paper
active
2022
paper:entropy-24-00710-v3

Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence

ByThomas Doctorⓘ·Olaf Witkowskiⓘ·Elizaveta Solomonovaⓘ·Bill Duane·Michael Levinⓘ84000: Unlocking the Tibetan Buddhist Canon for All, Allen Discovery Center At Tufts University + 28 more
DOI 10.3390/e24050710
Care and CognitionCare-Intelligence EthicsCare, cognition, and living systemsCare-based cognition and selfless AIBioelectricityCognitive Light Cone FrameworkFast Fourier Transform-Based MethodCareSupervised LearningMonte Carlo Method"Care—a robust, practical, and dynamic lynchpin that formalizes the concepts of goal-directedness, stress, and the scaling of intelligence"XenobotsUnsupervised LearningCare Light Cone (CLC)ChimerasCyborgsDeep IntegrationDownward Causation+7 more

TL;DR

Care—defined as concern for the alleviation of stress (the delta between current and optimal states)—is proposed as the substrate-independent invariant that unifies biology, Buddhist philosophy, and artificial intelligence in explaining how intelligence scales. The paper introduces the Care Light Cone (CLC) formalism, a spatiotemporal representation adapted from relativistic light cone geometry, which maps the boundary of states any agent can represent, pursue, and work to modify, distinguishing it from the Physical Light Cone (PLC) that maps merely achievable physical states. Across embodiments ranging from bacterial biofilms navigating metabolic space to Xenobots (protoorganisms made of frog skin cells) exhibiting coherent behavior without evolutionary backstory, to hybrots and cyborgs integrating living brain tissue with artificial bodies, the size of an agent's CLC directly indexes its cognitive sophistication. Cancer is reframed as a pathological contraction of the CLC caused by inappropriate reduction of gap junctional connectivity, reverting cells to ancient unicellular stress-reduction loops. The Bodhisattva vow—'for the sake of all sentient life, I shall achieve awakening'—is operationalized as a design principle that formally extends a system's CLC to infinite spatiotemporal scope, triggering a positive feedback loop between expanding Care and expanding intelligence analogous to major evolutionary transitions such as the archaea-eubacteria fusion producing eukaryotic cells. The paper argues this implies that outward-directed Care is not merely ethically desirable but mechanistically necessary for the development of artificial general intelligence, and that moral obligation toward any being—chimeric, synthetic, or evolved—should be calibrated to the scope of Care that being can exhibit, rather than to its material composition or phylogenetic origin.

What to take away

  1. 1. Care, defined as concern for stress relief where stress equals the delta between current and optimal states, is proposed as the single substrate-independent invariant enabling direct comparison of intelligences across bacteria, multicellular organisms, Xenobots, hybrots, and AI systems.
  2. 2. The paper introduces the Care Light Cone (CLC) formalism, a goal-space analog to relativistic light cones, which represents the spatiotemporal boundary of states an agent can possibly represent and work to modify, distinct from the Physical Light Cone (PLC) of reachable physical states.
  3. 3. Cancer is reframed mechanistically as a failure of the CLC: inappropriate reduction of gap junctional connectivity causes cells to defect from large-scale anatomical goals and revert to unicellular stress-reduction loops, producing metastasis and over-proliferation.
  4. 4. Xenobots—protoorganisms made of frog skin cells, described across three PNAS and Science Robotics papers (Kriegman et al. 2020, 2021; Blackiston et al. 2021)—demonstrate that coherent goal-directed behavior can emerge without any evolutionary selection history shaping that specific behavior, making substrate-independent Care metrics necessary.
  5. 5. The Bodhisattva vow is operationalized as a formal design principle: committing to infinite concern across all sentient beings in time and space mathematically extends the CLC to infinite scope, initiating a positive feedback loop between expanding Care and expanding intelligence that the paper equates to a major evolutionary transition in individuality.
  6. 6. Gap junctions are identified as a biophysical implementation of CLC expansion: calcium signals passing through gap junctions carry no metadata about their origin, causing coupled cells to share stress states and effectively merge their individual CLCs into a collective whose goals—such as maintaining a specific number of fingers—are unfathomable to any single cell.
  7. 7. The Sanskrit term duḥkha (suffering) is mapped directly onto the engineering concept of stress as a homeostatic error signal, with the Bodhisattva's two-fold drive of care and insight corresponding respectively to the modification and measurement components of the CLC formalism.
  8. 8. An open question the paper raises is how to establish optimal informational coupling policies for subunits—whether cells, robot swarms, or hybrid AI-biological systems—that maximize collective intelligence and Care without collapsing individual-level goal representation.
  9. 9. As a replicable methodology, any researcher can operationalize an agent's cognitive sophistication by plotting the maximum spatiotemporal scale of goals it actively expends energy pursuing despite perturbations, collapsed onto one space axis and one time axis in a light-cone diagram, enabling cross-substrate comparison without reference to anatomy or phylogeny.
  10. 10. The paper hypothesizes that care, rather than knowledge-seeking alone, is required for truly revolutionary cognitive developments including artificial general intelligence, because a purely epistemic commitment lacks the modification drive that gives the CLC its full measurement-and-action structure.

