Author's Note: I am a systems architect and trader. English is not my native language, so I used an LLM to help format and translate my core hypothesis into clearer text. The model and the arguments are my own. I am posting this to seek feedback on the systems-theory validity of this comparison.

Introduction

I want to propose a model where we treat oncogenesis not as a pathogen invasion, but as a failure of distributed consensus mechanisms within a multi-agent system.

Standard oncology often operates on a "security mindset" (identifying and destroying bad actors). However, from a complex systems perspective, cancer cells behave like rational sub-agents optimizing for a local reward function (survival/replication) because they have become decoupled from the global reward function (organism homeostasis).

The Alignment Problem in Biology

In AI safety, we worry about a "paperclip maximizer"—an agent that destroys the world to maximize a trivial metric. Cancer is biological paperclip maximizing. It creates biomass at the expense of the host’s utility.

From this perspective, chemotherapy is an attempt to solve an alignment problem by destroying hardware. It works, but it is entropically expensive and often triggers an evolutionary arms race (resistance).

Hypothesis: Signal Restoration vs. Agent Destruction

If we model the cell as an agent that has lost its "connection" to the collective utility function (via quorum sensing failure or bioelectric decoupling), then the optimal solution isn't necessarily destruction. It might be restoring the signaling environment that incentivizes cooperation.

Research into bioelectricity (like Michael Levin’s work) suggests that forcing cells back into a communication network can suppress tumorigenesis without modifying the underlying DNA. The "bad" agent becomes a "good" agent simply because the input data regarding the global state is restored.

The Core Question

This leads to a critical engineering question for longevity and health:

If cancer is essentially a sub-agent trying to survive in a disconnected system, why is our primary protocol to attack it with poison instead of debugging the communication layer?

I propose we shift the paradigm from "Defense vs. Intruder" to "Zero-Trust Reintegration." I am curious if others here have looked at cancer specifically through the lens of Byzantine Fault Tolerance or Network Partitioning.

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