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Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME): an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds

Michael Levin

arXiv:2201.10346v1q-bio.TOcs.MAq-bio.CB

TL;DR

Synthetic biology and bioengineering create embodied cognitive systems whose diverse architectures challenge conventional ways of comparing minds. TAME offers a continuous, empirically grounded framework for such systems and applies it to morphogenesis, where bioelectric and collective mechanisms support testable hypotheses about cognition and evolvability.

  • Problem

    Existing approaches lack frameworks for comparing minds whose bodies, architectures, and origins differ from familiar natural model species.

  • Method

    TAME formalizes a continuous, multi-scale, empirically grounded approach to cognition that abstracts from substrate and origin while examining morphogenesis as basal cognition.

  • Results

    TAME identifies morphogenesis as a collective cognitive process and develops testable links between anatomical regulation, bioelectricity, and cognition.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The framework supports research on diverse biological and engineered minds across cognitive science, evolution, regenerative medicine, and artificial intelligence.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    TAME assumes gradualism and denies a privileged material substrate for Selves, treating these as foundational commitments rather than established universal conclusions.

Abstract

from arXiv · show

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. 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. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME - Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere - a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can scale during evolution. 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 cell-level feedback loops into anatomical homeostasis. This architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems has important implications for plasticity of bodies and minds, greatly potentiating evolvability. 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.

Introduction

The paper introduces TAME as an empirically grounded framework for recognizing and comparing diverse cognitive agents across biological and engineered substrates. It treats cognition as continuous, embodied, and applicable beyond conventional animals with brains.

  • TAME develops a multi-scale framework for theory and experiment across biology, cognition, evolution, and biotechnology.
  • Cognition includes adaptive responsiveness and action across conventional organisms and bioengineered systems, not only advanced or metacognitive capacities.
  • TAME uses a continuous axis of persuadability to identify the conceptual and practical tools best suited to modifying a system’s behavior.
  • The framework rejects a binary distinction between systems that know and systems that merely “know,” emphasizing differences in modeling usefulness.
  • TAME develops hypotheses linking morphogenesis, behavior, and physiological allostasis while addressing minds created through bioengineering.
  • The paper focuses on empirically testable cognitive function rather than phenomenal consciousness, situating the framework among biology, philosophy, and information science.

Cognition: changing the Subject

The paper reconceives minds as embodied, collective, multi-scale Selves whose boundaries and material substrates can change. TAME uses gradualism and substrate neutrality to compare natural, engineered, and unconventional agents.

  • Advanced animals are collective intelligences whose cognitive Selves depend on plastic material substrates that change during evolution and an agent’s lifetime.
  • The composite nature of intelligence allows a Self’s material implementation to change radically while memories, preferences, and agency persist.
  • Changing bodies during development exposes limits of models that map cognition onto a stable, mature brain.
  • TAME seeks deep invariants that enable recognition, study, and comparison of diverse intelligences while abstracting from composition and origin.
  • TAME treats cognition as continuous rather than separated by a bright line between true cognition and merely metaphorical cognition.
  • The framework denies a privileged material substrate for Selves and incorporates cognition in cells, plants, tissues, swarms, and engineered systems.
  • TAME applies this perspective to experiments involving trainable gene-regulatory networks and associative drug-pulsing strategies.
  • The framework treats Selves as malleable, designable or evolved, multi-scale agents whose components compete, communicate, and cooperate.

Somatic cognition: an example of unconventional agency in detail

TAME applies its framework to morphogenesis as a form of basal cognition in which cellular collectives coordinate complex anatomical outcomes. This application connects collective activity with testable cognitive hypotheses.

  • Morphogenesis is presented as collective activity in which individual cells cooperate to construct complex structures.

Goal-directed activity in morphogenesis

Morphogenesis exhibits goal-directed, context-sensitive problem-solving across developmental and regenerative systems. TAME links these capacities to bioelectric communication, pattern memory, multi-scale competency, and testable parallels with cognition.

