The multiscale wisdom of the body: collective intelligence as a tractable interface for next-generation biomedicine

The dominant paradigm in biomedicine focuses on the genetically-specified components of cells, and their biochemical dynamics. This perspective emphasizes bottom-up emergence of complexity, which constrains interventional approaches to micromanaging the living hardware. Here, I explore the implications for the applied life sciences of a complementary emerging field: diverse intelligence, which studies the capacity of a wide range of systems to reach specific goals in various problem spaces. Using tools from behavioral science and multiscale neuroscience, it is possible to address development, regenerative repair, and cancer as behaviors of a collective intelligence of cells as it navigates the space of possible morphologies and transcriptional and physiological states. This view emphasizes the competencies of living material – from the molecular to the organismal scales – that can be targeted by interventions. Top-down approaches take advantage of memories and homeodynamic goal-seeking behavior, offering the same massive advantages in biomedicine and bioengineering as the emphasis on reprogrammable hardware has had for information technologies. The bioelectric networks that bind individual cells toward large-scale anatomical goals are an especially tractable interface to organ-level plasticity. This suggests a research program to understand and tame the software of life by understanding the many examples of basal cognition that operate throughout living bodies. Tools are now in place to unify the organicist and mechanist perspectives on living systems toward a much-improved therapeutic landscape.