Posts Tagged ‘biology’
“In nature, as in work of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absoluteness, to endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being”*…
Does AI threaten our humanity? Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, suggests that the horse has already left the barn…
From Silicon Valley to the Vatican, across kitchen tables and in the halls of power, the world is astir over the question of whether humans will be able to control the AIs we’ve created. But that begs the question: What does it mean to be “human”?
One place to start sorting this all out is what Confucian philosophy calls “rectification” — naming things for what they actually are.
To N. Katherine Hayles [here], author of Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Non-human Symbionts [here], we are already “post-human.”
As she explained to Claire Webb in a recent Futurology podcast, the concept of “human” is culturally and historically contingent. These days, she says, there is still the dominant view that arose with the Enlightenment of the human as an autonomous, singular entity with “rational free will.”
For Hayles, that has never been true because humans have never existed as an entity apart but have always been “woven in the web” of a surrounding environment, or “Umwelt.” It is the symbiotic interactions within that interdependence which determine the signs we sense, the meaningful interpretation of the information we process, the decisions we make, and the actions we take that define who we are.
The most obvious example of our relational interdependence with non-human life is the gut bacteria within us, the biological functions of which we’d perish without.
The false notion of self-enclosed human autonomy is even less true today, she argues, because “we are already in a deeply symbiotic relationship with computational media — chips, routers, devices, microwaves, etc. They have become the controllers, processors and disseminators of a flow of information” in which we are inextricably enmeshed — and, in advanced societies, without which we couldn’t survive. If it all crashed, we couldn’t transport food, fly airplanes or operate the stock market. We’d quite literally live in the dark.
As Hayles describes it, this condition amounts to “distributed cognition and distributed decision-making” between human and non-human participants. She calls these “cognitive assemblages” or “networked intelligence.”
In short, we are “post-human” because we are inseparably joined in an “integrated cognitive framework” with computational media.
This post-human condition would seem to place us some distance along the continuum toward Singularity, the full fusion of humans and intelligent machines. By definition, this symbiosis blurs the line of who or what is in control.
In a related Futurology podcast, Kevin Kelly [here] tells Nils Gilman that “we are already in the Singularity.” From his northern California perch, Kelly has been surfing the waves of technological innovation and cultural transformation for decades, going back to his time as co-founder of The Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand and then Wired magazine.
What Kelly means by “already in” is that human/machine fusion is a presently ongoing process that doesn’t suddenly cross some rapturous threshold, but incrementally unfolds with the accelerated deepening of the “integrated cognitive framework” Hayles talks about.
We can’t clearly see the massive change taking place now in its pixelated form, but will only be able to recognize the fuller picture of what has taken place from a future retrospective standpoint. Our perspective is clouded, says Kelly, by the fact that “we are living inside the event horizon.”
For Kelly, the Singularity is not a closed process with a fixed endpoint, but perpetually open to the emergence of new creative forms and unexpected symbiotic combinations, what the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible” that can’t be foretold. “The Singularity is always near,” as Kelly puts it, but forever remains on the elusive horizon.
Hayles departs from the transhumanist vision of Singularity where human consciousness one day is uploaded to an inorganic substrate other than the biological body.
She makes the point, as do many others, that artificial intelligences on their own cannot attain consciousness.
This is because they lack the “natural intelligence” that can only emerge from the extraordinary complexity of the millennia-long evolution of embodied humans adapting to their environment to survive and thrive. No matter how powerful the large language models may be, language which inherently infers that distinctly human experience, cannot be meaningfully transferred to an inorganic substrate lacking the commensurate context.
AIs cannot know the “ground truth” of embodied intelligence, which, at bottom, is the homeostatic quest for survival that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues is the root of emotion and self-awareness.
AIs may use chain-of-reasoning logic to achieve objectives by stringing together the language they’ve been trained on, but the meaning is not the same. Precisely the danger of AIs is that they become empowered as actors through “recursive self-improvement” ungrounded in lived experience.
As such, they lack the ingrained primal training that informs moral reasoning. In Pope Leo XIV’s words, “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.”
Though AI models may “imitate language” and “simulate empathy and understanding,” he says, “they do not understand what they produce.”
What humans invaluably bring to the table of an “integrated cognitive framework” is, in the parlance of the pontiff, the “integral” nature of the human as a “whole person” in the full set of relations with others and nature that constitute him or her. “The person,” he says, “is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery.”
In this sense, retaining “human control” of AIs means purposefully and insistently instantiating the integral element drawn from lived human experience into our entwinement with intelligent machines.
The challenge is not just about “disarming” the capacity of AI agents to act on their own, as the Pope has called for, but also about “arming” the integral conception of the human within the integrated cognitive framework in which we already dwell…
From an integrated to an integral cognitive framework: “We Are Already Post-Human,” from @noemamag.com.
* Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
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As we contemplate connection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1973 that a US Federal Judge signed his decision, following a lengthy trial, declaring the ENIAC patent invalid and belatedly credited physicist John Atanasoff with developing the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff- Berry Computer (or simply, “the ABC”). Built in 1937-42 at Iowa State University (then Iowa State College) by Atanasoff and a graduate student, Clifford Berry, it introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits.
As it happened, these ideas were communicated from Atanasoff to John Mauchly, who used them in the design of the better-known ENIAC built and patented several years later.
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”*…
The line between life and death has never been clear—and, as Amanda Heidt reports, modern technology blurs it further…
Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.
Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.
“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”
The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”
While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.
“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”
Read on to consider whether this work is a breakthrough, “a bane for bioethicists,” or both: “How To Tell If You’re Dead” (or here) from @scattercushion.bsky.social in @nautil.us.
* Haruki Murakami
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As we (attempt to) understand undoing, we might spare a thought for someone who crossed the threshold on this date in 1955: James Dean. An actor, he appeared in just three major films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), but became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, and had a profound impact on cinema and popular culture.
Dean died in a traffic accident, when his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder collided with a Ford near Cholame, California.
Actor Alec Guinness later claimed that, in a chance encounter with Dean at the Villa Capri a week before the crash, he had predicted the young actor’s death in his newly purchased sports car. In his autobiography, Guinness wrote that when Dean proudly showed him the vehicle, he found it “sinister” and recalled saying, in a voice he barely recognized, “Please, never get in it.” He then added, “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” Dean reportedly laughed and replied, “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean! “Author Jason Colavito argues that the story is “almost certainly Guinness’s ex post facto fabrication,” noting that at the time Guinness merely said Dean had told him that friends had begged him not to buy the car because they feared he would drive it too fast. – source
“This was not that the subject was simple enough to be explained without mathematics, but rather that it was much too involved to be fully accessible to mathematics.”*…
The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But, Philip Ball asks, does it serve a scientific purpose?…
In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio waves our planet emits or reflects into space. Today we scan the cosmos for some of these telltale signatures light-years away.
Life leaves a mark, yet even now there’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic substances like the rocks, gases, and oceans that are the sole components of dead worlds. Many scientists cite properties such as replication or metabolism. Others speak in more abstract terms about the way life is out of thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings. But some give another kind of answer. Living organisms are different because they do stuff for reasons.
It’s not enough to say that life is a nonequilibrium organized state through which there’s a constant flux of matter and energy. That description applies to hurricanes, too. But hurricanes just are. Only living entities have goals: to find food, to reproduce, to survive, sometimes simply to experience good things. (Dog owners will recognize that this is not just a human attribute.)
One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have “agency.” It’s a hotly contested term. Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation. (Whether we’re truly the only species to do so is another issue.) Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life. Since there’s no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean. But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life. If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning? Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance. I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program. But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works. I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea…
[Ball unpacks the idea of agency, then reviews both scientific observations and the theories that they have provoked. He concludes…]
… I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects of uniting such theoretical ideas with biological mechanisms. It seems unlikely to be coincidental, for example, that organisms that seem to show more agency also have molecular pathways that permit more openness to the influence of context and external information.
If we can get a clearer idea of what makes an agent, this could help us to understand how collective goals arise — as they did when multicellular organisms first arose long ago — and how they can break down, as in cancer. What’s more, a proper theory of agency might give us a clearer idea of what’s needed to make genuine artificial agents, not just computers and machines programmed with our own goals, but ones that can formulate their own. We might then also get a clearer idea of the potential benefits and dangers such truly agential machines might bring. But perhaps the most compelling argument for recognizing agency is that it might help us understand what makes life so different — not just humans, but life — that it is able to shape an entire planet in a manner visible from outer space.
Purpose? Goals? On the idea of “biological agency”: “Is Life Just Different?” from @philipcball.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Erwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? (in which he wrestled, in his way, with Ball’s question, contending that life feeds on negative entropy) Full text here.
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As we wonder why, we might send frustrated birthday greetings to Ernő Rubik; he was born on this date in 1944. An architect and inventor, he created the Rubik’s Cube (in 1974), which has become the world’s best-selling puzzle game, with over half a billion sold.
A Rubik’s Cube consists of 26 small cubes that rotate on a central axis; nine colored cube faces, in three rows of three each, form each side of the cube. After the cube arrangement is randomized (the highest level of entropy), the player must restore order (that’s to say, practice “negative entropy”), returning it to the original condition of faces with matching colors on each side — which is one among 43 quintillion possible configurations.
“I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.”*…
As Frank Landymore explains, we’ve been underestimating fungi…
Scientists have mapped the Earth’s entire underground fungal network, showing that it’s so extensive that if it were stretched into a straight line, it would reach other star systems — and span a sizable chunk of the Milky Way galaxy, for that matter.
