8 ms·

John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism

2 points by saeranv 5y ago

nathias 5y ago
This competition/cooperation ratio seems to be the key concept, I wonder if anyone measured it across different systems. It seems almost as a subtype of the noise/signal ratio.
carapace 5y ago
This information about the nature of planaria is fascinating. See also the work that Levin's lab is doing, e.g.: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg and "xenobots": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://cdorgs.github.io/ https://cdorgs.github.io/ and "Growing Neural Cellular Automata, Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis" https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ Also check out Trichoplax adhaerens, an organism on the cusp between single-celled and multicellular lifeforms: > Trichoplax are very flat organisms around a millimetre in diameter, lacking any organs or internal structures. They have two cellular layers: the top epitheloid layer is made of ciliated "cover cells" flattened toward the outside of the organism, and the bottom layer is made up of cylinder cells that possess cilia used in locomotion, and gland cells that lack cilia.[2] Between these layers is the fibre syncytium, a liquid-filled cavity strutted open by star-like fibres. > On both sides of the septa [fibre syncytium?] are liquid-filled capsules that cause the septa to resemble synapses, i.e. nerve-cell junctions that occur in fully expressed form only in animals with tissues (Eumetazoa). Striking accumulations of calcium ions, which may have a function related to the propagation of stimuli, likewise suggest a possible role as protosynapses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax You can push a trichoplax through a sieve that forces the individual cells to split apart and they will crawl around independently and reform the organism. You can dye two trichoplax different colors, split them, put the cells near each other, and the cells will form a single "piebald" organism together. > It is also possible to rub Trichoplax adhaerens through a strainer in such a manner that individual cells are not destroyed but are separated from one another to a large extent. In the test tube they then find their way back together again to form complete organisms. If this procedure is performed on several previously strained individuals simultaneously, the same thing occurs. In this case, however, cells that previously belonged to a particular individual can suddenly show up as part of another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax#Regeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax#Regeneration
drclau 5y ago
If you like this, you should really pick up Peter Watts' books. He is the author of the post, the owner of rifters.com and one of the best hard SF authors out there. I can't recommend him enough. Also, importantly, he published part of his work, including full books, for free in multiple electronic formats, here [0]. Refs: [0]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
- matheusd 5y ago
  Any recommendation on where to start on his material?
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    "The Things", [0] as mentioned in the featured article itself, is ridiculously relevant. It's the story of The Thing, but told from the perspective of the Thing. [0] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
  - drclau 5y ago
    My personal favorite is Blindsight [0][1]. I read it multiple times (3 or 4, I think) over the years. If you like Blindsight, you’ll probably want to continue with the sidequel, Echopraxia. You can also find them bundled together under the name Firefall. And I think out of his main works, Blindsight is probably the most accessible. It also led me to Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” [2], which Watts used as a source material in his research and had good things to say about. The Rifters series is great, too, but there’s a sort of darkness or heaviness to it that may not work for everyone. And bonus content, a fan made short movie based on Blindsight, here: [3]. I hope this helps. :) Links: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) [1]: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503 [3]: https://vimeo.com/myshli/blindsight https://vimeo.com/myshli/blindsight
    - 5y ago
mdp2021 5y ago
> Pepper et al’s paper on Somatic Evolution [...] : how can multicellular life evolve in the presence of Darwinian processes that should, by rights, turn every individual cell against its neighbors in a competition for resources? Why isn’t every somatic cell in it for themselves, why doesn’t all multicellular life devolve into cancer? > Planarians ... [a]re not exactly worms. They’re not even individuals. What they are is habitats: cellular substrates containing individuals. Individuals who may not even like each other very much
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3np 5y ago
This resonates heavily with me. It's an intuitively interesting idea. I do have one issue though (emphasis mine): "a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component." So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. ...But then the definition is meaningless. It'd be great to make it weaker without breaking it, so to say
- deleted 5y ago
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- mistermann 5y ago
  > So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. A far out way of considering it is in the context of greater humanity and the various pesky problems within it like anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, child deaths due to malnutrition, war, lack of genuine (non-illusory) empathy, etc.
  - munificent 5y ago
    I've had this weird thought stuck in my head over the past few months as I've been reading "Humankind" and watching the horrors of politics and the pandemic: The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others. It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another. It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.
bobthechef 5y ago
Questions of identity are some of the oldest in metaphysics. It is important that one take a disciplined in this respect because there is nothing impressive about posing half-baked "what ifs" if you can't be bothered to work out the consequences to any serious degree and to observe the absurdities you've gotten yourself into. An explanation cannot undermine the fact it tries to explain without ceasing to be an explanation.
sysihyk 5y ago
I prefer John Carpenter’s “Hoax Watch”, tho :)

