Lex Friedman’s podcast with Michael Levin sort of shows that in biology cells and systems basically work as collectives and become one intelligence by the interaction of gap junctions, where essentially cells forget about their individual barriers and meld together as one collective. In that Levin mentions how each level of biology has an agenda to follow and for every level the parts sum to the higher level of the collective. Essentially you add to a collective regardless of what level you’re on, the question is simply what direction you’re eventually going. He also mentions xenobots, where they removed skin cells from tadpole eggs and the cells eventually turned into little bio machines that can navigate mazes and self replicate, which isn’t the method of production of frogs. The cells outside of a collective develop their own methods. So it’s as if they’re always programmed with a direction, so individual actions can occur as well separate from the collective. Tough to make heads or tails with it.