The groundbreaking work, published in a study in the journal Science, focused on microorganisms known as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Forming the hidden backbone of our planet’s soil, they circulate water and nutrients and regulate the climate by locking away vast stores of carbon.
Altogether, the global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons, the study found, which is four to six times more than the biomass of all human beings. Around 40 percent of that fungal mass resides in high-altitude or flooded grasslands, like the Everglades in Florida.
The authors hope that their work will highlight the indispensable but overlooked role that these fungal networks play in the Earth’s ecosystems, with around 70 percent of all ground-based plant life depending on the fungi.
“People just aren’t paying attention to these ecosystems,” coauthor Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam and director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), told The New York Times. “What we want to do with these data is really shine a light on some of these hidden patterns underground.”
“I hope this builds into the conversation for their protection because wild grasslands are going away quite quickly,” lead author Justin Stewart, a fellow SPUN biologist, told Live Science. “These are areas that people are really ripping up because it’s much easier to rip up a grass than it is to rip up a tree.”
To unearth this subterranean network, the researchers used data from over 16,000 soil samples across 300 previous papers that calculated the local density of fungal filaments, or hyphae, across the globe. They then fed this data into a machine learning model to predict the density of these hyphal networks per square kilometer of topsoil.
The results were staggering. In all, the model found that the planet is lined with more than 110 quadrillion kilometers of hyphae, or 68 quadrillion miles, which is almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On a cosmic ruler, that equals nearly 12,000 light years, or about a tenth the diameter of our galaxy, which is enough to take you to the Westlund 1 super star cluster.
It’s the clearest picture yet of just how much fungal networks underpin our terrestrial ecosystems. What’s fuzzier from the model, though, is what it says about their health. The density of the fungal networks were lower in soil used for growing crops, but “we don’t know where networks are very healthy and where they’re threatened,” Kiers told the NYT…
“Earth’s Underground Fungus Network Is So Gigantic That If You Stretched It Out, It Would Reach to Other Star Systems,” from @futurism.com.
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As we muse on the mycorrhizal, we might ponder a different kind of massive spread, as we recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev said that without Spam, the Soviet Army would have starved. And Spam was not only eaten but was also incorporated into many other aspects of the war (e.g., grease for guns, cans for scrap metal).
During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Japan, Korea, Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a singular part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific region.
Today Spam is regualrly eaten in 50 countries around the world. According to the Spam website, there are 12.8 cans of Spam products consumed every second; over nine billion cans of Spam have been sold (so far). Big Ben is 1,163 Spam cans tall, and it would take 415,469,599 cans of the stuff to circle the circumference of the Earth. Need to know more? There is a museum devoted to anything and everything related to the Spam brand in Austin, MN.
Contrary to rumor, Spam is only made from six ingredients: pork with ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite.
“There are few creatures more remarkable than the lowly slime mold”*…
… nor, perhaps, more beautiful…
We’ve looked before at the at the “intelligent” accomplishments of the humble slime mold, and wondered what they might mean and what they might teach us. Photographer Barry Webb invites us to appreciate their spendor…
Blown wildly out of proportion in large format, the slime molds that British photographer Barry Webb captures seem atmospheric and sculptural. Stemonitis, for example, looks like dozens of thin pieces of wire with their ends coated in colored wax. But this fungi-like form is one of hundreds of kinds of slime mold, and it typically only reaches a height of about two centimeters at the most. Thanks to Webb’s macro photos, we glimpse a phenomenally beautiful world up-close that is otherwise virtually invisible.
Scientists have documented hundreds of these organisms, which aren’t actually related to plants, fungi, animals, or molds—despite the name. They comprise a unique group unto themselves, more closely related to amoebas. And new discoveries are being made all the time. From mottled gray bulbs that look like snow-covered trees to pink, coral-like tendrils, Webb chronicles a huge array of colors and shapes. He also consistently submits images to local and national botanical records so that researchers have access to high-resolution imagery…
“Barry Webb Documents a Marvelous, Macro Array of Colorful Slime Molds,” from @thisiscolossal.com.
More of Webb’s portraits of slime mold on his site.
* Brandon Keim (in “Complexity Theory in Icky Action: Meet the Slime Mold“)
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As we get small, we might send microscopic greetings to William Ian Beardmore (W. I. B.) Beveridge; he was born on this date in 1908. A microbiologist and veterinarian who served as director of the Institute of Animal Pathology at Cambridge, he identified the origin of the Great Influenza (the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918-19)– a strain of swine flu.
While there is no way to know with certainty the Bard’s birth date, his baptism was recorded at Stratford-on-Avon on April 26, 1564; and three days was the then-customary wait before baptism. In any case, we do know with some certainty that Shakespeare died on this date in 1616.
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