This is the threshold I talk about in my sibling comment. It is very difficult to come up with a materialist argument for what about that 'certain arrangement' makes cognition. I am unsure if it is possible to prove that there is no such argument, but I don't think we have made any progress in finding one either.
I'd claim it's not necessarily harder than it is to argue certain arrangements make a computer. Which is to say, there's grey area but it's ultimately just a label we give to certain patterns/behavior, not some special line where the universe starts doing something different, so it's fine to be somewhat vague/arbitrary (when do sand grains become a heap?).
I think "Cognition as a property of all matter" is leaning too much towards panpsychism. There's a spectrum of chairs from thrones to stumps, but I wouldn't say "Chairness is a property of all matter".
Do we doubt people we know think when they are absent? Is our phone exhibiting cognition when we have telephone conversations?
I never found the sorites paradox to be a terribly challenging argument in itself. Formal proofs rely on the assumption that a tiny change to a state is the same is no change and thus an an accumulation of tiny changes is also no change. I just don't accept the base premise. The common sense arguments with grains of sand in a pile, trees in a forest etc. just seem to rely on the vagueness of definition allowing individual judgement to place the threshold at different places.
My comment was on the philosophical shortcomings of the statement in particular and the philosophical shortcomings of socially acceptable expressions of materialism in general.
“Particular arranges” is mind-body dualism with lipstick.
I doubt there is such a threshold, I think the issue people have with the idea that rocks might have cognition is it too difficult to perceive the difference in scale of complexity of a brain compared to a rock. People have trouble comprehending the idea of a millionth, going further than that there is the intrinsic difficulty of accepting something existing at a scale you cannot perceive or even conceive of what that might be.
Which parts of the (skin) cell are alive?
Here are the options: 1: All of it is irreducibly together alive. 2: Some of it is alive, some of it is not.
If 1: then life is made of non living material. If 2: repeat the above options with this new smallest piece of life. If there are no parts left to examine without reaching 1: then it is all alive.
Then we are left with two options. A: Life is made of non-living material in specific arrangements. B: life is a property of all material.
More than likely we are dealing with the first option. Life from non-living material. Which implies life could be created from other arrangements of materials that function analogously to a cell (at a different scale, maybe).
This question may be settled soon... well, as soon as someone builds a x-sized replica of a cell and proves it 'works' (given proper input/output/environment).
My gut also tells me this is true: with the following reasoning. A chair isn't actually any particular chair, but a template: a pattern, which can be expressed in other materials besides any one particular example. A pattern can be expressed in different mediums, and life looks like such a template... to me at least.
That's my two cents: add some salt.
I doubt the “soon” part. Artificial neurons are vast simplifications of real neurons, and even complex networks like GPT don’t come close the complexity of biological networks, both in network structure and in terms of what goes on between the neurons (eg chemical processes, as opposed to just the activity of the neurons themselves). Individual neurons have been shown to have capability to both process and store information, something which artificial ones don’t do. Besides, we are only scratching the surface in our understanding of biological neurons and brains. How can we say “this thing we built that is a vast simplification of this thing we barely understand will soon exceed the complexity of the thing we don’t yet understand”?
All trends indicate we’re only a couple years away from an AI superintelligence. No additional understanding of biological brains is required to get there.
There is no division into cognitive and non cognitive matter. Cognition is not a direct property of matter at all.
Cognition may be a property of all neural systems, but it is certainly not a property of all matter.
Cognition as a property of all matter is the simplest premise for any materialist theory of the mind.
Any and all theories that divide matter into cognitive and non-cognitive types are logically equivalent to Cartesian dualism. Socially of course, scientific-dualism is often more palatable to contemporary intellects.