This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Developmental and Learning Sciences Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and the Chemical Structure Dynamics and Mechanism Program in the Division of Chemistry in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
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. The current project aims to discover these physical principles. The investigators 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 demonstrate the emergence of morphology from the flow of energy and matter. The investigators' recent work shows that more complex dissipative structures detect and move to new energy sources. To do so, these dissipative structures store energy, and release it during time-delayed actions related to their own persistence, thus demonstrating rudimentary perception-action. The project focuses on non-living, physical systems that generate their own morphology and perceiving-acting capabilities. The investigators will: 1) Create a set of physical systems that self-organize their morphology so as to detect information in the environment, and act on that information relative to a goal; 2) Design paradigms in which these systems develop perceiving and acting capabilities that begin to converge on the complex perception-action behaviors of simple organisms, including searching for new energy sources; 3) Use new concepts, such as functional symmetry breaking, to extend the theory of dissipative structures to encompass systems that obey thermodynamic laws locally (i.e., on smaller spatial and temporal scales), but develop the ability to perceive and act in the service of rudimentary goals globally (i.e., on larger spatial and temporal scales). In so doing, the project seeks to provide an overarching theoretical framework for understanding how self-ordering physico-chemical systems come to detect information about their environments and act on that information in the service of maintaining their own structures, in effect, developing rudimentary forms of foraging for energy and matter.
Currently, the goal-directed perception and action of living systems is beyond the explanatory reach of natural law. The project will provide a new starting point for understanding perception-action grounded in thermodynamics. The work will begin with relatively simple, non-organic physical systems, but the implications for the biological and behavioral sciences are considerable. As such, the project should help create a new interdisciplinary field that connects phenomena in biology (in the broadest sense of the term), self-organizing systems, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Ultimately, the results of the project may provide the foundation for a new type of engineering, in which a system self-organizes its perception and action to achieve an imposed goal.
