ArticleFrontiers in psychology2019
The Computational Boundary of a "Self": Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 84 papers.
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84 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Continual decision-making dynamics across biological organisms.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
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- Transcendental model selection: a computational account of symbolic cognition and general intelligence through morality and culture.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- What is groundwater?Hydrogeology journal · 2026Article
- Are we trapped on Earth: space and accelerated ageing.NPJ microgravity · 2025Review
- The Neuro-Melanoma Singularity: Convergent Evolution of Neural and Melanocytic Networks in Brain Metastatic Adaptation.Biomolecules · 2025Review
- Aging as a Loss of Goal-Directedness: An Evolutionary Simulation and Analysis Unifying Regeneration with Anatomical Rejuvenation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Discovering sensorimotor agency in cellular automata using diversity search.Science advances · 2025Article
- Genetic tests as prophecy: understanding self-defeating and self-fulfilling mechanisms in (predictive) genetic testing.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2025Review
- Associative conditioning in gene regulatory network models increases integrative causal emergence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Basal Xenobot transcriptomics reveals changes and novel control modality in cells freed from organismal influence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Toward aitiopoietic cognition: bridging the evolutionary divide between biological and machine-learned causal systems.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- A microfluidic sucrose gap platform using trilaminar flow with on-chip switching and novel calibration: Challenges and limitations.Biomicrofluidics · 2025Article
- Minimization of prediction errors during cerebral embryogenesis and the emergence of agency.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2025Article
- Temporal depth in a coherent self and in depersonalization: theoretical model.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- When cells think: a neuro-symbolic view of epigenetic regulation.Environmental epigenetics · 2025Article
24 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, and molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own native contexts. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan creatures' bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent larger organism. In this article, I synthesize ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology toward a hypothesis about the origin of Individuality: "Scale-Free Cognition." I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents. Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface - the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive "light cone" which defines the scale and limits of its cognition. I hypothesize that higher level goal-directed activity and agency, resulting in larger cognitive boundaries, evolve from the primal homeostatic drive of living things to reduce stress - the difference between current conditions and life-optimal conditions. The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggest a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents,
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