Alignment is a central problem in systems composed of diverse, interacting components, from biological development to social and engineered systems. One crucial aspect of this problem is determining an answer to the question of to whom or to what the alignment should be. We argue that in decentralized systems, alignment is necessarily to a virtual governor, an abstract governing entity embodied in the coordinating relationships among agents, such as bioelectric networks or the price system. Crucially, despite not being a physical object, virtual governors are causally instructive, controlling the behavior of a system by aligning its parts toward higher-level goals. As a result, agents, from cells to humans and all manner of diverse intelligences, behave as if pursuing the objectives of the virtual governor. We argue that alignment is necessarily to a virtual governor in decentralized, coordinated systems, discuss examples of virtual governors, and describe how virtual governors are constructed by the very components they align.

The problem of aligning humans and artificial intelligences can be understood in terms of minimizing externalities between them. However, economics cannot define externality because it contradicts the rationality assumption. This paper applies the homeostatic principles, from anatomical homeostasis to its disorder – cancer, to define externality. Drawing upon the perspective of cancer as a problem of scaling cellular collectives, this paper shows how to redefine both externality and rationality in terms of cognitive light cones (which demarcate the scale of goals any agent can pursue). We propose that cognitive light cones are constructed out of interoceptive signals for the purpose of anatomical homeostasis. We show that externalities can be understood in terms of anatomical homeostasis and derive some important implications for AI alignment, including the possibility of using market mechanisms enable the mutual co-construction of alignment between artificial intelligences and humans.