METAZOA, Animal life and the birth of the mind, Peter Godfey-Smith

Philosophy
161

I was referring to constructive and destructive interference. The reason I’m so obsessed with the randomness issue is that it has significant implications for the freewill debate. Absolute determinism precludes choice.

You are a treasure trove of interesting bits of information and the tree defense mechanism is an example.

My definition of intelligence is the ability to make choices in response to a changing environment. If the tree was purely mechanical it couldn’t make “choices”. It is the problem with current computers as stated by “garbage in garbage out”. In a way the goal of Quantum computing is to give the computer “choices”. To allow it to evolve solutions very rapidly. That is in a way mimicking life. If you stretch this idea back in time to the beginning, was the big bang itself a random event?

I haven’t given these ideas much thought in 10 years probably because I had nobody to talk to. No environment in which to evolve them. The point however is very simple. I illustrated it with my story of Darwin. Everyone knew about evolution by way of domestication but the big step Darwin made was how random events could lead to change. What people rejected in Darwin’s theory was randomness. They had always assumed that the world was deterministic. That there had to be a designer. That everything had been predetermined by that designer in some obscure way. Early scientists were looking for that design and called themselves natural philosophers.

Newton spent a great deal of time trying to discover hidden messages within the Bible. After 1690, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. In a manuscript Newton wrote in 1704, he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible.

Religious views of Isaac Newton - Wikipedia BTW there is nothing wrong with Wikipedia if you just want a few quotes.

It turns out you can extract “scientific” information from the Bible just not in the way Newton was thinking. The bible is a record of cultural evolution. Of particular interest is the evolution of a culture from a hunter gatherer society to a tribal society to a civilization. As it relates to this discussion how “random” events forced a people to evolve in response. That the responses were in some sense “mechanical” has to do with how the abstract world is largely reductionist. How languages reduce reality to what is comprehensible.

I hope you are not expecting me to have the same intellectual clarity you have. Nonetheless I’m glad you are enjoying it. One thing you have to understand about me is I’m fairly autistic. Almost entirely focused on things not people. It is not just a social problem but a barrier to finding meaning in life. Sometimes I may not seem to be following along because I wander off into my own little world.

162

That is a good bit of moderation. Still I would like to discuss the religious thing someday just not right now. The relevant issue being how it interferes with clarity of though. More specifically when that is important and when it is not.

163

So there you have it. A lot of things get shouted in the middle of a public debate. Provocation is the name of the game.

Can we take a nuanced look at the charge, claim? But not my words, here stuff you can take to the bank:

Lamarck and Darwin revisited - PMC.

Conclusions

Several recent findings indicate that CRISPR-Cas systems of adaptive immunity differ with respect to the level of self-nonself discrimination at the adaptation stage. Some of these systems seem to acquire spacers randomly, resulting in extensive cell death, with subsequent selection of surviving cells that are resistant to infection thanks to the incorporation of spacers from parasite DNA.

Other CRISPR-Cas variants possess mechanisms of efficient self-nonself discrimination during adaptation such that the incorporated spacers come almost entirely from foreign DNA.

These systems seem to qualify as machines for Lamarckian evolution. Subsequent experiments will determine how common is each of these scenarios among the diverse CRISPR-cas systems in bacteria and archaea.

However, even at this stage, it is becoming clear that the Darwinian and Lamarckian modes of evolution form a continuum of evolutionary regimes defined by mechanisms of evolvability that bias the mutational process to different degrees of specificity. In the course of evolution, Darwinian selection and genetic drift appeared first as intrinsic properties of replicators whereas the (quasi)Lamarckian mechanisms evolved jointly with mechanisms of DNA repair.

“Lamarckian” has become a buzz word,
then there are the underlying facts beyond the buzz words,
and how we humans choose to arrange them to complete a story we tell ourselves.

How we frame our questions, can limit what we learn, as much a stimulate it.

164

Dawkins is way past the scientific part of his life, he is a celebrity talker, another intellectual entertainer on stage, maintaining his product, and the accolades while he can, and to heck what history makes of him in hindsight.

