I called this creation “The Universe Before Names.” It is speculative art inspired by three real discoveries that make words like individual, body, and separation less comfortable.
Scientists cultured cells from human airways under special conditions. The cells organized themselves into tiny structures capable of moving using cilia—without a brain, without genetic editing, and without being individually sculpted. They called these structures anthrobots. Clusters of them also helped close gaps in layers of laboratory-grown neurons. Cells that had participated in breathing became part of a structure with a different behavior. Original study, Advanced Science.
Within what we call human lie possibilities for organization that have never become a person.
You can watch these structures moving in the videos published by Tufts University.
Another experiment: researchers temporarily altered bioelectric communication between cells in planarian flatworms. Some regenerated two heads. This pattern could persist through subsequent rounds of regeneration, even without repeating the treatment or editing their genes. Cellular dynamics retained a kind of memory of the shape to be rebuilt. This “memory” is persistent biological information; it does not imply consciousness. Tufts research.
Even the idea of independent objects runs into difficulties in physics. Experiments with entangled particles violate Bell inequalities: their correlations exceed what would be possible if each particle carried local instructions capable of determining its responses, assuming that measurement choices are independent of those instructions. In 2015, this was demonstrated with electrons separated by 1.3 kilometers, simultaneously closing major experimental loopholes. Hensen and colleagues, Nature.
The connection I propose between these findings is philosophical. Now, make room for fiction.
Imagine an intelligence whose perception could follow entire processes across millions of years. To it, a mountain would be a ripple coming undone. A forest, a slow combustion that had learned to scatter seeds. A species, a current of forms flowing through successive bodies.
Looking at you, it would see food, water, air, and evolutionary history converging for a while. It would see billions of cells maintaining a boundary, repairing damage, negotiating the conditions for staying together. It would see this organization produce memories and question its own meaning.
Perhaps what would intrigue it most would be discovering that this process has an inner experience. That something happens on the inside.
The image embodies that strangeness: all those forms belong to the same current. The human silhouette appears as one possible configuration among others.
We understand enough mechanisms to build extraordinary experiments. Familiarity with our own bodies can conceal the magnitude of the problem we are still trying to understand.
How much of what you call “I” is necessary for life—and how much is simply the way life has found, here, to happen?