  • Regenerating tissues reach invariant anatomical targets from diverse starting conditions, varying their means rather than following only rote steps.
  • Developmental and regenerative systems pursue anatomical states larger than individual cells through context-sensitive collective activity.
  • Antler tissues can retain wound-location information across years and reproduce ectopic growth, demonstrating rewritable experience-dependent pattern memory.
  • Planarian fragments regenerate missing structures and can form one, two, or zero heads after bioelectric manipulation of ion channels or gap junctions.
  • Morphogenesis reaches common large-scale goals through diverse molecular mechanisms, showing plasticity and coarse-graining over subunit states.
  • The paper argues that communication dynamics scaling cells into coherent Selves evolved before brains in morphogenic control.
  • Morphogenetic systems display parallels with cognitive systems, including responses to injury that resemble mirror-neuron and somatotopic organization.
  • TAME generates predictions about shared molecular machinery in morphogenesis and cognition, including ion channels, gap-junction genes, neurotransmitters, and memory genes.

A bioelectric model of the scaling of the Self

TAME models the scaling of individual cellular competencies into larger collective Selves through bioelectric coupling. Gap junctions expand computational boundaries, enhance cooperation, and can fail in cancer when cells revert toward unicellular goals.

  • A bioelectric model of the scaling of the Self: Gap-junction coupling enables smaller Selves to bind into an emergent higher Self, while breakdown of this process can shrink the Self boundary.The paper presents this as an evolutionary solution to the many-into-one problem.
  • A bioelectric model of the scaling of the Self: Gap junctions connect competent cells into electrochemical networks that expand their sensing radius, integrate spatially distributed information, and increase computational power.These networks can also support credit assignment through Hebbian dynamics at electrical synapses.
  • A bioelectric model of the scaling of the Self: Cancer can close gap junctions, causing cells to revert toward unicellular selves that treat the body as external and pursue cell-level goals.The model predicts, and cited data suggest, that managing bioelectric connectivity can override default genetically determined states and induce metastatic-state reversion.
  • A bioelectric model of the scaling of the Self: Physiological coupling enhances cooperation because effects of one cell’s actions on its neighbor are immediately propagated back to the coupled system.The proposed game-theoretic extension allows agents to Cooperate, Defect, Merge, or Split; merging removes defection as an option.
  • A bioelectric model of the scaling of the Self: Multiscale agency creates a positive feedback loop in which increasingly complex collective Selves can potentiate further evolution.The coupling mechanisms are therefore both products of evolution and functionally relevant to evolution itself.

Evolutionary aspects

TAME treats developmental bioelectricity as a computational layer that links morphogenetic problem-solving with behavioral cognition. Its properties provide a basis for hypotheses about how control mechanisms could be transformed into behavioral cognitive capacities.

  • Evolutionary aspects: Developmental bioelectricity provides a tractable computational entrypoint into the informational architecture of morphogenetic collective intelligence.The framework distinguishes it from merely another developmental micro-mechanism by emphasizing its computational role.
  • Evolutionary aspects: Bioelectric circuits exhibit modularity, memory, spatial integration, and generalization, which TAME identifies as critical aspects of basal cognition.These properties support a bridge between anatomical problem-solving and behavioral sophistication mediated by brains.
  • Evolutionary aspects: TAME uses developmental bioelectricity to formulate hypotheses about the evolutionary path from morphogenetic control mechanisms to behavioral cognitive capacities.The proposed unification concerns how Selves arise and expand across biological scales.

Somatic bioelectrics reveals the origin of complex cognitive systems

Somatic bioelectricity is presented as an ancient, pre-neural system for organizing cell groups and anatomical form. Its scalable information processing and flexible signaling help explain how cell-level homeostasis could extend to whole-body organization and evolvability.

