From Morphogenesis to Mind: Developmental Intelligence as Navigation on Information-Geometric Landscapes

Recent work on developmental intelligence has challenged conventional assumptions regarding the origins of adaptive behavior. Neurobots - self-organizing neural precursor collectives assembled into evolutionarily novel moving bodies - demonstrate coherent behavior, exploratory dynamics, and adaptive competencies despite lacking architectures shaped by evolutionary history for their embodied form. These findings raise a fundamental question: what is the underlying process being expressed? This paper proposes a geometric interpretation of developmental intelligence. Building upon developmental intelligence, Information-Geometric Substrates, Persistence Geometry, and control-first models of adaptive organization, we argue that morphogenesis, regeneration, developmental intelligence, and cognition can be understood as manifestations of a common process: geometric navigation through structured landscapes of accessibility, viability, and recoverability. Within this framework, the critical explanatory variable is not possibility itself but accessibility - the set of futures that remain reachable from a system's present state. The neurobot findings are interpreted as a particularly visible instance of this process. Their exploratory dynamics, adaptive organization, and functional convergence despite structural variability are consistent with a trajectory-centered account in which adaptive systems discover, preserve, and recover viable futures rather than merely execute predetermined programs. We further argue that morphogenesis, regeneration, developmental intelligence, and cognition differ primarily in the temporal horizons over which navigation occurs. The resulting synthesis suggests that adaptive organization across biological scales may be governed less by architecture than by the structure of accessible futures. Neurobots are therefore significant not simply because they reveal novel forms of adaptive behavior, but because they make visible a continuity extending from morphogenesis to mind.