Michael Levin — Technological Scaffolding Alters the Information Flow within the Brain (2019) / Cognitive Light Cone paper (Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2022)
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2022.
Levin introduces the cognitive light cone as a measure of an agent’s temporal and spatial scope of action — analogous to the light cone in physics (the region of spacetime that can causally affect or be affected by a given point). An agent with a small cognitive light cone acts only in the immediate present and local space; an agent with a large cognitive light cone models distant futures and acts across extended networks of causation.
The key insight is that biological evolution can be understood as the progressive expansion of cognitive light cones — from single cells (acting within milliseconds and micrometers) through tissues, organs, and organisms to cultural collectives (acting across decades and continents). This expansion is driven by the development of scaffolding — information-processing structures that extend the scope of agency beyond what any individual component could achieve.
For OM: the protocol underground can be understood as a collective organism that has developed distributed scaffolding (its meta-protocols: consent culture, high agency, participatory aesthetics) specifically suited to expanding the cognitive light cone of its participants — navigating problem spaces (virtual capital, latent experiential terrain) that institutional organisms are structurally blind to.