Brinedew

Unpublished draft

Somatic Control Manifesto

Design principles for clonal multi-agent systems

  1. Defection is an existential risk
    1. Every cell is a potential cancer. Takes only a few transgressions to bring down everyone - sometimes less.
  2. Abandon your friends
    1. Single-cell bottlenecks enforce uniformity and trust - at least initially. All that preceding somatic cooperation? Deleted. It feels wasteful but starting alone is the best way to delay runaway selection within the body.
  3. Burn the boats
    1. Cooperation is stronger when there’s no escape route. When a fish dies, its cells could float outwards into the open sea and survive. They don’t. They choose to die with the fish and honor the death pact.
  4. From immortal make mortal
    1. Mortal cells can only replicate so many times before running out of life.
  5. Sacrifice many to serve the few
    1. Disposable soma serves the immortal germline
  6. Loyalty over competence
  7. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down
  8. Specialize by forgetting
  9. Make them monitor each other
    1. You can’t be everywhere at once, so borrow the concept of dictatorless dystopia.
  10. Suicide under stress
  11. Empty husks can’t betray you
    1. Red blood cells, keratinocytes are more trustworthy en masse since they can’t clone themselves
  12. Trust can only go down with time
  13. Aging extends lifespan

“a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” — Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, ch. VIII (1877). “Evolution is cleverer than you are.” — Leslie Orgel’s Second Rule “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but is unwilling to be seen with her in public.” — Source unknown “The ability to commit suicide is a fundamental property of animal cells.” — Martin C. Raff, “Cell suicide for beginners,” Nature 396 (1998). The dream of every cell is to become two cells — Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology.

  1. Burn boats: Differentiation is irreversible because reversibility is cancer. iPS cells are basically tumors we temporarily control. The body doesn’t mess around with plasticity.
  2. Immortal to mortal: We age because immortality at the cellular level equals cancer. It’s a direct trade-off. No complex organism solved this.

Let Us Bloom

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  2. Sacrifice many: Most cells are cannon fodder. The math is stark: 37 trillion cells, maybe a few thousand matter for lineage continuation. The rest are tissue paper.
  3. Loyalty over competence: This is counterintuitive. You’d think evolution would pick the best cells. But the “best” are the most dangerous. So it picks the most docile. Efficiency is a liability.
  4. Nail hammered: Immune surveillance and cell competition are relentless censors. They don’t care about potential benefits of variation. Variation = risk.
  5. Specialize by forgetting: You literally break the genome’s ability to access other states. It’s like welding doors shut. Makes tissues brittle but safe.
  6. Suicide: Apoptosis thresholds are set to kill false positives. Better to lose good cells than keep bad ones. It’s a draconian policy.
  7. Empty husks: These are brilliant. You strip cells of everything that makes them alive so they can’t rebel. It’s like building your house from bricks that used to be people.
  8. Aging extends lifespan: This is the cruelest one. The same thing that protects you (senescence) slowly kills you. But the alternative is faster death by cancer.