Sorry for the cynicism - but it’s a cynical dog eat dog media world out there, and if you choose to stay, you wind up playing anyways. Not that I knock it, if you got it, flaunt it. But don’t expect me to take Dawkins too seriously, one way or the other, at this point, I let my experiences and accumulated knowledge call the shots.

The question is how well do we understand what he really meant. Here’s what I’m thinking of:

Your failure is in not defining which “Lamarkican” you are talking about, the extreme cartoon character, or the much, much subtler toned down reality of how environmental influences translate into biological systems. Read what the actual experts say. Re. Noble, I know that he’s also pointed out, these are his opinions, and not the holy grail. Something worth considering in light of your thrust. Whereas Dawkins, …

165

Have you given thought to the phenomenon of anesthesia in context of “selective interference”?

Anesthesia renders the “conscious” mind completely unconscious, i.e. total oblivion, but leaves the unconscious homeostatic mind able to function in controlling the body’s vital functions.

Then, after a short time this total oblivion ends and your back to reality. The problem is, that contrary to waking from sleep to the new day’s schedule, that being under anesthesia you cannot tell how long you were “away” . You could have been under for 5 minutes , 5 hrs, 5 days , 5 years, 50 years.
This is really amazing stuff.

166

I’m not playing that game.

167

You make it sound like there’s a well defined boarder between consciousness and unconsciousness. It’s not quite so neat.

But that’s the way the public debates work.
Then ya come home and do a little homework.

168

I read your links. They are balanced and include nuance. This forum used to have more of that.

1 Like
169

There is something interesting about sleep, anesthesia and sleep walking in relationship to consciousness I just don’t know exactly what it is.

I’m afraid I’m not up familiar with selective interference. A quick review of literature suggests it is somehow applicable to about everything. Maybe you can suggest a good read?

I don’t know if it is relevant or not but I have a story about anesthesia that I have pondered.

For thirty years we have only owned Borzoi dogs. It is recommended that they only receive anesthesia if absolutely necessary. My casual observation is compared to other dogs they don’t sleep as soundly as other dogs. You may have heard the saying let a sleeping dog sleep. We had a Giant Schnauzer that if he was sleeping and you accidental woke him up you could get bit before he was fully awake. With Borzoi they seem to always be instantly fully awake when something in the environment changes. That is there brain seems fully awake. It does take them a while to get their body together. The giant Schnauzer could undergo anesthesia and recover his coordination fairly rapidly. It took one of our Borzoi three days to fully recover it’s coordination after anesthesia. My assumption is that there is some relationship between body design and sleep patterns. What it is I don’t know.

Another interesting bit of information is that some animals have strange sleep patterns.

The resting habits across different fish species are varied depending on the environment. Unihemispheric sleep allows some fish to put one half of their brain to sleep while the other half stays active, allowing the fish to keep swimming. Some fish enter estivation, a state of dormancy that is similar to hibernation.

All I can say is that the need for sleep is a very costly adaptation. It surely must tell us something about consciousness.

A naive assumption would be that sleep reduces energy consumption by the brain but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

brain energy expenditure in non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep only decreases to ~85% of the waking value, which is higher than the minimal amount of energy required to sustain consciousness [3**]. Second, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is as expensive as wakefulness and the suspension of thermoregulation during REM sleep is paradoxically associated with increases in brain metabolic heat production and temperature [4]. Third, neither torpor/hibernation (for instance, in mammals undergoing daily hypothermia) [5] nor several anesthetic states [6] can completely redeem sleep need and recovery, in spite of the loss of consciousness and the accompanying decrease of energy use. Sleep must be related to some essential functions that are adaptive to the organism in the face of their relatively high energy requirements.

Overall, both in terms of energy metabolism and neuronal activity, the immediate sleep “savings” are quantitatively minor as they might support processes necessary to improve and/or restore the ability to learn and remember during subsequent wake periods.

Obviously sleep has multiple benefits but if we are only interested in it from a consciousness perspective consciousness must come with a cost. That relates back to the mechanical issue we were discussing. I suggested earlier that consciousness interferes with efficiency. Mechanical systems are less prone to “error” than cognitive processes. That has to be weighed against the advantage of being able to consciously interfere with reflex behavior.

