Toggle light / dark theme

‘This is the first drug that provides a real treatment option,’ says leading researcher Scientists are hailing a historic step in the fight against Alzheimer’s, after a drug was proven to slow the disease in long-awaited clinical trials. The breakthrough comes after decades of failed attempts to find a way to do so, and has prompted hope among experts that it could eventually pave the way for treatments which could ultimately lead to a cure.

Talk kindly contributed by Michael Levin in SEMF’s 2022 Spacious Spatiality.

https://semf.org.es/spatiality.

TALK ABSTRACT
Life was solving problems in metabolic, genetic, physiological, and anatomical spaces long before brains and nervous systems appeared. In this talk, I will describe remarkable capabilities of cell groups as they create, repair, and remodel complex anatomies. Anatomical homeostasis reveals that groups of cells are collective intelligences; their cognitive medium is the same as that of the human mind: electrical signals propagating in cell networks. I will explain non-neural bioelectricity and the tools we use to track the basal cognition of cells and tissues and control their function for applications in regenerative medicine. I will conclude with a discussion of our framework based on evolutionary scaling of intelligence by pivoting conserved mechanisms that allow agents, whether designed or evolved, to navigate complex problem spaces.

TALK MATERIALS

This educational video about cellular automata was filmed, narrated, and edited by Rudy Rucker in 1990, using some “CA Lab” software he worled on at Autodesk. Renamed “Cellab,” the software and manual are available for free on Rucker’s website.

http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm.

But certainly you can watch the video without using the software. Two-dimensional CA rules discussed include Langton’s worm, the game of Life, Silverman’s Brain, the Vote rule, the Rug rule, gas-simulating rules, and many others.