Repost from end of bread.
NON GENETIC HEREDITY
BIO COMPUTATION OUTSIDE THE BRAIN
"Morphogenetic" fields.
BFD? Rupert Sheldrake's 'biomorphic fields" confirmed is a big deal. This is the biggest medical breakthrough in human history - though many outside medicine know about these fields and how to manipulate them.
Summary lifted from YT:
Bodies have bioelectrical patterns that store information "memories" separately from genomic, anatomical states. These bioelectrical patterns play a huge role in developmental processes, so that being able to control them is basically like a holy grail of regenerative medicine. It also offers interesting new insights for AI and cognition.
Detailed notes:
2:55 memories are preserved in metamorphosis/regeneration.
5:16 unicellular creatures "think"
9:00 planarian can be cut into pieces and each will regrow to the correct full organism! Each piece knows about the whole (a bit like a hologram!), and can do collective decision-making to guide themselves to the correct structure (important to know when to stop 8:41).
9:21 planarians have conquered aging! (new favourite animal here)
10:00 further examples of pattern homeostasis (keeping its shape, robustly, to the programmed shape)
14:40 biology is dealing with hardware right now; can we move to dealing with software?
16:26 bioelectric mechanisms in brain come from ancient mechanisms found in cells through the body
20:00 seeing cancer via electrical signal anomaly
20:20 how to control these bioelectric processes
22:20 editing the morphology of organisms, without changing the genome, just by interacting with the developmental processes! wow!
24:07 computational modeling
24:30 altering pattern memory. Wow, an electrical memory that holds information, separately from anatomy and genome!
27:34 extending connectionist models to understand this. Stable attractors (like Hopfield nets!)
28:31 applications in regenerative medicine. Making frogs regrow their legs!
29:20 and reversing birth defects. Hmm, it's really cool that you can bypass genomics, but this patterning only affects anatomy right? If a gene generating some protein essential for some biochemical pathway is missing, you can't fix it with bioelectrics right? See comments at 40:27 But still the applications seem awesome
30:50. The endgame. A biological compiler to design organisms. As Freeman Dyson wrote: "a new generation of artists will be writing, composing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses"
31:40. The future. a highly-robust ML technology, based on non-neural architectures. I can smell our friend Physarum polycepharum appearing soon :P (didn't but would have been cool)
32:52 "non-neural networks" lol. Robot scientist lol.
33:36 Thank
Q&A
34:36 difference between behavioural and anatomical electrical patterns, and how to control the anatomical ones. Anatomy at low frequencies, behavior at high frequncies; they are pretty well-separated.
37:18 best approach to create truly intelligent systems
39:30 what about plants, and mechanical signaling. Plants independently evolved bioelectric control. Mechanical forces interact with electrical effects (and also with genetics ofcourse). Key question: "at what point in that control structure is it most efficient to intervene" (to me the hardware-software divide is just about identifying the parts of a system that are more suitable for control
41:56 Consciousness.
44:12 Timescale of control signals. Very short interventions, as you are basically just rewriting the electrical memory :)
46:22 non-neural nets
48:23 Ethical concerns
49:42 relations to signal transduction networks and systems biology models
50:51 relation to reaction-diffusion models