I really don’t have anything intelligent to say about all this. I have found it takes me years to work out something like selective interference and generate any interesting ideas in relationship to the new information. I have given a lot of casual thought to sleep but without the scientific background it is easy to jump to wrong conclusions.

In the previous science forum I participated in my favorite person was a experimental physicist. Something I remember him saying to our biology expert was that biology was too messy for him. That physics was so much “simpler”. I kind of witty response to something that was speculative about what physics could tell us about biology. Ultimately however the two have to be tied together as you have suggested. Apparently we are just not there at this point.

170

The world used to have more balance and nuance. Something has changed and some people blame social media. Before that they blamed TV. In a way you could say as it relates to this topic that consciousness has declined in response to technology. We have become more mechanical and at the same time more chaotic?

171

When properly administered it is. When you are under anesthesia, “you”, (the self-aware mind), cease to exist. There is nothing, no senses, no emotions, no dreams, absolute oblivion.
But biochemical homeostasis continues to keep your body alive, albeit in a vegetative state.

Interestingly, all living organisms respond to same dosage of anesthetics. Must have something to do with inhibiting microtubule function. They are after all a common denominator in all Eukaryotes.

172

I simply don’t feel comfortable with those simple generality being taken literally.

There’s a difference between all living organism respond to anesthetics, and what you wrote. As for what the real experts write, seems to me there’s room for a lot of complexity.

All life can be anesthesized

The father of experimental biology, Claude Bernard, performed numerous experimental studies which allowed him to conclude “that all life is defined by the susceptibility to anesthesia.”2,11,12 Claude Bernard’s paradigm is still valid today as all organisms, even prokaryotic bacteria, are sensitive to anesthetics.8,9,12,13-15 Sub-cellular organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts are sensitive to anesthetics as well,16-21which is in line with the prokaryotic sensitivity of both membranes and proteins recorded in bacteria.14,22-24 Finally, several sub-cellular processes based on the cytoskeleton, such as cytoplasmic streaming and phagocytosis, are inhibited by exposure to diverse anesthetics.6,25-30

Go to:

Early evolutionary origins of anesthesia: Endogenous anesthetics help to cope with stress

As discussed by James Sonner, the variability in response to anesthetics is extremely small in comparison to other drugs.8,31 Moreover, the wide molecular diversity of compounds acting as anesthetics is very large, and additionally, the mystery of universal sensitivity of all living organisms to these compounds remains. All this suggests, in line with the Claude Bernard thesis, that the ability to respond to anesthetics is essential for life.8 …

Reading through much of that, paints a different sort of picture for me.

Science doesn’t work by what must be the case.
It’s based on the evidence at hand.
They are still working on it.

I do (like much of) what you share, but your conclusions seem too expansive and pat, compared to the sort of stuff I’m reading when I look up the topic.

And I’m sorry Hameroff seems tainted to me. Show me other scientists providing solid back up and I could change my tune - . . . (out of time)

173

I keep saying that this has to end up being a philosophy of science discussion.

I think we can start by defining intelligence. My definition is the ability to make choices. Since all life makes “choices” one of the characteristics of life is intelligence. You can take a similar approach to defining science. All life does science. It “observes” the environment, makes choices based on those observations and tests them by “experimentation”. The important thing is the order. Observation, hypothesis, experimentation. The suggestion is that there is a misunderstanding about subjectivity. Remove the observer and you remove the starting point. Objectivity is simply not confusing the subject with the object. We do that all the time because language is abstract. Even the languages of math and logic. We confuse the idea of a thing with the thing itself. The thing itself is unknowable because of complexity and chaos. What science actually is is a way to reduce complexity. It is fundamentally reductionist and deterministic.

I keep bringing this up because it seems to be a universal principle. The key to physical evolution is randomness. It applies to everything because everything’s an evolutionary process, including science as we know it. What that means philosophically is solutions without comprehension. We get a hint of it by looking at computers. Computers have no comprehension nor do they typically use standard mathematical solutions. They evolve solutions. No comprehension required. When you move on to quantum computers what they are essentially doing is maximizing randomness and speeding up evolution of solutions.

