cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 13, 2020, 15:47 (1500 days ago) @ David Turell

A supporting article by Dan Dennett and Michael Levin :

https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-age...

"...we’re saying that biologists should chill out and see the virtues of anthropomorphising all sorts of living things.

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"We reject a simplistic essentialism where humans have ‘real’ goals, and everything else has only metaphorical ‘as if’ goals. Recent advances in basal cognition and related sciences are showing us how to move past this kind of all-or-nothing thinking about the human animal – naturalising human capacities and swapping a naive binary distinction for a continuum of how much agency any system has.

"Thanks to Charles Darwin, biology doesn’t ever have to invoke an ‘intelligent designer’ who created all those mechanisms. Evolution by natural selection has done – and is still doing – all that refining and focusing and differentiating work. We’re all just physical mechanisms made of physical mechanisms obeying the laws of physics and chemistry. But there is a profound difference between the ingenious mechanisms designed by human intelligent designers – clocks and motors and computers, for instance – and the mechanisms designed and assembled by natural selection.

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"The great progress has been mainly on drilling down to the molecular level, but the higher levels are actually not that well-off. We are still pretty poor at controlling anatomical structure or knowing how to get it back on track in cancer – this is why we don’t have a real regenerative medicine yet. We know how to specify individual cell fates from stem cells, but we’re still far from being able to make complex organs on demand. The few situations where we can make them are those in which we’ve learned to communicate with the cell swarm – providing a simple trigger, such as the bioelectric pattern that says ‘build an eye here’, and then letting the intelligence of the cell group do the hard work and stop when the organ is done.

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"Once the individual early cells – stem cells, for instance – are born, they apparently take care of their own further development, shaping both themselves and their local environments without any further instruction from their parents. They become rather autonomous, unlike the mindless gears and pistons in an intelligently designed engine. They find their way. What could possibly explain this? Something like a trail of breadcrumbs? Yes, in some cases, but the cells have to be smart enough to detect and follow them. We might hope for some relatively simple physical explanation.

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"Notice how ‘you’ can be a single cell or a multicellular organism – or an organ or tissue in a multicellular organism – and still be gifted with informational competences composed out of the basic ‘nuts and bolts’ of information-processing structures. Agents, in this carefully limited perspective, need not be conscious, need not understand, need not have minds, but they do need to be structured to exploit physical regularities that enable them to use information (following the laws of computation) to perform tasks, beginning with the fundamental task of self-preservation, which involves not just providing themselves with the energy needed to wield their tools, but the ability to adjust to their local environments in ways that advance their prospects."

Comment: The article is a philosophic phantasy in my view. Natural selection is suddenly an active designer. Information is assumed, just appeared somehow, not explained, nor are the mechanisms that interpret it. And the complaint is the research is not done properly to get down to the nuts and bolts when most of what they want cannot be done without using the cells themselves to perform biological mechanisms. In other words they are pleading for complete reductionism in biology when it is unlikely that is ever possible. The article is huge. I suggest reading all of it as it is an exact fit for dhw's wishes about intelligent cells.