Bioelectricity as an interface to unconventional intelligence: from philosophy to biomedicine

Michael Levin (Tufts University)

All embodied intelligence is collective intelligence - made of parts that work together to create an emergent mind with memories, goals, preferences, and competencies that none of the individual parts have. Each of us starts life as a quiescent egg cell - a little blob of chemistry and physics - which slowly, gradually self-assembles into a complex being with exquisite form and function. In this talk, I will describe our work to understand the self-construction of minds and bodies, and the mechanisms by which cognition scales and projects into new spaces. One of our model systems is groups of cells, which form a collective intelligence that solves problems in the space of anatomical possibilities. We have discovered some of the ways that all cells, not just neurons, use natural bioelectric networks to store the memories of this collective intelligence. We have developed new ways to re-write that information for applications in birth defects, regenerative medicine, and cancer, using the bioelectric interface to communicate with, not micromanage, the cellular behaviors. Finally, I will describe how our work on synthetic bioengineering is uncovering inputs into emergent cognition beyond heredity and environment, and speculate on a future of diverse intelligence and freedom of embodiment.