Writings
Brain-immune network “ecosystem”
questions the very distinction between i) cognitive processes, supported by neural cells in the brain; ii) and bodily processes, supported by non-neural cells in the body. Rather, we suggest, all cells process information, make decisions, interact with each other, and as such, actively contribute to the survival of the biological organism as a whole.
František Baluška, Michael Levin On Having No Head: Cognition throughout Biological Systems, Front. Psychol., 21 June 2016 Sec. Cognitive Science Volume 7 - 2016 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00902
Giovanni Pezzulo and Michael Levin, Top-down models in biology: explanation and control of complex living systems above the molecular level, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2016.0555
Richard Watson, Michael Levin, The collective intelligence of evolution and development, Collective Intelligence, 2023, Volume 2: 2:1–22
“The key to being an individual is to have a functional structure in which diverse experiences across its components are bound together in a way that generates causal relationships and composite memories that belong to the higher space of the individual and not its components (Fields and Levin, 2022).”
“Is it more productive to describe the history of life as a whole as evolution or as development? We suggest a third option: that fully integrating evolutionary and developmental concepts into a single, scale-free description may enable novel insights.”
Anna Ciaunica, Michael Levin, Fernando Rosas, Karl Friston, Nested Selves: Self-Organisation and Shared Markov Blankets in Prenatal Development in Humans
Douglas Blackiston, Sam Kriegman, Josh Bongard, Michael Levin, Biological robots: Perspectives on an emerging interdisciplinary field
Michael Levin, Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds
One key pillar of this research program is the commitment to gradualism with respect to almost all important cognition-related properties: advanced minds are in important ways generated in a continuous manner from much more humble proto-cognitive systems.
Given the ability of human subunits to merge into even larger (social) structures, how do we construct higher-order Selves that promote flourishing for all? The multicellularity-cancer dynamic (Figure 9) suggests that tight functional connections that blur cognitive boundaries among subunits is a way to increase cooperation and cognitive capacity. However, simply maximizing loss of identity into massive collectivism is a well-known failure at the social level, always resulting in the same dynamic: the goals of the whole diverge sharply from those of the parts, which become as disposable to the larger social Self as shed skin cells are to us. Thus, the goal of this research program beyond biology is the search for optimal binding policies between subunits, which optimize the tradeoffs needed to maximize individual goals and well-being (preserving freedom or empowerment) while reaping the benefits of a scaled-up Self at the level of groups and entire societies.
Last revised on August 14, 2023 at 14:03:45. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.