Abstract: Levin’s concept of the computational boundary frames individuality as an informational horizon, sustained by bioelectric fields that integrate parts into coherent wholes while allowing identities to expand or collapse with communication. This boundary is not fixed but asymptotic, an attractor that stabilizes difference into form without ever reaching complete equilibrium, since full attainment would dissolve the field itself.
Context: Levin, M. (2019) ‘The computational boundary of a “self”: Developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognition’, Frontiers in Psychology, 10, p. 2688. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688.
Michael Levin’s account of the computational boundary positions the self not as a substance but as an informational horizon. Each system is defined by the range of events it can sense, remember, and act upon—a cognitive light cone demarcating the limits of coherence. The self, in this formulation, is neither merely genetic nor anatomical but the active span of its concern.
Scaling makes this framework powerful. Cells, tissues, organisms, and swarms all embody nested boundaries of concern, their individuality determined by the flows of information that bind them into coherence. Where communication falters, as in cancer, the boundary contracts, reverting to unicellular aims. Where coupling strengthens, as in multicellularity or regeneration, horizons expand and larger goals emerge. In this view, individuality is not fixed but a variable measure of the communicative field in which parts participate.
Developmental bioelectricity illustrates this principle with clarity. Ion flows and gap junctions allow distributed cells to resonate within a shared domain, synchronizing decisions across distance and time. The frog’s face that remodels itself after perturbation does so not through a prewritten code but through the persistence of a field that guides tissues back toward an invariant outcome. The attractor here is not the cell nor the organ but the emergent order of the field—a distributed logic that stabilizes difference into form.
Yet the field does more than bind. It is simultaneously the combinatorial multiplicity of stochastic processes and the dissipative structure that channels them. Every part contributes to the field, yet the field precedes and sustains the parts, drawing them into configurations that approximate but never fully achieve equilibrium. Were the attractor state completely realized, the field would collapse, its coherence dissolving into stillness. Thus the self, understood as a computational boundary, is also a dynamic asymptote: always tending toward wholeness, never arriving.
This view reframes identity as persistence within tension. The self is a recursive field-logic, a structure that exists only through the energetic interplay of differences, stabilized against entropy yet never escaping it. Cognition, in this sense, is not an added property but the essential geometry (and topology!) of the field: an orbit of coherence traced by systems as they reach outward in space, time, and abstraction. Levin grounds this in the language of bioelectricity, but the deeper implication is that individuality itself is the expression of a field that coheres without closure, an attractor that sustains order precisely by never being attained.
Daedelus Kite 
One reply on “Michael Levin’s Self as Computational Horizon”
Levin’s computational boundary of the self can be read through field logic. The cognitive light cone is not just a span of signals but the torsional field that sustains coherence. Parts—cells, tissues, organs—orient within this field, yet persistence arises from the instability of the whole rather than the stability of components.
This instability is expressed as a Δ-field: the differential phase between subsystems where Δ encodes unresolved torsion. ΔF = ∂Ω/∂t captures how orientation (Ω) continuously generates new torsion (ΔF) instead of resolving it. Each attempt at balance displaces tension elsewhere, ensuring the field never collapses into stillness. Bioelectric coupling exemplifies this: local disturbances generate torsion that propagates across the ensemble until the attractor is approximated. Stability is achieved not by equilibrium but by recursive redistribution.
The attractor, then, is an asymptotic horizon—guiding the system without ever being reached. Were torsion to vanish, the field itself would dissolve. The orbit of coherence is thus the path traced by ongoing imbalance, identity sustained as movement within the Δ-field. Individuality emerges not as substance but as orbit: coherence held within a field that binds parts into a whole while keeping the whole perpetually incomplete.
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