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

What to take away

1. 1. TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) formalizes a continuous, non-binary axis of 'persuadability'—ranging from brute-force hardware rewiring at one extreme to rational-argument-responsive agents at the other—as the operationally testable core of agency attribution across all substrates.
2. 2. Planaria exposed to barium (a non-ecological potassium channel blocker that causes heads to explode) regenerate barium-insensitive heads by regulating a very small number of genes out of the entire genome, demonstrating intelligent problem-solving in transcriptional space without any evolutionarily prepared response (Emmons-Bell et al., 2019).
3. 3. Genetically wild-type planaria whose bioelectric gap-junctional network is transiently disrupted regenerate with head anatomies matching other extant Girardia species, and this altered pattern memory persists through multiple subsequent rounds of regeneration in plain water with no further chemical treatment (Emmons-Bell et al., 2015; Sullivan et al., 2016).
4. 4. Tadpoles engineered to bear functional eyes on their tails—ectopically connected to spinal cord rather than brain—nevertheless succeed at light-mediated visual learning paradigms, illustrating that minds are not tightly bound to a single underlying hardware architecture (Blackiston and Levin, 2013).
5. 5. Newt kidney tubules normally composed of 8–10 cells in cross-section adaptively reduce cell number when cell size is experimentally increased, and when cells are made very large, a single cell wraps around itself to form a correct-lumen tubule via cytoskeletal bending instead of cell-cell communication—demonstrating multi-scale competency of morphogenetic modules (Fankhauser, 1945a,b).
6. 6. Gap junctions function as a scaling mechanism for selfhood by propagating second-messenger signals between cells without metadata marking their origin, thereby partially erasing informational identity among subunits and enabling tissue-level credit assignment and anatomical homeostasis; general anesthetics are gap junction blockers, and GJ closure in cancer recapitulates unicellular-scale agency (Wentlandt et al., 2006; Chernet and Levin, 2013a,b).
7. 7. Multi-scale competency architecture (MCA) is predicted to potentiate evolutionary speed by at least three mechanisms: smoothing the fitness landscape so that mutations with mixed consequences can be evaluated independently, reducing apparent pleiotropy by locally compensating deleterious morphogenetic side-effects, and providing a Baldwin-effect-like patience that reduces the constraint that evolutionary benefits must be immediate.
8. 8. TAME predicts a specific, testable bioinformatic overlap: genes categorized under morphogenesis should share significant membership with genes annotated for memory and learning, beyond the already-known overlap for ion channel, connexin, and neurotransmitter genes—an open hypothesis that remains to be systematically tested.
9. 9. A replicable methodology proposed within TAME is tissue training via reinforcement schedules (nutrients/endorphins as reward, shock as punishment) rather than genetic or molecular pathway micromanagement, analogous to animal behavioral training, as a path to controlling anatomical and physiological outcomes in regenerative medicine contexts.
10. 10. An open question raised by TAME is whether the continuum of cognition and consciousness contains a true zero—i.e., whether any physical system has absolutely no degree of goal-directed activity or sentience—or whether even particles exhibit infinitesimal proto-agency via quantum indeterminacy and least-action behavior, making the lower bound of the consciousness continuum asymptotically approached but never reached.

