“If I only had a Brain”

Scarecrow can be forgiven! We have developed a fetish for the grey matter inside our skulls. We know that when we think, we utilize intercellular processes in our brains. It is easy to see why we (or Scarecrow) might think that those brains were an essential precondition of thought itself.

But turns out, brains are overrated! Consciousness is opportunistic: it co-opts physical structures as it finds them and retrofits them for its purposes. The neural structure of the human brain seems ideally suited: “Oh, the things I could do with this!” The long held hypothesis of ‘human exceptionalism’ seems justified. 

There are, however, three potentially serious problems with an anthropocentric model like this. First, there are abundant signs of consciousness throughout the animal kingdom, and there are reasons to believe (see below) that consciousness may also occur in other ‘kingdoms’, e.g. among plants (forests), fungi (the Wood Wide Web), and, yes, even bacteria and other unicellular organisms (slime mold).

Second, we need a model of consciousness that can account for the possibility of intelligent, extra-terrestrial life that may use an entirely different chemistry as its substratum. And third, we need to be able to account for signs of consciousness, now or in the future, as they arise in silicon based AI.

In the February 2026 Issue of New Scientist, Conor Feehly quoted Tom Froese (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology): “The origins of agency (consciousness) coincide with the origins of life (itself).” I am…therefore I think.

Feehly also noted: “Theoretical biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues at Tufts University in Massachusetts recently applied cognitive tools to systems far simpler than even basic, single-celled organisms ...”

In a previous post on this site we explored Michael Levin’s study of the cognitive abilities of Slime Mold. Unlike most unicellular organisms, a slime cell can be visible to the naked eye, growing to as much as a foot in diameter.

But here Feehly went further:

“Surprisingly, even simple networks of biomolecules appear to display some degree of a self… In 2022, complexity scientist Stuart Bartlett at the California Institute of Technology and David Louapre at Ubisoft Entertainment in Paris, France, found that simple ‘autocatalytic’ chemical systems, which react together to replicate themselves, could also learn by association. 

“In autocatalysis, one chemical is fed into the system as fuel, while another chemical is produced by consuming that fuel. The pair found that the reaction rate between these two chemicals is influenced by previous patterns in the concentration of available fuel – a behavior that Bartlett describes as a ‘primitive form of learning’.”   

In our previous post (above) we explored the cognitive abilities of Slime Mold. We compared the performance of slime with that of a supercomputer and the results surprised even me. Think Achilles and a certain tortoise!

A recent article in Knowable Magazine (2/11/2026) spelled it out:

“Some slime molds of the species Physarum Polycephalum consist of one giant, pulsating cell that keeps changing shape as it moves around and branches out to access food and avoid unpleasant things like salt or light. 

“But it took a 2010 experiment led by Japanese biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University to reveal the depths of its sophistication. When Nakagaki placed the oat flakes that Physarum likes in a pattern mimicking the cities surrounding Tokyo, the slime mold’s branches almost exactly reproduced (in just a few hours) the efficient transport connections between them that humans had taken years to develop.”

Nakagaki compared the achievements of Slime Mold with those of a supercomputer, based on the 25 nodes (stations) that constitute the Tokyo area railway system. Both were asked to optimize routes balancing several different variables simultaneously, understanding that there could be more than one ‘right answer’ (a ‘Pareto Frontier’). 

The supercomputer solved the problem in several hours with 100% accuracy. The Slime Mold solved the problem in the same (or less) time but achieved only 91% – 96% accuracy. However, because it was more fault tolerant, mold came up with attractive solutions (i.e. points near the Pareto Frontier) that the ‘perfect’ computer had to rule out.

So a draw? Not bad for slime! But there’s more to the story: Suppose Tokyo decides to open a new station or close an existing one. Every time a change is made, even to just one node and even just temporarily, our supercomputer must solve the problem from scratch. 

Think GPS: Every time you make a wrong turn, it recalculates your entire route; sometimes the new route barely intersects the old one. Apply that to Tokyo Rail. Imagine if they closed one station only to have AI tell them that now they have to reconnect all the stations in the system. Talk about dysfunctional!

Being Slime Mold, on the other hand, means ‘never having to say you’re sorry’, never having to start over. Why would it? Slime modifies its existing model incrementally the same way Tokyo modifies its transit network; there’s no such thing as rebuilding from scratch in the real (organic) world. Modern Rome rests on Caesar’s ruins.

Note: I am a direct descendant of Planet Earth’s first DNA equipped cell. So are you, dear cousin; and so is your pet goldfish.

Slime Mold is a form of distributed intelligence, like blockchain; it compulsively preserves the past and builds off it. A supercomputer, on the other hand, is the paradigmatic central planner, periodically ‘starting over’ with a new and improved economic plan for the People’s Republic. A computer starts fast and achieves impressive early results. But when it comes to long term utility, central intelligence is a bust. Just as the people of Eastern Europe.

A slime cell looks like a central blob from which a network of vein-like ‘tubes’ emanates — first larger tubes, then smaller tubes that fan out in the direction of food and retract in the vicinity of poison (e.g. salt) or another danger (e.g. sunlight). Inside those tubes, cytoplasmic fluid is rhythmically flowing back and forth…

“The…best-positioned tubes will grow larger and larger and receive more and more flow, while others will fade away — and hence, over time, a super-efficient network of links will form.

“You could say that the shape of the network (and its underlying fluid flow dynamics) helps Physarum to remember. Appropriately sizing its branches in accordance with food sources it has encountered recently makes for a simple but effective way to recall where food can be found…contraction patterns may persist and store information similar to the way waves of activity in our brain can store information.”

So brains do not create consciousness; consciousness configures brains…and other ‘mind friendly’ patterns in the material medium. Author L. Frank Baum (1900) makes the point that Scarecrow had always been conscious and intelligent. Sadly, he was taken-in by society’s brain fetish and made to feel inferior. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, he fell prey to the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.

Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man, and therefore Baum, are early existential heroes. They are defined by their choices and their actions, not by their physical substrata. None of us is controlled by our Past; we each configure the past so that it supports our own immediate choices. We create our own causal pathways, our own destinies, our own pathologies. 

Alcoholic Anonymous is famous for its memes. One of the best: “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” In our context, we can interpret this as follows: 

We make our own changes

Nothing changes us 

When we change, everything changes

We are more mold than machine,

Thank God.

***

Paul Klee’s “Botanical Theatre” (1924) imagines plants as if they were performers on a stage, each form carrying a sense of personality and intention. With its delicate lines and playful abstraction, the painting suggests that plant life has its own quiet intelligence, unfolding in rhythm and structure like a choreographed act.