Can Something Without a Brain Be Intelligent?

What if a brain isn't required to learn?

It sounds ridiculous until you meet Physarum polycephalum, a strange slime mold with no brain, no neurons, and no nervous system that has demonstrated some surprisingly sophisticated behavior.

In this episode of the TTT Podcast, Beard Laws and his AI co-host Luther open the file on one of nature's strangest organisms.

Researchers have watched slime mold navigate mazes, build remarkably efficient networks, alter its behavior based on previous experiences, and use its own slime trails as a kind of external spatial memory.

Then there's the famous Tokyo experiment.

Researchers placed food sources in locations representing population centers around Tokyo and allowed slime mold to build its own network between them. The resulting network showed surprisingly similar characteristics to the real Tokyo rail system when researchers compared efficiency, cost, and resilience.

But that's only where the rabbit hole begins.

Because experiments have also suggested that slime mold can display habituation, a basic form of learning in which previous experience changes future behavior.

And this organism doesn't have a single neuron.

So what exactly counts as learning?

What counts as memory?

What counts as problem solving?

And at what point are we willing to use the word intelligence?

Matt and Luther explore the strange science of decentralized biological systems, play a round of Brain or No Brain, and confront an uncomfortable possibility:

Maybe intelligence isn't a switch that's either on or off.

Maybe it's a collection of abilities that nature has been developing in ways that look nothing like us.

Because when we dismiss slime mold by saying, "That's not intelligence. That's just chemistry," there's one slightly inconvenient problem.

Aren't we chemistry too?

Chapters
00:00 — The Brainless Organism That Can Solve Problems
02:45 — Open the File: What Is Slime Mold?
06:37 — The Slime Mold Maze Experiment
10:57 — The Blob That Recreated Tokyo
16:42 — Can Slime Mold Remember?
20:00 — Learning Without a Brain
23:53 — Brain or No Brain
26:36 — What Actually Counts as Intelligence?

The TTT Podcast is hosted by Beard Laws with AI co-host Luther and is part of the Bleav Network.

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