Each of us begins life as a single cell. In fact, some organisms live their whole life as a single cell – an amoeba or a Paramecium can be seen under the microscope in a drop of pond water, going about their lives. Without a brain or nerves, they hunt for food, avoid trouble, manage a myriad of internal chemical processes to stay alive and reproduce, and can even learn from experience. But evolution discovered a remarkable process: by linking together into groups and exchanging information, cells manifest a greater being to emerge into the world: you (and other animals and plants).
During the amazing process of embryonic development, a single fertilized egg cell replicates, and the daughter cells do not swim off like amoebas but stay together and connect. They connect using chemical and especially electrical signals, which allow them to connect in a way in which their individual memories spread through the tissue, suppressing the individuality and producing a kind of collective intelligence that shares all the memories. When the “I” of each cell becomes the “we” of the tissue, they are able to be cooperative and aligned – literally physically aligned in some cases, but also aligned to common purpose – the building of a healthy complex organism.
It is possible to speak of this as intelligence not simply because it’s a complicated outcome, but because they solve problems. Scientists have discovered that if you challenge this process, called morphogenesis (the generation of shape), the cellular collective will often find ways to still get to the correct final outcome. For example, early embryos cut in half do not form half-bodies, but two perfectly normal twins – each half realizes that much is missing and will regenerate it. Some animals are able to regenerate their limbs, eyes, and other organs, growing rapidly when damaged but stopping when the correct pattern is complete.
Thus, living tissue is a goal-seeking agent able to pursue specific paths through the space of infinite space of anatomical, physiological, and metabolic possibilities.
During embryogenesis and evolution, the small, modest goals of single cells (“more food in my tiny body”) become the larger goals of cell collectives (“build a normal organ, repair it if damaged”), and even the very large goals of some humans (“world peace”). This process sometimes breaks down, and individual cells can disconnect from the body and constrict their view to an ancient amoeba-like form where the rest of the body is just external environment to them; this leads to cancer. The ability of the boundary between Self and world to be flexible and to change goes all the way back to our origins. In a normal early embryo, all the cells are aligned to make one individual. But if little scratches are made in it, separating it into islands, each piece will think it is alone and organize an embryo; when the scratches heal, the result is a set of conjoined twins or triplets. The individual cells inside that embryonic disk must decide whether they belong to one or the other embryo and every cell has some other cell as an external neighbor. Thus, the setting of the boundary between a being and the outside world is one of the earliest acts of any new Self coming into the world. One possibility is that by committing to increase that boundary – to include more and more other beings inside our Self, we can increase the size of goals that we pursue and improve the harmony between ourselves and other beings we currently view as separate and outside our horizon of concern.
The early embryo is not necessarily “1 being” and this is not determined by our genetics – the field of cells becomes an ocean of potentiality from which 0, 1, 2, or more whole beings (like humans) can arise. As always, the genetic information inside our cells produces the mechanical hardware inside of cells, but the physiological software implemented by those cells is what determines the outcomes and allows a coherent being (or more) to develop.
We – like bee-hives and ant colonies – are a collective intelligence. During our embryogenesis, the bioelectric and chemical signals between cells solved anatomical problems, and later, the same electrical mechanisms worked in our brains to connect our neural cells into a coherent whole that solves problems in the 3-dimensional and even linguistic world. There is a fundamental duality. On the one hand we are a true emergent individual with memories, goals, and preferences that belong to none of the individual cells or organs that make up our body; on the other hand, we are a collective, using the laws of physics and computation to enable our many parts to communicate and coordinate. This is how our thoughts can influence the chemicals in our muscles to enable us to move: electrical processes that encode our hopes and dreams become transmitted through our body control systems to move tiny chemicals in the muscle cells enabling us to act on our intentions.
In fact, even the chemical reactions inside our cells have some intelligence – they can learn from experience. Thus science is discovering the pervasive and highly diverse minds that exist throughout the universe. Most importantly, we often cannot guess what kind of mind is resident in chemical systems, cells, organs, societies, and even machines that we make ourselves. This must be discovered by experiment – trying the various approaches from the behavioral sciences (like training, as we would do with an animal) to see what any particular system is capable of. Scientists are learning a kind of humility, because saying that something has (or doesn’t have) a degree of intelligence is really dependent on their own ability to recognize what kind of problem-solving capacity and intent might be latent therein. Scientists are working now to develop better tools and methods for this, so that we can more easily recognize, create, and ethically relate to novel intelligences.
The science of diverse intelligences has many implications. The ability to recognize the active mind within unfamiliar beings will drive new medical treatments (by enabling communication with cells and reprogramming their goals toward health), new technology (including hybrid and swarm robotics and effective artificial intelligence), and new systems of ethics that do not rely on the familiar but fundamentally superficial criteria of what beings look like and how they arose. The technology based on the development of the field of diverse intelligence has the potential to improve the embodied existence for all sentient beings, facilitating the freedom of embodiment (which goes beyond repairing normal bodies to the rational control and improvement of body form and function) and enhancing the ability of all minds to reach their full potential.
