slime molds
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by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

"I've only read five books. But I keep reading those same five books over and over again." - unknown

James Hillman, the dean of the Zurich Jung School, wrote Revisioning Psychology. I had a friend, who read that book eight times. I only read it once, only a page or two at a time, so slowly that my one time might have taken as long as my friend's eight.

The theme of that book (I cried at the end) is the change that has taken place to the way we think and imagine, our mind and heart, since the Renaissance. In a phrase: for them the world was alive; for us it is dead.

We get our word "animated," lively, from the Latin word animus, and "animation," like cartoons moving as if alive across the screen.

These days the novelty of moving pictures has worn off, but recently we are entranced again by another lifelike performance. Asking if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is alive is not as ridiculous as it may first seem. But let's back up, and ask more basically, is Artificial Intelligence intelligent?

Intelligence is measured (as in an IQ test) by the ability to solve problems, sometimes in more than one way. Heuristics are ways of solving problems, quickly and practically. By that standard, no, AI is not intelligent; it just repeats, and only after making billions of comparisons, what it has been taught.

Aside from the huge environmental concerns (enough electricity to power a small town), the main cost of AI is its training, feeding it information (so it can make billions of comparisons). And then, just when they get one version up and running, there is a new version that must be trained all over again.

In terms of intelligence, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, is the yet unattained gold standard, a machine that can think on its feet, handling novel, unrehearsed problems.

Learning by oneself, a quality of intelligence, suggests agency, doing things for oneself, a quality of living things. Agency speaks of goal-orientation, an agenda. The slime mold, moving up a sugar gradient (to where there is more food) is following a goal. Cross that smear of sugar with a line of salt and that slime mold is smart enough to leave the sugar for the moment and go around the salt. Make it impossible to go around the salt, and, lacking brain or neurons, the slime mold decides to go across it.

Michael Levin, a world-class authority on intelligence, speaks of slime molds and also of primitive computerized number sorting systems, very basic algorithms, which discover on their own that sometimes they must temporarily suspend their prime directive (like the slime mold leaving the sugar), and for a moment allow lesser order (move backwards, so to speak) in order to achieve a greater future order. That's intelligent.

"We are all collective intelligences," Levin declares, speaking of intelligences inside our body, principally the collective intelligences of our cells. Our liver and kidneys, he explains, for example, are organs with millions of cells actively, sophisticatedly working together to deal with what we throw at them.

Descartes, who was and still is so influential on the way we think scientifically, declared that only human beings are truly alive: only we think, therefore only we are. Dividing the world into a realm of nature and a realm of God, he asserted that only we humans possess a soul. All other life, he taught, and science still acts as if, all animals and plants are machines, fleshy robots, like the oh-so-lifelike automatons, those clockwork mechanized toys of his era that fascinated French society so.

Levin, a biologist at the top of his field, reminds us that animism, the belief that the world, and all things in it, is alive, still holding sway in unscientific cultures around the world.

The plant acts as an intelligent agent. Attacked by insects, it performs a complicated chemical dance, communicating to its plant neighbors, through roots or through the air, to beware of the danger and ready their resistance to the coming attack.

With apologies to Descartes, and his geeky modern followers, the cat and dog, of course, have souls. And plants are happier, growing better when you sing to them.

Descartes agreed that there was a God, arguing only that His living realm did not extend to "unintelligent" things. While Descartes only restricted soul, his scientific descendants have snuffed it out.

There are horrible consequences associated with believing and living as if the universe is dead, made only of dead, stupid material. It is not healthy, neither for the individual nor for society, to believe and act as though life is just a random accident and intelligence is only a freak of nature.

Levin through biology and Hillman through culture are telling the same story. It's the good news we all need to hear, over and over again.

The old time wanted posters promised their bounty "Dead or alive," but we only get our reward when we take the world in alive. And this is the point of Hillman's book, namely that our psychology and our society must must be revisioned and reanimated, must be brought to life again

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