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.

For publications, presentations and other resources: and https://drmichaellevin.org/

00:00 Introduction
07:56 Michael Levin on what the paradigm shift is he's working on.
14:54 On the hardware-software analogy when it comes to cells
20:47 How important are bioelectric fields in our own body?
24:16 What is cognitive glue?
26:30 What is the substrate needed for bioelectric fields?
31:23 How fast is communication via bioelectric fields?
33:18 How bio-electric signals enlarge the cognitive light cone
33:58 A collective of cells 'knows' more than the sum of the individual cells
35:09 Where is the 'story' of self, the 'form', stored?
37:12 The limits of the conventional story that focuses on genes and molecules
39:58 How robust is the memory that is stored in voltage gradients?
41:08 On free lunches in evolution...
44:48 Wasps as bio-engineers
45:41 Why Zenobots are called Zenobots
48:18 On how to 'tell' cancer cells to stop
50:32 What is a 'mind-melt'?
51:51 How the Gaia hypothesis could be tested...
52:36 Can we train the weather as an agent?
55:19 How can we know if we are part of a larger Mind?
57:01 A dialogue between two neurons in your brain...
58:34 On the syntax semantics divide
1:04:09 What is consciousness?

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

This is, I'm guessing, a bit farther than Levin might take his Platonism but I thought it was interesting nonetheless ->

Minds in the Making: Bringing Formal and Final Causes Back into Evolutionary Science, with Michael Levin

M. Segall

What I find most exciting is the way Mike rethinks evolution. Traditionally, reductionistic biologists conceive evolution as an essentially random search through genetic microstates, with occasional mutations that may confer an advantage eventually getting “selected” (which isn’t agential selection but just means the environment allows the phenotypes those genetic mutations program to survive at higher rates). Instead, Mike describes evolution as a process that selects for ever-greater agency, and that this agency itself is a function of collectives—of what can be understood as swarm intelligence. Rather than evolution having to stumble upon a phenotype or anatomical form through chance genetic mutations, cells and cellular collectives display some degree of agency—spontaneous decision-making and problem-solving ability. Much like we can imagine and explore various possibilities in our own minds, these cells navigate multiple developmental pathways, making decisions that are not merely repetitions of inherited genetic programs.

Talking about a “Platonic morphospace” in developmental biology lets us address what has been largely off-limits in modern science since the time of Descartes—namely formal and final causality. These non-mechanical kinds of causality were first articulated by Aristotle in a non-evolutionary context, but they can be adapted to elucidate contemporary empirical findings where it very much appears as though living organisms are drawing upon a reservoir of possibilities not already stored in their genome to achieve goals in novel environments. It is not sufficient as an explanation to say an organism is the accumulation of its genetic parts. Instead, there is a kind of emergent wholeness that is communicated across the entire cellular collective, luring its morphogenesis and, crucially, telling it when it has achieved its finished adult form. Individual cells do not have a blueprint of the final form; rather, the whole organism or tissue coordinates to manifest a pattern. This introduces a sense of formal causality (manifesting patterns of wholeness) and final causality (purpose and agency) back into our explanations.

Mike’s Platonic morphospace can be understood as a topos or continuum of possibilities available to cells and cellular collectives. Mind, in this sense, becomes the capacity to explore these adjacent possibilities—an activity we typically associate only with human imagination. Where is this mind? It is not confined to a single cell but spread throughout swarms of cells that communicate bioelectrically. Indeed, neurons are simply specialized versions of what all cells do to some extent. So mindlike activity, rather than being an exclusively human privilege, may be present wherever agents coordinate and make decisions together. In this view, Darwin’s emphasis on descent explains how existing forms persist, but it does not fully explain the creative search for and successful realization of new forms. There seems to be an improvisational agency, a real-time capacity to choose which among many latent possibilities to actualize.

Iain McGilchrist talks to Michael Levin.

Michael Levin is a synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. He is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

Whitehead is the subject for this conversation between Dr. Michael Levin, developmental biologist and pioneer in the area of morphogenesis and regenerative possibilities, and Matthew Segall, a philosopher who sees Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology as a way forward in healing the rift between philosophy and science. They discuss the role of behavior, environment, time and necessity in shaping life. Timestamps and links follow description. The relationship between philosophy and science is tied together now by the work in developmental biology. Advances in science can help to sharpen philosophical categories. Plato's static view of forms and Aristotle's great chain of being need to be revolutionized to account for the emergence of forms in evolutionary history. Mechanistic science has been successful in terms of instrumental knowledge, but has left out formal and final causes. Whitehead's view of evolution as an accumulation of facts in the past and a field of possible forms in the future was discussed, as well as the agency that is needed to search this field of possibilities. Perhaps the environment is massively underdetermined, but pattern memory can be visualized and rewritten. Finally, Levin posited that "proof of humanity" must be related to the level of compassion, ability and existential struggles that humans have.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

03:20 Question regarding Michael Levin's view of the relationship of philosophy and science.

