CONCEPT
Life 2.0
Tegmark's stage of life in which hardware is fixed by evolution but software—the behavioral repertoire—can be reprogrammed through learning, the regime that made human civilization possible.
Life 2.0 is the second stage in Tegmark's taxonomy: organisms whose biological hardware remains determined by evolution but whose software can be reprogrammed through learning. A human being cannot redesign her neural architecture through an act of will, but she can reshape her synaptic connections through thousands of hours of practice, install cognitive software for reading or mathematics, and internalize frameworks—from language to general relativity—that evolution never anticipated. The hardware has not changed significantly since the Cognitive Revolution roughly 300,000 years ago; the software has changed beyond recognition. Language, writing, science, technology, law, religion, and art are all Life 2.0 software innovations running on the same neural substrate evolution provided. The modern physicist running simulations on a laptop uses essentially the same hardware as a Pleistocene hunter.