What write4u is doing is digging down to the smallest observable units and looking for how you get solutions without comprehension. By extension you arrive at what Dennett was trying to tell people in that consciousness is an illusion. Subjectively it is not an illusion but objectively it is. People don’t like this answer because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that we think of as sophistication.

To future illustrate the point, consider genius. High intelligence is a necessary but insufficient condition for genius. There are plenty of highly intelligent people that never produce solutions. Einstein saw the problem and said the key to his success was not high intelligence but imagination. Here I’m going to define imagination as the ability to produce large numbers of random ideas. The genius is in the random ideas just as it is with the quantum computer. A lot of people have “imagination” or the ability to produce mutations but they are in the wrong environment to provide solutions. Those mutations have to exist in the right environment or brain that has what you could call reproductive fidelity. I know it is a bit of a stretch but here I’m going to equate reproductive fidelity with high intelligence. You can start with a good memory and go from there.

You can still argue that writeu4 doesn’t have sufficient observations to form a hypothesis. But as I have pointed out neither did Darwin. He didn’t need the observations because everyone had already made them by way of many generations of selective breeding. All he had to do was have the imagination or the mutated idea that ran counter to the reproductive fidelity of the existing social melee. That idea was very simple. Replace “unnatural” selection with natural selection. It was rejected because at the time nothing was considered random but rather the “will of god”. The genius you might say was in a single word, random. The same kind of genius you find in the concept of zero.

What you are looking for in the proof of concept is the randomness in the microtubule function hypothesis. Once you have found it you will have demonstrated a solution without comprehension.

What you and lausten are trying to do is maintain the proper amount of reproductivity fidelity. That does not produce solutions. It is a necessary but insufficient condition.

174

I said earlier that there are no absolute truths that are not trivial. Once something is “known” it becomes trivial. The philosophical question as I said earlier is what does understanding mean? It turns out that for most people it means more accurate and precise. It has to do with how everything is a matter of degree and not kind. I propose it as a universal principle. How accurate and precise do you need to be to say you have understanding. If you make it an absolute you have taken yourself out of the world of science. What you see as absolute is actually an illusion created by the abstract nature of language. It is why I never argue with creationists. If you think there are absolutes you will never find solutions.

175

[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:172, topic:8495”]

The father of experimental biology, Claude Bernard, performed numerous experimental studies which allowed him to conclude “that all life is defined by the susceptibility to anesthesia.”2,11,12 Claude Bernard’s paradigm is still valid today as all organisms, even prokaryotic bacteria, are sensitive to anesthetics.8,9,12,13-15 Sub-cellular organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts are sensitive to anesthetics as well,16-21which is in line with the prokaryotic sensitivity of both membranes and proteins recorded in bacteria.14,22-24 Finally, several sub-cellular processes based on the cytoskeleton, such as cytoplasmic streaming and phagocytosis, are inhibited by exposure to diverse anesthetics.6,25-30
[/quote]

So that establishes the sensitivity of all organisms to aromatic chemicals.
It is also established that all organisms respond to the same quantities and mixtures
(Hameroff), but we are talking about “consciousness” and what it takes to become unconscious.

The body’s basic metabolism alone requires a lot of biochemical activity. But consciousness is a different animal that seems to emerge along with sensory acuity.

176

Ironic that.

I’ve spent the past years doing battle with Canada Thistle, that invaded a stretch of river bank that my landlord cleared of brush and down trees three years ago. No spray, just pulling, and since Maddy and I walk down here a lot I made it my patrol with gloves in back pocket ready to go. I don’t have the time to really get into it, but I’ve come to appreciate that I’m dealing with an intelligent entity, no I was doing battle with an intelligent entity. And it came back with various tactics and such.
It required repeated assaults followed by the underground plant regrouping before sending forth another series of sprouts, with ever greater stealth ingenuity. Amazing, fascinating, but I can say this year I’ve won. Perhaps a dozen pulled, and this past walk didn’t see any.

Yet, must stay vigilant, they are sneaky little beings and can develop root systems that will amaze, if you given them time and opportunity.

Some other time I’ll have to write about my little awaking to and interacting with other forms of intelligence, such as weeds, that often work on timescales totally different from our own.

