A single cell slime mold makes decisions without a central nervous system
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This intelligent behavior arises from the simple compulsions things to reach equal potential.
The slime mold experiments are cool because they connect simple compulsions with emergent intelligent behavior in an organism. I have wondered if it's the same for us, if conciousness is really just the sum of all our simple compulsions, arising from basic rules - like is water "conscious" of wanting to seek it's own level, ions conscious of wanting to react, etc, and together that makes up what human conciousness is?
For an example, consider the AI effect [1].
I googled “simple compulsions” already
Edit: thanks for the clarification all, I didn't realize it was an entrance exit maze, I was thinking of one sealed on a ll sides where the water can't get out.
pour a little water on a counter and you'll get a round area with little walls at the edge, if it's not clean it'll kinda break down where it's dirty (surface tension doesn't hold up) once it hits the edge of the counter, the surface tension pushes all the water over the edge. if it's a perfectly flat clean surface it'll make a perfect circle till it hits the edge.
so the water won't fill every nook and cranny of the maze, it'll start a new circle at every decision point, till one of those circles goes over the edge.
It would be a fun experiment to test this with and with an open exit drain at the end of the maze.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979999/
Could there be a relationship between these slime mold memories and memories in more complex organisms?
http://www.consciousentities.com/penrose.htm
https://medium.com/awake-alive-mind/roger-penrose-on-the-bra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106451...
(I'm a complete numpty here, so need very basic explanations!)
If you believe consciousness is completely materialistic, then maybe it is like that.
I personally think that to be conscious means to be aware of being aware.
You could say it’s a circular definition (or recursive), and it is, but it’s the only way to define something by itself instead of as reference to something else.
The qualia realist views that you are describing are likely more popular in philosophy classrooms than in CogSci or neuroscience programs.
Source: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/EncConsc_coma_2009.pdf
It could be that every atom is conscious. But my guess is that it requires some kind of a larger physical construction for consciousness to appear. It would still mean that our consciousness is a collection of simple compulsions. I just think atoms are too small to contain that behavior on their own.
If dogs have consciousness, then there is no line between dogs and humans.
If mice have consciousness, then there is no line between mice and dogs.
If bugs have consciousness, then there is no line between bugs and mice.
etc.
Until you get to, say, a rock rolling down a hill to find the low-energy spot, or an electron... Does that have consciousness? Most people would say no, but I would say then, where does "no line" become "line"?
This is a fairly solid proof of panpsychism imo.
edit:
You can go up the chain as well, from the complex (human beings) to the very-complex: groups of friends, to companies, which are collections of human beings, to the global economy, which is a collection of collections of human beings. I think that's as far up as it goes, but it is interesting to think about.
Like could an motivated human torture it and could it try and escape the situation.
The amount of computing going on in the peripheral nervous system is staggering - and when you look at HOW and WHERE this computing works with effectors and sensors you realize how much of intelligence is reliant on those systems being there.
Brains are interesting - but they actually don't do all that much when it comes to the majority of how people interact with the real world, and frankly you don't need that much (physical mass of) brain to be intelligent.
Even with a lame comparison to computers, the machines also need a lot of stuff to put a CPU to work.
At best, this is an anecdote.
Anecdotal evidence.
Also, if the mind is fully integrated with the body, how you explain seemingly inconsistent states that seems to work just fine. Eg., people with ALS or quadriplegic or severely injured or mutilated. If the mind can perfectly works without a perfectly abled body, where's this mind body connection? Also, where's such connection in a comatose brain with a completely funcional body? Maybe I misunderstood what this mind body connection is supposed to be.
I'm not sure how you consider that working "just fine."
John Lilly, sensory deprivation tanks?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
In short, the biomolecular machinery that neurons use to think is present in all cells.
Trying to stay within what I think you are saying, don't forget that if you amputate some insect's legs, they will keep flicking around for a while, even though there is no connection to the brain. Surely the insect doesn't suddenly forget how to move it's now missing leg. But the leg does seem to have its own capacity to remember how to jump or whatever even without the brain. Until it runs out of energy, of course.
You're ascribing a higher meaning to the limited spasms of a dismembered limb.
Is this not obviously false? Cut out someones heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, etc. and they will surely have a "cognitive deficit" in the form of death. (Assuming no transplant is used)
Intelligence is not simply the theoretical capability to do higher reasoning in a structured test in my opinion - it's the functional capability to actually prove you can do higher reasoning through demonstration.
You can't just go "a-chopping" anywhere any have the same functional capabilities. If I chop off your thumb, you are significantly functionally less intelligence in a practical test: if my intelligence test requires you to zip up your pants as a step, you would do much more poorly without your thumbs than someone with 40 fewer IQ points.
