Wow, stealing my own comment from last week’s Grokking at the edge of linear separability because it applies here even more so: this paper is so simple, dumb, and absolutely breathtakingly interesting. Thanks for sharing! Never would I have thought that “mycelium doesn’t explore the center of a circle” would hold such profound insight…

For those interested, heres the paper itself: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450482... two interesting things to me:

1. Based on my silly American reading of citation names, it seems Japanese researchers have been leading the charge on basal cognition - a great cultural diversity win! Obviously American and European cognitive scientists are involved, but I get the impression most would dismiss this as misguided.

2. The intro has some of the best philosophy I’ve ever seen in an empirical paper. No citations to philosophers of course because they’d be laughed at, but it’s spot on:

This evidence led to a formal framework called “basal cognition” for reframing the definition of cognition as “fundamental processes, such as memory, learning, decision-making, and anticipation, and mechanisms that enabled organisms to track some environmental states and act appropriately to ensure survival and reproduction” which existed long before nervous systems evolved. On the contrary, recent studies considering neuroscience hypothesize that the cognition of humans, as a brained animal, emerges from the patterns of interconnections and information transfer across numerous neurons…
In this context, the brain exhibits at least two levels of cognition. One is the basal cognition at the cellular level of each neuron, and the other is the classical means of cognition, which emerges from the activities and interconnections of the neural networks. This classical cognition is crucial for brained organisms to “recognize” the external world.

Preach! I’ll do them the favor of providing IMO the clearest exploration of this idea from premodern cogsci (aka philosophy), Schopenhauer’s “fourfold” theory of life:

Thus causality, this director of each and every change, now appears in nature in three different forms, namely *as cause* in the narrowest sense, *as stimulus*, and *as motive*. It is precisely on this difference that the true and essential distinction is based between inorganic bodies, plants, and animals, and not on external anatomical, or even chemical characteristics.
The cause in the narrowest sense is that according to which alone changes ensue in the inorganic kingdom… Newton's third fundamental law: "Action and reaction are equal to each other." applies exclusively to cause…
The second form of causality is the stimulus; it governs organic life as such and hence the life of plant, and the vegetative and thus unconscious part of animal life, which is in fact just a plant life. This second form is characterized by the absence of the distinctive signs of the first. Thus here action and reaction are not equal to each other, and the intensity of the effect through all its degrees by no means corresponds to the intensity of the cause: on the contrary, by intensifying the cause the effect may even be turned into its opposite.
The third form of causality is the motive. In this form causality controls animal life proper and hence conduct, that is, the external, consciously performed actions of all animals. The medium of motives is knowledge.

I think this is a direct rephrasing of the above, putting fungus/“basal cognition” in the “vegetative” category.

As Cladistics slowly erodes all of our taxonomic distinctions, I think we could all stand to incorporate more of similarly functional divisions in our intuitive paradigms/standpoints/worldviews. Schopenhauer doesn’t mention “fungus” or “mushrooms” once (much less “slime molds”!), but I think he would happily call them “vegetative” nonetheless, and be thrilled to see this paper!

TL;DR: cognition is graduated, which means it’s neither uniquely homogenous nor uniformly gradual.