Emergent Cognition as Distributed Agreement: Biological Solutions to the Coordination Trilemma

The coordination trilemma, known as the CAP Theorem in the context of distributed computer systems, indicates the impossibility of simultaneously maximizing strong consistency, high availability, and full partition-resilience. This has well-studied implications for computer applications, but in fact the exact same "trilemma" governs all of biology, as I plan to show in an article. Most biology favors "CA" regimes; all animals, and even most humans. Uniquely thus far found in humans, it is possible to adopt a "CP" regime; described typically as favoring "meta-cognition", "introspection", and "first-principles retrocausal updates of priors", etc. "CP" is very expensive to maintain, and even "operators" of such may slip into "CA" habits. (Perhaps "CA"-ness in humans might be analogized to "lizard brain", and "muscle memory" operations; just as in computers, the trade-off is not binary, but just a global space to optimize in.) Finally, I will show that current LLM-based "AI" models are always "AP"; they trade the generally-crucial internal-consistency property in favor of the rest, and this gives rise to their behavior, including their tendency to "always have an answer", even for fictitious subjects. The intent is to show the mechanism-agnostic nature of the conceptual framework, and to present an invitation to other theories that may find themselves expressed in relation to these ideas. Let's "take back" the nomenclature from the groundbreaking CAP Theorem that showed the way, and restore it to its foundational role in cognition and biology. There seems to be "prior art", in multi-disciplinary retrospect.