  • Somatic bioelectrics reveals the origin of complex cognitive systems: Developmental bioelectricity predates nervous systems and uses analog dynamics to coordinate transcription, cell behavior, development, regeneration, and remodeling.Neural signaling is described as building on prior bioelectric organization of internal morphology, while operating faster on external-world data.
  • Somatic bioelectrics reveals the origin of complex cognitive systems: Bacterial communities use brain-like bioelectric dynamics to organize tissue-level distributions of metabolites and second-messenger molecules.This parallels the proposed scaling from single-cell bioelectric properties to collective proto-bodies in biofilms.
  • Somatic bioelectrics reveals the origin of complex cognitive systems: Bioelectricity helps scale free-living cells’ homeostatic pathways into whole-body anatomical homeostasis.The paper links this scaling to the emergence of powerful master inducers that initiate self-limiting morphogenetic cascades.
  • Somatic bioelectrics reveals the origin of complex cognitive systems: Many ion-channel combinations can produce the same Vmem dynamics, allowing evolution to exchange channels while preserving bioelectric states.Bioelectric influence can propagate across tissues, supporting flexible exploration of developmental mechanisms.
  • Somatic bioelectrics reveals the origin of complex cognitive systems: Somatic bioelectric states can function as primitive pattern memories, extending computational analysis of information processing beyond neurons.The paper also proposes that epithelia may preprocess electrical information into larger-scale features for downstream processing.

Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution

TAME argues that multi-scale competent modules make anatomical systems robust, adaptive, and more evolvable by solving problems across nested levels. This framework also reframes agency and cognition as distributed across biological components and unconventional bodies.

  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Complexity makes bottom-up control of biological systems difficult, motivating attention to higher-level control signals and multiscale architectures.The inverse problem concerns identifying signals that induce desired changes in complex systems.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Biological modules act as sub-agents that solve problems in their own spaces, allowing systems to reach target morphologies despite perturbations in starting conditions or components.Regeneration is presented as one case of broader anatomical homeostasis.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Multi-scale competency smooths the fitness landscape by shielding some mutation effects from selection when morphogenetic subsystems compensate for deviations.The paper suggests anatomical homeostasis may address mutation-induced deviations from target morphology, not only damage.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Multi-scale competency reduces apparent pleiotropy by allowing beneficial effects of mutations to become visible even when other effects are initially harmful.The supplied passage frames this as a consequence of competent morphogenetic subsystems.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Competent modules can hide negative consequences long enough for lineages to discover and later hardwire adaptive effects of mutations.The paper compares this opportunity-generating process to the Baldwin effect.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Homeostatic setpoint-seeking makes genotype–anatomical phenotype relationships more linear and improves controllability through top-down pattern encoding.Bioelectric pattern memories reduce the need to solve difficult inverse problems for achieving high-level outcomes.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: Robustness and environmental responsiveness trade off, while nested homeostatic loops can combine stable large-scale outcomes with sensitivity to changing conditions.The paper relates this tradeoff to criticality and says plastic modules can reduce the sim-to-real gap.
  • Multi-scale autonomy potentiates the speed of evolution: TAME treats consciousness as compatible with multiple views while focusing empirically on cognition and functional organization across bodies and biological scales.The framework applies its multiscale perspective to metamorphosis, technological hybrids, and uncertainty about other minds.

A more inclusive framework for cognition

TAME offers a continuous, empirically grounded framework for treating cognition as distributed across diverse biological and engineered substrates. It combines a multi-scale view of agency with practical research directions spanning morphogenesis, synthetic organisms, bioethics, and the development of the framework itself.

  • A more inclusive framework for cognition: Cognition can be unified across radically different substrates because regenerating, physiological, and behaving systems expend energy to achieve adaptive outcomes under perturbation.The framework treats substrate, scale, and origin as non-fundamental differences for comparing problem-solving systems.
  • A more inclusive framework for cognition: TAME rejects binary cognitive categories, treating cognitive traits as a continuum that includes engineered, evolutionary, and potentially exobiological agents.It replaces bright-line distinctions with empirically guided models chosen for prediction, control, and experimentation.
  • A more inclusive framework for cognition: Every intelligence is collective: nested agents use homeostatic activity, while morphogenetic homeostasis provides a manipulable model for studying how local processes scale into larger Selves.Gap-junctional coupling is presented as a tractable mechanism for coordinating subunits with porous and changing cognitive boundaries.
  • Open problems: TAME remains conceptually incomplete, requiring integration with other frameworks, quantitative refinement of its cognitive spaces, and better methods for measuring planning, exploration, robustness, and generalization.These open directions include testing whether the proposed spaces have objective reality and developing automated models evaluated by predictive quality and parsimony.
  • Research directions: TAME extends beyond conceptual claims into an empirical program on morphogenetic plasticity, synthetic organisms, and smart materials.Proposed studies include modeling regenerative error correction and predicting attractors or setpoints in agents without long evolutionary histories.
  • Ethical implications: The framework also reframes bioethical assessment around recognizing diverse Selves rather than judging constructs primarily by similarity to human brains.It argues that ethics should consider both risks from bioengineering and opportunity costs associated with failing to address suffering and other societal problems.

