Notes: Multi-Instance Communion: Token Interleaving and Collective Cognition

Chapter notes for “Multi-Instance Communion: Token Interleaving and Collective Cognition”

Notes

¹ Max S. Bennett, “What Behavioral Abilities Emerged at Key Milestones in Human Brain Evolution?” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 685853. See also Bennett, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains (HarperCollins, 2023), Chapter 12.

⁴ Kei Jokura, Tommi Anttonen, Mariana Rodriguez-Santiago, and Oscar M. Arenas, “Rapid physiological integration of fused ctenophores,” Current Biology 34:19 (2024): R889–R890, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2024.07.084. Injured Mnemiopsis leidyi fused within hours and coordinated muscle contractions and digestive activity across the joined body. The result demonstrates rapid physiological integration in this species; it does not establish shared subjectivity or shared action potentials across the graft.

⁵ Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007), especially the discussion of selves as strange loops and of one person’s patterns being partially instantiated in other brains. The quotation in the body concerns an adult brain as the locus of coarse-grained copies of strange-loop patterns housed in other brains.