An Agent’s Cognitive Light Cone – the span of space and time over which it can hold and pursue goals – is not fixed. Defection is the collapse of that light cone when an agent is cut off from the feedback that binds it into a larger agent: disconnected from its neighbours, the sub-agent reverts to a smaller-scale goal – typically its own local persistence – and pursues it at the expense of, and often to the destruction of, the whole it belonged to, and ultimately itself.
Defection need not be intentional. It is not malice added but interconnection lost: change the information a part receives about the whole, and its effective goals contract to match its shrunken horizon.
The paradigm case: cancer
Michael Levin’s cancer research is the paradigm example. A cell turns cancerous when it loses the bioelectric connectivity that linked it to the cellular collective. No longer registering that it is part of a wider organism with a role to play, it falls back to the ancient unicellular goal of its own reproduction – its cognitive light cone shrinks from “the body” to “this cell” – and proliferates until it kills its host. The tumour is not a foreign invader but a native part whose agency has detached from the whole.
Speaking of cancer in different contexts is using a Scale-free Abstraction, not a metaphor: the same pattern recurs wherever agents are nested, and it is metastable in the same way at every scale – a defecting part is stable only until it destroys the system that sustains it.
Social defection
At social scale the pattern names several familiar things at once:
- The control attractor: a regime that detaches from the feedback of the society it governs and subordinates the whole to the small goal of its own persistence is defection at civilisational scale – metastable, then self-destroying. It wields Power over a whole it has ceased to be part of.
- Modernity as separation: the individualism that experiences the self as standing apart from its larger systems is a chronic, low-grade contraction of the collective light cone (Machado de Oliveira).
- The super-rich as separation: the Broligarchy, and the wealthy more generally, disconnected from the social fabric and obsessed with reproducing individual wealth, is defection at the scale of a class.
The antidote
The counter to defection is right relations: maintained interconnection and feedback keep an agent’s light cone matched to the whole it is part of. This is why a collective agent in service to life must be built on a self-model of interconnectedness.
References
- Levin (2019), “The Computational Boundary of a ‘Self’: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition” (the cognitive light cone)
- Levin (2021), “Bioelectric signaling: Reprogrammable circuits underlying embryogenesis, regeneration, and cancer” (cancer as loss of the collective’s connectivity)
- Levin & Dennett (2020), “Cognition all the way down”