Can cells think? | Michael Levin

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A quick 8 minute bite of Michael Levin's take-away from experimental work in biology for anyone who isn't familiar with him:

Neat, I haven't encountered Levin before and enjoyed the video. I might look into him some more. That bit about the flatworms was absolutely fascinating.

One of my favorite books I read in the last few years was Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living, by the philosophers/biologists Maturana and Varela. They argue that life is autopoietic, which is to say, it's a homeostatic system - a system which operates to keep some variable constant. Just as a thermostat is a system that's organized around keeping keeping temperature within some desired bounds, a life form is a system that's organized around keeping its own organization constant - like the flatworms in the video, finding a way to have a head even in exotic conditions. I'd recommend the book to people interested in the foundations of biology and/or sociology. Sociologists like Luhmann have indeed adapted this sort of biologistic thinking to conceive of societies as life forms.

That greater scale when it comes to greater-than-human intelligences like societies or other collectives is where such thinking is most fascinating to me. It gives a lot of weight to the philosopher Land, who argues that capitalism and AI are the same thing, and that the AI takeover started in the 15th century. It sounds crazy at first glance, but makes enough sense if you conceive of market forces as an intelligence which is able to (re)structure society for the sake of its own flourishing.

The autopoiesis part is really important as well because our emotions and interiority follow patterns where the goal is some combination of first and foremost homeostasis and a close second - following up on Darwinian priorities. It's a fractal / holographic dynamic that seems to happen at many different levels.


That sounds sort of like when people say that we're already cyborgs based on how much of our memory we outsource to the internet and private hard drives. I'd guess what Nick Land is saying in that context is that the printing press was an earlier version of the same thing, I'd say why stop there - we technically had this the moment we started making writing systems and to some limited degree when we had cave art.

For the greater-than-human intelligences you have Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's version of analytic idealism which is granular (down to two-bit agents) which subsumes Darwinian evolution as part of their dynamics and they have a simple frame where two two-bit conscious agents interacting involves a third conscious agent as a mediator and that the universe is structured from bottom-up by those dynamics. This is where, for groups of humans, you'd also have concepts such as the French occult idea of 'egregores', which are roughly equivalent to varying scales of Ned Block's 'China Mind' objection to functionalism with multiple realizability. What we can see is that we don't sense the consciousness of our own cells or tissues, we'll have physical sensations but we don't take part in their private experience and it seems like that principle would apply upward as well to some degree.

Have read similar things in Discover Magazine, and heard similar things on NPR. How collective masses of individuals reach equilibriums with any one individual being in charge. Happens on the internet with certain patterns. Happens in free market economies. And even with a single individual. Your own brain is "brainless". There is no "little man" sitting inside of your brain guiding your brain. And even if there were such a thing...what would control HIS brain? A little man inside of HIS brain, or another little man inside the brain of the person inside of ....