Slime molds is a topic which I seem to revisit with dismaying regularity, as they appear to easily solve problems which computers find difficult:
Samir Patel of Archaeology Magazine writes a report on how the Romans might have designed their transportation network:
… Physarum polycephalum, consists of a single large membrane around many cell nuclei, and has drawn the attention of a wide range of scientists because of its uncanny ability to solve almost impossibly complex computational problems.
Now NewScientist, in “What if … We don’t need bodies?” (8 August 2015, paywall), brings up the idea of transferring minds to computers:
What if we could separate mind from body entirely? Many now believe that we will transfer our minds on to computers, whether in a matter of decades or hundreds of years. “I would say that it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable,” says Graziano.
What would life as an upload be like? We’d still need outside stimulation. Cut off entirely, a brain would suffer sensory deprivation, says Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford. “It’s going to fall asleep, then hallucinate and probably gently go mad. You need to give it a way of interacting with the world, although it doesn’t have to be the real world.”
Which provokes me to wonder, what if we take a baby step here and upload a slime mold to the computer? Could the slime mold, er, representation, still retain its “uncanny ability” to solve tough computational problems? If so, could the computer then isolate the capability and incorporate it into its own repertoire of tools?
Or do the inherent limitations of computation apply to the uploaded creature? I’m inclined to think the latter, at least with the current crop of computers. Perhaps someday we’ll have widespread biological computing and then the upload would retain all the capabilities.
