Oscar Castro

The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and computing device. These devices treated the slime mould as an active living substrate, yet it is a self-consistent living creature which evolved over millions of years and occupied most parts of the world, but in any case, that living entity did not own true cognition, just automated biochemical mechanisms. To “rehabilitate” slime mould from the rank of a purely living electronics element to a “creature of thoughts” we are analyzing the cognitive potential of P. polycephalum. We base our theory of minimal cognition of the slime mould on a bottom-up approach, from the biological and biophysical nature of the slime mould and its regulatory systems using frameworks such as Lyon’s biogenic cognition, Muller, di Primio-Lengelerś modifiable pathways, Bateson's “patterns that connect” framework, Maturana's autopoietic network, or proto-consciousness and Morgan's Canon.

Jakob Johannes von Uexküll’s biological thought influenced a new path to approach the view of a living being throughout of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the past century, in Spain a “new vertebrate way of thinking” was generated, as Ortega would say. And the work of Uexküll initiated an interest in the circles of thinkers of the likes of Julio Caro Baroja, José Ortega y Gasset, and Xavier Zubiri among others. My aim is describing how Uexküll plays a part in the development in the foundations of thoughts of these thinkers; in particular, Ortega and Zubiri’s thought and their interactions between the circumstantiality and formality, respectively, and Uexküll’s Umwelt. In fact, Ortega’s biological thought was the foundation of his vitalism realism and made a giant step in philosophical anthropology existentialism in his Meditations of Quixote in 1911. We will also see the anthropologist Caro Baroja’s epistemic Uexküll influences. A retrospective view of Spanish thought will be developed, where the seeds of Uexküll made fruitful the development of several authors, as well as some transitive or indirect influences; even the generation of discrepancies in others. Finally, we will describe the development, in Spanish, that had the work of Thure von Uexküll, which includes the work of his father. With Thure, the Uexküll influences in Spain concluded until the start of interest in zoosemiotics and biosemiotics.