Sims 3 mind meld3/13/2023 The compound agent supports memories, goals, and cognition that belongs to that Self and not to any of the parts alone. Much as single celled organisms transitioned to multicellularity during evolution, the single cells of an embryo construct de novo, and then operate, a unified Self during a single agent’s lifetime. And yet, under the hood, we find collections of cells which follow low-level rules via distributed, parallel functionality and give rise to emergent system-level dynamics. That is also how we formulate models of learning (“the rat learned X”), moral responsibility, decision-making, and valence: at the center is a subject which has agency, serves as the locus of rewards and punishments, possesses (as a single functional unit) memories, exhibits preferences, and takes actions. However, as human adults, our primary experience is that of a centralized, coherent Self which controls events in a top-down manner. There is no truly monadic, indivisible yet cognitive being: all known minds reside in physical systems composed of components of various complexity and active behavior. Considering classical and recent data from the perspectives of computational science, evolutionary biology, and basal cognition, reveals a rich research program with many implications for cognitive science, evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, and artificial intelligence.Īll known cognitive agents are collective intelligences, because we are all made of parts biological agents in particular are not just structurally modular, but made of parts that are themselves agents in important ways. This architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems has important implications for plasticity of bodies and minds, greatly potentiating evolvability. An important medium exploited by evolution for joining active subunits into greater agents is developmental bioelectricity, implemented by pre-neural use of ion channels and gap junctions to scale up cell-level feedback loops into anatomical homeostasis. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can increase during evolution. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. TAME provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that manifest in similar ways in numerous other substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME-Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere-a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species. Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. 2Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.1Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, Medford, MA, United States.
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