I have written a lot about the fact that biological systems, like us, are basically collective intelligences. We are made of many cells, each of which has competencies and agendas of their own; our research program involves the cognitive glue mechanisms that bind their goal-seeking behavior into a cohesive emergent Self operating in spaces beyond what the individual subunits can comprehend.
Around 2016, a major effort took place to find a mate for a rare snail. Scientists studying left-right asymmetry named, & tried to find a mate for, Jeremy. Imagine how far these issues were above anything Jeremy could comprehend. He was the star of an immense, inscrutable, alien drama giving meaning to his life that he could not begin to understand. The results of this research, involving Jeremy’s love life, anatomy, and genetics, will be part of the scientific record in perpetuity, and could lead to very important advances that affect many human patients. Jeremy lived and died having no inkling about the broader patterns and concepts involved.
Those of us who like to outpaint ideas – extending concepts to see where they lead – inevitably ask: could this mean that we too, are part of an even larger collective? Not everyone asks this; some people are tied to a specific level as privileged, and while they can agree that we are made of parts, they can’t imagine what it’s like to be those parts or how we could possibly be such a part ourselves. Kind of like in the brilliant Flatland, when the Sphere, a 3-dimensional being, never tires of amazing the 2-dimensional Square with his tales of a greater world, but balks when Square hypothesizes that the Sphere could himself be a low-dimensional projection of an even higher-dimensional object. Preposterous, Sphere says.
Scale-free thinking asks us to imagine a lower-scale version of this failure of imagination: we’re full of components like the intestinal parasites in the sketch above that, were they capable of that level of thinking, could potentially conclude that they too lived in a cold, unfeeling, mind-less, purposeless universe and were the top level of cognition. Gauging the level of agency of your environment is an interesting, and important challenge, and it’s not warranted to assume the level of agency of the outside world is very low, any more than it’s wise to assume this about various kinds of other systems.
There is a cheap version of this howver, where we just say “The Universe is a huge organism and we are like cells in it”. Like the animist assumption of a spirit in every rock, this kind of idea is easy but is low in payoff because it doesn’t facilitate progress. When declared by fiat, without the hard work of asking how do we know, and what does it enable, it is a sterile, if beautiful and inspiring idea. Many of us have worked on frameworks that offer principled research programs to determine when it is correct to make these kinds of cognitive claims about unconventional agents. The benefit of that kind of research (difficult though it is) is that by answering specific questions, we gain a roadmap to future progress to actually do something useful, and gain wisdom, from that kind of thinking. So no, we can’t just assume it’s true that we are cells in a galactic organism, or that the collective intelligence lens holds when scaled up beyond the level of individual organisms. Gaia and other hypotheses like it need to be tested. Also, collective intelligence is different than that of its parts because it often works in different problem spaces, but it’s not necessarily greater or more advanced (although it often is).
So, how would we know if we were part of a greater being? I expect, but can’t prove (although I bet someone could) that due to Gödel and Turing limits, we could never definitively prove that we were part of a larger system with significant cognition. But I suspect we could gain evidence for it. What would the evidence look like? I think it would look like synchronicity. I think what we would notice is events whose conjunction looked like coincidence at the level of physics (lack causation at lower levels) but exhibited deep meaning which we could just barely begin to grasp. Deep patterns in our lives and world events which had no satisfying explanation or joint explanation at local scales of individual events but were bound by a large-scale meaning that we could perceive (even partially).
We already have examples of this in our technology. To the nodes of an artificial neural network, events would seem oddly correlated; they are connected with a global meaning, not well-explained by local facts. Perhaps quantum entanglement is a “basal” version of synchronicity for the smallest-agency components of our universe. Another useful intuition pump is fractal images. Look at the images in this post; it’s obvious there’s a pattern but what causes the long-range correlation between the pixels? It is not possible to guess a truly compressed representation unless you already know in advance the short, simple formula in complex numbers that generated it and underlies the global order. To test these ideas in the real world, we would need to develop a set of interventions (not just observations), whose coordinated outcomes would not be well-explained by physics (though consistent with it), but would be understandable from the lens of larger-scale patterns and hypothesized goals and cognitive competencies of the putative larger system.
Something like the idea of the universe as a great intelligence is appealing, to stop the infinite regress of questions about any physicalist story of the universe: what is responsible for the laws governing it? Personally, I have an affinity for the concept discussed by Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Spira – that we are all fragmented alters produced by a dissociative identity process from a great cosmic universal mind. Of course, that leads to the question of why this universal mind fragmented; known examples in the biological realm include stress/trauma, reproductive urge (planarian fission), and boredom (being the only mind, with no one to talk to, and seeing all truths as obvious tautologies, could be pretty boring). I don’t think we can ever know for sure, despite the relevance of transpersonal experiences that can certainly feel like a degree of reintegration. But there is something symmetrical and pleasing about a set of cycles of fragmentation, and the components’ struggling for (and eventually achieving) reintegration. Of course there are ancient cosmologies that are relevant, and more modern models of bouncing universes as the physical side of the process.
There is a recent advance in biology which may be a model system for gathering evidence about events at higher levels. Consider the thanatotranscriptome (discussed here) – a set of genes that are turned on when an organism is dying. It occurs to me that this transcriptional event is a sign that the cells are aware the higher level (the multicellular organism) is disbanding. The individual cells may or may not have any problems (especially if it’s an aquatic organism) but the larger system of which they were a part is falling apart, and the cells clearly know this. It is not known yet whether this is mediated by some kind of interesting detection of higher-level membership or something more boring and conventional such as oxygen deprivation when the heart stops (or both). It also stands to reason that if thanatotranscriptome genes are indicators of subunits leaving a collective, some (or all?) embryonic genes may be an indicator of the opposite – cells realizing they’re becoming part of a story (a self-model and a cognitive light cone) far greater than themselves.
I leave you with this bit of prose, from the perspective of a single neuron in a brain or artificial neural network, trying to decide if the physiological dynamics of its world provide hints of a greater purpose in it (click on it to see the text). The bit at the end about the dogs was more readily recognized when I first wrote it (a few years ago) than it is now, so the relevance is explained here (it’s about the dog images recovered from Deep Dream analysis of neural networks).
Images by Jeremy Guay of Peregrine Creative.
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