slime

Unlike a typical programmable agent that processes information through memory, slime mold decision-making can’t be predicted or replicated, since it coordinates itself entirely through sensory feedback with its environment. Exactly how this feedback happens is still unclear, but it has something to do with the extracellular slime traces that the cell leaves behind to tell itself where it’s already been. It does not make internal memories, but it does make choices based on past behavior. Its cognition is identical to movement; it knows exactly and only what it does. “Physarum’s spatial memory works,” writes Steven Shaviro, “not by internal representation, but rather by a physical marking of the very space that is being remembered. In this case, the map actually coincides with the territory.”⁶