Wesley Clawson

Authored papers (1)

• Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organisms2023

  Cellular collectives exhibit goal-directed competency that is substrate-independent, composition-independent, and origin-independent — a property Clawson and Levin term teleonomy — and this invariant, not genomic or phylogenetic identity, is proposed as the organizing principle for understanding, engineering, and ethically evaluating the full spectrum of possible living agents. The argument is grounded in concrete demonstrations: Xenopus tadpoles with ectopic eyes grafted onto their tails still achieve functional vision, with optic nerves routing to the spinal cord rather than the brain (Blackiston & Levin, 2013); Fankhauser's polyploid salamander embryos maintain normal tubule cross-sections by having a single enlarged cell wrap around itself when cell number is insufficient; and frog skin cells dissociated and cultured in vitro self-organize within 48 hours into Xenobots — spherical proto-organisms that swim via cilia, repair damage, and execute kinematic self-replication never observed in any other organism (Kriegman et al., 2020, 2021) — without any transgenic modification. The multi-scale competency architecture (MSCA) is introduced as the explanatory framework: every subsystem from molecular networks to organs pursues goals in its relevant problem space, enabling the collective to navigate novel morphological and behavioral spaces that selection never directly visited. Planarian lines permanently converted to two-headed morphologies by bioelectric circuit manipulation, and brain-computer interfaces achieving handwriting decoding from paralyzed patients at speeds exceeding prior approaches (Willett et al., 2021), are marshaled as evidence that teleonomic robustness operates across evolved and engineered configurations alike. The paper argues this implies that regenerative medicine, robotics, and ethics must abandon binary categories — organism vs. machine, evolved vs. designed — and replace them with a continuum parameterized by the spatiotemporal scale and competency of an agent's goal-directed behavior.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Their work is cited by (11)

• Stress sharing as cognitive glue for collective intelligences: A computational model of stress as a coordinator for morphogenesis2× refs
• Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Stress, care, and intelligence2× refs
• AI: a Bridge toward Diverse Intelligence and Humanity’s Future2× refs
• Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence2× refs
• Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue2× refs
• Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence2× refs
• Multiple ways to implement and infer sentience2× refs
• The Causally Emergent Alignment Hypothesis: Causal Emergence Aligns with and Predicts Final Reward in Reinforcement Learning Agents2× refs
• Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments2× refs
• Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biology2× refs
• Developmental Bioelectricity: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind2× refs

Recent mentions (3)

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