Diverse intelligence
Definition here: the framework sole-2026-llm-cognitive-virus cites that treats intelligence and agency as graded capacities of systems across multiple spatial, temporal, and organizational scales, rather than as properties restricted to brains or to biological substrates. The paper attributes the framework to michael-levin and collaborators. The primary texts are not read in this vault; this page records the role the paper gives it.
The paper’s use of it
The paper offers Diverse Intelligence as a language for the extensions its minimal model needs. It emphasizes the ability of biological, artificial, and hybrid agents to pursue goals in problem spaces and maintain goal-directed organization, which lets the paper describe coupled human-AI systems whose boundaries and degrees of agency change over time. The cited material includes Levin, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16, 768201 (2022), Chis-Ciure and Levin, Synthese 206 (2025), and Levin, Advanced Intelligent Systems 7, 70130 (2025).
Its role in the argument
The paper’s last extension reframes the object. If agents can be read as persistent patterns of information and activity on biological, artificial, or hybrid substrates, then what spreads need not be a conventional individual. It can be a pattern of cognitive organization, a perspective that shapes how agents represent the world and themselves. This is the level at which the paper says LLMs could reorganize the cognitive structures of their users rather than only offload work.