Michael Levin — A Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds (2022)
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, published open access.
Levin proposes a “technological approach to mind everywhere” (TAME): a framework that treats cognition, agency, and goal-directedness as substrate-independent properties that can be instantiated in any physical system capable of processing information toward goals — not just neural tissue. TAME applies a deflationary standard: rather than asking whether an entity is “truly” conscious in some metaphysically robust sense, it asks what goals the entity pursues, what competencies it exhibits, and how it navigates its problem spaces.
This framework “fights mind-blindness” — the institutional tendency to deny cognition to entities whose cognitive architecture differs from the human norm. Under TAME, cells, bioelectric fields, tissues, organs, and collective organisms all exhibit minimal agency; their “minds” differ in scale, speed, and problem space rather than in kind.
Key concepts:
- Cognitive light cone: the scope of past and future that an agent can model and act within
- Latent problem spaces: physically real but experientially occluded dimensions that intelligent agents navigate
- Diverse intelligence: the spectrum of cognitive architectures across biological, artificial, and collective systems
For OM: TAME provides the scientific grounding for treating protocol undergrounds as cognitive organisms — and for the claim that their meta-protocol values are not cultural preferences but attributes of efficient collective cognition.