I can’t explain it, I don’t even try.
What I try to do is be able to describe what I’m witnessing - and work out from there. Oh and simply enjoy the moments I’ve been blessed with.

image
image1920×2560 1.4 MB

It’s beautiful running as it is, but it won’t last. The last glory days of the spring, as hot temps creep into the La Plata Mountains.

2 Likes
177

Stripped of it’s historical references and looked at from a philosophical perspective Christianity is the doctrine of freewill. The basic thesis is that everyone one ultimately has the freedom to choose god but god is never defined. It is a sound moral foundation for reason that may not be clear to the modern mind.

Because of the amazing success of the scientific and industrial revolution determinism has become the dominant philosophical stance. The problem with determinism can be explained by a simple algorithm.

Determinism no freewill, no freewill no human agency, no human agency no human dignity, no human dignity no morality, no morality no civilization.

Now freewill may not be “real” but nothing our minds can conjure up is. Freewill is the disciplining of instinct. It’s not an absolute in the same way that nothing having to do with language is absolute. Language derives it’s absoluteness from the internal logic of a closed system. System that should not be confused with the thing itself. Freewill is created in the same way money is. Money isn’t real but it transends time and space by altering their meaning. It’s realness is a creation. The process for that is how it interacts with physical reality. It over comes the limitations of physical commodities such as gold by altering the meaning of time and space. It facilitates trade in ways those commodities could never do. Freewill is also a creation. The process is similar to how money became real. It is very hard to live without money but money isn’t real. In the same way it is very hard to have a civilization without freewill. A society in which instincts are not disciplined. The way instinct is disciplined is through virtue. An example, although there could be many cross cultural ones, are the ones that Christian philosophers observed as socially functional. A short list follows.

Chastity or Purity and abstinence as opposed to lust or Luxuria. Temperance or Humanity, equanimity as opposed to Gluttony or Gula. Charity or Will, benevolence, generosity, sacrifice as opposed to Greed or Avaritia. Diligence or Persistence, effortfulness, ethics as opposed to Sloth or Acedia. Patience or Forgiveness, mercy as opposed to Wrath or Ira. Kindness or Satisfaction, compassion as opposed to Envy or Invidia. Humility or Bravery, modesty, reverence as opposed to Pride.

Islam is also very functional but it has different ideas about virtue than Christianity. Islam is an almost perfect religion for a tribal society. It only gives sexual access to young men if they become warriors and it keeps the women as warrior producing machines. Even if the young men die they get there sexual access. The problem is it ran into civilizations based on technology. As soon as technology became more important than “cannon fodder” it started to fail. If you look at the early books of the bible you can see Judaism was also a perfect warrior producing machine for a tribal society. The advantage it had was it evolved to become compatible with technological civilization and lost it’s tribal roots to some extent.

What is particularly interesting is that unlike Islam and Judaism Christianity disassociated itself from the political. That was until the Roman Catholic Church came on the scene and replace the philosophy with a religion. This disassociation from the political is like Buddhism. Giving both of them a universal appeal and that is their magic. Both are philosophically a discipline that creates freewill.

If Dawkins had been born in India I think he could say he was culturally Buddhist without contradicting his atheism. It is harder to do with Christianity but perhaps not if you bring back the original cultural context. The way that people think and communicate is much different than it was in the past. You have to strip away thousands of years of cultural evolution to see what they were saying.

178

I was going to talk about how plants are an example of solutions without comprehension but you beat me to it.

Nice story I enjoyed it.

1 Like
179

Define your terms.

The dictionary gives the example: “canals carved by the agency of running water”. It’s an effect of a cause. You are observing effects and assigning them properties without data on how those effects came to be.

It’s a giant leap from no freewill to no agency, unless you can define those terms to fill that in. The leap to dignity is huger. It presupposes freewill is required for dignity before establishing what freewill is.

180

You mention language a lot, then you throw out definitions as if they are be all and end all. (Note your word “simply”, indicating you’ve covered the topic). But those words are steeped in history and carry baggage.

So what follows in your post doesn’t build on a strong foundation.

You say it yourself later