Fascinating article. So life goes: seek energy to run the proton gradient, that drives all higher emerging functions in a hierarchy. I may have missed the method to pump protons out tho?
Anyway, I think that ‘thinking’ and ‘reasoning’ are just evolved movement. We have sensors and actuators and an ever increasing complexity of signal moving from sensors to actuators through a processing layer that eventually turns into our cognition. For bacteria, there’s a real short way from signal to actuation, but in ginormous life such as us, we delay signals and process them over many layers of complexity, but all signals eventually maps to an action, a movement.
The world model of a bacterium isn’t big and it likely doesn’t have complexity enough to shape a full spatial sense (only directional based on gradients - taxochemical reaction ?). More complex organisms creates internal representations of sensors/signals in a world model, and senses only those representations, so our core executive cognition never sees anything but highly abstract representations of real signals, never the direct signal itself. It does however accumulate in the cognitive structure and WILL map to 1 or more actions based on it later.
Like the Author, I think this article creates better understanding of both living systems but also cognition in its simplest binary form - converge or diverge, safety vs exploration, go back or go forward - much like the simple pulsing behavior of slime molds.
Life is basically just a really complex way to resolve energy gradients by creating metabolic pathways that channel that energy towards creating localized low entropy environments. I’d argue cognition is a bit too strong a word to use in this scenario, it’s more of a mechanical feedback loop like thermostat. The change in environment triggers chemical change in the organism, and it changes behavior in response. But it absolutely is the basis for all volition. Complex organisms like us just have a huge number of really complex feedback loops that our brains end up balancing.
Fascinating article. So life goes: seek energy to run the proton gradient, that drives all higher emerging functions in a hierarchy. I may have missed the method to pump protons out tho?
Anyway, I think that ‘thinking’ and ‘reasoning’ are just evolved movement. We have sensors and actuators and an ever increasing complexity of signal moving from sensors to actuators through a processing layer that eventually turns into our cognition. For bacteria, there’s a real short way from signal to actuation, but in ginormous life such as us, we delay signals and process them over many layers of complexity, but all signals eventually maps to an action, a movement.
The world model of a bacterium isn’t big and it likely doesn’t have complexity enough to shape a full spatial sense (only directional based on gradients - taxochemical reaction ?). More complex organisms creates internal representations of sensors/signals in a world model, and senses only those representations, so our core executive cognition never sees anything but highly abstract representations of real signals, never the direct signal itself. It does however accumulate in the cognitive structure and WILL map to 1 or more actions based on it later.
Like the Author, I think this article creates better understanding of both living systems but also cognition in its simplest binary form - converge or diverge, safety vs exploration, go back or go forward - much like the simple pulsing behavior of slime molds.
Life is basically just a really complex way to resolve energy gradients by creating metabolic pathways that channel that energy towards creating localized low entropy environments. I’d argue cognition is a bit too strong a word to use in this scenario, it’s more of a mechanical feedback loop like thermostat. The change in environment triggers chemical change in the organism, and it changes behavior in response. But it absolutely is the basis for all volition. Complex organisms like us just have a huge number of really complex feedback loops that our brains end up balancing.