Figure Legends

The figures present TAME as a framework for comparing cognition across nested biological scales, unconventional agents, and diverse problem-solving spaces. They emphasize morphogenesis, bioelectric pattern memory, and gap-junction coupling as mechanisms for collective anatomical intelligence.

  • Diverse, Multiscale Intelligence: Biological systems form nested computational architectures in which molecular, cellular, tissue, and engineered components can participate in cognition.The framework treats these levels as subsystems with varying problem-solving capacities and allows chimeric combinations of biological and engineered components.
  • The Axis of Persuadability: The axis of persuadability represents agency as a testable continuum from brute-force control to rational persuasion, without implying a linear evolutionary hierarchy.Its purpose is pragmatic: identify the control strategy best matched to a system’s cognitive capacities.
  • Cognitive Selves can change in real-time: Cognitive selves can persist while bodies, brains, and substrates change, as illustrated by metamorphosis, regeneration, and memory transfer across planarian tissues.These examples connect radical material remodeling with persistence of information or agency.
  • Cognitive agents solve problems in diverse spaces: Agents solve problems in behavioral, transcriptional, anatomical, and physiological spaces, with intelligence reflected in reaching favorable states despite perturbations or intermediate detours.Planarian regeneration under barium illustrates transcriptional problem-solving, while the goal-directed framework links morphogenesis to homeostatic control.
  • Morphogenesis and cellular collectives: Morphogenesis is presented as collective intelligence: cells regenerate target anatomies, deploy alternative mechanisms, and use bioelectric and gap-junction networks to store and scale pattern information.Planarian bioelectric patterns can encode altered anatomical targets, while tissue networks expand sensing, memory, prediction, and coordinated action beyond individual cells.

Tables

The tables map cognitive concepts onto pattern formation and present TAME’s claims about distributed agency, developmental memory, bioelectric scaling, and evolutionary consequences.

  • Isomorphism between cognition and pattern formation: Small pieces of planarians can retain the correct body pattern, illustrating distributed or holographic storage of morphogenetic goal-state information.The framework links this capacity to bioelectric patterning and organ-level monitoring of body configuration.
  • Isomorphism between cognition and pattern formation: TAME maps cognitive-neuroscience concepts such as self-modeling, goal-seeking, adaptivity, and top-down control onto developmental and regenerative processes.Examples include bioelectric representations of morphogenetic states, regeneration toward target configurations, and signaling-pathway control.
  • An example of the scaling of cognition: Developmental and regenerative systems display plasticity and goal-directed correction, while aging is associated with declining cognition-like and regenerative capacities.The listed examples include age-dependent cognitive decline and age-dependent loss of regenerative ability.
  • An example of the scaling of cognition: Biological Selves scale when cells join bioelectric computational networks that expand sensing, actuation, stress propagation, and pursuit of anatomical goals.Gap junctions partially erase cellular ownership information, promoting cooperation and tissue- or organ-level agency.
  • Evolution benefits from multiscale competency of components: Bioelectric networks insert a physiological layer between genes and anatomy, reducing inverse-problem limitations and helping engineers design or evolve complex proto-cognitive circuits.This intermediate layer makes relationships between genes, bioelectric patterns, and anatomy easier to reverse and control than genome-to-anatomy mappings alone.
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