Think differently - if you can't prove you're more intelligent by actually DOING something then you aren't more intelligent.
Similarly, even if we don't like the words we use to describe 'ability', why steal intelligence? We still need a word for the pretty obvious cluster of things relating generally to cognition, information crunching, and problem solving.
There are many axis on which Stephen Hawking and I differ (pre-death of course). I, for instance, can go jogging, or speak without machine assistance, or zip up my pants. Stephen Hawking could understand advanced mathematics and come up with physics breakthroughs. Am I smarter than Stephen Hawking? Are we even tied?
It seems evident that there are at least two types of ability that are at least somewhat decoupled from each other. Some tasks involve both, some tasks involve one, and some tasks involve the other. Certainly we see correlations between them, and it would be unwise to completely discount one when considering the other, but grouping them under one heading needlessly confuses the issue, especially when that heading is generally understood to refer to one of the types of ability specifically.
It seems clear that the word we use for the axis on which Stephen Hawking had me beat is 'intelligence'. Now that doesn't mean that the definition is set in stone whatsoever. If you want to use the same sequence of letters to describe a kind of fruit, you can do so. But regardless of if you give it a name or not, that axis, that real empirical grouping of ability, still exists. And while that grouping exists, and while a word is commonly used to refer to it, there is little reason to try and use that word to refer to something else except to try and transfer some of the associations with the grouping to that other thing. No matter what it confuses the issue.
Regardless, how we choose to define intelligence actually has little to do with the relevance of the body to the development of AI. Computers already have lots of ways to interact with the world, from a myriad of sensors to motors to screens. There is no problem with the statement "intelligence is highly dependent on the body", except the potential confusion that I noted above. There is, however, a problem with the statement "cognition is highly dependent on the body". The problem with that statement is that it is demonstrably false. Most of the body doesn't do any sort of informational computation except the simple control systems needed to handle the local area. Those control systems are fascinating (every joint has a little PID loop with incredibly clever ways of essentially integrating and deriving!), but hardly beyond the understanding or evaluation of AI researchers. So we shouldn't expect some secret of better AI in the body. We shouldn't expect it in the brain either, but certainly not the body.
edit: Having actually commented I now see how pointlessly long and confusing my comment is. Sorry about that, I'm having trouble actually translating my thoughts into words here.
The structure of these transducers is critically important as they gate/filter the interaction types with the physical world that ultimately are the bounds on what humans can reason about. They are doing transformations and "pre-processing" if you like to compress real world signal into something that can be interpreted by the other systems in the body.
[1] https://www.umms.org/ummc/health-services/hearing-balance/pa...
I don't think many people seriously believe that artificial neurons are in any way comparable to a real neuron, much less believe that an ANN is comparable to what goes on in the human body. Maybe in some very limited cases like the visual cortex, but even then I think most people would admit that it's a poor model valid only to a 1st approximation.
That said, there is still merit in pushing the current approach further while other researchers continue to try to understand how biology implements intelligence and consciousness.
Pretty much everyone talks/reasons specifically only about the brain and never how they work holisitcally sensors and effectors.
For example, in computer vision, all of the biggest work assume the starting point of a 2D (RGB+Grey) matrix as the starting point. They never make any assumption about how that image is generated. Only really in the LIDAR world is the sensor considered, and even then everyone is trying to jam LIDAR return into a 2D matrix.
For example, build a system that learns to have reflexes. That is, has processing close to or near a sensor and can work collaboratively with other sensors to learn (not explicitly programmed) to take action based on input without a central processing system.
I would argue that if you can build a complex enough physical reflex learning system, then you have enough of the building blocks for a human level system.
But the title of the article is actually, "A memory without a brain", which is actually much more interesting. A better rewrite of the title would be "A single-cell slime mold can remember the locations of food sources", which is actually pretty cool.
The break through here is that they've found the memories are encapsulated in the diameter of the microtubules: “Past feeding events are embedded in the hierarchy of tube diameters, specifically in the arrangement of thick and thin tubes in the network.”
A slime mold is a collection of adjacent cells without a hierarchy that can act together to make decisions. Our brain is also a collection of adjacent cells that can act together to make decisions.
They're fundamentally the same thing. It seems like people are shocked primarily because we arbitrarily defined a notion of certain collections of cells being an "organism", and a slime mold doesn't fit within this ontology.
In a way the slim mold is a analogous to one of the simple vehicles that ends up becoming more intelligent through the simple mechanisms and evolution.
Book link: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vehicles