Yeah, and that’s looking like it’s the key to a realistic understanding of biological consciousness.. A third way, so figure.
What are you totally unfamiliar with Nick Lane’s work???
If you’ve had a chance to read or listen to any of his lectures, or article, or books, you should be able to decide that based on your own intellect.
I’ll step back here, keep my commentary and feelings to myself and let Professor Nick Lane take his shot at explaining it.
Again, the entire text is better than these snippets, but if they don’t jog your interest, I haven’t got a prayer.
SELF starts at page 211
¶2 - Professor 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. …”
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¶3 - Professor 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?
¶4 - Professor Lane: “… The idea is pleasing, but I wouldn’t have given it any more thought but for a visit from a scientific seer, Luca Turin, a biophysicist interested in quantum biology, …"
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¶6 - Professor Lane: “Even more intriguingly, Turin has detected a radiowave signal associated with electron transfer in respiration. …
Don’t worry about the details here. The point is that these radiowave signals increase when brain areas are active, and are suppressed by anesthesia, again implying an effect on respiration. …
Even Turin admits that brains emitting radio waves sounds like the stuff of science fiction.
But it seems they do.
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¶7- Professor Lane: “ … What next? Instead of electron transfer to oxygen being coupled to proton pumping and ATP synthesis, some proportion must hop on a xenon bridge straight to oxygen. That oxygen is presumably still bound to cytochrome oxidase at the end of the respiratory chain in the normal way, so the electrons are not escaping as free radicals.
Even so, short-circuiting the respiratory chain must affect the electrical membrane potential, which should be measurable (though these are not easy measurements to make). So … could it be that a change in mitochondrial membrane potential affects our conscious state?
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¶8- Professor Lane: “I mentioned electromagnetic fields. We have long known that the brain generates electrical fields, which we measure in the EEG. …
Plainly the EEG is produced by changes in electrical voltage, and these changes are big enough to incriminate large networks of neurons firing in synchrony (rather than individual cells).
But these neural networks … are still composed of individual neurons, which behave in similar ways. The question is, at the cellular level, which electrical charges are involved?
The glib assumption is that charges on the cell membrane (or action potentials) are responsible.
But if Turin is right, then a big part of the answer might be mitochondrial membrane potentials.
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¶9 Moving charge necessarily generates an electromagnetic field, and the mitochondria clearly do so – not only with the transfer of electrons to oxygen but even more dramatically in the circuit of protons across the membrane, looping from the respiratory complexes to the ATP synthase and back round. … Doug Wallace …
… there’s evidence that electrical fields can and do play a direct role in brain function.
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If so, the key point is that the electrical fields generated by neurons do have motive force**. They are not too weak to change things physically, as long assumed.**
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¶10 This kind of statement might have pushed the boundaries of respectable science until recently, but the extraordinary work of the developmental biologist Michael Levin and others shows that electric fields can control the development of small animals such as the flat worms known as planarians.
I suspect that twenty-first-century biology will be the biology of fields.
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. …
{Thereafter, another dive into metabolism, calcium flux, pyruvate dehydrogenase, Kreps cycle flux, ATP synthesis - this is stuff that powers work, constructing and transforming molecules. Resulting in varying electrical field that create a “unifying force to bind the disperate flowing molecules of a cell together to make a self with moods and feelings.”}
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.
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¶11 Let’s put aside multicellular organisms with their nervous systems and think about protists such as paramecium, which also generate electrical fields on their mitochondrial membranes.
…What unifies the whole? What coordinates it as a ‘self’?
Once you think about electrical fields, it is hard to imagine anything else.
But then we are faced with another problem. …
Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self? …
{Here Professor Lane shares from his experience at the lab bench, spending hours peering through his microscope at single celled paramecium, who were mirroring the same range of “marvelous and sophisticated” goal oriented behaviors expected from a much more complicated creatures.
Then he brings it back to Mitochondria, oxygen uptake, producing electrical fields, … }
What unifies the whole? What coordinates it as a ‘self’?
Once you think about electrical fields, it is hard to imagine anything else.
But then we are faced with another problem. …
Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self? …
{To learn more you’ll want to read Nick Lane’s The Vital Question}
{Interestingly, mitochondrial membrane’s electrical potential is the same as the plasma membrane of bacteria. This relates to the primal origin of Eukaryotic cells when they engulfed a foreign germ without digesting it.
Instead, a mutual arrangement was evolved, cell provided a home and resources while the mitochondria focuses on becoming a factor to produce fuel and, it turns out, much more.}
Lane asks, “Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self?”
{Which circles right back around to ramification from mitochondria electrical fields and potentially influencing the entire cell, and beyond, to neighboring cells.}
¶14 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?
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.”
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