Cellosophy

Principles of Minimal Cognition: Casting Cognition as Sensorimotor Coordination

Within the cognitive sciences, cognition tends to be interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective, involving a stringent set of human capabilities. Instead, we suggest that cognition is better explicated as a much more general biological phenomenon, allowing the lower bound of cognition to extend much further down the phylogenetic scale. We argue that elementary forms of cognition can already be witnessed in prokaryotes possessing a functional sensorimotor analogue of the nervous system. Building on a case-study of the Escherichia coli bacterium and its sensorimotor system, the TCST-system, we home in on the characteristics of minimal cognition, and distinguish it from more basic forms of ontogenetic adaptation. In our view, minimal cognition requires an embodiment consisting of a sensorimotor coupling mechanism that subsumes an autopoietic organization; this forms the basis of the growing consensus that the core of cognition revolves around sensorimotor coupling. We discuss the relevance of our interpretation of minimal cognition for the study of cognition in general

What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels? | Quanta Magazine

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides | Quanta Magazine

Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.

Cognition without brains? Learning and memory in microorganisms

Memory and learning are cognitive abilities typically associated with animals that possess a complex nervous system. Interestingly, recent studies suggest that microorganisms might also display learning-like behaviours. However, a factor limiting progress in this field is the lack of shared, microbe-specific frameworks that allow microbiologists to easily compare discoveries with concepts developed in cognitive sciences. In this review, we aim to bridge this gap by providing a conceptual overview of the definitional requirements for memory and learning to classify microbial behaviours and capabilities. Additionally, we identify and address problems that cause conceptual ambiguity in the microbial cognition literature, thereby facilitating more productive debates on the topic. Finally, we provide a novel perspective on how microbes might ‘learn’ from each other.

Learning Outside the Brain: Integrating Cognitive Science and Systems Biology

Learning is commonplace in organisms such as ourselves and even in organisms as far distant as the bee and the octopus. Such learning is implemented by brains, or neuronal networks, and has been extensively studied within ethology, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Whether learning also takes place in nonneuronal settings has remained a matter of sustained controversy, too often dominated by ideological views. In this survey, I will explain how learning can be rigorously interpreted as a form of information processing and then explore the evidence for whether learning also takes place in organismal contexts outside the brain, such as physiology, development, and individual cells. I will try to explain why it is important to build bridges in this way between cognitive science and systems biology, why concepts and methods from various branches of engineering may be helpful in this task, and what the eventual impact may be on how we think about the organism.

The sentient cell: the cellular foundations of consciousness

"All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that maintain consciousness requires a nervous system. The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, the role of genes, the impact of cognition, and how biological information is processed by all species. It also calls for a rethinking of a variety of issues including the moral implications of the sentient capacities of all species, how welfare concerns need to be expanded beyond where they currently are, and critically, how all life is intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology. The Sentient Cell explores this revolutionary model, which updates the standard neo-Darwinian framework within which current approaches operate and examines the underlying biomolecular features that are the likely candidates for the "invention" of consciousness and outline their role in cellular life." --

A Complex Hierarchy of Avoidance Behaviors in a Single-Cell Eukaryote

Dexter et al. replicate the disputed, century-old observations of Jennings, confirming by video microscopy and statistical analysis that the single-cell ciliate Stentor roeseli exhibits a hierarchy of avoidance behaviors. They show further that each organism’s decision between contracting and detaching resembles a fair coin toss.

Senomic view of the cell: Senome <i>versus</i> Genome

In the legacy of Thomas Henry Huxley, and his ‘epigenetic’ philosophy of biology, cells are proposed to represent a trinity of three memory-storing media: Senome, Epigenome, and Genome that togethe...

All living cells are cognitive

All living cells sense and respond to changes in external or internal conditions. Without that cognitive capacity, they could not obtain nutrition essential for growth, survive inevitable ecological changes, or correct accidents in the complex processes of reproduction. Wherever examined, even the smallest living cells (prokaryotes) display sophisticated regulatory networks establishing appropriate adaptations to stress conditions that maximize the probability of survival. Supposedly "simple" prokaryotic organisms also display remarkable capabilities for intercellular signalling and multicellular coordination. These observations indicate that all living cells are cognitive.

