Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition.
The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggest a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the basic drive of infotaxis
It is a well-known fact that the biosphere is a set of nesting dolls
Do integrated Selves only exist at the level of “organisms” (bodies), or could they arise and co-exist at multiple levels of organization and be recognized in novel contexts and implementations?
Selves as goal-directed computational agents regardless of implementation
definition of this Self comes from the boundary of information being able to pass between the subunits
unified Self out of its constituent components and the surrounding environment is the set of parts that operate toward reaching specific goal
Developmental bioelectricity is the ubiquitous exchange of slowly changing ion-based voltage signals within and among cells (Funk, 2013; Levin and Martyniuk, 2018). All cells are electrically active, and modern neurons evolved from pre-neural precursors that were already reaping the benefits of ionic signaling for computation
Normal bodies consist of networks of cells working together toward a unified goal - create and maintain specific large structures. In an important sense, each cell is integrated, via physiological signaling, into a coherent swarm intelligence with system-level (anatomical) goals. In cancer, the scope of the coherent Self of a cell reduces from being as large as the boundary of a whole body, to that of just one cell’s surface. The scope of the Self – the structure which a cell works to maintain and support – shrinks drastically in two main ways.
eir neighbors by a shutdown of gap junction synapses, a cell can neither measure distant events nor communicate across anatomical distances with other cells and with the outside world (Kull, 2000; Ay and Lohr, 2015). All of the attention (in terms of measurement and activity toward scaled goals) is focused at the single cell level, while the rest of the body is treated as the “external environment” (and all living things exploit their environment for their own benefit). Thus, the boundary between self and non-self (David Krakauer et al., 2014) can shift: multicellularity enlarges it, while carcinogenesis reduces it, and it is readily seen how this shifts the behavior of cells toward a mode that is not beneficial for the organism level. Moreover, the size of the Self shrinks temporally: the time horizon of activity shifts from decades (somatic cells execute regenerative and repair processes that maintain a body up to ~100 years) to a much shorter time frame, as cancer cells undertake activity which may kill the host (and themselves) within a mere year. Normal cells pursue goals (organ maintenance) that can be much longer than a cell’s individual lifespan, especially in tissues with rapid cellular turnover – the time scale for such homeostatic activity is one that belongs to the collective, not the cells themselves. Shrinking their Self reduces the ability to work toward temporally distant goals (reduces their temporal horizon of concern) and,
Identifying the most efficacious level of organization in a given system is critical for selecting targets in biomedical or engineering approaches to understand and control