EXAMPLE IV: THE ROBOTIC SLIME

From The Gaurdian: Slime mould used to create first robot run by living cells

Dr Zauner grew a star-shaped sample of the slime mould and attached it to a six-legged robot (with each point of the star attached to a leg) to control its movements.

Shining white light on to a section of the single cell organism made it vibrate, changing its thickness. These vibrations were fed into a computer, which then sent signals to move the leg in question. Pointing beams of light at different parts of the slime mould means that different legs move. Do it in an ordered way and the robot will walk.

Lets assume for this example that animal agency is different in kind from robotic or otherwise artificial agency, such that the slime mold’s behavior here is closer to genuine ‘original action’ than to mechanical ‘derivative action’. This is not to import any cognitive or otherwise mental phenomena to the slime mold. Its just a slime mold. The point is simply that its behavior is properly attributed to it, since there are no designers or other actors influencing the cyborg’s behavior.

But the mold also moves around a robot, with some sophisticated machinery backing it up. Here’s the problem: the slime mold is essentially just a photo cell for responding to light. We have plenty of those same sorts of cells, artifiically constructed, that can behave in a much more complex fashion with respect to incoming light. From an engineering perspective, the slime mold is rather superfluous, and this sort of example is more show than actual science.

But lets look at it from the perspective of our discussion on robotic agency. The robot moves because the slime mold reacts to the light. The cyborg (slime mold + robot) here could reasonably be described as “light avoiding” or some such cogntively neutral term. We could put the point counterfactually: the slime mold would move away if it had the means to move away. We have given it the means.

So what do we make of the resulting cyborg behavior? Is it properly attributed to the slime mold, or to the whole system, or neither? Is this even a sensible question?