Emergence

I just read the first three pages of Emergence and I have to stop reading and write about what I just read because I think it's so awesome. The author describes how slime mold (with no centralized brain) can solve a maze problem. And here's something that's so interesting that I'm going to quote it in full:

The slime mold spends much of its life as thousands of distinct single-celled unites, each moving separately from its other comrades. Under the right conditions, those myriad cells will coalesce again into a single, larger organism, which then begins its leisurely crawl across the garden floor, consuming rotting leaves and wood as it moves about. When the environment is less hospitable, the slime mold acts as a single organism; when the weather turns cooler and the mold enjoys a large food supply, "it" becomes "they." The slime mold oscillates between being a single creature and a swarm.

That's so fucking amazing. I used to think a lot about stuff like this. When I was young my dad planted a seed of thought into my brain about Gaia Theory and I spent many years thinking about whether or not we were just cells of the larger organism of Earth or whether or not our cells where aware of the larger being that they were apart of. I also used to think of Mitochondria and whether they were some other creature that just happened to be living a symbiotic relationship with us. Wow, it's amazing how the scientific daydreams of a ten year old boy sound a lot like the musings of a stoned college student.