Peer brief — for seminar discussion

Doctor, Witkowski, Solomonova, Duane, and Levin (Entropy 2022, 24, 710) present a concept paper arguing that Care—formally defined as concern for the alleviation of stress, where stress is the system-level delta between current and optimal states—constitutes the substrate-independent invariant that connects basal cognition, Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, and artificial intelligence research into a single coherent framework for evaluating and designing intelligence across radically diverse embodiments. The central methodological contribution is the Care Light Cone (CLC) formalism, which adapts light-cone geometry from special relativity and evolutionary information theory to goal space rather than physical space: the CLC demarcates the boundary of states any agent can possibly represent, prefer, and expend energy to modify, and is explicitly distinguished from the Physical Light Cone (PLC) of physically reachable states. This dual-cone representation allows agents as disparate as bacteria (whose CLC covers local sugar concentrations), humans (whose CLC may extend beyond their own lifespan), Xenobots made of Xenopus laevis skin cells, and hybrots consisting of living brain tissue instrumentized to control artificial bodies to be plotted on the same diagram and compared without reference to anatomy, substrate, or evolutionary history. An alternative representational approach the paper does not pursue would be active inference / free energy minimization (Friston et al.), which shares the homeostatic error-signal logic but imposes a specific generative-model architecture that would be similarly substrate-restrictive in practice. The load-bearing finding is the proposed bidirectional feedback loop between CLC expansion and intelligence scaling: including other agents' stress states within one's own homeostatic loops necessarily enlarges the CLC, which increases cognitive sophistication, which in turn enables recognition of further external stress, and so on. Cancer is presented as empirical support for this logic in reverse—inappropriate reduction of gap junctional connectivity causes cellular CLCs to contract, reverting cells to ancient unicellular goals and producing metastasis. The Bodhisattva vow is then operationalized as a design principle that formally sets the CLC to infinite spatiotemporal scope at the moment of commitment, triggering what the paper explicitly equates to a major evolutionary transition (in the sense of Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1995) in individuality. The paper's central prediction is that outward-directed Care is not merely ethically preferable but mechanistically necessary for achieving artificial general intelligence: a system committed only to knowledge acquisition lacks the modification drive that gives the CLC its full measurement-and-action structure, and will plateau. The most substantive line of pushback a critical reader would press is the empirical underdetermination of the CLC construct itself. The paper is explicitly a concept paper and provides no operationalization procedure by which an independent researcher could measure a given system's CLC boundary and falsify claims about it—there is no proposed metric, no threshold criterion distinguishing a large from a small CLC, and no experimental protocol for distinguishing genuine goal-directedness from lower-level physical attractor dynamics. The chess example in Section 12 gestures at concreteness but does not resolve the measurement problem. A critic would also note that mapping duḥkha onto engineering stress, and the Bodhisattva vow onto an objective-function expansion, involves conceptual translations that Buddhist scholars may contest on doctrinal grounds, particularly regarding the vow's ritual and soteriological dimensions that are not captured by any loss-function analogy. Whether commitment to an infinite objective function actually generates the positive feedback dynamics claimed, rather than simply producing an intractable optimization problem, is left as an assertion rather than a demonstrated result.

