I think so, it’s why I’ve been writing about it, but I’m just a spectator, here I share some expert thoughts from Professor Nick Lane.
The invention of the Krebs cycle was biology’s Big Bang, and I believe it provides the scientific foundation for building some useful modern philosophical concepts around.
The question: If materialism is correct, then every fact — every true statement — is a description of some arrangement of matter and energy? True or false?
This question fails to acknowledge, nor accommodate, the profound difference between elemental matter and energy, the stuff that creates everything we know–and biological matter and energy which creates all the life we know.
What’s the Krebs cycle?
In a kernel, it is how Earth’s processes, together with geology and chemistry worked out how to harnesses energy, creating biology, eventually creating a new form of matter. Life.
Before Kc, it was energy, forces, atoms, molecules, even fancy some stuff like organic molecules. They had some interesting potential, since they were linked together along a carbon backbone. Still they were dead matter subject to the same natural laws, like everything else out there in the cosmos.
The Krebs cycle changed that and it explains how those dead organic molecules were wired together and energized, creating a new form of matter. That is membranes and tissue. Something unlike anything creation had ever known. With the ability to rework some of nature’s normal physical constraints, at least transiently.
Why isn’t this a topic of major interest for philosophers?
Any young philosophy students out there looking for something of value to engage with? Think about it, our science is screaming that “awareness to consciousness” is woven into the very fabric of life, at the cellular level–with complex life growing out of that! Try seeing if you can dream up something provocative based on recognizing that reality.
The outline is not that complicated and possesses a beautiful internal consistency. The evidence and details are mindboggling and must be translated for us by actual experts with experience in the field and lab bench, such as Nick Lane.
Musing on the Krebs cycle also puts Thomas Nagel’s ‘what it’s like to be a bat’ challenge into an entirely different light. One that brings evolution and biological reality back into the frame.
Since there’s no reason for anyone to take my word for it, I’m going to enlist the help of Professor Nick Lane.
Professor Nick Lane PhD writes in his epilogue to the book “Transformer” (https://sackett.net/nick-lane__transformer.pdf)
Lane: “… It might seem uncanny that whole metabolic pathways can spring into existence in this way, in the absence of genes and information, but this is what recent experiments are telling us.
There is something thermodynamically and kinetically favoured about the innermost chemistry of life.
I find this unsettling, but that’s how it is.”
¶3 {A quick sketch of chemistry self-organizing to form protocells. Then animated by the same flux of gases into living matter, with one thing leading to another, eventually creating genes that further streamlined internal chemistry/metabolism and built upon it. …}
Lane: “From the beginning, the flow of energy and matter through the Krebs cycle was bound to the electrical potential on membranes. Flux is movement. The electrical potential humming away on cell membranes is movement too, dancing charge, electrons and protons, the elementary particles of life.
Moving charge generates electromagnetic fields that permeate our being. And clearly, the flux of metabolism generates electromagnetic fields on cells.
Could feelings somehow be related to this dance of charge, the ephemeral states of cells?”
Lane: “I have long wondered if that collapsing membrane potential ‘feels’ like something to a bacterium.
More than anything else, the humming electrical potential on the membrane betokens the living force.
And if it feels like something for a bacterium to die, its living force sucked away, …
… “All operate through much the same mechanisms, collapsing electrical membrane potential to induce death. Presumably, there must also be some ‘pre-death’ state, where the living processes are tenuous.
Beyond that, membrane potential is needed for far more than the basics of ATP synthesis and CO2 fixation. It powers the bacterial flagellum, allowing cells to move around and seek better conditions, as well as pumping all manner of things in and out of cells, maintaining their homeostasis.
Most strikingly, bacteria need their membrane potential to find their own midpoint, to divide in two and generate offspring.
Nothing in biology is more sacred than reproduction, and the simplest form of reproduction does not happen without an electrical charge on the membrane.
All these states of living and dying are linked with electromagnetic fields.
Do they all feel different?
How could they not?
Lane: “Metabolism and electromagnetic fields on the membranes bounding cells are intimately entwined and intrinsically meaningful.
These are the living states of cells, the stream of consciousness in its most elementary form.”
Lane: “… So, let’s take it to be possible that the electrical fields generated by mitochondria do have motive force. What can that tell us about consciousness?
Well, for a start, it might tell us why the brain is so hooked on glucose as a fuel. If you recall, calcium influx into the mitochondria from their associated membranes (MAMs) activates the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase, ramping up Krebs-cycle flux and ATP synthesis nearly exponentially.
Plainly that powers work, but it also gives scope to the full dynamic range of mitochondrial membrane potential.
To the full range of electrical fields.
To the full music of the orchestra.
Until now, biology has tended to study the materials that make up the instruments. The time has come to close our eyes and listen to the music.
I want to suggest to you that this music is the stuff of feeling, of emotion. Electrical fields are the unifying force that binds the disparate flowing molecules of a cell together to make a self with moods and feelings. …”
A scientific approach to understanding your “Self” — Nick Lane PhD., text of Transformer’s epilogue, “Self.”
Nick Lane’s other books https://nick-lane.net/
Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World, 2002
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, 2005
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, 2009
The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is?, 2015
Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, 2022
David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree of Life, a front and center history of the ‘70’s genetics revolution, that ushered in this golden age of biology.
The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness” proposal — A Student’s Introduction to Dr. Arthur Reber’s CBC
Cellular Basis of Consciousness #2 Reber’s Q/A — Student’s Resource, transcript of highlights.
Articles by myself,
Striving to Understand Consciousness. (with a little help from Nick Lane)
Science is getting closer to the source of consciousness. Nick Lane’s Transformer
“Honest Logic” from an Earth-centrist’s perspective
Considering Things Science Can Explain About Consciousness