unfortunately, this kind of approach really isn’t very rigorous. Or serious, for that matter.

And so the motte-and-bailey goes: “there are minds everywhere, from rock to biosphere.” However, you don’t really have to buy this. And also: “mind” doesn’t really mean what you think it does.

The first bailey position simply isn’t true: you cannot buy into the research program envisioned by TAME without buying into its metaphysical baggage. It is not what it pretends to be: a down-to-earth, no-speculation, theory-light, empiricist approach, treating concepts such as “agency,” “intelligence,” and “mind” as indicative of uncontroversial and empirically observable phenomena.

In reality, and I’ve said this already, TAME is loaded with metaphysical baggage that you simply cannot ignore. This is cleverly hidden by its intentional stance, which is a funny, almost ironic, kind of philosophy. Its purpose is to squeeze complex-sounding notions such as “selves,” “agency,” and “intelligence” into a simplistic Procrustean bed of mechanistic thinking. It aims to show that such concepts are not problematic, as long as we only use them as if they were real. A convenient shortcut to talk about teleonomy — apparent goal-directedness molded through evolution by natural selection.

This allows Levin to talk about complex phenomena as if they were actually simple, easy to grasp, straightforward to engineer and control. In this sense, TAME is a framework explicitly designed for motte-and-bailey. It attracts an audience keen to move beyond reductionism in science, but sells them an empty package. There is no content, no substance, inside the shiny wrapper.

Hence all the malleable and broad definitions. Take, for example, the term “intelligence.” What it boils down to is mere problem-solving, which is seen as a catch-all for “intelligent” goal-oriented behavior. An intelligent system is a system able to attain its goals in an efficient manner. That’s it.

But where do these goals come from? And how are the problems to be solved identified and defined in any precise manner in the first place? TAME cannot answer these questions other than saying “teleonomy!” It must’ve evolved somehow. Pure hand-waving.

And, of course, this is an extremely impoverished view of “intelligence.” An engineer’s view, not surprisingly. Upon closer scrutiny, you recognize pretty soon that it leads to an infinite regress: the definition of goals and problems is itself an optimization process which, in turn, needs to be optimized, and so on and so forth. It’s problems all the way down. Literally, in the case of TAME.

True “intelligence,” as we use the term for ourselves and the behavior of other living creatures, includes things like being able to choose the right action in a given situation based on incomplete, ambiguous, and often misleading information. It means having common sense. It relies on the ability to be creative, to frame and reframe problems. It requires true agency: the ability to actually choose your own goals.

The bottom line is: “agency,” “cognition,” and “intelligence,” as used by Levin, have nothing to do with agency, cognition, or intelligence as we would colloquially use these terms. They are lifeless computational caricatures. Zombie concepts. Devoid of any deeper meaning. And deceptive.

Because the associations that naturally come with the everyday use of these terms are heavily used by Levin to push his agenda. He recently claimed that sorting algorithms can think. What this really means is the trivial statement that “sorting algorithms can solve problems.” Well, yeah. That’s what they have been designed to do. But it has nothing to do with human thinking or intelligence. Nothing at all.

It's cones all the way down!

---

A PROFOUND LACK OF ORGANIZATION

Beneath all this superficiality lurks a deeper problem. Levin consistently ignores the one concept he’d actually need to build a reasonable philosophy of diverse minds. And this concept is the organization of living systems. 

In fact, TAME obliges him to ignore it, because of its dogma that you cannot draw any principled distinctions between living and nonliving systems. That’d be “Cartesian dualism” as Levin can’t stop pointing out. It just goes to show that he hasn’t really read his Descartes properly. Nor does he seem to understand the problem of life.

Living systems behave in a qualitatively different manner compared to nonliving ones. Now that is an observable empirical fact. How else would it be so easy for us to distinguish a living organism from dead matter in our everyday lives? Life is what kicks back when you kick it. Even though a more precise definition of life is notoriously difficult to come by, we reliably manage to recognize life when we see it. Acknowledging this is not the same as embracing any kind of dualism.

Quite the contrary: a true empiricist, you’d think, would want to come up with an explanation for this observed difference. In contrast, simply declaring that there is no difference goes very much counter our own experience. And it leads to all sorts of really counterintuitive claims about nonliving things having “agency,” “minds,” “intelligence,” and even “consciousness.” It doesn’t really mean anything.

This, by the way, is my main issue with the ideology of panpsychism in general, not just TAME. It explains the origin and nature of agency and consciousness away, simply declaring them to be non-problems. If everything is conscious, what’s the big deal? But in this way, we’ll never learn anything about what these concepts actually mean, and how the phenomena they refer to came to exist in the world. This is where organization comes in: it gives us ways to productively think about these questions. But without it, this is hardly possible.

