J. Scott Turner, "The Tinkerer's Accomplice"

"Does intentionality require memory? Let us say that the answer is yes. Does it is then follow that the only kind of memory that counts is embodied in webs of information flow between nerve cells striving to control one another through chemical synapses? Could not highly structured and persistent webs of matter and energy flows through a soil ecosystem also qualify as a form of memory?

Does intentionality involve cognition? Again let us stipulate that it does. Minds can come in many forms, though, and it does not follow that intentionality can arise only in mnids like ours. For that matter, need minds require brains at all? If our cognition arises from maps of the "real world" being built by agents of homeostasis that have no awareness of the minds they are producing, could not something similar arise among, say, a crowd of mound-building termites, with their mounds mapping environments just as our brains do?"

This idea is just amazing to me, and supports the application of abstracted systems in biology (such as how the mind works) to other systems (even if they are also in biology). It is also amazing to see such relience of the termites on their specific environments and to imagine that this relationship is even more interactive than it seems. The explanation (which I did not include here) of how these termites design their mounds and how specific the environment must be is fascinating. But it is even more fascinating to think about how that specific environment controls the mound design without the termites even "knowing."