Slime Mould and Philosophy

Hello, welcome everyone. It's January 29th, 2025. We're in Active Inference Guest Stream 97.1 with Dr. Matthew Sims discussing Acellular Slime Mold, a jumping off point for exploring different notions of biological memory. So, thank you for joining. Looking forward to hearing more. Thanks so much. Hello, welcome everyone. It's January 20, 2025. We're in the next one. Returning in one second. Thank you. We're back. Like a slime mold. Returning. We're back. Shall I start? Or should I? Shall we just go for it? Yeah, yeah. Begin from the beginning of the presentation. Thank you. I can't hear you. Oh, thank you. We're back. Go for it. Okay. Sorry about that. So yeah, today I'm going to be looking at a couple of questions regarding Phauserum Polycephalum, which is Acellular Slime Mold. And I'm going to be looking at different notions of memory that have been thought about in the biological sciences, not necessarily in, for example, when you're thinking about large language models or when you're thinking about computational memory outside of biological systems, but biological memory. Phauserum Polycephalum is a kind of, is a springboard, if you will, for thinking about things like this. Now this organism, I'm going to get a little bit into its biology and a little bit into kind of its, its complex life cycles. And these are, these are different things that I kind of have researched and thought about in the kind of more recent book that I've published with Cambridge University Press called Slymold and Philosophy. And this particular talk that you'll see right now is going to be kind of an excerpt, if you will, from a couple of the chapters, namely chapter three of the book. And looking at memory, I think that's a quite nice way to get, to get it, to get a kind of an overall understanding of the importance of this, this system, this model system. And it's a system that's becoming used more and more to investigate various questions in either cognitive science or in ecology or in, or in philosophy, biology or theoretical biology, more generally. Questions like biological individuality, for example, questions like, you know, the biological or the biological status of something like a spore, dormant spore, when we're thinking about living systems being systems that are metabolically active. So what does that mean if life is, you have a form of life that's not metabolically active and looking at the biology of something like a pizarin polycephaline or slime mold can really, I think it's very kind of instrumental into digging into these questions, more theoretical questions. And also you can explore and expand upon these questions by generating hypotheses that can be really tested in an organism that's quite easy to culture. So this talk is going to proceed as follows with that kind of background. I'm going to look at what pizarin is, then I'm going to turn to a really, really, really beautiful experiment. It's a very interesting and powerful experiment, well designed by Chris Reed and colleagues at Macquarie University. They're still, they're still doing experiments with pizarin. And this particular experiment is about kind of externalized memory in pizarin. I'll look at that experiment, go through it, then I'll look at different forms of biological memory. And these different forms of biological memory, I'm going to cap it out at three or four different forms of biological memory and try to connect them all. And then I'm going to ask a question regarding whether or not one or one or more of these forms of biological memory requires an explanation using kind of cognitive theories or cognitive frameworks. And I'm going to answer that question using the notion of metabolic individuality. I said, again, it's biological individuality, which we'll get into during the talk also. And so applying this particular type of criterion from biological individuality or metabolic individuality as a criterion, I'm going to be able to kind of rule out which…