#michael levin

This is a wild theory I haven't refined yet, it aligns with emerging fringe science I've been learning about. I'm not typically one to theorize, it just dawned on me.. probably off but genuinely intriguing. It involves bioelectric fields (intrinsically linked to electromagnetic fields) as information substrate... and "anatomical morphous space" as a collective intelligence.

Physicists are very comfortable with patterns arising from mathematical causes such as symmetries. Biologists instead typically land on one of two sources of patterns that are acceptable: heredity and environment. Heredity provides a long history, backed by selection via interaction with an external environment, of shaping a chemical medium (DNA) that is thought to explain why specific patterns (rather than alternatives) are observed. Many interesting questions exist about the origin of useful solutions – a pre-requisite for being able to select them from a pool of less useful ones, but here I want to focus on a source of order that pervades the living and non-living world: that studied by the discipline we call mathematics. … Consider the remarkable and beautiful (also life-like) pattern seen in the Halley plot kinds of fractals (Figure 6). That entire highly specific form is encoded in the very simple formula in complex numbers, and can be revealed by a simple algorithm. The fact that this highly complex pattern is indicated by a very short description of a function provides an un-ending richness from a small seed. I propose that it’s better to think of it not as a kind of infinite compression, but rather as the function serving as an index or a pointer into a morphospace of possible shapes. This idea will be developed further below, casting physical objects (such as embryos and biobots) as other types of pointers into the Platonic space. What sets the nature of this shape – where does it come from? There is no history of selection, no prior events in our universe that determine it. Like pi, e, and many other remarkable constants, forms emerge from mathematics in ways that cannot be explained by any kind of history or properties of the physical world – they would be this way even if the physical world was entirely different. … I argue that this breaks the closure of the physical world, as these mathematical facts impinge on physics and dynamics that are the substrate of evolution. It is a non-physicalist approach to the project of looking for sources of information and influence when we try to understand and guide biology (and the other disciplines that build on it).