Lecture 20: Ecology: The Science that Reasons Why (Turvey, 2019, Lectures on Perception)

Turvey has finally arrived at the ecological approach, but all the preceding chapters have made it such that there are preliminaries to deal with first. This first Lecture sets up a very broad, all-encompassing motivation for an ecological approach, summarised in the first sentence: "A theory of perception ought to be a theory for all organisms.". Turvey will spend some time identifying that previous work has focused on humans, we are one of a countless number of organisms and not especially representative, and that the why of perception-action should be rooted in the laws of thermodynamics. 

Endothelial Cells are Intelligent, Perceiving-Acting Agents

In my last post, I laid out a new project I'm working on about the perceptual life of cells. I spent the day at the Crick Institute recently to move the project forward, and this post is about developing the perception-action analysis in more detail. The goal in this post is to address the first question that needs an answer, specifically, are the cells perceiving-acting agents, or just doing something more mechanical?. In the next post, I will apply our task dynamical analysis to frame the project (from Wilson & Golonka, 2013). 

To cut to the chase, I'm now pretty happy that a perception-action analysis is appropriate at this particular cellular level. I set a high bar for this (mostly by reading Turvey & Carello papers, which should illustrate that height pretty clearly :) but it seems clear the cells are behaving with respect to information, and not simply being buffeted by forces. Applying some key criteria, and resting on the hard work of Turvey & Carello showing that intelligence isn't about brains but about behaviour, I will claim here that Bentley's endothelial cells are agents that exhibit intelligent behaviour, and there is a clear need for a behavioural scale contribution to any explanation of that behaviour.