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leiden_hybrid_concepts
label: sonnet
community:leiden_hybrid_concepts-run4-c4Collective intelligence & distributed cognition
All minds are composites of parts; individual and collective intelligence unified under substrate-neutral principles.
111 members. Each node is clickable.
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Sub-communities (16)
Finer clusters this community splits into. Each is its own community page.
Collective intelligence across biological scales17Distributed consciousness and moral consideration12Substrate neutrality of consciousness10Substrate-independent minimal cognition8Substrate-neutral cognitive phenomenology6Gradualism and nested cognition frameworks6Substrate-independent intelligence and morphological cognition6Substrate-independent consciousness & cognition6Non-dual consciousness frameworks for artificial minds5Pan-cognitivism and distributed biological intelligence5Distributed cognition across biological scales4Distributed agency and multiscale consciousness4Distributed consciousness and multiscale embodied ethics4Substrate-independent functionalism and emergence3Consciousness as emergent distributed integration3Cognitive capacity independent of neural substrate2
Drawn from 44 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 Minds9 members
- Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments7 members
- RESEARCH-VECTORS.md7 members
- 2026-05-14_phil-trans-A-goodfire-aboutblank-impact.md6 members
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates6 members
- Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Stress, care, and intelligence5 members
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds5 members
- The biogenic approach to cognition5 members
- Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence5 members
- The collective intelligence of evolution and development4 members
- Multiple ways to implement and infer Consciousness4 members
- 2026-05-15_manifold-overlap-papers-economy-strategy.md4 members
- Taking AI Welfare Seriously3 members
- AI: A Bridge Toward Diverse Intelligence.md3 members
- Synthetic Article & Review3 members
- 2024 03 07 Stefan Lesser Kay 1984 Opening the Hood of a Word Processor.pdf 4145872 members
- Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organisms2 members
- Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind2 members
- Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence2 members
- Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds2 members
- Topological constraints on self-organisation in locally interacting systems2 members
- World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence2 members
- Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness2 members
- 2026-05-09_briefing_for_ozero.md2 members
- Multiple ways to implement and infer sentience2 members
- 2026 02 02_2324_Search_Papers_The Research Thread On Sci Loop Methodology For Ai1 member
- Koan Battery: Measuring Reflective Mode Accessibility in AI1 member
- Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence1 member
- Topological constraints on self-organization in locally interacting systems1 member
- Janus Information Flow Transformers 20251 member
- published: 28 March 20221 member
- Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior1 member
- Design for an Individual: Connectionist Approaches to the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality1 member
- 2022-09-17_Greg-Bryant_WestDean1996AlanPowers.pdf_4226081 member
- 2021-11-09_dorian_schrodinger-life.pdf_c3c4f51 member
- 2026 02 02_2328_Search_Papers_The Literature Shows Strong Theoretical Foundation1 member
- On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism1 member
- unfold-chat-catalog.md1 member
- Paper Summary: Interpreting Language Model Parameters1 member
- Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models1 member
- 2024 07 12 Hibai Unzueta Simon Nicholsons Theory Of Loose Parts v2.0.pdf 7cc4f01 member
- GEOMETRY-OF-CARE.md1 member
- Mechanistic Interpretability of EEG Foundation Models via Sparse Autoencoders1 member
- Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Dukkha, care, and Intelligence1 member
Bridges (20)
Other communities that share members with this one — cross-cutting threads or papers that sit at the seam between two themes.
- Substrate-independent cognition & consciousness37 shared
- Collective intelligence as universal architecture20 shared
- Collective intelligence across biological scales17 shared
- Distributed consciousness and moral consideration12 shared
- Substrate neutrality of consciousness10 shared
- Substrate-agnostic behavioral inference of cognition8 shared
- Substrate-independent minimal cognition8 shared
- Substrate-independent consciousness & cognition6 shared
- Gradualism and nested cognition frameworks6 shared
- Substrate-neutral cognitive phenomenology6 shared
- Substrate-independent intelligence and morphological cognition6 shared
- Pan-cognitivism and distributed biological intelligence5 shared
- Non-dual consciousness frameworks for artificial minds5 shared
- Distributed agency and multiscale consciousness4 shared
- Substrate-independent self & memory plasticity4 shared
- Distributed cognition across biological scales4 shared
- Distributed consciousness and multiscale embodied ethics4 shared
- Consciousness as emergent distributed integration3 shared
- Substrate-independent functionalism and emergence3 shared
- Cognitive capacity independent of neural substrate2 shared
Claims (100)
- Cognitive functions, including sentience, can potentially be achieved by very different systems and their disparate substrates.Central multiple-realizability claim of the paper, from abstract and §2.
- If different organizations of nervous tissue can achieve the same functions, the possibility that cognitive capacities, including sentience, can be achieved by other tissues should be considered.Conditional claim urging consideration of non-neural tissues for cognition.
- It is highly implausible that all sentient life in the universe achieves felt states using the neural circuitry underlying human Consciousness on earth.Reinforcement of substrate independence: Earth-like neural circuits are unlikely to be the sole substrate.
- We do not claim to measure consciousness; the battery measures a reproducible, prompt-sensitive reflective mode.Epistemic boundary-setting by authors: distinguishes behavioral traces from internal states.
- A typical modern human is a patchwork of many diverse consciousnesses, only one of which verbally reports its states.Applies the multi-scale agency view to human cognition, suggesting non-unitary selves.
- AI and Biological Cognition Share Mechanistic Principles
- All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts that must align with respect to system-level goals.Central thesis operationalized via free-energy scaling; frames intelligence as alignment problem across multiple scales.
