Today I Learned

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Griff

Slime mold is smart?

https://www.sciencefriday.com/segmen...s-slime-molds/

Despite having no brain or neurons and being just one giant goopy cell, these slime molds keep defying our expectations. They can solve mazes, recreate the Tokyo railway network (animation below), learn, and even anticipate events. They can make rational and irrational choices that mirror our own. Not to mention they’re visually stunning too.

Intelligence is organized matter.

I believe this, and all the weird--ethical?--implications.

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Earlier, Bruce's Inflation (cosmic) thread had me thinking-- the universe was too hot for atoms to form, for 380,000 years. That's a long time-- long enough for matter, such as it was, to organize into intelligence? Could it have survived, evolved, adapted to a cooling universe, become embedded in the later, more structured matter that was to form? Or, as a rare form of intelligent matter inside the hot soup of exotic stars?

Could things like the unexplained disparity between matter and anti-matter constitute a conscious decision by the universe, or pockets of conscious agency within large chunks of the universe? Kind of like, a huge de-centralized "slime mold" ??

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What if intelligence is the default state of matter, and we've been grossly mis-classifying what intelligence is?