There is a new paper by Jeremy England that seems relevant:
Self-organized computation in the far-from-equilibrium cell
Recent progress in our understanding of the physics of self-organization in active matter has pointed to the possibility of spontaneous collective behaviors that effectively compute things about the patterns in the surrounding patterned environment.
There is a new paper by Jeremy England that seems relevant:
Self-organized computation in the far-from-equilibrium cell
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0103151