Thinking about how science is unraveling philosophy’s eccentric Hard Problem. With a little help from Professor Nick Lane
David Chalmers leads philosophers who claim scientists, (that is people dedicated to studying physical reality), will never figure out how biological processes can produce subjective experience.
Then they go on to talk about studying “consciousness” by focusing on neurons and the brain. While the body gets lost like some kind of externality, an irrelevance to minimize and avoid.
Now please consider for a moment, your brain is intimately connected down to every cubic millimeter of your body. Your living body is about a nonstop exchange of information and resources between itself and the outside world. (Same as all other animals, down to single celled creatures.
It is your body that experiences the bike ride, it is your mouth, nose, fingers, etc. who are experiencing the food being eaten, same with the child or lover being touched - it is not your brain.
Everything your brain has to work with must be processed and communicated via our individual living body, (with its unique perceptual filters - product of nature via nurture.)
Professor Lane sees our body’s biology and organs, as a full orchestra of instruments, the physical biology scientists have been studying. Nick suggests it’s time to listen to the music they make, the best way to understand consciousness A creature’s life is all about the music those biological instruments can perform.
The brain? That’s the conductor, and the music that’s the thoughts and feeling surging through our bodies. At the end of this article I’ve added a 266 word quote from the professor.
Scientists have learned that besides neurons there are hormones, neurotransmitters, with their dancing chemical gradients. Also layers of bioelectrical production, with its myriad of discrete bioelectrical potentials, coursing through our body as it navigates our days.
Recent surprises, a missing connection uncovered. Kevin Lee, PhD Neuroscientist says: “There has never been a lymphatic system for the (brain &) central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.”
UVA researchers have discovered the brain and immune system are connected by vessels long thought not to exist. It’s the brain-immune system missing link.
Another surprise, for centuries we didn’t give “connective tissue” a second thought. With modern imagining and other technical magic, scientists have learned that fascia and interstitium are key to helping our brain map and track what our body is doing in time and space and circumstance, while helping keep muscles healthy. Makes absolute sense, but who would have thought it?
To think, humble “connective tissue” separating muscle groups, are a vast fluid-filled network that connects the entire body and redefines human anatomy.
All this hints at even deeper layers of inter body, awareness, communication, in short levels of consciousness. There is no reason to believe the body is not capable of creating mind. Why should we?
Consider, a crystal, a few wires and a diaphragm, can catch voices and music out of the air. A magnet and bit of wire set in motion, can unleash the magical power of electricity. Then die just as fast, soon as the motion ends.
Why on earth shouldn’t our bodies be able to create coordinated thought signals, and eventually even gods, all on their own? It did take over 600 million years worth of generations to get here.
Bottom line — it is scientifically, physically, neurologically silly to search for “consciousness” within our neurons and brain exclusively. No matter how heady the words and concepts.
As for the brain and neurons. We should be clear that neurons and complex brains are about complex thinking and language, and processing streams of incoming information in a nonstop interaction with the physical unforgiving world, as it flys past our physical being.
Brain is for thinking, central processing, the conductor of the symphony that is our body. Neurons are information highways. And consciousness is to be found way deeper, permeating all of it.
“Consciousness” itself was one of life’s very earliest hurdles before biology could evolve into complexity and creatures.
Consciousness needed to be figured out before complex molecules could successfully evolve into creatures possessing differentiated organelles and other components. All successfully working together to negotiate the “barrier” between “me” on the inside and everything else out there.
There was never a successful dumb creature on this planet, it could not have survived long enough to make babies.
This isn’t me fantasizing, it is what the scientists have been discovering and laying out these past decades. There for anyone to learn about, all it needs is the curiosity and sticktoitiveness to do the homework.
Check out: “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)”
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Nick Lane - Epilogue, Self, to the book “Transformer”, p.212
Nick writes:
“… 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.
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 (electrical) 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. 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. Alzheimer’s disease is the fading of that music as the fields fragment. …”
From Nick Lane’s Transformer epilogue “Self,” p.215
Can you feel it?
Understanding the “Self” and our place on this Earth, isn’t near as convoluted as profiteers would have us believe. Still, if it matters to you, you have to do your own homework. Struggle with it until knowledge transitions into understanding. Seek and ye shall receive.
Starts with deeply learning about, that divide between what you are thinking right now and the physical body and world you are restrained within.
I believe, better appreciating evolution as something more than merely a notion about things changing over time, is important.
So many facts to learn, but it’s just trivial until we connect the dots and the knowing becomes understanding about the pageant of evolution and how your body evolved over time.
At least I’ve found a life time of wonder, ever widening understanding, and some resolutions via this passion for understanding the Evolutionary Pageant that brought us to this point.
Now if only I could find some people interested in discussing, sharing and growing, and all that fun stuff I remember from the ‘70s and ’80 traveling and meeting people. Now it seems it’s all about projecting, provoke and monetize. Not so much discussing, and introspection and building upon the evidence at hand. It’s heartbreaking watching the general disintegration.
Take the evolutionary grand tour, start with, Hazen, Lane, Levin, Reber, Sloan-Wilson, Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, and others are first rate scientists and great communicators. The story is there for those who care to learn about it.
