Watch this YouTube.
Not only does slime mold have no nervous system, but it is not a single organism.
Slime mold’s intelligence does not reside within a single being. Rather, the intelligence of the slime mold belongs to the relationship between these beings. It is the network that is intelligent. It is the network, not the individual, that is adaptable, that is dynamic, that is creative.
So what? I’m not a slime mold. I have ideas. Slime mold doesn’t have ideas. I enjoy a free will and a unique identity that not one of these slime mold nuclei will ever experience.
Yes, probably, to say that slime mold have experiences at all would be ludicrous. Yes, humans do have the ability to cultivate a kind of uniqueness in themselves. And yes, slime mold can probably not be said to harbor ideas.
But what is an idea? How do you know when you have an idea? What makes it an idea, and not just a flickering of synapses in your head?
For one thing, you may still feel that you “have it,” that it is somehow “yours,” but you are more likely to feel that you have an idea if you are able to articulate it in a language that at least one other person can understand.
And your idea is certainly not much of an idea until you can implement it in some context and watch it solve a problem. That is to say, it’s the network of beings in the world around you that makes your idea an idea.
We humans had one kind of collective Genius when we moved in bands of 30 to 100, another kind of collective Genius, when we settled in communities of over 1000, still another when we learned to write, still another when we learned how to preserve and distribute printed text.
At every stage, what changed was not the aptitude of the individual, but the vastness of the network to which the individual belonged. This is why we have schools, and not “contemplation rooms.”
As teachers, we need to embrace our slime mold heritage. We need to seek more and more opportunities to feed our discoveries back into the network, and seek more and more opportunities to draw upon that network.
