{"id":229776,"date":"2026-01-25T05:08:47","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T11:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/cognition-all-the-way-down-2-0-neuroscience-beyond-neurons-in-the-diverse-intelligence-era"},"modified":"2026-01-25T05:08:47","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T11:08:47","slug":"cognition-all-the-way-down-2-0-neuroscience-beyond-neurons-in-the-diverse-intelligence-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/cognition-all-the-way-down-2-0-neuroscience-beyond-neurons-in-the-diverse-intelligence-era","title":{"rendered":"Cognition all the way down 2.0: neuroscience beyond neurons in the diverse intelligence era"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cognition-all-the-way-down-2-0-neuroscience-beyond-neurons-in-the-diverse-intelligence-era.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This paper formalizes biological intelligence as <i>search efficiency<\/i> in multi-scale <i>problem space<\/i>s, aiming to resolve epistemic deadlocks in the basal \u201ccognition wars\u201d unfolding in the <i>Diverse Intelligence<\/i> research program. It extends classical work on symbolic problem-solving to define a novel <i><i>problem space<\/i> lexicon<\/i> and <i><i>search efficiency<\/i> metric<\/i>. 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 <i>search efficiency<\/i> measures how many <i>orders of magnitude<\/i> of dissipative work an agentic policy saves relative to a maximal-entropy <i>search strategy<\/i>. Empirical models for amoeboid chemotaxis and barium-induced planarian head regeneration show that, under conservative (i.e.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This paper formalizes biological intelligence as search efficiency in multi-scale problem spaces, aiming to resolve epistemic deadlocks in the basal \u201ccognition wars\u201d 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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,269,47,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-life-extension","category-neuroscience","category-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}