Cognition and Consciousness: Learning from Cognizant Jellyfish

Slime mold has been a subject of discussion on the podcast since Season 1.  Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada originally used slime mold, aka physarum, as an example of spontaneous emergent order in nature, with the purpose of demonstrating that what looks like design can, and frequently does occur without any designer.  Prego then penned an essay in Season 5 to talk about the results of ongoing research.

The world-shaking conclusion of the investigation, the evidence that sent everyone back to square one, is that physarum exhibits cognition without a brain that is capable of symbolic representation.  Cognitive scientists until recently believed that symbolic representation was a necessary ingredient to the mix.

Jellyfish are likewise interesting to cognitive scientists, because they also exhibit cognition, and also do not possess any structure that functions as a brain, although jellyfish do have a neuronal net and are multicellular organisms that accomplish cognition in a somewhat different manner from slime mold.

The episode concludes with a discussion of the relationship between cognition and consciousness, what consciousness might be in a fundamental sense, and the fascinating ongoing debate among cognitive scientists, as new evidence continuously comes to light.

Transcript

From Slime Mold to Jellyfish

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth:  to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.

 As previously mentioned, senior contributing editor Prego de Nada is a lifelong user of and advocate for pakalolo.  If you do not recognize the term, pakalolo is Hawaiian pidgin which literally translates to “wacky tabacky”, i.e. cannabis.  

 Since the Hawaiian language only has seven consonants, “tobacco” is transliterated to pidgin as “paka”; and lolo in pidgin is an affectionate way of calling someone crazy or stupid, a usage which probably stems from lolo in the Hawaiian language, which means brain.

 Prego will tell you that pakalolo has many benign effects and very little risk. Among the benign effects Prego values most is stimulus to the imagination.  And many of the podcast essays that have been authored by Prego were inspired by ideas that came to Prego while in a state of botanical enhancement.

 Here is another one.

 Prego writes:

 In several previous essays I have reported on the amazing organism known as “slime mold”, or physarum.  I first mentioned Physarum as a marvelous example of self-organization and emergent order in the natural world in several essays published in Season One.

 My reason for talking about self-organization and emergent order was that I wished to help spread the word about this in a world where most people have not even yet heard of this widespread and pervasive phenomenon.  Most of our world today is stuck in medievalist intelligent-design thinking mode, and consequently there is much room for improvement in the thinking modes most people have inherited when it comes to diagnosing many types of problems and prescribing effective solutions.

 A medievalist thinker is one who takes as obvious the proposition that without a “someone” in a position of authority giving orders that order cannot be.  So the very existence of order is taken as proof that there is in fact a “someone” in a position of authority somewhere.

 My hope is that if I can demonstrate that order without a someone giving orders is not only possible but commonplace in the natural world, which includes human society, we can collectively move on from this mistaken archaic notion, and we will stop attributing agency.  This dynamic is what is behind much of the conflict taking place in today’s world, often cynically promoted by those seeking power.

 A brief review:

 Physarum is a very simple organism which is an agglomeration of single-celled amoeba-like creatures.  Each nucleus becomes part of this agglomeration but there are no internal cell walls, so we call the agglomeration a plasmodium.  The plasmodium has no musculature, no nervous system and not even any neurons. 

 The plasmodium is more than a colony but less than a multicellular animal.  The deeply interesting and surprising thing about physarum is that even though it is without neurons it is capable of a rudimentary sort of cognition.  

 The plasmodium exhibits goal-directed behavior and sensate interaction with its environment.  It forages by making use of a process that leads to near-perfect efficiency; it anticipates periodic events; and it habituates to irritants that do not harm it.  

 Communication within the plasmodium occurs by means of mechanical and chemical waves, and not by means of electrical signaling and reception, which is how internal communication happens in an organism with neurons.

 As a result of the investigation which has revealed this type of cognition, cognitive scientists have had to rework many of their theories of mind, specifically the ones based on the previously standard assumption, which was that without a brain that is capable of symbolic representation cognition would not be possible.

 Physarum and other simple organisms do in fact exhibit cognition, so anyone employing scientific thinking is compelled to go back to the drawing board and create a theory of mind that is consistent with demonstrated facts.  And that is how the concept of “basal cognition” came to be defined, a term used to describe the minimum functional criteria for the phenomenon of cognition to emerge.

 It naturally occurred to me that an investigation of cognition could lead to an investigation of the phenomenon of consciousness.  Many scientists perceive no clear boundary between cognition and consciousness – they regard consciousness as an advanced and complex form of cognition, and not as a phenomenon that is different in kind.  Others do perceive a boundary and have expressed reasons to believe that consciousness is different in kind from cognition.  It’s a subject of lively debate.

 As a next step in my own learning process, I thought it would be fruitful to investigate another simple life form that exhibits cognition, one that is more complex than slime mold, but still a life form with no central nervous system, although it does have neurons:  jellyfish.

 Here is what I have learned.

 Jellyfish have a diffuse nervous system – a nerve net – but no brain.  They have specialized sensory structures that sense physical contact, and some of them even sense light.  They are capable of coordinated locomotion, reflex modulation and sensory integration.  Many of them even sleep.

