collective intelligence
Swarm Intelligence: Consciousness Emerging from Simple Agents
An individual ant has approximately 250,000 neurons and a behavioral repertoire that can be described in a few dozen rules. It cannot plan, reason, or adapt to novel situations.
Gap Junctions: The Body's Cellular Internet
Every conversation about the brain begins with synapses — the chemical and electrical connections between neurons that enable thought, memory, and consciousness. But there is a far older, far more pervasive communication network operating in your body, one that connects virtually every cell to...
Cellular Consciousness and Collective Intelligence: Levin's TAME Framework
Are individual cells conscious? Can a skin cell think?
Xenobots: Living Robots and the Emergence of Morphogenetic Consciousness
In January 2020, a team led by Michael Levin at Tufts University and Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont announced the creation of xenobots — living organisms assembled from frog cells that spontaneously organized into forms never seen in nature, moved through their environment, healed...
The Twelve Dimensions of Water: A Map of Consciousness Through the Universal Solvent
Every ancient tradition knew something that modern science is only beginning to rediscover: water is not merely a chemical compound. It is a living medium of consciousness, an information carrier, a bridge between the visible and invisible worlds.
Dream Journaling and Creative Insight: The Hypnagogic Mind as Problem-Solver
The history of human creativity is punctuated by moments of breakthrough insight attributed to dreams and dream-like states. Friedrich August Kekule's discovery of benzene's ring structure reportedly came in a reverie of a snake seizing its own tail.
Group Flow: When Collective Consciousness Exceeds the Sum of Its Parts
Something happens in a jazz ensemble when the music catches fire. The individual musicians stop being individuals.
David Bohm: The Quantum Physicist Who Found Wholeness Beneath the Fragments
David Joseph Bohm is widely regarded as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the twentieth century -- and one of the most tragic. A student of Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, a colleague of Einstein at Princeton, and a contributor to quantum mechanics whose work is cited in...
The Noosphere: From Teilhard de Chardin to the Internet — The Sphere of Human Thought
Imagine the Earth from space. You see the lithosphere — the rocky crust and mantle.
The Bacterial Consciousness Hypothesis: Are Trillions of Conscious Entities Voting on Your Mental State?
Here is a question that most biologists would prefer not to engage, but that the gut-brain research makes unavoidable: are bacteria conscious?
The Mycobiome and Fungal Consciousness: The Hidden Kingdom Within and the Wood Wide Web of the Body
When researchers map the gut microbiome, they almost always mean the bacteriome — the bacterial communities inhabiting the gastrointestinal tract. Bacteria dominate the conversation, the funding, and the headlines.
Pesticides and Neurodegeneration: The Chemical Assault on Neural Consciousness
Here is an uncomfortable truth that should inform every conversation about pesticide safety: the three major classes of insecticides in widespread agricultural and residential use — organophosphates, organochlorines, and neonicotinoids — were all specifically designed to destroy nervous systems....