Michael Levin

So,

I can trust it, I can ignore it, I can do various things with it, whatever, but I know it comes from the outside.

Now imagine instead that you have two cells with a gap junction between them.

Something happens.

Let's say this cell gets poked.

There's a calcium spike.

The calcium spike or whatever small molecule signal propagates through the gap junction to this cell.

There's no ownership metadata on that signal.

This cell does not know now that it came from outside because it looks exactly like its own memories would have looked like of whatever had happened, right?

So gap junctions, to some extent, wipe ownership information on data, which means that if you and I are sharing memories and we can't quite tell who the memories belong to, that's the beginning of a mind melt.

That's the beginning of a scale up of cognition from here's me and here's you to no, now there's just us.

That's right.

It helps.

It's the beginning.

It's not the whole story by any means, but it's the start.

There are many, many layers to this as always in biology.

So there are chemical networks.

So for example, gene regulatory networks, right?

Which, which are, or basically any kind of chemical pathway where different chemicals activate and repress each other, they can store memories.

So in a dynamical system sense, they can store memories.