- All intelligence is collective intelligence, in the sense that it is made of parts which must align with respect to system-level goals.Opening axiom of the paper, a fundamental interpretive stance
- All intelligence is collective intelligence: each of us consists of a huge number of cells working together to generate a coherent cognitive being with goals, preferences, and memories that belong to the whole and not to its parts.Core interpretive thesis of the paper.
- All intelligences are collectives and all individuals are collectives; individual and collective intelligence are not categorically distinct but unified by connectionist principles.
- All intelligences are collectives; individual intelligence arises from interaction of many unintelligent components (neurons) arranged with right organization and connections.Foundational claim dissolving distinction between individual and collective intelligence by recognizing brains as archetypal intelligent collectives.
- All known cognitive agents are collective intelligences, made of parts that are themselves agents in important ways.Central thesis that no mind is truly monadic; all are composed of competent subunits.
- Autonomy and emergence of intelligence through organized interactive constructionChristensen & Hooker's position that intelligence emerges from autonomous self-organizing systems; related to biogenic approach.
- Bacterial chemotaxis as proto-cognitive behaviorLyon's position that bacteria exhibit cognition-like decision-making in response to environmental gradients.
- Beings with brains are, in an important sense, also collective intelligences.Extends collective intelligence concept to conventional brains.
- Buddhist thought offers an approach uniquely suited to understanding intelligence across computer science, bioengineering, and cognitive science without privileging specific embodiments.Paper's key integration claim: Buddhism's emphasis on care and non-essentialism provides the conceptual lens needed for post-anthropocentric intelligence science.
- Clinical concepts in EEG foundation models fall into three operational regimes: selectively steerable, encoded but entangled, and non-encoded.Interpretive claim summarizing the spectrum of concept steerability discovered.
- Cognition and learning are substrate-independent; principles familiar in artificial neural networks can be implemented by any network of signals with suitable weighted inputs.Central thesis enabling unification of neural, developmental, ecological, and social networks as instances of collective intelligence.
- Cognition and learning are substrate-independent; principles of basal cognition can be implemented by any network with signals and non-linear responses to weighted inputs.Core thesis that cognitive principles transcend neural substrates, enabling application to gene-regulatory, ecological, and social networks.
- Cognition as a biological process inherent to all living systemsCore claim of biogenic approach: cognition is not unique to brains or nervous systems but emerges from living organization itself.
- Cognition is Always Inferred from Behavior
- Cognitive architectures are the same causal structures required to create fitness at collective level and integration/coordination characteristic of a self.Unifying hypothesis linking evolutionary and organismic individuality through shared informational integration requirements.
- Cognitive capacities exist on a spectrum and tools from behavioral sciences can be productively applied to understand and control systems far beyond familiar animals with central nervous systems.Core tenet of diverse intelligence; justifies the methodological borrowing across fields.
- Cognitive Functions Should Be Identified by Behavior, Not Substrate
- Cognitive functions such as sentience are always inferred.First sentence of the paper, establishing the inferential nature of all sentience attributions.
- Collective intelligence exists on a spectrum across biology from cells to organismsAuthors argue no sharp distinction exists between familiar animal cognition and collective behavior in cells/tissues; same principles apply across scales and substrates.
- Collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals; an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales.Foundational claim extending collective intelligence to all biological scales.
- Consciousness (ability to suffer) should not be assigned only to one singular 'I' but distributed across multiscale body components.
- Consciousness also comes in degrees and kinds, and is fundamentally tied to goal-directed activity.TAME's gradualist stance extends to sentience; goal-directedness is the key.
- Consciousness also comes in degrees and kinds, consistent with the gradualist framework; there may be no true zero.TAME's implication that sentience accompanies goal-directed activity, with minimal versions present in particles and scaling up in organized systems.
- +70 more
Findings (11)
- All intelligences are collective intelligences (higher-level selves composed of competent parts); implies distributed consciousnessEmpirical consequence of multiscale autopoiesis: bodies are multi-tissue assemblies with similar dynamics in organs as in brain.
- Bourget and Chalmers 2020 survey: ~39% of philosophers accept or lean toward future AI consciousnessSurvey result on philosophical attitudes toward AI consciousness.
- Cell fragments reverse taxis direction relative to intact cellsIn electric fields: intact keratocytes migrate to cathode, but fragments of the same cells migrate to anode—collective behavior differs from component behavior.
- Francken et al. 2022 survey of ASSC members: only 3% responded 'no' to machines having consciousnessSurvey result showing widespread expert openness to machine consciousness.
- Greater multiscale scale-integration distinguishes wakeful conscious states from anaesthetic states.Empirical evidence (Milinkovic et al., 2025b) supporting scale-inseparability as consciousness correlate.
- In analysis of current ToCs, the operations and functional principles of most ToCs are not confined to neural substrates.This is the main empirical result from mapping the operational characteristics of popular theories of consciousness.
- Minimal cognition in unicellular organismsdi Primio et al. (2000) empirical work supporting cognitive capabilities in single cells; evidence for biogenic cognition.
- Organismic individuality can be separated from genetics: integration and collective action occur in non-neural systems.Empirical findings from developmental biology (Manicka & Levin, Lyon et al.) supporting mechanistic basis for individuality independent of genetic determination.
- Physarum slime mold demonstrates learning and decision-making in absence of neurons, including crossing noxious chemical barriers for reward and problem-solving with inert objects.Empirical support for basal cognition hypothesis: cognitive capacities not limited to neural systems; cognition scales from unicellular organisms.
- Several contemporary theorists have explicitly applied their theories to synthetic systems in light of AI and organoid bioengineering developments.A descriptive finding that some theorists are already extending their frameworks beyond brains.
- The operations and functional principles of most contemporary theories of consciousness are not confined to neural substrates.Primary empirical result from comparative analysis of major consciousness theories.