Slime mould: The fundamental mechanisms of biological cognition

Abstract

The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and computing device. These devices treated the slime mould as an active living substrate, yet it is a self-consistent living creature which evolved over millions of years and occupied most parts of the world, but in any case, that living entity did not own true cognition, just automated biochemical mechanisms. To "rehabilitate" slime mould from the rank of a purely living electronics element to a "creature of thoughts" we are analyzing the cognitive potential of P. polycephalum. We base our theory of minimal cognition of the slime mould on a bottom-up approach, from the biological and biophysical nature of the slime mould and its regulatory systems using frameworks such as Lyon's biogenic cognition, Muller, di Primio-Lengelerś modifiable pathways, Bateson's "patterns that connect" framework, Maturana's autopoietic network, or proto-consciousness and Morgan's Canon.

Mechanosensation Mediates Long-Range Spatial Decision-Making in an Aneural Organism

“…An understanding of this phenomenon in simpler models may advance the decoding efforts in neuroscience, which also seeks to understand how behavioral information is stored in living tissue. There are perhaps scale-invariant and substrate-indpendent principles of learning and memory that extend to all cognitive system that can be deduced using this simple model organism (Baluška and Levin, 2016;Friston et al, 2015;Pezzulo and Levin, 2015;Vallverdu et al, 2018;Yokawa and Baluška, 2018). Moreover, measurement of physical properties of the environment is an important but poorly-understood aspect of metazoan morphogenesis, including for example the biomedically important feedback loops that allow cells in a regenerating organ or remodeling structure to determine how to grow and when to stop based on large-scale properties of the real-time anatomy (Butler et al, 2009;Levin and Martinez Arias, 2019;McLaughlin and Levin, 2018;Whited and Levin, 2019).…”

Senomic view of the cell: SenomeversusGenome

“…Recently it is emerging that all cells [25] demonstrate basal cognition [8,14,16,23,26–33]. Indeed, it has been argued that life should properly be defined through the property of self-referential cognition [31,34].…”

“…Indeed, it has been argued that life should properly be defined through the property of self-referential cognition [31,34]. Furthermore, recent advances have also revealed that neuronal aspects and cognitive capacities are valid concepts for unicellular organisms too [14,16,22,35]. Even bacteria show sensory complexity and sensory-motor circuits between plasma membrane-based sensors and correspondent motor responses of their flagella modulated by previous experiences [14,36].…”

“…When so considered, the behavioral complexity of archaea, bacteria and diverse unicellular eukaryotes can be explained [14,18–21,72,73] In like manner, the intelligence of syncytial plasmodia Physarum polycephalum [16,74–76], as well as the intelligence of plants and their robust communicative/cognitive faculties can be sufficiently understood [8,77–82]. Thus, the Senome provides a background through which the basal cognitive capacities of the cell, can be explored along pathways toward the type of consciousness that is typically ascribed to animals, and eventually to ourselves.…”

“…Here we suggest that in order to succeed in resolving the biological basis of these fundamental aspects of living organisms, we need to add a new science to our biological agenda that focuses on sensory biology linked to cellular cognition and behavior. This new science of feelings, emotions, qualia and consciousness must be able to tackle these issues from an evolutionary perspective [4–7,16,18–22]. Its further requirement is an explanation of the emergence of a variety of elusive biological phenomena in their hypothetical ancient proto-states at the level of the simplest unicellular organisms [7,14,16,22,23], such as proto-feelings, proto-emotions, proto-qualia, proto-consciousness [7,24] which could then be further engaged as complexation in multicellular organisms.…”