paper
active
2026
paper:levin-lyons-cognitive-glues-economics-2026

Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence

ByMichael Levinⓘ·Benjamin LyonsAllen Discovery Center At Tufts University, Allen Discovery Center, Tufts University + 10 more
DOI 10.1098/rsta.2024.0528OpenAlex W7161154609
Cognitive glue & collective intelligenceDistributed & non-neural cognitionMultiscale CognitionCollective IntelligenceTame Technological Approach To Mind Everywhere

TL;DR

Levin and Lyons argue that the price system in market economies is not merely a resource-allocation device but the canonical instantiation of what they term a *cognitive glue* — a coordinating affordance that allows autonomous, heterogeneous agents operating at multiple scales to form mutually compatible plans without requiring centralized direction. Deploying the TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) framework, published in *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A* 384(2320), the paper formalizes cognitive glue as a shared model of relative scarcities, and claims that any system achieving genuine collective intelligence must solve the Hayekian distributed-knowledge problem in broadly the same structural way that price signals do: by compressing dispersed local information into a substrate-neutral, action-guiding representation that propagates across the system. The paper introduces the price system as a *generic template* — an abstract model against which candidate cognitive glues in biological, social, and artificial multi-scale systems can be evaluated. This implies that identifying the cognitive glue of any collective intelligence (a neural assembly, an immune system, a venture-capital network) requires locating the mechanism that encodes and transmits relative scarcities across subunits, and that designing or enhancing collective intelligence is, at root, a problem of designing better shared scarcity models.

What to take away

  1. 1. The price system is identified as the cognitive glue of the economy because it functions as a coordinating affordance enabling agents at multiple scales to form mutually compatible plans without central oversight.
  2. 2. The paper applies the TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) framework — originally developed by Levin for biological systems — to economic coordination, extending its scope beyond neural and cellular substrates to market institutions.
  3. 3. A cognitive glue is formally defined as a shared model of relative scarcities, meaning it must compress distributed local information about resource constraints into a signal that guides action across heterogeneous subunits.
  4. 4. Published in *Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A* volume 384, issue 2320 (2026), the paper appears in a theme issue on 'World models in natural and artificial intelligence', positioning economic cognition within that comparative framework.
  5. 5. The authors argue that the price system is not merely one example of a cognitive glue but a *generic template* — an abstract model that any cognitive glue in any substrate must instantiate in structurally analogous ways.
  6. 6. At least one open question the paper raises is how to identify or engineer the functional equivalent of a price system in non-market collective intelligences such as neural assemblies, immune networks, or AI multi-agent architectures.
  7. 7. The paper draws explicitly on Hayek's dispersed-knowledge argument, treating the inability of any single subunit to possess complete information about the system as the canonical problem that cognitive glues must solve.
  8. 8. As a replicable methodology, a researcher could operationalize the framework by testing candidate coordinating mechanisms in a multi-agent system against three criteria: substrate-neutrality, scarcity-encoding, and plan-compatibility across agents.
  9. 9. The paper proposes that biological phenomena studied under TAME — such as morphogenetic coordination across ~37 trillion cells — and economic markets share a common computational structure at the level of collective problem-solving, not merely as loose analogy.
  10. 10. A hypothesis the paper advances is that improving collective intelligence in any domain requires identifying and optimizing the system's cognitive glue, implying that failures of collective coordination (market failures, developmental disorders) are, in part, failures of the scarcity-signaling mechanism.

Peer brief — for seminar discussion

Levin and Lyons take the Hayekian insight that prices aggregate dispersed local knowledge and reframe it as an instance of a general biological-cognitive phenomenon. Working within the TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere) framework, which Levin has previously applied to cellular and morphogenetic collectives, they argue in *Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A* 384(2320) that the price system constitutes the *cognitive glue* of the economy — defined as a coordinating affordance that enables autonomous subunits operating at multiple scales to form mutually compatible plans. The load-bearing move is elevating the price system from economic mechanism to generic template: any multi-scale system that exhibits emergent, adaptive problem-solving must possess some functional analog of price signals, one that compresses information about relative scarcities into an action-guiding, substrate-neutral representation. The paper introduces this *shared model of relative scarcities* as the necessary and sufficient structural property of all cognitive glues, and uses the economy — a collective intelligence with observable, well-theorized coordination machinery — to ground what would otherwise remain an abstract TAME claim. The central implication is methodological and generative: to study or design collective intelligence in biological, social, or artificial systems (neural assemblies, immune networks, multi-agent AI architectures, venture-capital networks), one should first locate the mechanism that encodes and transmits relative scarcities, because that mechanism is doing the cognitive work. The paper closes by sketching research directions that combine economics and biology under this unified lens, explicitly inviting interdisciplinary collaboration around the DOI 10.1098/rsta.2024.0528. An alternative method the paper could have deployed is information-theoretic formalization — measuring how much mutual information a proposed cognitive glue preserves about system-wide resource constraints across agent pairs — which would have made the 'structural analogy' between prices and biological signals empirically testable rather than argumentative. The most contestable move is the claim that the price system is a *generic template* rather than one solution among many: critics will note that prices work under very specific institutional conditions (property rights, excludability, rivalry), and that non-market collectives — including the developing embryo that TAME is most naturally applied to — coordinate without anything resembling scarcity encoding in the Hayekian sense. The paper's taxonomy of cognitive glues thus risks being too price-centric, potentially obscuring coordination mechanisms that operate through synchrony, threshold cascades, or morphogen gradients rather than relative-value signals. Whether the 'shared model of relative scarcities' definition is genuinely substrate-neutral or quietly smuggles in market-specific assumptions is the question a seminar audience will press hardest.

Frameworks (1)

  • Tame Technological Approach To Mind Everywhere
    A conceptual framework for understanding cognition and intelligence across diverse substrates—including evolved biological systems, artificial systems, and bioengineered systems—using empirically-grounded, gradualist approaches. TTAME enables comparative analysis of mind-like phenomena regardless of the physical or biological substrate in which it emerges, facilitating cross-disciplinary study of unconventional intelligences.

Claims (8)

Hypotheses (1)

Original abstract (expand)

Collective intelligence has emergent problem-solving capacities that are different than those of its subunits. The plethora of multi-scale systems within nature and society makes it imperative to understand the interaction policies necessary and sufficient for emergence of collective intelligences. The economy is a complex system consisting of autonomous elements at multiple scales and which exhibits adaptive problem-solving capabilities, suggesting that the economy offers an interesting, important example of collective intelligence. We identify the price system as the cognitive glue of the economy by acting as a coordinating affordance that enables members to form plans that are mutually compatible. Using the collective intelligence framework of Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere, we elaborate on various aspects of the economy that make it useful to model the economy as a collective intelligence. We argue that any cognitive glue must solve the same kind of problem that the price system solves in broadly the same way that the price system solves it, and thus the price system serves as a generic template or abstract model for all cognitive glues. Finally, we describe some research ideas that combine concepts from biology and economics in the hopes of inspiring interdisciplinary collaboration. This article is part of the theme issue 'World models in natural and artificial intelligence'.

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