"Memory" can be used to refer to any form of statefulness, which is mostly what's being discussed here. I agree the article engages in some unwarranted anthropomorphism in some places, but there's still plenty of interesting material without that.

You might want to look into the work of Michael Levin’s lab to give you a broader perspective on the intelligence of individual cells and tissues. Your machine metaphor is arguably as misleading as anthropomorphization.

Edit: did you read the article? The examples described go far beyond your straw man about undiscovered receptors.

If a cell has an injury that impacts its mobility but not its ability to survive because it can adapt -- is that a memory? Are nutrients within a cell? How about its current position in relationship to a food source? Or a buildup of some molecule in response to environmental factors? If not to any of these, why not? Because it's not neuronal by-nature?

The past dictates the future and there are many, many, many, many, MANY ways to encode the past for future self-preservation.

You're doing yourself an intellectual disservice by sticking to one form of "memory". I'd even argue that you're the one anthropomorphizing the hardest by limiting "memory" to an idealized human form of memory.

Cellular memory is well-established in epigenetics, where DNA methylation and histone modifications persist through cell divisions without changing the underlying DNA sequence. These mechanisms allow cells to "remember" previous states and environmental exposures, which is fundamentally different from simple receptor-based responses.

Given how much more capable these little machines are than anything we can program, I think that "remembering" is hardly a stretch at all.

'member the first visual neural nets? just a few black spots in a grid, then colored spots, ... those grids were memory.