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.