James Dixon (UConn) at 12pm in Tobin 521B Weds. Feb. 15

Sneaking Up On Biology: Lessons from Non-Living Dissipative Systems.

Abstract: All organisms develop the ability to perceive and act in the service of goals and intentions, no matter how rudimentary. Behavioral scientists have traditionally considered perception and action as properties of higher-order animals, but recent work shows that all living things, including single-celled organisms, plants, and fungi, develop the ability to detect information in their environments and use that information to guide action. The diversity of biological systems capable of perception-action suggests that, rather than reflecting a particular biological specialization, perception-action develops through general physical principles that biology has richly exploited. In this talk, I will discuss recent efforts by our group to discover these physical principles. We take the theory of dissipative structures from modern thermodynamics as a natural starting place for understanding how perception-action emerges in self-organizing, epistemic systems. Dissipative structures famously demonstrate the emergence of morphology from the flow of energy and matter. Our work shows that more complex dissipative structures detect and move to new energy sources. In addition, they can serendipitously develop sensors that allow them to act in ways related to their related to their own persistence. Implications for understanding biological systems will be discussed.