Tax day!

Read Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates, which is wild, and feeds into the prompt-as-life concept I’ve been toying with. Among other things, it opens up experiments to show the level of self-organization available to prompts:

• A central claim of the emerging field of diverse intelligence is that cognitive capacities (Box. 1) exist on a spectrum: that tools, concepts, and approaches from behavioral sciences can be productively applied to understand and control systems far beyond familiar animals with central nervous systems (without the necessity to attribute advanced, human-level metacognitive traits). 
• Biological intelligent systems demonstrate increased ability to achieve their (collective) goals despite obstacles by integrating the individual competencies of their components (which can perform tasks in their own space without any inkling of the large-scale goals to which they contribute)
• Thus, the physiological process that leads to the emergence of integrated collectives, which scientists and conspecifics recognize as discrete individuals is fundamentally dependent on the geometry of interactions (and signaling barriers) present during the early establishment of individuality and the setting of borders between Self and outside world (since every cell is some other cell’s adjacent neighbor).
• However, the more interesting and fundamental issue is seen when considering just one cut: the cells on either side of the cut will create a head and tail respectively, but they were adjacent neighbors before the cut and located at the same positional information value. In other words, it is actually impossible for an anatomical decision like this to be made locally – the cells of the wound must coordinate with the remaining fragment to get information about where they are located, which way they are facing, and what other structures exist^121,122, in order to make adaptive decisions about large-scale growth and form that enable regeneration of normal worms.
• This recruitment of individuals to accomplish a high-level goal is seen in other collective systems like ant colonies^152,153, which often call in helpers when a task is large. The ability to recruit participants to complete tasks may be a central competency of collective intelligence that works across scales, from cells to swarms of entire organisms⁷.
• Cell and developmental biology offer very rich fodder for the emerging field of diverse intelligence: discovering a vast spectrum of problem-solving capacities in novel substrates and at unconventional spatiotemporal scales. Because of life’s multi-scale competency architecture, a fundamental aspect of intelligence is collective behavior: all intelligences appear to be made of parts, connected by mechanisms implementing policies that bind the competent components into a cooperative (and competitive⁶) computational medium that solves problems in new spaces and at higher scales.
• Importantly, the definition of intelligence as the ability to reach the same endpoint despite internal or external changes emphasizes not only robustness (successful use of novel navigational policies to overcome perturbations) but also its failure modes. Numerous ways of targeting of its sensory, memory, decision-making, or other components can de-rail the performance of a collective intelligence, resulting in birth defects and malformations.
  • I think this is a really important way to probe and examine prompts and models. How well do they reach their goals when damaged, and how do they do it.
• Cancer, a kind of dissociative identity disorder of the somatic collective intelligence¹⁰⁹, limitations in regenerative ability, and many physiological disorders could all be advanced by techniques that exploit not just the low-level mechanisms, but also the higher-level decision-making of life^16,17. 
• Living matter is a kind of agential material with the ability to propagate information across scales – a phenomenon which has many implications for evolution⁹, and for bioengineering²¹.

Ordered The Sentient Cell: The Cellular Foundations of Consciousness

SBIRS

• Write email summary of Friday’s meeting. Also find out who I send the MCMC description to. Done
• Start slide deck for the 22nd – started! Using ContextExplorer which is really good for this sort of thing.
  • These content creators do not exist
    • In which Facebook’s recommendation algorithm serves as the gateway to a network of inauthentic accounts
• Submit paper – done
• Gotta rewrite the final report in a way that “substantially revises” it. Sigh. Waiting for some direction from someone in authority.