
On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems (2016) - DimiD
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4914563/
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leesec
Was recently floored by Michael Levin's (one of this papers authors) talk at
NIPS. Possibly the most amazing talk I have ever seen.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg)

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maroonblazer
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?

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DimiD
His twitter account (@drmichaellevin) is a good place to start.

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adenadel
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted for this. He often tweets out
interesting articles on neuroscience and electrophysiology.

~~~
DimiD
The irony is that that's where I found this article in the first place.

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carapace
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](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage)
. Ephasis added.

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ariehkovler
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'?

~~~
tree_of_item
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.

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talkingtab
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18700328))
linked to a video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg)
about ion channels providing similar functionality to neurons, so maybe we
humans can create "brains" as well.

