Adaptive behavior and direct perception: ecological lessons from plant neurobiology

Paco Calvo

Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain

Title: Adaptive behavior and direct perception: ecological lessons from plant neurobiology

Abstract

With an eye to explaining how biological systems generalize, a panoply of strategies that rely upon the concepts of competence, cognition and misrepresentation is now available in the marketplace. The underlying assumption, on pain of falling prey to a neurobiologically implausible look-up table model, consists in the articulation of a combinatorial syntactic structure. By contrast, and elaborating on recent plant neurobiology literature, I shall argue that we may ‘ecologically’ explain the ability of biological systems, writ large, to generalize, once we opt instead for a different triplet, formed by performance, adaptive behavior and direct perception.

Contribution to the Workshop “Smart Solution from the Plant Kingdom”