ideasthesia

Sign in Subscribe

Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Xenobots self-organizing into novel coherent configurations

Xenobots and the Plasticity of Biological Coherence

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 6 of 11 In 2020, Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University scraped cells from frog embryos, dissociated them into a cellular slurry, and watched as these liberated cells—removed from their developmental context, stripped of any guiding scaffold—spontaneously reorganized into something nobody had seen

Tumor as coherence collapse—cells losing bioelectric coordination

Cancer as Coherence Collapse: What Tumors Reveal About Cellular Prediction

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 5 of 11 What if cancer isn’t a genetic mistake that needs fixing, but a breakdown in collective intelligence? What if tumors aren’t just rogue cells multiplying out of control, but communities that have lost their shared prediction model—their sense of what they’

Markov blanket boundaries in developing tissue—statistical separation of self from environment

Morphogenetic Fields as Markov Blankets: The Statistical Boundaries of Development

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 4 of 11 The boundary between you and not-you seems obvious. Your skin marks the limit. Inside is self, outside is environment. But your cells don’t experience this boundary. They’re bathed in fluids that connect to the larger world. Molecules pass freely through

Active inference at cellular scale—cells minimizing free energy through bioelectric coupling

When Friston Met Levin: The Free Energy Principle Goes Cellular

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 3 of 11 In 2021, Karl Friston and Michael Levin published a paper together that should have broken the internet. It didn’t—because most people still don’t know what the Free Energy Principle means, and even fewer understand that cells might be doing it.

Bioelectric voltage gradients forming coherence manifold across tissue

Bioelectric Fields as Coherence Manifolds: Where Levin Meets Information Geometry

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 2 of 11 In the last essay, we saw how Michael Levin’s work reveals cognition operating at the cellular level—bioelectric patterns functioning as morphogenetic memory, guiding development and regeneration without explicit genetic instruction. But we left something unfinished: how do voltage patterns across cell

Cellular bioelectric networks—voltage patterns coordinating morphogenetic intelligence

The Biologist Who Thinks Your Cells Are Smarter Than You: Michael Levin and the Revolution in Basal Cognition

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 1 of 11 What if your brain isn’t the only part of you that thinks? This isn’t mysticism. It’s the working hypothesis of one of the most cited developmental biologists of the past decade, a researcher whose work has forced neuroscientists, AI researchers,

Meaning as autopoietic process—self-making coherence

Synthesis: Autopoiesis and the Self-Making of Meaning

Series: Autopoiesis and Second-Order Cybernetics | Part: 9 of 9 There’s a peculiar kind of circularity at the heart of everything that matters. Your body maintains itself by continuously producing the components that maintain your body. Your sense of self emerges from processes that require a sense of self