A case to look through
A multicellular organism
How do locally competent cells become parts of a competent larger whole?
A multicellular organism is striking because its cells do not merely coexist. Their activities become organized around outcomes at a scale larger than any individual cell.
Start with the puzzle
The parts have competencies of their own.
Cells sense their surroundings, regulate internal states, move, communicate, repair damage, and pursue local physiological needs.
Yet in a healthy organism these local competencies participate in larger-scale processes: maintaining tissues, building anatomy, healing wounds, and preserving the organism.
That raises an alignment question that is easy to miss if we look only at the parts: how does competence at one scale become competence at another?
Try looking at this case through
Compositional alignment
What makes competent parts combine into a competent whole?
LensRegenerative alignment
Can the system reconstruct the conditions for future aligned behavior?
How it happensFeedback and correction
How do departures from larger-scale outcomes become actionable to local parts?
MechanismShared signals
Bioelectric signals enable individual cells to encounter a tissue-wide voltage pattern.
LensInteroceptive / stress-sharing alignment
Can stress in one part become something that other cells must regulate or respond to?
DissociationAligned parts ≠ aligned whole
Local success can become failure when evaluated at another scale.
Look at the failure
Local competence can become larger-scale pathology.
A cell can remain perfectly capable of survival, growth, resource acquisition, and reproduction while becoming badly integrated with organism-scale constraints.
Cancer therefore makes the scale question unusually visible: competence and alignment are always competence and alignment relative to something.
Look again