How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  “Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.   Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.   In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).   With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.   Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

The biogenic approach to cognition

After half a century of cognitive revolution we remain far from agreement about what cognition is and what cognition does. It was once thought that these questions could wait until the data were in. Today there is a mountain of data, but no way of making sense of it. The time for tackling the fundamental issues has arrived. The biogenic approach to cognition is introduced not as a solution but as a means of approaching the issues. The traditional, and still predominant, methodological stance in cognitive inquiry is what I call the anthropogenic approach: assume human cognition as the paradigm and work ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept. The biogenic approach, on the other hand, starts with the facts of biology as the basis for theorizing and works ‘up’ to the human case by asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. Biogenic explanations of cognition are currently clustered around two main frameworks for understanding biology: self-organizing complex systems and autopoiesis. The paper describes the frameworks and infers from them ten empirical principles—the biogenic ‘family traits’—that constitute constraints on biogenic theorizing. Because the anthropogenic approach to cognition is not constrained empirically to the same degree, I argue that the biogenic approach is superior for approaching a general theory of cognition as a natural phenomenon.

Brainchildren

Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social; only a unified, multidisciplinary approach will yield a realistic theory of how they came i...

Synthetic philosophy

In this essay, I discuss Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (hereafter From Bacteria) and Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life (hereafter Other Minds) from a methodological perspective. I show that these both instantiate what I call ‘synthetic philosophy.’ They are both Darwinian philosophers of science who draw on each other’s work (with considerable mutual admiration). In what follows I first elaborate on synthetic philosophy in light of From Bacteria and Other Minds; I also explain my reasons for introducing the term; and I close by looking at the function of Darwinism in contemporary synthetic philosophy.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

'A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work.' &#8212;<em>Nature</em>, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, The Evolution of Minds, Daniel C Dennett, 9780393355505

Is Life Just Different? | Quanta Magazine

The idea of ‘biological agency’ — that life devises its own goals and behaves accordingly — complicates our understanding of what it means to be alive. But does it serve a scientific purpose?

Laboratory of Evolutionary Design

Developing biological AI for human good at Stanford University

Controlled Mold

A blog about fermentation, engineering, and cell-ag. We run wild experiments on microbes and try to eat them, all with the help of computers and math.

Cognition all the way down 2.0: neuroscience beyond neurons in the diverse intelligence era

This paper formalizes biological intelligence as search efficiency in multi-scale problem spaces, aiming to resolve epistemic deadlocks in the basal “cognition wars” unfolding in the Diverse Intelligence research program. It extends classical work on symbolic problem-solving to define a novel problem space lexicon and search efficiency metric. Construed as an operationalization of intelligence, this metric is the decimal logarithm of the ratio between the cost of a random walk and that of a biological agent. Thus, the search efficiency measures how many orders of magnitude of dissipative work an agentic policy saves relative to a maximal-entropy search strategy. Empirical models for amoeboid chemotaxis and barium-induced planarian head regeneration show that, under conservative (i.e., intelligence-underestimating) assumptions, even ‘simple’ organisms are from two-hundred- to sextillion-fold more efficient in problem space exploration. In this sense, the deep insights of neuroscience are not about neurons per se, but about the policies and patterns of physics and mathematics that function as a kind of “cognitive glue” binding parts toward higher levels of collective intelligence in wholes of highly diverse composition and origin. Therefore, our synthesis argues that the “mark of the cognitive” is perhaps better sought in the measurable efficiency with which living systems, from single cells to complex organisms, traverse energy and information gradients to tame combinatorial explosions-one problem space at a time.

The cognitive cell: bacterial behavior reconsidered

Research on how bacteria adapt to changing environments underlies the contemporary biological understanding of signal transduction, and signal transduction provides the foundation of the information-processing approach that is the hallmark of the ‘cognitive revolution,’ which began in the mid-20th century. Yet cognitive scientists largely remain oblivious to research into microbial behavior that might provide insights into problems in their own domains, while microbiologists seem equally unaware of the potential importance of their work to understanding cognitive capacities in multicellular organisms, including vertebrates. Evidence in bacteria for capacities encompassed by the concept of cognition is reviewed. Parallels exist not only at the heuristic level of functional analogue, but also at the level of molecular mechanism, evolution and ecology, which is where fruitful cross-fertilization among disciplines might be found.