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Abstract Soil is not an inert substrate but a dynamic, living medium that actively shapes the flows of matter, energy, and information. Its granular architecture, reactive chemical interfaces, and dense biological networks collectively transform environmental inputs of moisture, heat, nutrients, and signals. Transformations such as structural hysteresis, chemical equilibria, and microbial legacies embed traces of past events, giving soil a material memory. Viewed through this lens, soil exhibits features of physical intelligence, distributed sensing, adaptation and memory. It is proposed that soil functions as an embodied information processor, where morphology and dynamics perform the work of sensing, memory, and computation. This perspective situates soil within the broader paradigm of morphological computation and distributed intelligence, aligning it with other natural systems that compute through physical formation. Recognizing soil as a paradigmatic case of physical intelligence opens new conceptual and technological avenues, from bio-inspired computation and environmental sensing to precision agriculture and soil based reservoir computing.
Merchant et al. (Sun,) studied this question.