Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: A Grounded Framework (pdf, 2022) (www.frontiersin.org)

Ariel Levin’s 2022 Perspective introduces TAME (Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere), a grounded framework for recognizing, comparing, and engineering cognition across unconventional substrates. Rejecting a binary view of “minds,” TAME treats agency as a continuous, empirical property of multi-scale systems—cells, tissues, bodies, and hybrid bioengineered composites. It reframes morphogenesis and anatomical homeostasis as instances of basal cognition, driven by distributed, problem‑solving dynamics. Crucially, the paper highlights developmental bioelectricity (pre‑neural ion channel and gap‑junction networks) as a mechanism that scales cell‑level computation into coordinated anatomical goals, enabling plastic, evolvable multi‑scale competency. For the AI/ML community this matters two ways: conceptually, it expands what counts as an intelligent system beyond software and neural nets to embodied, chemically and electrically integrated substrates; practically, it proposes testable axes and tools. The “axis of persuadability” operationalizes how to predict and control systems—from brute‑force rewiring to persuasion via argument—suggesting new benchmarks and agency detection algorithms (generalized Turing‑style tests). Technically, TAME motivates hybrid design strategies (chimeric biological + engineered components), new control paradigms exploiting bioelectric signaling, and experimental programs linking low‑level feedback loops to emergent memory, goal structures, and evolvability—offering fertile ground for embodied AI, regenerative medicine, and evolutionary computation research.