community
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leiden_hybrid_concepts
label: haiku
community:leiden_hybrid_concepts-run4-c2-c4Morphological cognition and collective cellular intelligence
Cells as goal-directed agents maintaining anatomical representations through gap-junction-mediated information integration; cancer as cognitive defection when collective Self boundaries collapse.
12 members. Each node is clickable.
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Drawn from 8 sources
The papers/notes whose extracted claims & findings make up this cluster.
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds3 members
- Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology2 members
- Life as we know it2 members
- Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence1 member
- Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Stress, care, and intelligence1 member
- alexander-and-levin.md1 member
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates1 member
- Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organisms1 member
Bridges (5)
Other communities that share members with this one — cross-cutting threads or papers that sit at the seam between two themes.
Claims (10)
- Cancer as Cognitive DefectionCancer results from defection from large-scale anatomical goals due to reduction of gap junctional connectivity, causing cells to revert to unicellular concerns
- Cancer can be seen as a breakdown of the binding process that scales Selves, with cells reverting to unicellular goals.Oncogene-induced gap junction closure shrinks the cognitive boundary of cells.
- Cancer can be understood as a dissociative identity disorder of the morphological collective intelligence.Provocative reinterpretation of cancer as a failure mode of collective decision-making.
- Cancer is a breakdown of the collective intelligence of tissues, a shrinking of the Self boundary due to gap junction closure.Frames metastasis as cells reverting to unicellular goals, treatable by restoring bioelectric connectivity.
- Cells are agential materials, not passive substrates for evolution
- Cells navigate multiple problem spaces: physiological, metabolic, transcriptional, anatomical
- Gap junctional coupling partially erases informational boundaries between cells, enabling the scaling of the Self to tissue- and organ-level goals.Proposes a mechanism for how merging physiological states via gap junctions creates a new, larger cognitive agent.
- Life requires only a boundary (Markov blanket), ergodicity, active inference capacity, and autopoiesis—not reproduction or DNA.Reframes definition of life focusing on dynamical self-organization rather than genetic reproduction.
- Problems of cognition (mind) and morphogenesis (body) share fundamental commonality in competent problem-solving.Authors propose deep principle unifying neuroscience and developmental biology through goal-directed behavior as common thread.
- Cells maintain internal representations of correct anatomical structure (target morphology) that causally constrain growth, regeneration, and repair.
Findings (2)
- Carcinogenesis illustrates failure of SCI loop integration when cells revert to unicellular selves and detach from collective morphogenetic goals.
- Lesioning active, sensory, or internal states causes rapid structural disintegration and loss of spatial organization.Demonstrates autopoietic maintenance: Markov blanket integrity is necessary for preserving internal state configuration.