The Molecular Mechanisms Behind Cell Cognition
Condensate formation is central to how budding yeast cells decide their response to environmental and internal conditions.
Budding yeast cells must decide whether to mate or proliferate depending on their environment.
Life, according to biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University in Massachusetts and the late philosopher Daniel Dennett, is ‘cognition all the way down’.
They wrote in 2020:
‘We reject a simplistic essentialism where humans have “real” goals, and everything else has only metaphorical “as if” goals’, and recognising
‘a continuum of how much agency any system has’.
Author's summary: Cell cognition is a complex process.