Introduction: Rethinking Discrete Categories
- Traditional categorizations of living things (discrete species, clear separation between humans and other beings) are inadequate for understanding intelligence and future beings.
- We need a framework for understanding, creating, and ethically relating to *diverse* intelligences, regardless of composition (what they’re made of) or origin (evolved, engineered, or a combination).
- Focus should shift from categorizing natural and traditional “kinds” (types) to focusing on scales and intelligence.
The Continuum of Being and Intelligence
- Evolution and developmental biology show a *continuum* of forms, not sharp distinctions between humans and other life stages (embryos, ancestors, or future augmented humans).
- Horizontal Modification of beings are possible and very likely, which challenge these natural distinctions.
- Humans will be modified (technologically, biologically) for health and augmentation. Distinguishing between “human” and “machine” becomes difficult.
- We need a framework (like Rosenblueth & Bigelow’s scale) to relate to various intelligences: primates, birds, octopuses, colonial organisms, engineered life forms, AI (robotic or software), and even aliens. The scale is: Passive Matter, Computational Matter, Agent Materials and Metacoginition.
- The goal of such framework is to create interaction (including creating new discoveires, and capabilites withing biomedicine and more), along with a much more sound etheical footing.
- We all start as cells (“just physics”), eventually turning into things described by pscyology and even psychoanalysis.
- We need a “story of scaling” to understand how systems described by physics also become describable by psychology.
Agential Material and Collective Intelligence
- Unlike Legos, biological systems are made of “agential material” – cells with their own agendas and problem-solving capacities (e.g., *Lacremaria* single-cell organism).
- All living systems, and even the “single” unified person is a *collective intelligence*.
- We, people, *are all made of* parts. The body, especially even the pineal gland (in rene descarte times considered the singular organ), are collection of things with multiple things inside it.
- Even our *selves* are “collective intelligences” composed of parts. The challenge is explaining how these parts create a unified sense of self.
- Alan Turing saw a connection between the origin of bodies (morphogenesis) and the origin of minds.
The “Self” is Dynamic, Not Hardcoded
- Counting “embryos” isn’t counting a fixed number of beings. It’s counting the alignment of cells committed to a shared anatomical plan.
- Experiments with duck embryos show that the number of “selves” can change dynamically based on physiological processes (e.g., creating conjoined twins by separating groups of cells).
- Selves construct themselves (including defining their own boundires from the envrionment); a “self” isn’t something predefined genetically.
- Split-brain patients and dissociative identity disorders also show that the number of “selves” in a brain isn’t fixed.
- Cognitive Glue (e.g. nerovus system): Creates a higher level entity, with cognitive abilities far exceding each single part.
Radical Plasticity: Caterpillars and Planaria
- Caterpillar to Butterfly: Caterpillar (simple, 2D movement) is reorgnaized drastically to turn to Butterflies (flies, has hard parts, eat different things). Caterpillars, if trained, have memory. Butterfly memory persist, and what is useful for the caterpillar is translated into actions (of flight, eatings etc) for the butterfly, demonstrating profound adaptation beyond mere memory.
- Planaria Memory and Regeneration: Planaria remember training even after their heads (including brains) are removed and regrown, implying memory storage outside the brain and transfer to a new brain.
Multiscale Competency Architecture
- Biological systems have problem-solving abilities at multiple scales (molecules, cells, tissues, organs), not just in three-dimensional space but also in gene expression spaces, physiological spaces, and “anatomical morphospace.”
Beyond Reliability: Salamanders and Picasso Frogs
- Salamanders (high ability for regenration) with varying numbers of chromosomes and cell sizes *still* build the correct structures, demonstrating robust adaptation to unexpected variations, even in the number of cells!
- Shows evolution produces problemsolving capabalities rather than rigid reliability.
- Evolution makes a “error minimization” and is not simply fixed instructions: Picasso frogs (organs scrambled) still develop into normal frogs, indicating a system for *error minimization,* not just following hardwired instructions. Organs do unusual pathways to correct itself.
Beyond Genetics: Morphogenetic Plasticity
- Example 1: Flies run Ant-Morphogenetic programs on wings: it protects from predator. This illustrates morphogenetic (change in shape/structure) potential.
- Example 2: Wasp on Oak-leaves. The typical oak and acorn, are well understood (shape and everything). But Wasp makes signals, causing structures on oaks very different to the ones typically observed.
- Genetics defines the *hardware,* but cells can achieve diverse outcomes. A wasp can induce an oak leaf to build a *different* structure (a gall) without changing the leaf’s DNA.
