Intelligent beings without brains are abundant in nature – a growing scientific consensus

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You’ve probably seen the headlines lately about amoeba, slime mold, and other single-celled organisms that problem-solve, think, and make complex decisions. You might be tempted to dismiss it as anthropomorphism. Are scientists wrongly attributing human characteristics like intelligence to simple brainless organisms?

“When people say we’re anthropomorphizing, I’m saying you’re using a term that doesn’t exist in modern science. There’s nothing like it anymore, ”says Michael Levin, developmental and synthetic biologists at Tufts University and lead author of a new study on solving slime mold problems. “What does this word really mean? It means humans have magical abilities, doesn’t it? And that we inappropriately allow something else to have this magical ability. It’s almost pre-scientific thought. I just don’t see it as a bearable worldview anymore. “

Levin’s study released last week shows a slimy mold, a brainless drip called Physarum, detect signals in its environment and make a decision on where to grow. The results suggest that he is “able to construct a picture of the world around him using some kind of sonar. It’s kind of biomechanics, ”says Levin. “He’s sitting on this gelatin and he feels the way all the objects around him are pushing on this gelatin. By observing these mechanical signals, he determines where the different objects, bigger and smaller, are located, and then he makes decisions which way to crawl.

An important feature of the study design is that no food was used in this experiment. Previous studies demonstrate Physarum learning and memory using food (smell and taste), also called chemical detection. Levin’s study shows that slime mold relies on another sense. He uses to touch detect objects from a distance.

It is only good science to ask if there could be any explanation other than thought. Unlike a compass that can rotate and then point north, Physarum is able to process memories of past experiences with competing sensory inputs in real time and perform calculations that can and do indeed alter the way it will react.

“Here’s what he’s definitely doing,” Levin suggests. “It’s definitely about making decisions. Because among the different options of his environment, he always chooses to go towards the greatest mass distribution. In addition to decision making, it is also about detecting and processing information. “During the first few hours, before it develops in any direction, it acquires information and determines which direction it is going to go. ”

If you feel the urge to push back on these claims, Levin thinks it may be more of a psychological or semantic blockage. How much work are you willing to do to separate thinking from the acts of information processing, problem solving, and decision making? And what reluctance can we attribute to our psychological need to preserve thought as a sacred human privilege? “If you don’t call it thinking, then you’re going to have a hard time saying what it is [that] human brains do when they think.

The scientific paradigm shift

In his 1962 classic The structure of scientific revolutions, The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn wrote: “… scientific revolutions are ushered in by a growing feeling, again often limited to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the world. exploring an aspect of nature. .. ”

In many areas, the existing paradigm has not functioned adequately in the exploration of certain aspects of nature. “When I say learning, I mean learning. When I say memory, I mean memory, ”insisted evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano of plant behaviors when I interviewed her for my 2018 article, A mind without a brain: the science of plant intelligence takes root. Galiano was frustrated after appearing on the popular science show Radiolab. At the end of the show, the growers and a plant biologist suggested that Galiano spoke in poetic metaphor when she spoke of her experiences with plant intelligence, even though no credible scientist interprets their results metaphorically.

Galiano, Levin and Levin’s colleagues Donald Ingber, director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, and Nirosha Murugan of Algoma University in Canada, are among a growing number of researchers from scientific disciplines and around the world. who observe the behaviors of brainless organisms that are increasingly difficult to justify as purely stupid and mechanical, thus pushing the boundaries of the old scientific paradigm.

But Levin doesn’t think it’s anything revolutionary. “I really want to make sure that it doesn’t sound like I’m claiming something that other people don’t know. There is a very large community of people who study basal cognition, soft body robotics, active matter, there are all kinds of people who know that.

Levin believes the resistance Galiano received was due to her talking about plants. Based on his own experience, Levin’s research is either considered current or controversial, depending on where he is on campus. “I always know in which department I’m giving a speech based on the part of my speech that makes people angry. And it’s always a different part because you can say obvious things to a neuroscience audience, but if you say the same to a molecular geneticist, he throws tomatoes. And you can say things to a biologist, that if you look to the doctors of soft robotics or regenerative medicine, they’re like, yeah, no problem, and biologists go crazy saying it can’t be. So why is science so specialized and siled? Levin gives it up. “Since when does nature have departments?

There is no doubt that a clear line between unintelligent life and intelligent life would be easier for humans to accept. “It worked well when we had this creationist view of the world,” says Levin. “There’s just no way to do it scientifically.”

Levin notes that the brain may not be the only intelligent thing occupying the human body. When he mentions cell behavior, it prompts me to make an obvious follow-up: does every cell in the human body think? Without hesitation, Levin replies, “Cells most certainly think if we keep in mind that thought is a continuous variable. Do they think like humans? Of course not. Do they have the same hopes and dreams as humans? Absolutely not. Are they making a small version of what we are doing? Most definitely, yes. All the cells in your body do it.

Stay tuned for Part 2 on Cyborgs, Hybrots, and the Implications for Artificial Intelligence.

For related content, watch Levin’s TED talk on the electrical code of cells that could end cancer and aging:

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