Fire, Cells, and Circuits: Fragments to Agents to Humans with Dr. Daniel Barulli

Join us for a special event featuring two presenters who have spent a lot of time thinking about a shared set of issues in different ways. Dr. Daniel Barulli will provide a perspective based on machine learning and artificial agents. Tone Fonseca will provide insight into the origin of agency in the natural world, and how this relates to the story of the human experience as written in Fire, Cells, and Circuits.

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How do we go from scattered molecules to purposeful organisms, and from organisms to minds that build models, reason about the world, and create meaning? This chapter bridges three fundamental scales of organization, fragments, agents, and humans, by examining how complexity emerges at each transition.

We begin by exploring agency through the lens of machine learning and artificial systems: How do computational agents form world models? What distinguishes inductive from abductive reasoning, and can artificial systems truly perform both? How do control theory and collective intelligence help us understand what it means for a system to be goal directed?

Then we turn to biological systems, asking how agency might arise naturally without external programming. What "programs" a living agent if there's no designer? How do biological systems climb from simple chemical reactions to iconic, indexical, and eventually symbolic representation? We'll examine how constraints of existence, the need to constantly rebuild oneself as a Thesean system, might give rise to intrinsic agency that can appear as if it transcends mere physical law.

Finally, we explore the emergence of human level cognition: how collections of cellular agents give rise to creatures that don't just survive and respond, but wonder, plan, fear, and share stories. What makes human reasoning and symbolic thought unique? How does competition between agents drive increasingly sophisticated modeling? And how does the narrative self, the "I" that experiences and reflects, emerge from these layers of agency?

This chapter sets the conceptual foundation for understanding how simple systems might become complex minds, providing the bridge between the biological origins explored in Cells and the cultural and technological developments we'll trace through Fire and Circuits.