The slime mould Physarum polycephalum has been used in developing unconventional
computing devices for in which the slime mould played a role of a sensing, actuating, and
computing device. These devices treated the slime mould as an active living substrate, yet it
is a self-consistent living creature which evolved over millions of years and occupied most
parts of the world, but in any case, that living entity did not own true cognition, just automated
biochemical mechanisms. To “rehabilitate” slime mould from the rank of a purely living …