Why Cognition Happens Everywhere (Rocks, Cells, Societies) - Benjamin Lyons

We often think of cognition as a grand, strange, and magical thing. However, what if it was actually pretty basic, simple, and pretty much everywhere? Such that even rocks, economies, or cells perform "cognition."My guest today is Benjamin Lyons, who has written a paper with the Michael Levin on the nature of intelligence. They argue that intelligence works much like an economy (Benjamin is an economist by training), whereby local-level parts each do their own little thing, and then aggregate all of it together. In the economy's case, this produces everything that we need in our daily lives. But as a general theory of intelligence, we can apply the same logic to get insights into brains, organisms, life, diseases, emotions, and more...Timestamps: 00:00 Rethinking Cognition02:56 Cognition Can Happen Anywhere06:12 Paper w/Michael Levin: Price System & Intelligence09:51 Bioelectricity vs. Price Systems12:00 The Role of Agency in Cells and Organisms14:48 Survival Instincts: Cells, Corporations, and Human Behavior18:03 The Nature of Goals: Beyond Survival and Reproduction25:35 Exploring Agency in Biological Systems28:27 Cognition and Embodiment: A Unified Perspective30:12 The Body as a Coordinating System34:32 Love, Sacrifice, and Biological Existence37:15 Complexity in Human Cognition and Coordination39:39 Emotions: Choices or Hard-Coded Responses?41:37 Optimization Principles in Physics and Biology42:49 Disease Models: Economics and Biology IntersectFind Benjamin:-Substack: https://interestingessays.substack.com/-https://x.com/BenjaminLy61243-Paper with Mike Levin: https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/osfxxx/3fdya.html (title: Cognitive Glues Are Shared Models of Relative Scarcities: The Economics of Collective Intelligence)Find Jack: -X: https://x.com/jack_roycroft -Substack (where I'll be writing soon): https://substack.com/@jackroycroftsherry