Once you’ve disconnected from the network, you can no longer remember this grandiose goal that you had before, where the collective was working on building and maintaining organs. As far as you’re concerned, you’re an amoeba. The rest of the body is external environment, and that border between self and world has shrunk. The cognitive light cone of that cell has drastically shrunk. It is not more selfish than other cells, it just has a smaller self. So cancer is in large part a dissociative identity disorder of the cellular collective intelligence.
Future medicine is going to look a lot more like a kind of somatic psychiatry and not like chemistry.
Any combination of evolved material, engineered material, and software is some kind of possible embodied mind.
We need to let go of old categories around living things versus machines and all that, because the entire variety of life (what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful”) are a tiny corner in the space of possible beings.
Bioelectricity is interesting because it happens to be the cognitive glue that enables the scaling of intelligence. Forming into bioelectrical networks is how the tiny little goals of single cells—metabolic goals and proliferative goals and so on—are scaled up into grandiose goals like building a limb or a face and so on. It is the cognitive glue.
The backbone of biology and things we call life are just systems that are very good at scaling up the cognitive properties of their parts into bigger and bigger cognitive light cones.
The fundamental interesting thing about life is not any of the dynamics that are currently studied in chemistry and so on, it’s the creative problem-solving of the material. And it starts very early on. It goes below the single cell level, and you don’t need cells for it. But the story of life is the story of scaling up intelligence.
Cancer is a fundamental failure mode of the system that keeps us together. The question isn’t, “Why do we get cancer?” The question is, “Why isn’t it all cancer all the time? Why do we have anything but cancer?” And it’s because of these communication networks that allow cells to join together to have bigger goals.
