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question:how-do-the-activities-of-competent-lower-level-agents-give-rise-to-a-multiscale-holobiont-that-is-truly-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts

How do the activities of competent lower-level agents give rise to a multiscale holobiont that is truly more than the sum of its parts?

Source paper

extracted_from

Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

(2022) · Levin, Michael

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Claims (3)

claim

There is no clear bright line demarcating true cognition from metaphorical as-if cognition; cognition exists on a continuum.
gates
Core TAME claim rejecting binary categories; supported by evolutionary biology and recent bioengineering.
Goal-directed activity as core of Self
gates
The basic hallmarks of being a Self are the ability to pursue goals, to own compound memories, and to serve as the locus for credit assignment, at a scale larger than any component.
gates
Proposed operational definition of a Self within the TAME framework.

Hypotheses (1)

hypothesis

All known cognitive agents are collective intelligences
gates

Concepts (3)

concept

Scaling of the cognitive Self
gates
The process by which smaller agents join into a larger emergent Self with expanded cognitive light cones, mediated by gap junctions.
Scaling Of The Self
gates
Mechanisms by which smaller competent subunits bind into a higher-level Self with larger goals; key example via gap junction connections.
Many-to-one problem
associated_with
The question of how competent small-scale agents bind into a unified larger Self.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

How Do The Activities Of Competent Lowerlevel Agentsquestion0.815
How do large numbers of competent subunits work together to become intelligences that expand the scale of their possible goals?question0.769
Central research question of basal cognition; addresses the scaling problem—how cognition emerges across organizational levels from cells to organisms.
Biology employs a multiscale competency architecture where each level solves problems with some degree of competency in its own problem space.claim0.765
General structural claim about organization of life.
Large language models show that linguistic competence can be dissociated from more basal agentic capacities (goal-directedness, multiscale competency, valence)claim0.763
Used to argue AI minds must be assessed empirically via behavior science rather than via language interface alone.
The large-scale morphological goals of an organism override and harness the local competencies of individual cells to adaptively navigate morphospace.claim0.757
Describes top-down control in morphogenesis.
A multi-scale competency architecture facilitates evolution of robust problem-solving, living machines.claim0.757
Key proposal linking multi-scale agency to evolutionary advantage.
The living process must give rise to coherent entities at a middle range of scale.claim0.752
Asserts middle-range entity emergence as a necessary output of any living process
Biology commits to optimizing salience and meaning, not fidelity, via high-level, agent-based interpretation.claim0.750
Central claim that biological memory prioritizes gestalt over details.

Cross-corpus bridges (2)

same_concept_as · Nomic cosine

External markdown files that talk about the same concept as this entity.

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How do the activities of competent, lower-level agents give rise to a multiscale Self that is truly more than the sum of its parts?questions/how-do-the-activities-of-competent-lowerlevel-agents.md0.830
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How do multiple homeostatic and goal-directed agents at different scales integrate into coherent larger wholes?questions/how-do-multiple-homeostatic-and-goaldirected-agents-at.md0.800