On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems (2016)(ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems (2016)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4914563/
4 comments
Indeed, I just watched it and it is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
At about the 38:00 mark, during Q&A, he mentions some yet-to-be-published work by his team where it's possible to make artificial living machines that are completely unlike the organisms from which the material is sourced (if I'm transcribing his words more or less accurately).
That sounds like the stuff of science fiction. Does anyone know where to follow the progress of this kind of work?
At about the 38:00 mark, during Q&A, he mentions some yet-to-be-published work by his team where it's possible to make artificial living machines that are completely unlike the organisms from which the material is sourced (if I'm transcribing his words more or less accurately).
That sounds like the stuff of science fiction. Does anyone know where to follow the progress of this kind of work?
This is fantastic!
Among other things, I had no idea that mainstream science was (re)visiting human regeneration since Robert Becker passed away. (Cf. "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_%28book%29 ) His book is the only other place I've ever seen the fact about young children being able to regenerate finger tips. Imagine a thing like that going unnoticed for all of human history.
Anyhow, two things strike me:
First, you have subjective experience of your own body's non-cerebral thinking, (cf. Robert Anton Wilson's "neuro-somatic" level of awareness) if you want to interact with it you don't need technology.
Second, intelligence is not just per-organism, it's ambient. The whole global ecosystem is self-reflexively intelligent. And again, you have access to subjective experience of this awareness, if you want to interact with it you don't need technology. Our societies' current disconnect from this awareness is a (temporary or terminal) phase of our development as a species. I don't know what caused it. My favorite theory is that we are suffering from mass shock in the aftermath of the Younger Dryas (with or without the comet.) However, it could be that the rest of the ecosystem is like a yolk to the embryo that is humanity, and we actually do represent the Zaphod Beeblebroxian center of the universe in re: life on Earth, and everything is happening just as it should. Or there could be an aeons-old war between aerobic and anaerobic life and we are biological weapons developed by the anaerobes, and when we trigger the Clathrate Gun it will mean their plan worked.
In any event, I hope that this kind of mainstream scientific acceptance of these ideas will lead to a deeper understanding of the living intelligence that surrounds us and of which we are comprised. In a couple of places he says, "we would like to have technology that can do this", and I keep thinking, "We do!" Life itself can be viewed as a form of super-advanced nanotechnology. It's had billions of years to think, and it's tried a bunch of things, and recently it tried us...
We don't need technology if science finds a way for us to understand Findhorn.
We should expect that someone with a birth defect or a severed limb will one day soon be able to heal themselves by direct communication with their own tissue. We should expect to be able to ask for crops that have specific traits and abilities by direct communication with Nature. The limiting factor here is our belief about what's possible. Here's mainstream science delivering belief-changing data.
Among other things, I had no idea that mainstream science was (re)visiting human regeneration since Robert Becker passed away. (Cf. "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Electric_%28book%29 ) His book is the only other place I've ever seen the fact about young children being able to regenerate finger tips. Imagine a thing like that going unnoticed for all of human history.
Anyhow, two things strike me:
First, you have subjective experience of your own body's non-cerebral thinking, (cf. Robert Anton Wilson's "neuro-somatic" level of awareness) if you want to interact with it you don't need technology.
Second, intelligence is not just per-organism, it's ambient. The whole global ecosystem is self-reflexively intelligent. And again, you have access to subjective experience of this awareness, if you want to interact with it you don't need technology. Our societies' current disconnect from this awareness is a (temporary or terminal) phase of our development as a species. I don't know what caused it. My favorite theory is that we are suffering from mass shock in the aftermath of the Younger Dryas (with or without the comet.) However, it could be that the rest of the ecosystem is like a yolk to the embryo that is humanity, and we actually do represent the Zaphod Beeblebroxian center of the universe in re: life on Earth, and everything is happening just as it should. Or there could be an aeons-old war between aerobic and anaerobic life and we are biological weapons developed by the anaerobes, and when we trigger the Clathrate Gun it will mean their plan worked.
In any event, I hope that this kind of mainstream scientific acceptance of these ideas will lead to a deeper understanding of the living intelligence that surrounds us and of which we are comprised. In a couple of places he says, "we would like to have technology that can do this", and I keep thinking, "We do!" Life itself can be viewed as a form of super-advanced nanotechnology. It's had billions of years to think, and it's tried a bunch of things, and recently it tried us...
We don't need technology if science finds a way for us to understand Findhorn.
We should expect that someone with a birth defect or a severed limb will one day soon be able to heal themselves by direct communication with their own tissue. We should expect to be able to ask for crops that have specific traits and abilities by direct communication with Nature. The limiting factor here is our belief about what's possible. Here's mainstream science delivering belief-changing data.
If you work with any kind of evolutionary system or neural networks or meta-optimizers (Like Schmidhuber's Gödel machine) there comes a point when you realize that "intelligence", whatever it is, should be expected to arise. Evolution and meta-evolution proceed at the same time in life, so intelligence should be ambient in Nature. (This is what Wolfram has been talking about with his "New Kind of Science" tome, etc. Gregory Bateson also talked about this in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences)".)
Now, combine this idea, that meta-evolutionary adaptation naturally leads to ambient intelligence (put another way, living systems have as much intelligence as is adaptive, the limiting factor on the intelligence of the global ecosystem is NOT the difficulty of being intelligent because it's actually really easy to be intelligent) with the recent discovery that the oceans are a sort of naturally occuring Grey Goo[1], and it seems that the oceans themselves are intelligent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
> Marine phages, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists until recently, appear to be the most abundant and diverse form of DNA replicating agent on the planet. There are approximately 4x1030 phage in oceans or 5x107 per millilitre.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage . Ephasis added.
Now, combine this idea, that meta-evolutionary adaptation naturally leads to ambient intelligence (put another way, living systems have as much intelligence as is adaptive, the limiting factor on the intelligence of the global ecosystem is NOT the difficulty of being intelligent because it's actually really easy to be intelligent) with the recent discovery that the oceans are a sort of naturally occuring Grey Goo[1], and it seems that the oceans themselves are intelligent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
> Marine phages, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists until recently, appear to be the most abundant and diverse form of DNA replicating agent on the planet. There are approximately 4x1030 phage in oceans or 5x107 per millilitre.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage . Ephasis added.
Fascinating. I wonder how the principles here could be adapted to tech? I'm thinking specifically of IoT-type setups with low-powered on-device processing that are mesh networked, without needing a cloud-type backend as a 'brain'?
I'm thinking of numerical optimization that uses algorithms inspired by nature but very different from the current crop of neural networks, while still taking advantage of GPUs, gradient descent etc.
If a "debate" is a kind of AI/neural network activity this makes sense. The smaller groups could correspond to layers, and one would expect that the level of interchange would be higher in groups of small groups compared to single large group. In this model, a debate is "thinking" where the participants act as neurons. A recent thread on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328) linked to a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg about ion channels providing similar functionality to neurons, so maybe we humans can create "brains" as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg