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[Article] How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' really is (www.newscientist.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/interestingshare@lemmy.zip

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What if, though, “selves” are present in those very cells, ahead of the point at which they merge to form a greater whole? It might sound outlandish, but biological simulations are indicating that those minuscule units of life, which we usually think about as passive machines – cogs blindly governed by the laws of physics – have their own goals and display agency. Surprisingly, even simple networks of biomolecules appear to display some degree of a self, a revelation that could lead to novel ways of treating health conditions with far fewer side effects.

What’s more, some biologists say this new grasp of selfhood can reveal what is special about life and how it began in the first place. “The origins of agency coincide with the origins of life,” says cognitive scientist Tom Froese at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have always been fascinated by Christopher Alexander's arguments that life is a property that can be measured for a given space, that rather than being an impossible philosophical question life and intelligence are a product of particular architectures that can be organically enhanced with the addition of other nuanced structures.

To see life and intelligence this way is so much more exciting to me than any chemist's binary definition of life they would employ by severing each constituent element into smaller and smaller pieces until it can be sufficiently interrogated and dissected to subdue and encapsulate the essence of life as if it were no more than a fraudently magic trickster presence to be caught and jailed within the known and exploitable.

No, the magic of life and intelligence is an analog not digital value and it inherently resides in summation, it can never be found within the individual elements.

“If we are to use the theory of centers – and the concept of life – as the basis of all architecture, it would be reassuring to know that wholeness, together with the properties which bring centers to life, is a necessary feature of material reality, not merely a psychological aspect of things which arises during perception of works of art.

… According to a ‘cognitive’ interpretation, the centers could merely exist in the mind’s eye … and the fifteen properties … could also exist merely as artifacts of cognition …

… I shall argue that nature too is understandable in terms of wholeness … I shall try to show that the structure of centers I call wholeness goes deeper than mere cognition, is linked to the functional and practical behavior of the natural world … and is as much at the foundation of physics and biology as it is of architecture.

https://iamronen.com/blog/2018/03/24/christopher-alexander-the-fifteen-properties-in-nature/