06:15 Developmental biology is the key to looking at the relationship between philosophy and science.

22:30 Whitehead's injunction to take self-organization seriously

28:30 Free energy principle and the agency of the environment

28:50 The environment is massively under-determined

32:45 Engineering protocols. What do I need to know in that spacetime environment to most optimally relate to that system?

33:45 How Whitehead might relate to the idea of cognitive light cones

36:50 The Ideal is a judge (Jordan Peterson). Does this scale?

40:15 Tracking microstates, or macrostates?

47:55 Anomaly

51:30 Determinism is a side effect of the deistic hangover of Newton and Descartes The Observer is within the world being observed, and has an impact on it.

55:40 Mechanistic cosmology is deism, basically. We need a new metaphysic.

58:30 We are more than just perceiving beings

1:01:45 Every cell is trying to behavior shape its neighbors

1:11:00 The Logos as ordering principle

1:13:20 Ingression of relevant novelty The relationship between perception, agency, and intelligence as collective efforts.

1:16:10 Does the prompting of the oak tree leaf presuppose that the subroutine that creates the gall is already present in the leaf?

1:20:00 When a salamander regrows a limb, is that a memory capacity?

1:22:50 Energetic transmission is a kind of vector feeling (Whitehead) What is the Place of Thinking, Feeling, and Willing in Nature?

1:23:50 The project is the sentience of physics and the physics of sentience

1:24:34 The distinction between control and relationship The Paradigms of Control v. Relationship The Spectrum of Persuadability Levels of Controllability

1:28:50 Ethical considerations and the movement from force to persuasion

Links Mentioned:

Michael’s paper on cognition - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

Gabriele Carcassi Video -    • Newtonian/Lagrangian/Hamiltonian mech...  

Michael Levin’s blog post on advice - https://thoughtforms.life/what-advice...

TOE ep with Levin, Tung and Gumuskaya -    • New Groundbreaking Research, Anthrobo...  

TOE ep with Levin -    • Unveiling the Mind-Blowing Biotech of...  

TOE ep with Bach and Levin -    • Michael Levin Λ Joscha Bach: Collecti...  

TOE ep with Lang, Friston and Levin -    • Levin Λ Friston Λ Fields: "Meta" Hard...  

TOE ep with Iain McGilchrist -    • Iain McGilchrist: The Self, Conscious...  

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Biggest Myths of Biology
07:18 - Tying Michael's Work Together
35:25 - What Are Humans?
56:05 - Basal Cognition
01:14:10 - Conscious Agents
01:33:25 - Bioelectricity and Cancer
02:16:15 - Support TOE

[Laird]

Really interesting stuff, Sci. A couple of random thoughts and related questions based on what I've consumed from this thread so far (with perhaps more to follow later):

It wasn't clear to me quite what Michael's answer to one part of Hans's question in the first video was, that of where the bioelectric fields originate in the sense of being present in a fertilised egg. It seems that he's found these bioelectric fields to be present in distributions of cells: intelligent collectives of cells even. It's not clear to me how, then, the field could be present at the start within that single fertilised cell, or at least how/why it would later develop from that single fertilised cell if it wasn't present at the start. Is it clear(er) to you?

I also wonder whether this idea of searching through an ordered Platonic realm by intelligent (collectives of) cells is a variant of or is at least compatible with the Third Way that @stephenw champions. Are you aware of Michael commenting anywhere on this?

Really interesting stuff, Sci. A couple of random thoughts and related questions based on what I've consumed from this thread so far (with perhaps more to follow later):

It wasn't clear to me quite what Michael's answer to one part of Hans's question in the first video was, that of where the bioelectric fields originate in the sense of being present in a fertilised egg. It seems that he's found these bioelectric fields to be present in distributions of cells: intelligent collectives of cells even. It's not clear to me how, then, the field could be present at the start within that single fertilised cell, or at least how/why it would later develop from that single fertilised cell if it wasn't present at the start. Is it clear(er) to you?

I also wonder whether this idea of searching through an ordered Platonic realm by intelligent (collectives of) cells is a variant of or is at least compatible with the Third Way that @stephenw champions. Are you aware of Michael commenting anywhere on this?

I think your question about fetal cells being directed by electric fields is answered in one of the talks I plan to post. (My expensive internet is currently barely functioning heh.)

IIRC Levin has not mentioned anything about the Third Way, but this could be me just forgetting sadly.