Discussion with Michael Johnson 1

First of two conversations on Michael Levin’s channel, on vasocomputation, stress as cognitive glue, and computation and cognition in unconventional substrates. Johnson brings his hypothesis that tension in vascular smooth muscle latches Bayesian priors about the nervous system’s appropriate range; Levin brings distributed stress minimization, stress reduction as the driving variable of anatomical homeostasis. Together they ask how neurons compete for blood flow, how the body punishes defectors, and why so much of that tension never gets released.