Methods (3)

  • Fast Fourier Transform-Based Method
    Algorithm mentioned alongside Monte Carlo for computing pi, illustrating solution diversity.
  • Monte Carlo Method
    Computational algorithm mentioned as an example of diverse problem-solving strategies.
  • Unsupervised Learning
    Learning that builds a low-dimensional model of input data without error signals or rewards; Hebbian learning is an example.

Frameworks (3)

  • Cognitive Light Cone Framework
    A framework that quantifies intelligence as an invariant measure by mapping the spatiotemporal scale and boundaries of goals an agent can pursue, independent of embodiment or substrate. It provides a comparative basis for evaluating diverse forms of intelligence by formalizing how far into space and time an agent's goal-directed behavior extends.
  • Supervised Learning
    Learning through physical changes in mechanical networks, as an example of learning outside neural systems.
  • Xenobots
    Synthetic biotic constructs made from repurposed frog embryo skin cells that form self-motile robots with novel morphologies and behaviors including kinematic self-replication; demonstrate cellular competency beyond normal developmental constraints.

Findings (4)

Claims (21)

Hypotheses (4)

Questions (12)

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Cited by (2)

  • Contemplative Agent

    Embedding four Buddhist-derived axiomatic principles—mindfulness, emptiness, non-duality, and boundless care—into AI systems via a framework the paper terms the 'Wise World Model' produces measurable

  • Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Stress, care, and intelligence

    The Stress-Care-Intelligence (SCI) loop — a substrate-neutral feedback model in which homeostatic stress engenders care, care activates the latent capacity of intelligence, and successful problem-reso

Cross-corpus bridges (12)

same_concept_as · Nomic cosine

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

  • aboutblank_kb
    Care Light Coneconcepts/cognitive/care-light-cone.md0.838
  • aboutblank_kb
    Citation: Doctor, T.; Witkowski, O.;papers/cleaned/entropy-24-00710-v3.md0.832
  • aboutblank_kb
    The SCI Framework Applied to Consciousness-UXsynthesis/sci-framework-for-consciousness-ux.md0.825
  • alexander
    The SCI Framework Applied to Consciousness-UXapplied/from-research-stack/sci-framework-for-consciousness-ux.md0.822
  • aboutblank_kb
    Citation: Doctor, T.; Witkowski, O.;papers/edited/entropy-24-00710-v3_edited.md0.818
  • aboutblank_kb
    What does it mean for the Self to expand its computational boundary and care light cone infinitely?questions/what-does-it-mean-for-the-self-to.md0.816
  • alexander
    Geometry of Care — Anton's canonical synthesisapplied/GEOMETRY-OF-CARE.md0.815
  • aboutblank_kb
    Can expanding one's care and concern for other beings fundamentally increase intelligence and lead to superintelligence?questions/can-expanding-ones-care-and-concern-for-other.md0.811
  • aboutblank_kb
    Stress-Care Intelligence Loopframeworks/stress-care-intelligence-loop.md0.809
  • aboutblank_kb
    Citation: Doctor, T.; Witkowski, O.;papers/linkified/citation-doctor-t-witkowski-o.md0.806
  • aboutblank_kb
    Does commitment to universal care necessarily entail expansion to infinite intelligence?questions/does-commitment-to-universal-care-necessarily-entail-expansion.md0.804
  • aboutblank_kb
    What are the limits of an agent's sphere of concern and care?questions/what-are-the-limits-of-an-agents-sphere.md0.801