Wait a minute, you may say: now you’re simply positing the opposite of TAME, that there is a fundamental difference between living and nonliving systems. But you don’t have any evidence for this either! Plus: organization adds additional conceptual ballast to your point of view. Is this really necessary? Gratuitously making up stuff is against empiricism! Whatever happened to Occam’s razor?

The thing is, empiricism and theory are never far from each other: what you observe, and how you classify those observations, crucially depends on the kinds of questions you are asking. Those questions, in turn, depend on the concepts that you rely on to ask them. We have a chicken-and-egg situation here: we really cannot claim which came first — discerning observation or the theory that underpins it. In the best case, of course, the two co-evolve in a tightly coordinated manner.

Therefore, it is completely legitimate to ask: what is it that makes living systems special? After all, we are able to robustly discern them from dead matter. And since life and non-life are made out of the same chemical ingredients, the answer must lie in how those ingredients interact with each other in living systems.

The number one feat organisms achieve is that they manufacture themselves. And despite what Levin claims he can do with his “biobots,” or engineered hybrid or “autonomous” systems — no matter how much he attempts to mold the definition of a “machine” to his purposes — no machine humanity has ever constructed out of well-defined parts can manufacture itself.
 
What’s worse: he mistakes self-manufacture for feedback-driven homeostasis. But the two are not the same thing. Feedback is a circular regulatory flow within some dynamic process, while self-manufacture describes the interaction between processes across scales that collectively co-construct each other.

Even if we could build a self-manufacturing automaton (and, mind you, there is nothing that says we can’t), it would no longer be an automaton in the familiar sense of the term: a programmable mechanism with entirely deterministic behavior. Living systems are open-ended, constantly adapting to their surroundings in surprising ways, because they are self-manufacturing. Their behavior cannot be captured entirely by any formalized model. Their behavior is not completely predictable, and their evolution is beyond prestated law. Levin never ever touches on any of this.

Why not? It’s weird. First of all, I’m sure he is aware of all the literature on biological organization that is out there (although he meticulously avoids engaging it in any serious manner). And, second, it is not normally like him to ignore any fancy idea that may appeal to his audience. So, what is going on here?

The snag is exactly what I’ve just said, and it bears repeating: if you understand biological organization properly, you understand that it cannot be completely formalized. Living systems are truly and fundamentally unpredictable because of the peculiar way in which they are wired together. In this sense, they are very different from algorithmic processes, or any other rote problem-solving procedure. All of this goes fundamentally against Levin’s dogmatic (not empirical!) computationalism.

Taking biological organization on board in any serious manner completely invalidates his whole approach. Poof! And it’s gone.

The simple truth of the matter is: we cannot (and should not) think we can perfectly control and predict living organisms, or the ecological and social systems they are the components of. But this is Levin’s central aim, his dream, his claim to fame. He cannot let that go.

TAME stands for “technology approach.” It’s about the domination of nature through engineering — not a deeper understanding, or respectful participation. Moving fast and breaking things, is what Levin is all about. Just look at the number of podcasts he appears on, the number of papers he publishes, the number of grants he obtains. It also explains the hype. Along his frenzied sprint into a techno-utopian future, he cannot possibly admit that nature is fundamentally not controllable, that there are limits to what we can and should do. That TAME is pure and utter hubris.

So you see: it’s techno-utopian politics, not the search for truth and understanding, that drives this whole enterprise. TAME is not empiricism, but a cultish ideology with an agenda: to engineer everything, including the weather and humanity’s future evolution.

But before we go there and have a closer look at that, let me briefly reexamine the claim that TAME will deliver biology from reductionism. That’s why his fans love Levine. But again, you will see that the good looks deceive: there is nothing to be found behind that pretty facade.

---

ANTI-ANTIREDUCTIONISM

So here’s the million-dollar question: is TAME really antireductionist?

Well, I’d say it depends on what you mean by “reductionism.” I’ve already mentioned that Levin speaks out loudly and often against gene-centric approaches — the kind that only accept molecular genetic mechanisms as proper explanations in biology. Luckily such thinking is connected to a breed of biologists who are slowly but surely dying out. Yet, there’s still more than enough of these fossils around, so I will say this out loud: I support Levin fully when it comes to this part of his campaign!

But then, to Levin, everything is bioelectricity. It is the general principle for all of biology, he claims. He talks about the “unifying rationality” of bioelectric fields, contrasting it with the “irrationality” of individual “cellular agents.” Smart tissues from dumb cells. Biobots, not moving blobs of tissue culture.

And he not only claims to have evidence that bioelectric fields are in charge, that they allow you to “program the organism,” but also that they are conveniently modular, with distinct field states serving as “master inducers” of “self-limiting organogenesis.” Here we are: no more “one gene, one-enzyme” — but “one field, one organ.”

I’ve heard this kind of thing before. A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I did my undergraduate diploma work in the lab of Drosophila geneticist and ultra-reductionist Walter Gehring at a time when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. And people in the lab back then were constantly talking about “master control genes” as “selectors” of “cell fate” and “master switches” in evolution.

