3 December 2020 Sheri Markose gives Keynote Talk On the Digital Foundations of Intelligence: How We Became Smart and Protean at 2019 C3 Complexity Symposium of the University of Sydney Centre for Complex Systems 

Markose theory on the digital foundations of biotic/genomic intelligence (GI), that reaches its apogee in humans, postulates that intelligence began as an unique and advanced form of cybersecurity with the adaptive immune system (AIS) tasked with protecting the code based genome from hackers and the exact same mechanisms are also found in neuronal cognition.  The Achilles heel of code based digital systems is they can be hacked and autonomy is lost if hackers can subvert the original code. Since the emergence of the Thymus Medulla in jawed fish 500 million years ago, a mirror system of the gene codes allows the AIS to simulate in an offline environment in the Thymus Medulla, using the V-D-J combinatorics , cloned codes of potential hacker malware to the original genomic codes which are executed online to 3-D print tissues and their encapsulation of phenotype.   Markose claims that the entire paraphernalia of foundational work of Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and Emil Post on code based systems aka recursion function theory  is needed to understand how social cognition of the ‘other’ evolved as a self-referential mapping from self-codes  of the genome in the AIS in the Thymus medulla  or the self-codes recorded in the mirror neuron system  from the vast online motor and sensory neuronal codes. These correspond to the bijective mappings well known as  Self-Rep and  Self-Ref in Gödel formal systems, that Douglas Hofstadter made famous, of online machine executions of a code and meta offline recordings of the same.   The status of the Gödel sentence as a fixed point of a hacker/negation/Liar function in the offline AIS of a specific gene code which has to be matched, in real time, with the online hack on the same tissue code.  In other words, the Gödel sentence in the AIS mirror system permits a gene code to self-report it is under attack.  At this point if the biotic hacker cannot be eliminated, the AIS has to produce innovative antibodies in a manner that is mathematically identical to the Emil Post arms race structure of a productive function that generates  novel syntactic objects with the immuno-cognitive system being inherently incomplete in the Gödel sense.  Markose claims that this is the recursive machinery behind endogenous evolvability and novelty production that underpins the uber intelligence and proteanism and it is characterized by the immune-cognitive mirror systems in the AIS and in the mirror neuron system in the brain along with the capacity to recognize negation and encode the Gödel sentence.  The latter prompts novelty production or the smarts to think outside the box.  In the absence of this, it is highly unlikely that digital  systems like the genomic systems can survive viruses/hacking and become complex.