Mar 2, 2025 01:59 AM
https://www.noemamag.com/a-radical-new-p...om-matter/
EXCERPT: . . . We seem to be entering a new era of cries du coeur to gather more life, including plants, under the umbrella of intelligence. [...] Their authors are not even at the vanguard anymore. Some boldly go even further, finding behavior they label intelligent in fungi, bacteria, slime molds and paramecia. Even the cells that constitute our bodies are now standing at the velvet ropes, backed by frontier scientists waving evidence of behavior that might qualify as the hallmarks of intelligence if it were observed in an animal.
What on Earth is going on? Should we consider everything to be intelligent now?
There’s some evidence that the question is exactly backward. A small but growing number of philosophers, physicists and developmental biologists say that, instead of continually admitting new creatures into the category of intelligence, the new findings are evidence that there is something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself.
And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.
[...] In the past few decades, it has become increasingly clear that similar electric signals mediate the actions and senses of all kinds of creatures without nervous systems. “Non-neural cells can be wired up too,” said Alison Hanson, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. “They’re found in bacteria, they’re found in plants, they’re found in fungi, they’re found anywhere. You put epithelial cells together, you get an electric network, just on a slower timescale. They’re not unique to human brains. They’re everywhere.”
Take plants. They may not have nervous systems but they do process and transmit information using methods that range, like ours, from hormonal to chemical — and electrical. A leaf has on the order of 30 million cells, each of which is studded with thousands of tiny electrical conduits called ion channels. This turns every plant cell into an electrical conductor. To instantiate their defenses, plants may employ fast electric signals whose rhythms look a lot like human action potentials. For example, tomato plants send them when their fruits are being eaten and release an antimicrobial chemical, possibly to guard against infection. But plants also make use of other types of electric signal — the variation potential, which may tell it about non-biotic attacks like fire, and the slower, more localized “system potential,” whose meaning is contested.
Fungi may also use electric signals to process the valence of stimuli from their environment. Researchers have measured oscillations in the electrical voltage of their constituent hyphae when they colonize their food. The function of these oscillations has not yet been as extensively probed or characterized as a plant’s.
However, as Adamatzky told me, “Fungi respond to different stimuli with consistently different patterns of electrical spiking.” His recordings of electrical activity in four species of fungi suggested that these differences could be encoding representations of their external world. The “language” he had identified was not like our social chatter; it was akin to how analog electrical signals encode our own brains’ experience of the world around us — a kind of neural code.
For example, the electrical signals may be a signal from a scouting tendril that alerts the rest of the body to the discovery of a good source of nutrition. Other studies of wood-decaying fungi, including oyster and honey mushrooms, have also found action potential-like responses to light, fire, salt and alcohol, among other stimuli. And some mushroom caps change their electrical activity after rainfall, possibly propagating their “knowledge” down to underground hyphae.
Slime molds, whose “bodies” are single cells without central command structures, still manage to pass electrical signals. Environmental stimuli cause synchronized rhythmic oscillations that appear to encode a memory of the original stimulus. Researchers theorize this is important to their ability to learn.
Scientists are divided on the implications of all this — some, like Siryaporn, think that the electrical signals in these creatures are just stimulus-response tropisms. Others believe they might be a reflection of the sensory information the creatures are picking up, potentially analogous to some kind of “concept” they are able to form of the world around them.
Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . We seem to be entering a new era of cries du coeur to gather more life, including plants, under the umbrella of intelligence. [...] Their authors are not even at the vanguard anymore. Some boldly go even further, finding behavior they label intelligent in fungi, bacteria, slime molds and paramecia. Even the cells that constitute our bodies are now standing at the velvet ropes, backed by frontier scientists waving evidence of behavior that might qualify as the hallmarks of intelligence if it were observed in an animal.
What on Earth is going on? Should we consider everything to be intelligent now?
There’s some evidence that the question is exactly backward. A small but growing number of philosophers, physicists and developmental biologists say that, instead of continually admitting new creatures into the category of intelligence, the new findings are evidence that there is something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself.
And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.
[...] In the past few decades, it has become increasingly clear that similar electric signals mediate the actions and senses of all kinds of creatures without nervous systems. “Non-neural cells can be wired up too,” said Alison Hanson, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. “They’re found in bacteria, they’re found in plants, they’re found in fungi, they’re found anywhere. You put epithelial cells together, you get an electric network, just on a slower timescale. They’re not unique to human brains. They’re everywhere.”
Take plants. They may not have nervous systems but they do process and transmit information using methods that range, like ours, from hormonal to chemical — and electrical. A leaf has on the order of 30 million cells, each of which is studded with thousands of tiny electrical conduits called ion channels. This turns every plant cell into an electrical conductor. To instantiate their defenses, plants may employ fast electric signals whose rhythms look a lot like human action potentials. For example, tomato plants send them when their fruits are being eaten and release an antimicrobial chemical, possibly to guard against infection. But plants also make use of other types of electric signal — the variation potential, which may tell it about non-biotic attacks like fire, and the slower, more localized “system potential,” whose meaning is contested.
Fungi may also use electric signals to process the valence of stimuli from their environment. Researchers have measured oscillations in the electrical voltage of their constituent hyphae when they colonize their food. The function of these oscillations has not yet been as extensively probed or characterized as a plant’s.
However, as Adamatzky told me, “Fungi respond to different stimuli with consistently different patterns of electrical spiking.” His recordings of electrical activity in four species of fungi suggested that these differences could be encoding representations of their external world. The “language” he had identified was not like our social chatter; it was akin to how analog electrical signals encode our own brains’ experience of the world around us — a kind of neural code.
For example, the electrical signals may be a signal from a scouting tendril that alerts the rest of the body to the discovery of a good source of nutrition. Other studies of wood-decaying fungi, including oyster and honey mushrooms, have also found action potential-like responses to light, fire, salt and alcohol, among other stimuli. And some mushroom caps change their electrical activity after rainfall, possibly propagating their “knowledge” down to underground hyphae.
Slime molds, whose “bodies” are single cells without central command structures, still manage to pass electrical signals. Environmental stimuli cause synchronized rhythmic oscillations that appear to encode a memory of the original stimulus. Researchers theorize this is important to their ability to learn.
Scientists are divided on the implications of all this — some, like Siryaporn, think that the electrical signals in these creatures are just stimulus-response tropisms. Others believe they might be a reflection of the sensory information the creatures are picking up, potentially analogous to some kind of “concept” they are able to form of the world around them.
Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self... (MORE - details)