How naive of me to think this cartoonish view of development and evolution had died out! Because here it is: in Levin’s treatise on TAME, in the year 2022 CE. This time applied to fields, granted, not individual genes, but the principles and habits of thinking are the same: we are still looking for some localized central controller in biological systems in the hope we can find that knob to tweak.

This is the direct opposite of antireductionism — anti-antireductionism. Or just plain reductionism, really. Yes, those fields are a property of a tissue, not a single gene or even an individual cell. But the approach is still reductive: it cuts all the complexity of biological systems down to a single explanation.

Some kind of messiah y’all have chosen here: all of Levin’s talk about “agency,” “intelligence,” and “mind everywhere” is nothing but a smokescreen for just another kind of reductionism! What he presents is a mechanicist’s dream of predictability and control. Linear thinking at its most linear. Or, shall we say: a mechanicist’s illusion.

The sorcerer's apprentice got lost in the woods ...

---

THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

In the end: this has always been the point: if you don’t reduce nature’s complexity to simple principles, then you cannot dominate her. True complexity implies limits to control. But the techno-utopian cannot admit that. For we must take our destiny in our own hands. That’s the dogma. And to do this, we must fool ourselves into thinking we are the true masters of that destiny.

At the same time, overly simplistic grand narratives of neverending progress no longer work these days. We are transiting rapidly from our modernist dream into a fractured postmodern post-fact nightmare. The zombie is the most accurate myth of our time. What does that tell us? And how many zombie movies do you know with a happy ending?

The thing to do in such a world — if you are desperate to have an impact, to change the world in a way that really matters — is to sell yourself as some kind of metamodern messiah. Metamodernism is the new narrative. The next big thing to come. That which rebuilds after postmodernism’s deconstruction.

And so you disguise your good old modernist tale in a fancy metamodern dress. The aim remains the same: to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth. Engineer everything, yes! But don’t be too upfront about it. Instead, package your story in layers of glimmering obfuscation that cater specifically to metamodern hackers, hipsters, and hippies.

TAME bristles with futurist engineering metaphors fertilized by the burning-man spirituality of “diverse intelligences and minds everywhere.” Levin sells himself as the metamodern visionary who can see further than the rest of us. He publishes papers about ethics, and produces AI-generated imitation indigenous poetry. What he’s telling you is that he cares. He will engineer everything responsibly — a weight upon his shoulders that few of us could bear. All he needs is your money and your attention!

It’s bullshit at a very sophisticated level. And it’s dangerous bullshit at that.

Don’t get me wrong: I do believe Levin is genuine about the whole thing. Unlike some other individuals I know, he seems too sanguine to be a real grifter or a fraud. He truly believes he is the chosen one — our Lisan al Gaib. But like Paul Atreides (or Brian), he is not the messiah. He is just a naughty boy.

Because TAME is not good philosophy. And it is not a good foundation for any sustainable research program or policy either. The only thing that is fairly predictable in our complex world is that our attempts at engineering everything will have many unexpected (and unpleasant) side effects. Nothing ever goes as planned. The battle plan never survives the first battle.

In the end, what survives is a bunch of more or less interesting empirical work. But, as I have argued, TAME cannot be judged by its empirical success alone. It is an integrated package.

And some conceptual frameworks work better at generating hypotheses to be tested empirically than others. They may be broader, more productive, or more conducive to insight in some other way. One of Levin’s central claims is that TAME produces more and better experimental work quicker than any other conceptual frame.

Yet, by refusing to engage with the peculiar nature of life — with its organization — Levin’s arguments fail to connect, and become intrinsically self-limiting. They aim high, yet fall short of their target. And they don’t even fail in any interesting way. Biobots are just moving blobs of cells, not “thinking machines.” Bioelectric fields remain to be explored, but will not be the promised cure-all. I could go on.

By ignoring the special nature of living systems, TAME is actually narrower than any truly agential approach. In many ways, it goes in the right direction, yet still manages to miss the point. It restricts, rather than enables. It is a pair of conceptual blinders, not empiricism on steroids, as it would claim.

Levin is the ultimate sorcerer’s apprentice. “Die ich rief, die Geister / Werd' ich nun nicht los.” The spirits he is summoning will be difficult to get rid of again. His vision is short-sighted, utterly modernist, not metamodern. There is not much new here. TAME is grandiose, but not grand. Its promise rings hollow. And its claims turn out to be rather vacuous after all is said and done.

Nature is complex, mysterious, and beautiful. Sometimes, she is cold and cruel. It’s all part of the deal for a limited being in a large world. To find happiness is to fully participate in life. To go with the flow. Not to control, predict, and manipulate. Why obsess about engineering everything? It’s not going to happen, or not going to end well if it does. No amount of wishy-washy babble about intelligence and minds everywhere will convince me otherwise.