2 points by saeranv 5y ago

This competition/cooperation ratio seems to be the key concept, I wonder if anyone measured it across different systems. It seems almost as a subtype of the noise/signal ratio.

carapace 5y ago

This information about the nature of planaria is fascinating. See also the work that Levin's lab is doing, e.g.: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg and "xenobots": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://cdorgs.github.io/ https://cdorgs.github.io/ and "Growing Neural Cellular Automata, Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis" https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ Also check out Trichoplax adhaerens, an organism on the cusp between single-celled and multicellular lifeforms: > Trichoplax are very flat organisms around a millimetre in diameter, lacking any organs or internal structures. They have two cellular layers: the top epitheloid layer is made of ciliated "cover cells" flattened toward the outside of the organism, and the bottom layer is made up of cylinder cells that possess cilia used in locomotion, and gland cells that lack cilia.[2] Between these layers is the fibre syncytium, a liquid-filled cavity strutted open by star-like fibres. > On both sides of the septa [fibre syncytium?] are liquid-filled capsules that cause the septa to resemble synapses, i.e. nerve-cell junctions that occur in fully expressed form only in animals with tissues (Eumetazoa). Striking accumulations of calcium ions, which may have a function related to the propagation of stimuli, likewise suggest a possible role as protosynapses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax You can push a trichoplax through a sieve that forces the individual cells to split apart and they will crawl around independently and reform the organism. You can dye two trichoplax different colors, split them, put the cells near each other, and the cells will form a single "piebald" organism together. > It is also possible to rub Trichoplax adhaerens through a strainer in such a manner that individual cells are not destroyed but are separated from one another to a large extent. In the test tube they then find their way back together again to form complete organisms. If this procedure is performed on several previously strained individuals simultaneously, the same thing occurs. In this case, however, cells that previously belonged to a particular individual can suddenly show up as part of another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax#Regeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax#Regeneration

drclau 5y ago

If you like this, you should really pick up Peter Watts' books. He is the author of the post, the owner of rifters.com and one of the best hard SF authors out there. I can't recommend him enough. Also, importantly, he published part of his work, including full books, for free in multiple electronic formats, here [0]. Refs: [0]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

matheusd 5y ago
Any recommendation on where to start on his material?
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  "The Things", [0] as mentioned in the featured article itself, is ridiculously relevant. It's the story of The Thing, but told from the perspective of the Thing. [0] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
- drclau 5y ago
  My personal favorite is Blindsight [0][1]. I read it multiple times (3 or 4, I think) over the years. If you like Blindsight, you’ll probably want to continue with the sidequel, Echopraxia. You can also find them bundled together under the name Firefall. And I think out of his main works, Blindsight is probably the most accessible. It also led me to Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” [2], which Watts used as a source material in his research and had good things to say about. The Rifters series is great, too, but there’s a sort of darkness or heaviness to it that may not work for everyone. And bonus content, a fan made short movie based on Blindsight, here: [3]. I hope this helps. :) Links: [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) [1]: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503 [3]: https://vimeo.com/myshli/blindsight https://vimeo.com/myshli/blindsight
  - 5y ago

mdp2021 5y ago

> Pepper et al’s paper on Somatic Evolution [...] : how can multicellular life evolve in the presence of Darwinian processes that should, by rights, turn every individual cell against its neighbors in a competition for resources? Why isn’t every somatic cell in it for themselves, why doesn’t all multicellular life devolve into cancer? > Planarians ... [a]re not exactly worms. They’re not even individuals. What they are is habitats: cellular substrates containing individuals. Individuals who may not even like each other very much

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

3np 5y ago

This resonates heavily with me. It's an intuitively interesting idea. I do have one issue though (emphasis mine): "a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component." So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. ...But then the definition is meaningless. It'd be great to make it weaker without breaking it, so to say

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mistermann 5y ago
> So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time. A far out way of considering it is in the context of greater humanity and the various pesky problems within it like anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, child deaths due to malnutrition, war, lack of genuine (non-illusory) empathy, etc.
- munificent 5y ago
  I've had this weird thought stuck in my head over the past few months as I've been reading "Humankind" and watching the horrors of politics and the pandemic: The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others. It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another. It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.

bobthechef 5y ago

Questions of identity are some of the oldest in metaphysics. It is important that one take a disciplined in this respect because there is nothing impressive about posing half-baked "what ifs" if you can't be bothered to work out the consequences to any serious degree and to observe the absurdities you've gotten yourself into. An explanation cannot undermine the fact it tries to explain without ceasing to be an explanation.

sysihyk 5y ago

I prefer John Carpenter’s “Hoax Watch”, tho :)