TalkingOctopus

The word "epistolution" is a substitute for “cognition.” Cognition is defined currently as something like "evolved problem-solving," and that won't do. I think that what begins the process of life is something that understands the world. I mean something that has a subjectivity, lives in an umwelt, and tries to get a grip on that situation. It defines for itself what entities and forces exist and is curious to look for causal relationships between them. It has the quality of imagination and explanation. It expects not that certain futures are statistically likely, but that some relations between entities and forces are possible and others are impossible.

I suspect our current biological paradigm goes wrong mostly in an epistemological sense. We think of life as something that happens because we are shaped by natural selection to seek survival and reproduction, and thinking is how we do it. I think this is wrong, not only because natural selection can't "seek," but because in order for the initial conditions for natural selection to have been met something like thinking is already required, a purposive and adaptive plasticity. This would mean that the basic aim of lifeforms has to be reimagined. It would mean that underneath all cellular function is a basic mechanism that accumulates a point of view. It stores that point of view in things like structured water, organelles, and biomolecules like DNA. These points of view are the units which are naturally selected.

In this theory, everything in living cells is memory, the stuff of minds. It's the whole cell and the whole organism that store a relation to the world, which explain the world in a certain way. That's why regeneration is possible; when you cut off a part the remainder knows how to recreate it because it still has a relationship to the world and truths discovered in that world that aren't severed by the amputation. Likewise when the brain is damaged; other parts can take over the lost functions. As Richard Watson says, “reproduction is just a special case of regeneration.”

— Charlie, 2025