The science and philosophical implications of bioelectric fields

They ‘told’ cancer to stop, and it did: The science and philosophical implications of bioelectric fields

Hans Busstra, MA
Prof. Michael Levin, PhD

‘Talking’ to cells without influencing genes or molecules: it can be done by influencing bioelectric fields. By manipulating the bioelectric fields in organisms like planaria and tadpoles, Prof. Michael Levin has shown how eyes and other organs can grow in unconventional locations, how planaria can be ‘told’ to grow two heads, and perhaps most importantly: how cancer cells can be ‘told’ to stop growing in frogs. These promising experiments might lead to groundbreaking new therapeutics. The importance of the pioneering empirical work of Prof. Michael Levin at Tufts University, on the intersection of bioelectricity, regeneration, and cognition, can hardly be overstated. Philosophically, his work has deep implications for how we think about evolution, cognition and consciousness.

In 2020, Levin’s Lab created so-called Zenobots, programmable, living organisms made from frog cells (Xenopus laevis), designed to perform specific tasks such as movement or carrying objects. They represent a fusion of biology and robotics, created by assembling cells into novel, self-organizing structures guided by bioelectric signals. In trying to make sense of what his work on Zenobots points to, Levin regards evolution as the process whereby nature explores a Platonic realm of possibilities, ‘hardware configurations’ that, in a sense, are pre-existing and waiting to be discovered. And when it comes to intelligence, Levin sees only collective intelligence, in the sense that all intelligent lifeforms we know of are structured as sets of cells. Therefore, we ourselves could also very well be part of a larger intelligence.

While the relation to Sheldrake's work on Morphic Fields is rather obvious, I do want to note that Andreas Wagner also suggested Platonic Forms might be involved with Evolution:

Possible creatures

It seemed Darwin had banished biological essences – yet evolution would fail without nature’s library of Platonic forms

How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.)

In physics, the Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner called it ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’. And indeed, it is not clear why Newton’s law of gravitation should apply to so much more than the falling apple that might have inspired it, why it should describe everything from accreting planets to entire solar systems and rotating galaxies. Except that it does. For whatever reason, reality appears to obey certain mathematical formulae.

Nature’s libraries add another dimension to a centuries-old debate about the reality of the Platonic realm. Until now, this debate largely revolved around abstractions like the ones we find in mathematics. With the genotype networks, a new element enters: experimental science.

Levin seems much more emphatic that Physicalism is false in this video.

Excerpted from:

Michael Levin is a Distinguished Professor in the Biology department at Tufts University. He holds the Vannevar Bush endowed Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Prior to college, Michael Levin worked as a software engineer and independent contractor in the field of scientific computing. He attended Tufts University, interested in artificial intelligence and unconventional computation. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He did post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, where he began to uncover a new bioelectric language by which cells coordinate their activity during embryogenesis. His independent laboratory develops new molecular-genetic and conceptual tools to probe large-scale information processing in regeneration, embryogenesis, and cancer suppression.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 Introduction
1:27 - The Prisoner’s Dilemma (Game Theory applied to Life)
7:55 - Computational Boundary of the Self
10:17 - “Goal States” & “Cognitive Light Cones”
13:55 - To Naturalize Cognition
19:00 - The Hard Problem of Consciousness
23:10 - Defining Consciousness
27:14 - The Field of Diverse Intelligence
43:25 - Who inspired Mike within his field
46:52 - Is Mike a Panpsychist?
52:09 - Thoughts on Illusionism
55:44 - Links to IIT
57:56 - Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME)
1:02:14 - Proof of Humanity Certification
1:10:00 - Phase Transitions in Mathematics
1:15:26 - Bioelectric Medicine
1:21:06 - Can Cells Think? What is the Self? Is Man a Machine?
1:28:55 - Metacognition & Cloning
1:35:49 - Teleology, Teleonomy & Teleophobia
1:50:08 - All Intelligence is Collective Intelligence
1:54:33 - Conclusion