Material‐Based Intelligence: Autonomous Adaptation and Embodied Computation in Physical Substrates

The design of intelligent materials often draws parallels with the complex adaptive behaviors of biological organisms, where robust functionality stems from sophisticated hierarchical organization and emergent long‐distance coordination among a myriad local components. Current synthetic materials, despite integrating advanced sensors and actuators, predominantly demonstrate only simple, preprogrammed stimulus–response functionalities, falling short of robustly autonomous intelligent behavior. This perspective proposes a fundamentally different approach focusing on architectures where material‐based intelligence is not predesigned, but arises spontaneously from self‐organization harnessing far‐from‐equilibrium dynamics. Such an approach includes minimal physical models, intrinsically embedding information‐theoretic control within the material's own physics and its seamless coupling with the environment. It explores interdisciplinary concepts from material physics, chemistry, biology, and computation, identifying concrete pathways toward developing materials that not only react, but actively perceive, adapt, learn, self‐correct, and potentially self‐construct, moving beyond biomimicry to cultivate fully synthetic, self‐evolving systems without external control. This framework outlines the fundamental requirements for, and constraints upon, architectures where complex, goal‐directed functionalities emerge synergistically from integrated local processes, distinguishing material‐based intelligence from traditional hardware‐software divisions. This demands that concepts of high‐level goals and robust, replicable memory mechanisms are encoded and enacted through the material's inherent dynamics, inherently blurring the distinction between system output and process.