What is it like to be a Clicker? Consciousness and cognition in _The Last of Us_

Nagel (1974) kickstarted a now-long tradition in the Philosophy of Mind of using thought experiments to elucidate the relationship between conscious experience and the body, and the difficulties of explaining its character in a pure physicalist fashion. In this article, Nagel points out that, even though we know a lot about how bats use echolocation to navigate and make sense of their environments, these (naturalistic, mechanical) explanations don’t help us to imagine what it is like to be a bat, how their inner experience is qualitatively different from ours. Recent research in the novel area of Plant Cognition (Calvo 2016, Calvo & Lawrence, 2022) has strongly, albeit controversially, suggested that some plants and fungi exhibit fitness-increasing behaviors that strikingly resemble aspects of animal cognition, even in the absence of a dedicated, central nervous system: they seem capable of sensing/perceiving their environment, form memories and learn from past experiences, make anticipatory decisions regarding their current state and the environment, and communicate and behave as a coordinated collective. On the other hand, in the Philosophy of Mind, there has been an increasing interest in non-representational forms of cognition. The 4E Cognition movement has suggested that representational, intentional cognition only emerges when more basic cognitive abilities (imitation, communication, and language) are already in place and that most cognitive activities don't involve contentful representation. This leaves open the possibility of basic fungal cognition, sophisticated enough to explain the behaviors exhibited by the Infected in The Last of Us. Regarding the relationship between plants and fungi, Simard (2018) has suggested that the symbiosis between these organisms confers cognitive abilities to the trees and plants involved in this relationship, mainly abilities such as learning, communication, and a type of intelligence based on memory. When the symbiosis occurs within a forest ecosystem, the participating fungi act as nodes in a network, being a link between the different trees colonized by a certain fungus. By achieving a free-scale ecosystem interconnection within forests (Beiler et al. 2015; Beiler and Simard 2010), fungi act as mediators between plant organisms, providing a substrate for direct communication between symbiotic agents based on chemical and electrical signals (Simard et al. 1997; Song et al. 2015). This suggests Clickers not only use echolocation, but also an underground communication network established from the symbiosis between plant and fungus, allowing recognition of the space in which they are located and adaptation within it. This article will attempt to explain how Clickers gain basic echolocation given the loss of neural cognitive resources, in order to explain how this mixed/symbiotic cognitive agency, if ever possible, might be explained.