 Slime mold and jellyfish, although structurally different, are functionally similar.  Jellyfish have many specialized cells, whereas slime mold is one giant cell.  Jellyfish have a diffuse net of neurons, whereas slime mold has no neurons at all.  Internal information processing in jellyfish includes electrical signaling, whereas slime mold relies solely on chemical and mechanical signaling.  Both species exhibit basal cognition as described above, but with differences in how they carry it out.

 The behavior of physarum shows decision making, memory without symbolic representation, and problem-solving ability via embodied dynamics rather than internal models.  It demonstrates that cognition can be distributed in material processes, not confined to neuronal tissue.

 Jellyfish also have muscle tissue, which physarum does not, that they use for propulsion and other movements.

 So with jellyfish we are examining a cellular organism that is more complex than physarum, which exhibits cognition without neurons, and one that exhibits cognition involving neurons, but without any structure than functions as a brain.

 Among the capabilities of the jellyfish are sensory-motor integration; coordinated action; and modulated states of fatigue, arousal and sleep. 

 Facts like these are extremely helpful to anyone who is scientifically investigating sentience, cognition and consciousness.

 Notice that I qualified the investigation with the word “scientifically”.  There are many among us who also investigate consciousness by means of fantasy and imagination, which in effect suspends skepticism and favors credulity.  I am not condemning this – on the contrary, I believe this sort of imagining can be a good thing because it is imagination that leads us to testable hypotheses which we might never get to if we exercise the skepticism too early in the process.

 See for example the work of those who speculate that consciousness is a basic property of all matter in the universe, referred to as panpsychism, such as Christof Koch and especially David Chalmers.

 Panpsychism posits that consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical reality like mass and energy that finds expression in complex systems, and which can be explained in reductionist terms.

 We are wise, of course, to bear in mind the distinction between the stories that scientific investigation tells us and the stories that live only in fantasy.

 And scientific investigation to date has shown us that the most fruitful explanation for the existence of consciousness is the evolutionary advantage it confers on conscious beings.  As such it is an emergent phenomenon rather than something that can be explained in reductionist terms.

 A lively ongoing debate concerns what some cognitive scientists refer to as “the hard problem” of consciousness.  The hard problem in their view is how to account for subjective experience, and they claim not to see how theories of emergence explain “what it is like” to experience conscious awareness.  Emergence in their view can explain function but not feeling.

 Others, notably the late Daniel Dennett, argue that there is no hard problem, that consciousness is fully explainable in physical terms, and that positing the hard problem reveals an assumption that there exists what he calls a Cartesian “theater of the mind”, in which some supposed observer watches the experiences that are presented to it.  

 He argues that you are not really explaining consciousness by inventing a smaller conscious observer.  He says that this argument leads to an infinite regress, a mind within a mind within a mind, et cetera ad infinitum.

 In his view, the self that we humans imagine ourselves to be is a mental construct based on information being edited and re-edited by competing neural processes, a sort of continuously evolving narrative.  

 Neuroscience has at the very least shown that sights, sounds, memories and emotions are processed in different parts of the brain, and there is no single physical location where it all comes together.

 In this view there is no sharp distinction between cognition and consciousness.  Consciousness is metaphorically somewhat like cognition on steroids.  It is what cognition feels like, or seems to feel like, when it reaches a certain level of complexity where the system represents itself as part of the world.

 Others are arguing that there is something more to subjective experience, that something remains to be explained.

 I also call your attention to Melanie Challenger, a profound and imaginative thinker, who argues that the mind is more than what happens within the confines of the skull; that it is instead a whole-body experience.  The organism does much of its sensing, responding and regulating independently of the brain.  What we call subjective feeling arises from sensate interaction with the environment, and it is somewhat artificial to try to distinguish between cognition and feeling.  Mind, in her view, is what a living body does as a whole system.

 Other contributors to this fascinating scientific investigation are Antonio Damasio and Evan Thompson, and I encourage you to look deeper into the work of all these scientists if you find the topic interesting.

 And as for David Chalmers, who is a sort of gadfly to the discussion, which is not all bad, I see parallels between his insistence on “something more” and Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological proof of the existence of God.  

 Anselm argued that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, and from this basis concluded that God must exist simply because we can conceive of such a “that”.

 Chalmers argues that we can conceive of a zombie that is physically identical to us but which does not have subjective feelings, and from this basis concludes that conscious feeling is over and above the physical.

 Anselm argued that we can conceive God, therefore God must exist; Chalmers argues that we can conceive zombies, therefore consciousness is non-physical.  

 Anselm’s argument was buttressed by the fact that anyone who disagreed with him was risking being burned at the stake as a heretic, and without this buttressing we might very well not be still talking about him and his ontological “proof”, simply because the logic is less than compelling.

 Chalmers’ argument is similarly less than logically compelling, and does not have the buttressing Anselm enjoyed, so far fewer people agree with Chalmers today than agreed with Anselm back in his day.

 Thanks to Prego for this fascinating look into the latest in cognitive science.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences.

 Treasure your memories.

 Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.