This paper formalizes biological intelligence as search efficiency in multi-scale problem spaces, aiming to resolve epistemic deadlocks in the basal “cognition wars” unfolding in the Diverse Intelligence research program. It extends classical work on symbolic problem-solving to define a novel problem space lexicon and search efficiency metric. Construed as an operationalization of intelligence, this metric is the decimal logarithm of the ratio between the cost of a random walk and that of a biological agent. Thus, the search efficiency measures how many orders of magnitude of dissipative work an agentic policy saves relative to a maximal-entropy search strategy. Empirical models for amoeboid chemotaxis and barium-induced planarian head regeneration show that, under conservative (i.e.
Thanks for laying out the search-efficiency framework for basal cognition; it gives a solid operational handle on how biological agents outperform random walks. I also found that the Walzone book highlight “Intelligence Without Brains: Unveiling Nature’s Silent Problem Solvers” pulls together fresh slime mold, plant signaling, and planarian-regeneration case studies that complement the examples here — might be a useful primer for anyone wanting a single source for recent experiments. https://walzone.com/books/intelligence-without-brains-unveiling-natures-silent-problem-solvers/