The beauty of collective intelligence, explained by a developmental biologist | Michael Levin

• People tend to think of intelligence as being of two kinds: There's the quote, unquote "real" intelligence, which is what we are supposed to have, and then there's this idea of a 'collective intelligence,' so swarms of bees, colonies of ants, shoals of fish, and so on.

And people tend to think of those as radically different things. But the reality is all intelligence is collective intelligence, and this is because we are all made of parts. So you and I are collections of cells, and these cells, including neurons and various other cells in our body, have many competencies—this is because they were once separate individuals by themselves. They were unicellular organisms with all of the skills needed to survive in a complex world.

And that journey that we all took, those progressive steps by which we construct ourselves—we construct our bodies, we construct our minds—that journey is maybe the most profound question in all of science.

I'm Michael Levin, and I'm a developmental biologist at Tufts University. Developmental biology is maybe the most magical of all the sciences because you get to see with your own eyes that journey that we all take from physics to mind.

We all start out life as an unfertilized oocyte, and then slowly, gradually, step-by-step, that oocyte turns into a bunch of cells that self-construct an embryo, and eventually that embryo matures and becomes a large-scale adult. In the case of a human, it will be an individual with metacognitive capacities and the ability to reason.

But we all have our origin in that chemistry and physics of that initial oocyte. And the magic of developmental biology is that there is a mechanism by which all of these cells get together, and they are able to cooperate towards large-scale goals.

This is the notion that biology uses what I call a "Multi-scale competency architecture," which basically means that we are not simply nested structurally in terms of cells which comprise tissues, comprising organs, and bodies, and then ultimately societies and so on—that's obviously true on a structural level.

But more interesting is the fact that each of these layers has certain problem-solving competencies. Each one solves problems in their own space, so cells are simultaneously solving problems in physiological spaces and metabolic spaces and gene expression spaces, and tissues and organs are solving those problems.

But, for example, during embryogenesis or regeneration, they're also solving problems in anatomical space. They're trying to navigate a path from the shape of an early embryo or a fertilized zygote all the way up to the complexity of a human body with all of the different types of organs and structures.

So the competency architecture refers to the fact that all of the parts inside of us and inside of all other creatures are themselves competent agents with preferences, with goals, with various abilities to pursue those goals, and other types of problem-solving capacities.

What evolution has given us is this remarkable architecture where every level shapes the behavioral landscape of the levels below—and the levels below do clever and interesting things that allow the levels above not to have to micromanage, and to be able to control in an interesting top-down capacity.

One of the most important things about this emerging field of diverse intelligence is that we, as humans, have very limited capacity and finely-honed ability to see intelligence in medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds through three-dimensional space.

So we see other primates and we see crows and we see dolphins, and we have some ability to recognize intelligence. But we really are very bad at recognizing intelligence in unconventional embodiments where our basic expectations strain against this idea that there could be intelligence in something extremely small or extremely large.

People often criticize this approach by saying, "Well, then anything goes. If you can pick up a rock and say, 'I think this rock is cognitive and intelligent, you know, there's a spirit with hopes and dreams inside of..."