Cellosophy

Cellosophy

You don't need a brain to have a mind.

For the last century, cognition has been something brains do. For seventy five years of those, the doing of brains has been modeled as computation.

Neurons fire, networks compute, thoughts secrete out the other end. We suspect that picture is too narrow, for there's intelligence beyond the brain. A bacterium compares past and present chemistry as it swims toward food, and a slime mold solves a maze with no nervous system at all.

So we start smaller.

Cellosophy is our attempt to understand cognition from the bottom up, beginning with the living cell and leaving the human brain for later. This site is a guide for anyone curious to start with cells and see how far the inquiry goes.

Start hereRead the manifesto

Our Working Hypothesis

We study each cell as a being in a world. A bacterium has surroundings that matter to it, needs it has to meet and a life it has to keep going, so we start from the whole cell and ask what problem it's solving. That's why we use methods that keep wholes intact, like a pattern language, which describes a cell by the problems it keeps running into and the ways it answers them. We don't know yet whether these are the right tools for understanding cells as creatures. We expect to replace some of them.

Concepts

The ideas, in the order they build on each other. A map that runs from the first question all the way to designing new experiments.

Patterns

One living thing, from molecule to society, looked at scale by scale, each time with a figure drawn at true size.

If you read one page, read this one

DraftAdaptation: how a cell learns to ignore a steady signal
A swimming cell resets its own receptors so it can keep noticing change. Two figures, and real single-cell data.

Eight strands, from the first question all the way to design

This site is a draft, and will remain so for a while. Every idea and pattern is open for review. The Manifesto is the only piece that's been published in a final version.