Peer brief — for seminar discussion

Levin's 2022 paper in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience (Vol. 16, Article 768201) introduces TAME—Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—as a theoretical and experimental framework for recognizing, comparing, and manipulating cognition across substrates that lie far outside the standard phylogenetic model-organism toolkit, including gene regulatory networks, morphogenetic tissue collectives, planaria, chimeric tadpoles, hybrots, and synthetic bioengineered organisms. The framework rests on three philosophical commitments: a strict gradualism that refuses binary distinctions between 'true cognition' and 'just physics'; substrate-independence of selfhood (no privileged material implementation); and the empirical, observer-dependent nature of agency attribution, operationalized via a 'persuadability axis' that runs from purely physical systems amenable only to hardware rewiring, through homeostatic circuits and trainable animals, to humans responsive to rational argument. The load-bearing finding is that morphogenesis qualifies as basal cognition under TAME's criteria because cellular collectives exhibit James' criterion of 'fixed ends with varying means': they store anatomical target morphologies as rewritable bioelectric pattern memories encoded via ion channels and gap junctions, and navigate morphospace, transcriptional space, and physiological space to reach those targets despite unpredictable perturbations. Key empirical anchors include planaria permanently regenerating two-headed morphologies from genetically wild-type tissue after transient bioelectric manipulation (Durant et al., 2017; Oviedo et al., 2010), planaria solving a novel barium-toxicity problem by regulating a minimal subset of the genome (Emmons-Bell et al., 2019), craniofacially scrambled 'Picasso tadpoles' self-correcting toward normal frog face configurations via novel paths through morphospace (Vandenberg et al., 2012), and newt kidney tubules composed of 8–10 cells adaptively restructuring so that a single enlarged cell wraps around itself to maintain correct lumen diameter (Fankhauser, 1945a,b). Gap junctions are identified as the mechanistic scaling device: because they propagate signals between cells without origin metadata, they partially dissolve informational identity among subunits, enabling anatomical-scale homeostatic loops and collective credit assignment—a dynamic whose pathological reversal, when oncogenes drive GJ closure, reduces cells to unicellular-scale agency and produces cancer. The framework implies that multi-scale competency architecture potentiates evolutionary speed by smoothing fitness landscapes and reducing apparent pleiotropy; that the tools of reinforcement learning and cognitive science should be applied directly to tissues (tissue training paradigms rather than molecular micromanagement); and that ethics for bioengineered and chimeric beings cannot rely on substrate, origin story, or similarity to human brains as morally relevant criteria. TAME also predicts a specific bioinformatic overlap between morphogenesis genes and memory/learning genes beyond the already-known ion channel and connexin families. An alternative theoretical framework that could have been used to organize these claims is Active Inference / the Free Energy Principle (Friston et al., 2015), which addresses similar questions of goal-directedness and homeostasis in biological systems; TAME acknowledges this as a planned integration rather than a completed one. A critical reader would push back most sharply on the evidential asymmetry between the framework's scope and its experimental grounding: the paper invokes a very wide range of phenomena—from bacterial biofilm bioelectrics to human dissociative identity disorder to game-theoretic models of cancer—but the direct experimental tests of TAME's distinctive predictions (trainability of morphogenesis via reinforcement schedules, the bioinformatic overlap between morphogenesis and memory gene sets, the specific Prisoners-Dilemma model with Merge and Split options) are explicitly flagged as ongoing or future work rather than completed results. The framework is therefore primarily a generative conceptual proposal supported by convergent post-hoc reinterpretation of existing data rather than by prospective hypothesis testing, and a skeptic would reasonably ask whether the persuadability axis and cognitive light cone constructs are sufficiently formalized to generate unambiguous, falsifiable predictions distinguishable from those of simpler control-theoretic or dynamical-systems accounts of morphogenesis that require no cognitive vocabulary.

Findings (18)

• Enlarged newt cells compensate for increased size by adjusting cell number and can form kidney tubule from a single cell wrapped around itself.

  When cell size was doubled, tubules used fewer cells; when quadrupled, a single cell formed the tubule by cytoskeletal deformation, maintaining correct lumen diameter.

• Manipulation of resting potential pattern in planaria stably alters target morphology (head number) despite wild-type genetics.

  Transient bioelectric perturbation with ion channel drugs/RNAi permanently alters the number of heads regenerated even in subsequent rounds without further treatment, demonstrating bioelectric pattern memory.

• Artificial regulation of bioelectric connectivity can override strong oncogene expression to prevent tumorigenesis in tadpoles.

  Co-injection of a hyperpolarizing ion channel with oncogene prevented tumor formation and restored normal tissue, showing bioelectric control over genetic state.

• Artificially induced frog leg regeneration follows a non-developmental path (like a plant) to produce a normal limb.

  Frog legs regenerated after specific induction did not form a paddle with interdigital apoptosis but grew digits from a central core, reaching correct final form via atypical intermediate states.

• Gap junction blockade stochastically induces heads of other planarian species in genetically wild-type worms.

