There are implications of certain recent discoveries. Not to be mysterious, I'm talking about Levin's lab.[1] All cells "think" using the same bio-molecular m

There are implications of certain recent discoveries. Not to be mysterious, I'm talking about Levin's lab.[1] All cells "think" using the same bio-molecular machinery as neurons. Neurons are just denser and faster. -> Intelligence is ambient. All cells think, and all collections of cells (from biofilms and stomatolites on up) think. In computer terms all cells use compatible protocols and processors and the living world is a kind of biological internet ("Wood-Wide Web"). -> All life shares one mind. Whatever mind is, if you believe it "runs on" the physical substrate of cellular internet, then our minds are not separate from the minds of other living things. This would explain a lot. When I bring this up people often object that this is anthropomorphism, but don't see it that way. Since all living tissue is intelligent, I see humans as the anthropomorphism of that ambient intelligence of the biosphere. -> The biosphere is the result of "intelligent design": it's own. From early on, the evolution of life would have become (more deeply) self-referential through mental feedback, meaning that the advent of intelligence itself becomes a factor in the further evolution of life. Things like the great switch-over from anaerobic to aerobic metabolism and the concomitant massive increase in atmospheric oxygen may well have been deliberate choice on the part of the global mind. In any event, the reductive mechanistic view of "dumb" life is faulty. Earth is Solaris. Now this changes nothing about evolution. It's still a chemical tautology with no purpose, and adaptive pressure doesn't stop just because cells can think. ("Science does not remove the terror of the gods.") The Earth as a single being still has to navigate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Gaia is mortal. Part of the reason living systems seem so wildly inefficient (an illusion) is that they are so inconceivably resilient. (Efficiency vs. inefficiency is meaningless in evolution: there is no purpose so there can be no measurement of efficiency.) [1] "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698