The Multiscale Wisdom of the Body: Collective Intelligence as a Tractable Interface for Next-Generation Biomedicine

Intelligent soft matter: towards embodied intelligence

Intelligent soft matter lies at the intersection of materials science, physics, and cognitive science, promising to change how we design and interact with materials. This transformative field aims to create materials with life-like capabilities, such as perception, learning, memory, and adaptive behavior. Unlike traditional materials, which typically perform static or predefined functions, intelligent soft matter can dynamically interact with its environment, integrating multiple sensory inputs, retaining past experiences, and making decisions to optimize its responses. Inspired by biological systems, these materials leverage the inherent properties of soft matter such as flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to perform functions that mimic cognitive processes. By synthesizing current research trends and projecting their evolution, we present a forward-looking perspective on how intelligent soft matter could be constructed, with the aim of inspiring innovations in areas such as biomedical devices, adaptive robotics, and beyond. We highlight new pathways for integrating sensing, memory and actuation with low-power internal operations, and we discuss key challenges in realizing materials that exhibit truly "intelligent behavior". These approaches outline a path toward more robust, versatile, and scalable materials that can potentially act, compute, and "think" through their inherent intrinsic material properties-moving beyond traditional smart technologies that rely on external control.

Thoughts and thinkers: On the complementarity between objects and processes

We argue that "processes versus objects" is not a useful dichotomy. There is, instead, substantial theoretical utility in viewing "objects" and "processes" as complementary ways of describing persistence through time, and hence the possibility of observation and manipulation. This way of thinking highlights the role of memory as an essential resource for observation, and makes it clear that "memory" and "time" are also mutually inter-defined, complementary concepts. We formulate our approach in terms of the Free Energy Principle (FEP) of Friston and colleagues and the fundamental idea from quantum theory that physical interactions can be represented by linear operators. Following Levin (2024) [30], we emphasize that memory is, first and foremost, an interpretative function, from which the idea of memory as a record, at some level of accuracy, of past events is derivative. We conclude that the distinction between objects and processes is always contrived, and always misleading, and that science would be better served by abandoning it entirely.

Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle

We argue here that the Origin of Life (OOL) problem is not just a chemistry problem but is also, and primarily, a cognitive science problem. When interpreted through the lens of the Conway-Kochen theorem and the Free Energy Principle, contemporary physics characterizes all complex dynamical systems that persist through time as Bayesian agents. If all persistent systems are to some - perhaps only minimal - extent cognitive, are all persistent systems to some extent alive, or are living systems only a subset of cognitive systems? We argue that no bright line can be drawn, and we re-assess, from this perspective, the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation. We conclude that improving our abilities to recognize and communicate with diverse intelligences in diverse embodiments, whether based on familiar biochemistry or not, will either resolve or obviate the OOL problem.