“We are oblivious to all kinds of minds that are not like ours: Intelligence in plants, in cells, in unicellular organisms.” These aren’t the words of a New Age hippie inspired by The Secret Life of Plants, but a direct quote of respected biologist Professor Michael Levin, taken from a recent video released by Quanta Magazine (embedded below).
It’s important to note that Levin is not talking about human-like consciousness here. Quoting William James, he defines intelligence as “a degree of competency to reach the same goal by different means.” From that perspective, he believes, the majority of his field “feels strongly that intelligence goes all the way to the cell level.”
Individual cells are very good at pursuing tiny little agendas; very basic forms of goal-directedness in many different spaces… A paramecium-like thing swimming around the ocean has goals, preferences, competencies, sensing, decision-making, processing on a very small scale. But life is really good at scaling that up.
And the amazing thing is, in that scaling up, that groups of cells can exhibit a ‘collective intelligence’ that pursue larger goals than the single cell’s. Levin’s lab experiments aim to understand how cells can overcome novel problems to reach their goals – something that he says is the basis of “every IQ test that anybody’s ever taken,” solving a problem you haven’t seen before creatively using a certain set of objects.
In performing these experiments, what Levin’s team has learned is that groups of cells don’t follow a fixed blueprint – for example, DNA code – to construct anatomy:
What a lot of people think is that the growth of your body through anatomical space is a clockwork progression. That there are sets of rules determined by the DNA, and just by sort of cranking through those rules step-by-step something complex emerges.
…But if you change the environment, you change the parts themselves, you find an amazing capacity to reach those goals even when things change. For example, we made tadpoles with eyes on their tails. So the only eye in this animal is on the tail. Those animals, it turns out, can see. You would think that if you’re going to radically change the sensory motor architecture of a creature, you need many rounds of new evolutionary selection. You need mutation, you need adaptation, you need selection to make this thing work. [But] those animals see the first time you make them. Because you’re already starting with a problem-solving system that’s very prepared for novelty.
This is a part of the wisdom of the cells and tissues, this problem-solving that we still don’t understand.
Levin believes we are missing out on a lot by trying to simplify everything with binary distinctions: is it intelligent, or non-intelligent? Instead, he says, we should ask “what kind [of intelligence] and how much?”
Surprisingly, he says, “you almost always win and discover something new by skewing high intelligence than you do by skewing low – meaning, assume higher levels until proven otherwise.” And he believes this intelligence goes down at least as far as molecular networks, and could even be shown to exist in systems much larger than ourselves (Solaris anyone?):
As far as I’m concerned, even you know humble particles, they can do interesting things on that cognitive spectrum. On that I think I’m somewhat more radical than than many people in the field.
As far as how far up it goes, can you train a hurricane? Sometimes people ask me, they say, “Then you would even say the weather is intelligent?” And I would say, “have you ever tried to train a hurricane?” That’s an empirical question. It’s difficult to do the research, but it’s not impossible.
…You can’t do that from a philosophical arm chair, you have to do experiments. That is the scientific method.
Levin calls for scientists to ‘dream big’, and not dismiss possibilities just because they don’t fit the current paradigm. “The biggest limiting factor in this field, I think, is our imagination…because we’re just not prepared for this with our cognitive system.”
Levin concludes by noting that “Our ability to to recognize and communicate with novel intelligences depends on us getting beyond our our evolutionary biases.”
