Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains

What makes a system – evolved, engineered, or hybrid – describable by teleological and mentalistic terms such as intelligent, goal-directed, and cognitive? Here, we review classical thought on teleology in the life sciences and summarize ideas on goal directedness from an emerging field – diverse intelligence. This field seeks to characterize what all active agents, regardless of their composition or provenance, have in common. We emphasize: (1) empirical testability (not philosophical commitments to linguistic categories), (2) fecundity in discovery of new capabilities (not just reductive mechanistic explanations of results after they are made, but worldviews that facilitate and enable novel research), (3) operationalization of terminology by reference to conceptual and empirical toolkits shown to be effective for a given system (cognitive and teleological claims are really hypotheses of optimal interaction protocols), and (4) continuity of human goal-directedness with our unicellular origins (which implies a need for models of scaling of cognition). We describe in detail several recent examples of progress made by this framework which enables the application of powerful tools of cognitive neuroscience to the collective intelligence of cells navigating anatomical space, with applications in regenerative medicine, birth defects, cancer, and bioengineering. By abandoning teleophobia in favor of principled frameworks for understanding diverse minds embodied in the physical world, the plasticity and problem-solving competency of the agential material of life can provide fodder for advances in philosophical thought, as well as for biomedical and bioengineering applications.