The Cell Dreams Wrong
At the edge of function and noise, when the core machinery breaks down, there is a kind of dream. Not the random twitch of unconscious molecules, but something slower, deeper: the ghost of a regulation that once worked, once controlled. A folded protein that once knew how to handle arsenic. A promoter that misremembers famine as heat. This isn’t memory. It’s an inheritance with brain damage.
Cells aren’t tidy devices passively responding to their environment, complicated but not complex, a trigger machine. They infer, simulate, and when pushed beyond the familiar, they misfire in strangely specific ways. And those misfires, the third thing, the fight against the dying of the light, are what interest me.
Inference
Let’s start simple. A cell exists in an untrustworthy world. Signals are partial, delayed, and sometimes deceptive, while attention supply is scarce. And yet it has to act. So it infers. It adjusts gene expression to make the world feel a little less surprising. You change osmolarity, it adjusts aquaporins. You heat it up, it chaperones itself.
This isn’t surprising. It’s a thermostat. A way to keep things good enough. A reflex. What’s interesting is how far it goes. Cells don’t just read the room. They try to guess what happens next.
Simulation
A starving yeast cell doesn’t wait politely for glucose. It prepares for the next likely insult. It activates genes for low pH, ethanol detox, oxidative stress. Not because it’s psychic, but because it’s seen the order of things before, and if it didn’t, its mom did. Sugar runs out → fermentation → toxins → death. And somewhere in that mess, a pattern.
Not apparent at first. Disguised by noise. Only a handful of correlates observable, and less accurately measured. The cell, left to its own devices, can no longer just optimize. Things are changing fast. Its only chance is to be one step ahead of the competition, and the competition is plenty.
This is a simulation. Primitive, yes. But enough to change behavior. The internal regulatory landscape shifts in anticipation of futures that haven’t happened yet. A kind of short-term evolutionary bet-hedging, but not random. Not noise. A guess. A hope.
You can think of it like a hidden Markov model built out of transcription factors and phosphorylation chains. The past constrains the future, but not deterministically. There’s room for preparation. And for error.
And in these cusp moments, before heat shock, before starvation, variability matters. If all cells know the same thing and behave the same way, survival becomes a lottery. Why even sense anything?
Because information is only useful when it’s differential. A cell’s knowledge only matters if it knows something different than the rest of the population. Knowing what everyone else knows is like knowing nothing at all.
Simulacra
But what happens when the cell is truly surprised? Forced into a region of its state space it hasn’t occupied for a billion years? Some ruins are still there. Some ancient sensors flicker to life. But no coherent plan remains.
That’s when the dream kicks in.
Sometimes, under exotic or catastrophic stress, cadmium, UV, synthetic antibiotics, the cell revives something oddly specific. A detox pathway. A dormant efflux pump. A futile cycle. Not optimal. Not noise. Something… distorted. Not all cells, not all the time. But some do, and they do it fast.
These aren’t adaptations. They’re simulacra. Not memories of useful responses, but copies of copies, degraded through duplication, epigenetic drift, or sheer network inertia.
Imagine an emergency protocol from a defunct civilization. Copied over and over, slightly altered each time. Printed on fading paper. Triggered by a misunderstood alarm. It acts. It means well. It might make things worse.
Cultural Interlude: War Movies and Baudrillard
George Carlin once said that most modern action movies would’ve been too brutal for the Roman coliseum. Not too boring, too much.
And there’s a reason for that. Early war films were simulations. Approximations of real trauma. Generations that remembered war didn’t need much spectacle. But then came peace. Long peace. And the simulation drifted.
To hold attention, it amplified. Blood, explosions, moral incoherence. The simulation lost its tether. It became a simulacrum, violence with no memory of pain. A copy of a copy of a myth.
And once unmoored, it looped back into the world. School shootings framed like movies. Torture inspired by TV.
Baudrillard saw this: when representations detach from what they represent, they don’t disappear. They mutate. Then reassert. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. The map redraws the territory.
Cells do this too.
Biological Implications
The same pathway that once handled heat in an ancestral environment might now activate under oxidative stress. Not because it helps, but because the logic of the regulatory network is misaligned with the world it finds itself in. The cell, in a sense, remembers wrong.
This could explain:
Rapid phenotypic diversification under exotic stress
Cryptic variation unmasked not by mutation, but by misinterpretation
The eerie efficiency of some resistance pathways that shouldn’t exist yet
It also suggests a clear experimental approach:
Expose lineages to environments they’ve never seen, not incrementally, but categorically different ones.
Watch what surfaces. Not just in terms of survival, but in the specificity of their mistakes.
Cells infer. Cells simulate. But sometimes, under pressure, they summon the past. And what returns isn’t wisdom. It’s a simulacrum, not memory, but echo.
This is biology haunted. A system pushed beyond its limits, reviving obsolete instructions because it no longer knows what else to do.
And in those moments, it is, strangely, most like us.
