How the universe thinks without a brain | Claire L. Evans

Dive into the wonderfully weird world of non-human intelligence with Claire L. Evans in her captivating keynote at Sana AI Summit 2025. A Grammy-nominated artist and writer, Claire takes us on a journey through the quirky and often overlooked realms of intelligence beyond the human brain.

What’s in this video:
The magical transformation of rocks into computers
Slime molds: nature's unexpected network optimizers
Thinking with a body: the art of morphological computing
The surprising intelligence of single-celled organisms
Rethinking memory and learning beyond synaptic plasticity
The cosmic web and the universe's computational nature

Claire's keynote challenges our traditional notions of intelligence, urging us to look beyond the confines of the human mind. From slime molds solving mazes to bacteria exhibiting primitive cognition, she reveals the diverse and fascinating ways intelligence manifests in the natural world. Claire's perspective encourages us to move beyond a reductionist view of intelligence and consider the vast potential of biological and morphological computing

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00:15 - The magic of turning rocks into computers
01:08 - Limits of using rocks for computation
01:47 - Why our next computers might be grown, not mined
02:17 - The marvel of slime molds: nature's network optimizers
05:00 - Morphological computing: thinking with a body
05:25 - Intelligence beyond the brain: lessons from biology
06:45 - Rethinking memory and learning in nature
07:50 - Memory and aneural cognition in bacteria
08:23 - The capacities of uni-cellular creatures
09:40 - Evidence of the mass spacing effect in cells
10:53 - The intractable problem of mapping the c.elegans brain
13:28 - Why are problems are less unique than we realize
14:32 - To be is to compute
16:35 - Nature teaching the difference between representation and reality
17:50 - Why life is an emergent conversation
18:50 - Embracing a bottom-up approach to intelligence
19:07 - The limitations of a reductionist approach to biology
19:47 - The evolving metaphor of computing
20:44 - Claire's hope for the future