Communicating with Morphogenetic Intelligence
- Morphogenesis is the behavior of a collective intelligence in anatomical space. We need to learn how to *communicate* with this intelligence.
- Example: The wasp above “communicates” (through evolution) to tell cells of a different kind to construct different.
- Neurons/Nervous system uses computation and electricy. Evolution had already used and discovered the use of an electrial network to intergrate many cells both space and time way before it developed muscles.
- Voltage-Sensitive Fluorescent Dye Imaging: A technology that lets us measure voltage. This allows viewing “bioelectric pattern” showing the frog forming their faces, and learning to understand/decode the pattern/process.
- Electrical Pattern (“Electric Face”). Like brain scanning, shows activity but in organs: showing you can tell where a organ like a mouth/eyes is going to be way in advance.
- Pathalogical patterns exist and could signal issue. For example: cancers have abnormal patterns and disconnect from surrounding envrionment/cells and causing cells to “forget” larger structure.
- This approach offers way to do cancer therpatueis; by trying to change cell memory/state instead of “killing cells” or toxic therapies, and “reconnecting” the cells.
- Examples: Cells disconnected from environment will loose big structure, the memory can be restored through reinflucing the connection back, even with genetical defects still present.
Reprogramming the Body Plan
- The group has created ectopic eyes (induced on frog’s body): telling (through electral signal/patterns) cells to become another. Almost any region could be reprogramed into different organs, like eye. Cells cooperate with neighbours when only few cells are injected.
- Proving that “eye master genes” theory only partially accurate; once you know how to “communicate” in right language/patterns/signals, any cell has way more potential.
- Rewriting Pattern Memory (Planarian). Can change worm head: from one-head into two heads *forever*, they always reproduce/regenerate as two-heads after this. By Modifying Biopattern. Showing: DNA don’t dictate 100% how bodies change, the same genome (or DNA, no change in genetics here!) can still build very different things depending on how/where and by what the signal is/what the patterns are! The reprogramed cell can exist beyond generations/cuttings.
Origin of Goals and Xenobots
- Questions raised about Goals (Where these morphoentic and goal pattern exist outside DNA? The option and limit, including the example of re-routing worms’s into head of different species with wildly different genetics.): they aren’t completely set, but re-programmable, a “rewritable”.
- Just like reprograming computer instead of using “soldering iron”, the biology could and does re-program to fix and correct for goals.
- Xenobots (created from frog skin cells): These cells, when separated from the embryo, *spontaneously* self-assemble into new organisms (“xenobots”) with novel behaviors, including *kinematic self-replication* (building copies of themselves from loose cells).
- Xenobots have Cilia (hairs for frog mucas transport), in Xenobot use it to swim.
- Kinematic Self-replication (discovered by accident!) – creating generation of copies of Xebot with materials/parts on envrionment.
- Showcasing it is difficult to attribute Xenobot shape/behavours, as they don’t have any selective “evolution”.
- Evoluation create problemsolvers, rather than fixated behaviors/forms, that is, under condition changes/challenges.
- Anthrobots (from adult human tracheal cells): Similar to xenobots, these human cells also self-assemble into novel structures (“anthrobots”) with surprising capabilities, like repairing neural wounds.
The Spectrum of Persuadability and Ethics
- It’s wrong to look at “philosophically” into beings and deciding which one is an intelligence. There is experimental way of looking at this (“spectrum of persuadability”, from tools/hardwiring -> behavorial science and trainings -> Rich relationship) and intelligence.
- “Persuadability”: The kind of tools we use to communicate with things, scales. Cells are capable of things than what people thought, and it is easy to miss intelligence, making us “a lot left on table”.
- We are on the era of “diversity intelligence”. Where today’s Large Language Models (GPT-4) don’t matter, What Matters Is that: We need to do experienments, there are non-human minds, even some of the simplest thing has incredible complexity.
- Ethics: We must avoid denying moral worth to beings because they don’t look like us. The space of possible bodies and minds is expanding rapidly (cyborgs, chimeras, etc.), and we need better ethical frameworks. It’s about learning to relate to *different* beings. There will exist cyborgs and all types, including biological materials/evolved ones combined, making us “Synbiosis”, or beings living together and requiring a “ethical Framework”. It won’t just about whether things are “metal/human” that is traditional, or looking to the tree-of-life that decides on which being “count” – many, multiple things count, many will change. We are required to make moral frameworks and ethics in way never before required.
- Humanity on the Long Term: We are not the “best, and most developed”. Humans, what does this actually mean (to want Roomba, companion?). What it wants is *NOT* DNA, what does that mean (relationship etc) What matters? (That are Worth-Thinking!)