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Comment J.J. Gibson already said this (Score 1) 136

The noted perceptual psychologist and founder of ecological psychology already stated this in his The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. He states that visual perception doesn't involve just the brain and the eyes, it is dependent upon the head, neck, and the entire body. Although he was referring to visual perception specifically, he regarded all modalities as being dependent upon the body and it's parts in relation to one another and in relation to the environmental layout. His theories have largely gone unnoticed. I consider this to be another confirmation of his ecological psychology. A shame his work will probably continue to go unnoticed (although concepts he proposed, such as affordances, have been slowly creeping into the psychology literature).

Comment Intelligence has little to do with the brain (Score 1) 102

Even the humble slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) can navigate mazes to find a food source, using the most optimal (least expenditure of energy) path. Slime moulds have been used to create maps of major metropolitan transportation systems (such as the Tokyo subway system). Likewise, Darwin's famous experiments with earthworms revealed that earthworms use what the environment affords them in order to strengthen their burrows. They accomplish this despite lacking a central nervous system and any of the "big five" sensory organs. Finally, there are parallels between the pattern dynamics of the BZ (Belousov–Zhabotinsky) reaction and the aggregation phase of the slime mould life cycle (in which a chemical signal for starvation pulls distinct amoebas into an aggregate, and each amoeba that sends the starvation signal becomes the center of a circle towards which the other amoebas move).

Examples like suggest that many complex systems, both biological and otherwise, can demonstrate intelligent behavior. The social, cultural, political, biological, and other environmental contexts afford and constrain the kind of intelligence an organism has. Brains, especially human ones, aren't particularly special in this regard.

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