Unconventional Embodiments: Model Systems and Strategies for Addressing Mind-Blindness

Overcoming Mind-Blindness to Diverse Intelligences

• 🧠 Humans often exhibit mind-blindness, struggling to recognize intelligences with unfamiliar scales, problem spaces, or embodiments.
• 💡 The talk introduces model systems and frameworks to detect, communicate with, and ethically interact with a wide spectrum of novel beings.
• 🔬 Biology reveals a continuous spectrum from physics and chemistry to complex cognitive systems, challenging sharp categorical distinctions.

Protocognitive Abilities and Biological Plasticity

• ⚡ Even molecular networks demonstrate protocognitive competencies like learning, habituation, and memory.
• 🧩 Cells and tissues show remarkable plasticity, remapping information and adapting to novel arrangements, as seen in tadpoles with eyes on tails or planaria memory.
• 🦋 Caterpillar metamorphosis illustrates how memories can survive radical brain refactoring and be remapped onto new architectures for different organisms.

Bioelectricity as Cognitive Glue

• 🔌 Bioelectricity serves as the "cognitive glue" that binds cells into higher-level decision-making units, enabling them to store larger, more complex goal states.
• 🎯 This multiscale competency architecture means every level of organization has its own agendas and problem-solving abilities in various spaces, not just 3D.
• ⚠️ Cancer is presented as a failure mode where cells disconnect from the bioelectric network, reverting to smaller, individual goals rather than collective morphogenetic processes.

Exploring Novel Synthetic Organisms

• 🧪 New synthetic proto-organisms like xenobots (from frog cells) and anthrobots (from human tracheal cells) are created to study behaviors not shaped by evolutionary selection.
• 🚀 Xenobots exhibit self-motility, collective behaviors, kinematic self-replication, and novel competencies like sound perception.
• 🌱 Anthrobots, made from human cells without genetic modification, demonstrate distinct behaviors and the ability to heal damaged neural tissue, suggesting future personalized biobots.

AI for Biobot Discovery and Ethical Symbiosis

• 🤖 An embodied AI system called Mambot acts as a "robot scientist" to generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and revise theories for biobot design in a closed-loop system.
• 🌐 Mambot navigates anatomical morphospace using xenobots as a front-end interface, exploring the latent space of possible biological forms and behaviors.
• 🤝 The speaker emphasizes the need to develop tools for ethical symbiosis with future hybrid beings, recognizing the blurring lines between tools, agents, and intelligence.