Basal cognition is a field of research which holds that the basic tools of a mind, sensing, remembering, learning, weighing what is good or bad and choosing, are found in all living things, from bacteria and single cells upwards, and not only in creatures with brains. Its best-known voices include the philosopher Pamela Lyon and the biologist Michael Levin, with plant scientists such as František Baluška and slime-mould researchers such as Toshiyuki Nakagaki; critics say it stretches the word ‘cognition’ until it means little. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further still, teaching that everything, cells and stones included, is conscious, each in its own way.
What is basal cognition? #
A way of studying minds from the bottom up. Instead of starting with the human brain and asking which other creatures resemble it, basal cognition starts with the simplest living things and asks how they sense their surroundings, tell what helps them from what harms them, and act on it. Its researchers then use what they find to understand more complex beings, ourselves included.1
The working definition most of them use comes from Lyon, for whom cognition is the whole set of processes by which a living thing takes in information, stores it, processes it and uses it, at any level of organisation.2 So cognition is broken into a toolkit of capacities that can each be studied on their own: sensing, memory, valence (registering something as good or bad for oneself), learning, decision-making and communication.1 Lyon calls this stance ‘biogenic’, beginning with life itself, as against the older view that cognition needs nerve cells.3
The field took stock of itself in 2021 in two linked issues of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, edited by Lyon with the philosopher Fred Keijzer, the biologist Detlev Arendt and Levin, under the titles “Basal cognition: conceptual tools and the view from the single cell” and “Basal cognition: multicellularity, neurons and the cognitive lens”.1
Who argues that cells think? #
A loose group of biologists and philosophers, who would mostly say ‘cognise’ more readily than ‘think’. Lyon, a philosopher at Adelaide University, holds that humans have regarded themselves for too long as “the crown of creation” because of our intelligence, and that “We’re on the cusp of a Copernican revolution”.4 Levin, at Tufts University, holds that every cell is intelligent in its own way, and that bodies are communities of smaller competent selves; see What does Michael Levin’s work say about intelligence in cells and bodies? The plant cell biologist František Baluška finds that plant cells signal electrically much as nerve cells do, and the philosopher Paco Calvo that plants meet any fair test of intelligent behaviour.
The evidence they point to runs right across life. A single-celled slime mould finds the shortest route through a maze, a result first published by the Japanese biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki. Yeast cells keep a record of a failed attempt to mate.5 Mimosa plants learn to ignore a harmless shock and remember it for weeks, as the ecologist Monica Gagliano found. And the neuroscientist David Glanzman’s work on sea slugs suggests that a memory can survive inside a cell after the connections that seemed to hold it have gone.4
The argument from evolution runs like this. Long before the first nerve cell, single cells had to find food and avoid harm, and Levin describes them as “doing pretty much the same thing that neurons do, just at slower speeds”. Evolution, “a notorious hoarder”, as the journalist Samanth Subramanian puts it, is unlikely to have thrown those older ways away when brains arrived.4
Why is it so controversial? #
Because it touches the line between humans and everything else, and the words on either side of it. Critics such as the zoologist Alex Kacelnik say that stretching ‘cognition’ to brainless beings “misleads the public” and “hollows out the word itself”. An oak ‘decides’ how many acorns to make, but that is not what a person means by going to cognitive therapy.6 Others go further. When Lyon co-edited the 2021 issues, one reviewer wrote, “This is dangerous. You must not dignify this idea in a journal of this stature.” Some scientists, Subramanian reports, worry that talk of cognition in cells “verges on animism – an enlivening of inert matter”; in Lyon’s words, they think that if they do not hold the line, “these vitalists are going to be letting ghosts into the living world next.”6
The defenders reply that the line was never as sharp as it looked. Levin compares the word ‘cognition’ to the word ‘adult’, which everyday life needs, though nothing changes on anyone’s eighteenth birthday: “Nature is telling us that there’s a continuum – there are no bright lines”. He refuses scare quotes as well: “Sometimes the slime mould knows, not ‘knows'”, though “that’s not the same thing as saying it knows that it knows.”6
The biologist Anne Pringle aims her warning at both camps. A test that only animals with nerves can pass looks anthropocentric; but it is “even more self-regarding” to read human experience into other creatures: “Why should we be so arrogant as to assume that our behaviour and our natural history is the lens through which to understand Earth?”6 And the philosopher Fred Keijzer admits that “Cognitive science is still at the stage that chemistry was before the periodic table… It’s a mess.”6
How does basal cognition connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
It asks the question the books ask. Most Westerners reserve consciousness for humans and perhaps a few ‘higher’ mammals, and struggle to see it in beings very different from themselves: “A slug? A blade of grass? Bacteria?” In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, and Spirit is conscious, so everything is conscious, just in ways unlike ours.7
Levin’s line between knowing and knowing that one knows is close to a distinction Therapeutic Shamanism already draws. Most people treat consciousness and self-awareness as the same thing, so tests built to find self-awareness find other beings lacking, and seem to confirm our place at the top. Self-awareness is wrongly taken to be the highest form of consciousness. There is another kind, collective-awareness, at the other end of a continuum with self-awareness. The cells of the body have little or no self-awareness, yet together they form a collective that lets a person experience themselves as a self-aware being.8 The body itself “has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives”.9
Lyon’s own explanation of the resistance meets the teaching too. She suspects people are afraid that if all living things share in intelligence, “we might have to start paying attention to the shocking and horrible things we’re doing to the rest of the living world.”10 Therapeutic Shamanism names the belief that lets us look away as the myth of human supremacy, against which humans are not the pinnacle but the youngest and least wise of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, “not about hierarchy, but about family”.11 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism go further? #
In two directions. Basal cognition is careful to speak of cognition, what living systems do with information, and most of its researchers set the question of experience aside; it also stops at the edge of life, with bacteria. Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of consciousness, and does not stop at life, for stones, rivers and mountains are conscious too.12 See Is the living world intelligent? and What is panpsychism, and how is it different from animism?
And it comes by a different road. The researchers build their case experiment by experiment. Animists believe that everything is alive and conscious, but this is far more than a belief, for they actually experience the world in this way, and the aim is to experience it for oneself.13 Where the two roads meet, as they increasingly seem to, each can be set beside the other.
