Mind the Matter: Active Matter, Basal Cognition, and the Making of Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This thesis explores a recent trend in theoretical biology and cognitive science called the biogenic approach to life and mind: the view that living processes of self-organization and self-maintenance are intimately linked with agential capacities underpinning survival and reproduction. It addresses a central question within this body of literature: what is an agent? What are the conditions that must be in place for agency to emerge in nature? What systems can be called agents in a realist sense; and what systems are metaphorically ascribed agency? Because the systems the biogenic approach examines (such as protists, unicellulars, and slime moulds, to name a few) do not exhibit sharp distinctions between their materiality and their cognitive capacities, these questions boil down to how mind relates to its material substrate more generally—connecting to debates in the life and mind sciences concerning the epistemic and ontological status of ascribing agency to natural phenomena. That is, it addresses the naturalisation of agency: how do we reconcile the purposive nature of organismic processes with our naturalist commitments to scientific methodology? Historically, this amounted to showing how the supposedly agential nature of organisms can be reduced to mechanistic processes. We treat organisms as if they are agents, but ultimately this locution can be elided when ontologising. In this thesis, I pull from recent developments in Active Matter Physics, Basal Cognition, and Bio-Inspired A.I. to argue that this conception of materiality and physicality needs to be reworked to reflect the state-of-the-art. When we pivot away from a conception of materiality as entailing reductive physicalism, we find that the above adumbrated disciplines are in fact conceptualising and operationalising notions of agency (and closely related notions of emergence and downward causation) that are both realist with regards to agency and non-reductive when exploring materiality. To conclude, I argue that the biogenic approach can better overcome concerns of reductionism and as if teleology when equipped with this updated view of materiality.