Associative conditioning in gene regulatory network models increases integrative causal emergence
Federico Pigozzi, Adam Goldstein & Michael Levin — 09 July 2025
When is a system more than the sum of its parts? When and how do the properties of active components enable the emergence of a high-level, integrated decision-making entity1,2,3,4,5? These questions bear on issues in ecology, philosophy mind, psychiatry, swarm robotics, and developmental biology6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. In a sense, all intelligence is collective intelligence14,15 because even human minds supervene on a collection of cells which are themselves active agents. One practical way to define integrated emergent systems is by the fact that they have goals, memories, preferences, and problem-solving capabilities that their parts do not have. For example, while individual cells solve problems in metabolic, physiological, and transcriptional spaces, what makes an embryo more than a collection of cells is the alignment of cellular activity toward a specific outcome in anatomical morphospace16. Here, we focus on one aspect of emergent agency: integrated, distributed memory.
What does this mean for psychodrama and group work
(see Logeman 1999)
Let me summarize what I’m reading above.
A group is more than the sum of its parts, and there’s a of leap in intelligence (cognition/governance/awareness) at a certain point, where the group can influence the structures within it. e.g. the embryo grows fingers in the right place. This is true of groups of cells.
I think it’s true of groups of people. It’s not to say that all groups have reached some form of higher understanding and agency.
Psychodrama groups definitely bring together people who can then discover a theme or concern and work on it together for days, finding more and more enabling solutions. People are healed, educated, and may have new consciousness. I’m thinking of consciousness here as a leap of understanding that reverberates through the person’s life and being.
I’m convinced the psychodrama stage and structure facilitate this process. There are structural guidelines; warm-up, action sharing, director and auxiliaries, protagonist and auxiliaries. These formalities and traditions are part of the holding space.
A group can facilitate delving into the psyche together, and there’s a lot of language that supports that, e.g collective unconscious. People share such things as feelings or relationship dynamics for instance, the victim-persecuted triangle These structures can be revealed; they’re commonly tundeerstood, they can be worked on together.
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What about social forces and social reality? Can we learn about those together? Can we look outward together?
Moreno talks about sociometric revolution, he likes small scale micro revolutions.
That’s sounds like psychodrama to me. It is still looking into the group and the relationship dynamic and sociometry in the group?
Look outwards!
How to do that in sociodrama?
- Look at history,
- Political frameworks.
- Moments of colonialism.
- Victories for the oppressed
- Make it a part of the warm up to read or watch something.
- Director directed warm up e.g. Action for a Better World
How does this relate to the next level of cognition theory presented by Levin et al?
From the abstract above:
One practical way to define integrated emergent systems is by the fact that they have goals, memories, preferences, and problem-solving capabilities that their parts do not have.
But how to get there? Can sociodrama help?
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