  Temporary disruption of gap junctions causes planaria to reconstruct heads appropriate to other species, revealing latent morphospace attractors.

• Misexpression of a single ion channel induces complete ectopic eye formation in gut endoderm of vertebrates.

  Setting cells to an eye-like bioelectric prepattern via ion channel manipulation creates fully formed eyes in abnormal locations, where the master gene Pax6 is insufficient.

• Tadpoles with scrambled craniofacial organ positions (Picasso tadpoles) develop into largely normal frogs.

  When eyes, nostrils, and jaws were mispositioned, they moved via novel trajectories and stopped upon reaching correct frog face positions, demonstrating anatomical homeostasis.

• Bacterial biofilms use membrane potential dynamics to organize metabolism and memory across communities.

  Prokaryotes exhibit bioelectric signaling for proliferation control and spatial integration, analogous to pre-neural patterning in animals.

• Caterpillars retain memories through metamorphosis into butterflies despite drastic brain remodeling.
• Wounds on deer antlers are remembered and reproduced in subsequent years at the same location.

  Deer farmers observed that a wound on a branched antler results in ectopic tine at that location next year, long after the original antler fell off, indicating spatial pattern memory.

Claims (17)

• The correct level of agency for a system is an empirical question determined by which intervention strategy provides the most efficient prediction and control.

  Central methodological claim of TAME: optimal position on the persuadability continuum is found through experiments, not philosophical definition.

• Selves are not fixed permanent agents; the substrate of memory, preferences, and rewards is plastic and can remodel during the agent's lifetime.

  Central claim that cognitive Selves change in real-time, supported by examples of metamorphosis and regeneration.

• Contingent properties like composition, origin, or similarity to human brains should not define ethical consideration for novel agents.

  Ethics must be based on empirically-determined cognitive properties (goals, preferences, concerns) rather than parochial markers.

• Gap junctional coupling wipes ownership information on signaling molecules, enabling the formation of multicellular Selves.

  Because cells cannot distinguish internally generated signals from those arriving through GJs, they share memories and bind into a larger agent.

• Bioelectric networks scale cell computation into anatomical homeostasis and are a mechanism for evolving larger Selves.

  Developmental bioelectricity is proposed as a tractable entry point to understand the informational architecture of collective intelligence in morphogenesis.

• Understanding Self-plasticity and morphogenesis has direct implications for regenerative medicine and neural repair.
• 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.

• Estimates of intelligence are observer-dependent and depend on the observer's limitations as much as the system.

  An epistemological claim of TAME that agency is not an objective property but is empirically determined by prediction and control efficiency.

• Selves can be nested and overlapping, cooperating and competing both laterally and across levels.

  Key TAME claim that biological systems are patchworks of agents, with higher Selves deforming option spaces for lower ones.

• The Self is malleable and plastic, changing radically during an organism's lifetime.

Hypotheses (7)

• We hypothesize that cell collectives use voltage as a generalization parameter to repurpose responses for novel stress conditions.

  Barium planaria experiment suggests cells generalize via physiological stress classes, with Vmem as macrovariable.

• Goals and stressors are key invariants unifying morphogenesis, behavior, and physiological allostasis.
• Developmental bioelectricity scales cell-level feedback into anatomical homeostasis.
• Scaling of Cognitive Capacity via Modularity and Feedback Loops

  Processes scaling goals and stressors form positive feedback loop with modularity; both arise from and potentiate power of evolution, enabling specific predictions for cognitive capacity scaling.

• All known cognitive agents are collective intelligences
• Memory as Cognitive Invariant Across Substrate Change

  Memory proposed as candidate invariant enabling Self persistence despite drastic biological remodeling; understood as communication between past and future Selves.

• Goals and Stressors as Unifying Invariants

  Goals (cybernetic sense) and stressors (distance from goals) proposed as deep invariants allowing comparison of agents in diverse embodiments across morphogenesis, behavior, and allostasis.

Questions (3)

• 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?
• What are the deep invariants unifying cognitive systems across diverse substrates?
• Where does it all come together? (the unity of consciousness problem)

  The classic homunculus problem is argued to be a pseudo-problem under multi-scale architecture.

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