In Search of Agents

[Note: this article has been improved using GSNV-GPT]

The Problem State

This essay is part of a larger project of applying a metatheoretical view — called the Global State Naturalized View — to contemporary questions in science, technology, culture and philosophy. Here I address the question posed by Michael Levin’s lab around what we normally call agents as being merely “thin interfaces” that ingress patterns from Platonic space. His most recent work has moved him to think of the patterns as being the source of agency, and the physical substrate — be it organic, material, or technological — as being the “agential material.”

Levin seeks to understand this relationship, between agential material and Platonic patterns, by using the grammar of behavioral science, by turning the focus from simple cause and effect to what he calls “persuadability.” Levin defines cognition as “solving problems by different means,” and his recent research is understood as persuading agential material to take different, often radically novel, means to an end state. These end states themselves often represent a first, unique kind of instance in biology. Too many people appeal to “emergentism” as an explanation, but Levin rejects it outright, saying that “emergence” is just a placeholder for gaps in explanatory reach.

Consider, for example, his anthrobots. By separating epithelial cells from human trachea tissue and releasing them as individuals into a medium, Levin and his lab have “persuaded” the cells to express completely novel behaviors, exploiting novel transcription sets without any structural changes to their DNA. How do the anthrobots “know how” to display new transcriptomes? This is an under-appreciated question in cellular biology. As an analogy, you can think of DNA as a library of instruction manuals on how to build proteins. All of a sudden, without time to adapt step by step, your world has completely changed. Sure, the right manuals you need to explore and exploit this new world are there somewhere in the library – but how do you know 1) what manuals you’ll need, 2) where the manuals are, and 3) what goals are you addressing in the first place?

Levin wonders “when did the cells’ lineage pay the cost of acquiring these new capacities?” I think this is a limiting way to form the question because it assumes that DNA is a kind of accounting of costs, and selection is a kind of appropriating the benefits. This is what I’ve critiqued as complex adaptive systems thinking (or the Darwinian attitude) and I think Levin should jettison the metaphysical baggage that comes with it. GSNV directly avoids complex adaptive systems thinking by re-interpreting the very possibility of creativity and novelty in terms of complex potential state theory.

The Solution Space

Step One: Naturalizing the Background

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