Scales of Life: From Basal Cognition to Planetary Intelligence

Keynote speakers: Deborah Coen, Michael Levin, Thomas Moynihan

This symposium seeks to investigate how information processing, cognition, and other forms of sensing and making sense occur at different scales, and how the ways of understanding these scales inform and deform one another across the contemporary earth and life sciences. An exploration of these issues involves thinking with the increasingly relevant notion of 'the planetary’ as a question of climate change and empire (Coen), as related to Gaia theory and its recent comeback in Earth System Science (Lovelock and Margulis, Latour, Stengers, Dutreuil), as inclusive of the technosphere and its geopolitical implications (Bratton), and as a framing for understanding intelligence and life as planetary-scale phenomena (Frank, Walker). Such an endeavour also entails observing how studying the behavior of biological organisms creates a mid-level bias in terms of the understanding of function (agency, teleology), and how looking at life itself via basal cognition may suspend all assumptions about the necessary material substrates for purportedly high-level capacities (Baluška, Levin, Lyon). Tracing the history of these ideas and their evolution over time is also crucial to orienting our planetary futures (Moynihan).

The organizers welcome proposals for 20-minute talks, working across a range of fields: philosophy, history of science, social studies of science, biology, earth sciences, and the arts. Presentations may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• How research projects in the contemporary earth and life sciences understand the very notion of scale as relevant to their objects and domains of investigation;
• How understanding information processing across scales, while risking descriptive ubiquity, can challenge stubborn or reactionary categorizations such as natural/artificial;
• The problem of the so-called ‘tyranny of scales’ in the modelling of complex physical systems and organisms, and possible strategies to deal with it; 
• The origins of multi-scalar thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Deadline: abstracts of 250 words and short bios should be sent to [email protected] by 28 February 2025. Letters of acceptance will be sent out by mid-March 2025. Participants with limited funding can apply to receive a lump sum towards travel and accommodation costs. As with all events at the ICI Berlin, there is no registration fee.

Organized by Maria Dębińska, Magdalena Krysztoforska, Julia Sánchez-Dorado, Ben Woodard

The symposium is hosted by the ICI Berlin; for more information about the venue, please visit: https://www.ici-berlin.org/

Any queries should be addressed to the organizers via email: [email protected]

Baluška F., Levin M. (2016). On having no head: cognition throughout biological systems, Frontiers in psychology 7, 902.

Bratton, B. (2019). The Terraforming. Strelka Press

Coen, D. (2018) Climate in Motion. Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale. Chicago University Press.

Coen, D. (2016) “Big is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas”. Journal of the History of Ideas, 77(2), 305-321.

Dutreuil, S. (2024) Gaïa Terre vivante: Histoire d'une nouvelle conception de la Terre. Editions La Découverte. 

Frank, A. (2024). “The Coming Second Copernican Revolution”. Noema, October 15. https://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-second-copernican-revolution/

Frank A., Grinspoon D., Walker S. (2022). “Intelligence as a planetary scale process”. International Journal of Astrobiology 21, 47–61.https://doi.org/10.1017/S147355042100029X 

Latour, B. (2017) Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity.

Levin, M. (2021). Life, death, and self: Fundamental questions of primitive cognition viewed through the lens of body plasticity and synthetic organisms. Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 564, 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbrc.2020.10.077 

Lyon P., Keijzer F., Arendt D. and Levin M. (2021). Reframing cognition: getting down to biological basics Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B37620190750. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0750 

Lovelock, J., & Margulis, L. (1974). “Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: The Gaia hypothesis”. Tellus, 26(1–2), 2–10.

Moynihan, T. (2024). “Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain?” Noema, November 19. https://www.noemamag.com/are-we-accidentally-building-a-planetary-brain/

Moynihan, T. (2020). “Can Intelligence Escape its Terrestrial Past?: Anticipations of Existential Catastrophe & Existential Hope from Haldane to Ćirković”. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 16(1), 71–101. https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/844 

Stengers, I. (2013) In conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, “Matters of Cosmopolitics: On the Provocations of Gaïa,” in Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, ed. Etienne Turpin. London: Open Humanities.

Walker, S. I. (2024). Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. Riverhead Books.