The World of SPLectrum
Where Basal Cognition and SPLectrum Meet
I wrote earlier about the field that waited a century — how basal cognition, the research programme studying cognition below the nervous system, spent a hundred years as orphaned results before Pamela Lyon inverted the question and gave the evidence a home. This post is about what happens when that field and SPLectrum are put side by side. They meet — and the meeting point is more precise than a general sympathy.
The field got there by method: start from what living systems actually do, and work up, instead of starting from human cognition and working down. SPLectrum got there from its seed principles through a definition of cognition to match — the process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience — it simply never mentions a brain, and never needed one. Two very different routes, one result: the human case stops being the definition of cognition and becomes one case among many — open ground, reached from different directions.
And what lives on that open ground, once you look? Meaning. The field’s cases — read closely — are small studies in meaning being handled by beings with no neurons at all.
A bacterium swims up a food gradient by holding the concentration of a few seconds ago against the concentration now. It doesn’t measure the world; it works with more than a moment ago — a relational term its own chemistry constitutes. A gradient only exists for a swimmer with a recent past.
Bacteria also talk. They release signal molecules and count each other by them — species-specific dialects, mostly, but one molecule is made and read across a huge range of species, and microbiologists themselves call it a common language. The striking part: the meaning of the signal is fixed by the receiver. Different species read the same molecule through different receptors, to different effect.
Cells talk a face into being. Before a frog embryo has any facial structure, a pattern of electrical voltage on its surface marks where the face will go — a plan held among ordinary, non-neural cells, in the medium of their interaction. Disturb the pattern in a flatworm and it will regenerate two heads, and regenerate two heads again when cut again — the altered target held somewhere that is not the genome. And neurons, it turns out, didn’t invent this medium; they inherited it and made it fast.
A slime mould builds a map it then lives in. The famous one re-drew the Tokyo rail network across a bed of oat flakes — and the network it builds is both its memory of the world and its body, at once.
Each of these is a being with its own language — partial in reach, contingent in character, disclosing a world that is that being’s own. The bacterium’s few seconds of chemical memory are not a lesser version of ours; they are exactly long enough for the comparison they enable, a complete case at its own scale. Much simpler beings, yes — but the simplicity is in the language’s reach, not in the case’s standing. Which rhymes with the seed’s pluralism, reached here by microscope: as many disclosed worlds as kinds of being.
The full reading — the cases worked in detail, and their importance to SPLectrum — is in the reference library, at basal cognition in close affinity. The short version fits in a sentence: the field has the cases, worked from the organisms outward, and SPLectrum has an account of cognition that never asked for a brain. Neither was built for the other, which is what makes the fit worth looking at.
This post is part of the language series. See also the reference entries on basal cognition in close affinity and the basal cognition subject.
Photo: Europeana / Unsplash