Mauro,

I am not a biologist, but I note that we have not even come to the conclusion that elephants and porpoises, which are clearly sentient, have rights.  Extending this recognition to artificial intelligence or alien lifeforms not based on carbon is going to be a tough philosophical and ethical challenge for our species.

It is certainly true, Michel. But times are changing rapidly. At the beginning of the third millennium the decisive act of human history could be made by AI. Now that robots are beginning to resemble human beings – both in terms of computation power and of physical structure – the issue cannot be sidestepped. in the opinion of some specialists, within a few decades the construction of superintelligent machines will enable us to go beyond the human condition. Left to itself, our biological brain will not be enough. We shall make recourse to nanorobotic systems to help us think, probably by connecting our minds to the cloud, the great and potentially infinite store of information on internet. Our very mode of thinking will become a hybrid expression of biological and non-biological elements. As the cloud becomes more and more sophisticated, we will upgrade ourselves. With time, the role of non-biological consciousness will become more and more important and consequently our mode of thinking will be more and more non-biological. Once this level has been reached, it is reasonable to think that there will be positive retroaction that will enable the development of further impulses: that is, AI will promote the construction of a better AI, which in its turn will begin the creation of an even better AI, and so on. Regarding the acquisition of new competences by means of self-learning, much will be done to raise this limited intelligence to the standards fixed by machines. It cannot be excluded that a brain capable of extraordinary computation might make possible the development of new senses. It will of course be very difficult to replicate the intricate work of evolution and define sophisticated processing of information as emotions such as pain or pleasure. But it is by no means senseless to think that the speed of technological change will produce such a great impact that it will profoundly change human life: a true discontinuity in the human history created by evolution. In my opinion, we have two ways: the first is to wait for things to happen, the second is to understand and guide the future.

Dear Mauro:

The mechanism that supports conscious processing in the brain is composed of sodium, potassium, calcium and chloride ions, water and proteins. The proteins contain carbon, as AMPA and NMDA. However, there are other signal transduction pathways composed of molecules that do not contain carbon, as IP3. If the latter are sufficient to generate the right kinds of hydroionic patterns, then the answer is yes!

It depends on the definition of consciousness. If consciousness is a transparent brain representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective (my working definition), then the inorganic cannot be conscious. Under a different definition of C, one might argue that the inorganic can be conscious.

No.

Otherwise the 'inorganic' would find a way to answer positively your question, unless it's just another internet nickname and he/she will answer very offended.

1. Definition of consciousness should be unique for biologists, physicists,neurologists and , Artificial intelligence experts.

2.Consciousness is the thing which shows the difference between living and non living things.

3. Consciousness is not related brain only. A living cell also may contain consciousness. Order may be different.

4. I have already discussed these matters in my papers(all the papers posted in RG for reference.Further prob is going on.

5.As per film theory of the universe originated by me, consciousness arises due to film change of the universe and the processing speed is 10 to the power of 44 films per sec. if an AI system reaches this processing speed it will attain life and behaves like living thing.

6.Finally a new theory originated by me about 'Bio force as a fifth fundamental force and its unification with other four natural forces of physics is explained that the information in a bio force can not form particles like photon gravitation etc due to the space time arrangement of it.  So 

The difference between life and death is- 

As per Grand Unification with Bio-force as fifth fundamental force, the bio-field is made up of 'Bio field space time'. Its density heavy than other space times made up of other four fundamental forces.

So all other four space times (electromagnetic, weak, strong and Gravity)float in that because their densities are less. at the same time bio field will submerse in other space times due to its heavy density.

Now Gravity space time deals with materialistic world. When Bio-field submerges in material there forms a loop. The out side bio field will be trapped in side the material then the material will get life.. if that loop breaks out the body with life becomes dead body.

Consolidation of all four space times gives rise to their elementary particle. But the fifth force can not form a particle. (Since a particle must have a balancing field around it). Thus it will remain as a wave and since there is no obstructions it will not be absorbent. Thus the disturbance in bio field will not loose its information. In the next split second of formation of zygote it will be associated to DNA. but will contain physical characteristics of DNA. It is applicable to all living things.

7. DNA is organic only. So the Answer is "Inorganic can not be conscious"

8. Here we have to notice that the interaction which goes up to the bio field only will have associated with a program that will be implemented in its body. Other interactions will be guided by the information in universal films.

Thanks for your interesting answers. It was obviously just a provocation. I studied medicine and neuropsychiatry for many years ...  :) Anyhow, until now, in the study of consciousness no one knows how a physical system (the brain, the nervous system, a set of neurons) can produce that set of phenomena that is our conscious experience. The study of the biological bases for consciousness has shown how physics is incapable of providing credible solutions; the lack of means to describe the interactions between neuronal structures and qualitative experiences leads to an investigative dead end. So, I try to rephrase the question in another way: if science is unable to answer any of these questions, might the way forward be to deal with the problem through the construction of organisms having ‘artificial consciousness’?

How would you judge whether or not your machine had this artificial consciousness, Mauro? If you have no idea how a physical system can give rise to consciousness you have no way of knowing whether or not your machine does that. Asking it is no good. It might lie, as humans often do.

I think your basic question is back to front really. A physical system is defined as one that gives rise to consciousness. Think about it, a physical thing is something we can see or touch - something that gives rise to experience. Forget the artificial distinction between the organism and its environment. Physical systems are those that give rise to experience. It is then strange to ask how can it be that physical systems give rise to experience is it not?

When we ask how does... we normally mean by what sequence of events or mechanism. We have no real problem with the sequence of events or mechanism in brains. We know most of that down to quantum level. The real question is which set of events, at what structural level, are the basis for the 'conscious thoughts' we talk about. That needs sorting out, but it is a piece of practical science, not a deep mystery.

So I think your question is bit like asking how numbers add up. Well, numbers are the things that add up. How they do it in practice is easy - two beads on an abacus add up if you shift them to the right together. As to what adding really is - that seems like a question that does not deserve an answer. It is hard to see how there can be an answer to what reality is, since there is nothing that would act as a gold standard to compare it with.

Jonathan, I think I understand what you want to say. I confess that I never believed that the distinction between an 'hard problem' and an 'easy problem' will help us to understand what consciousness really is. We have to admit that it is extremely difficult to imagine how the consciousness (assuming that we agree on the meaning of the term) evolved from the laws of matter. Was it a fortuitous occurrence in the course of evolution, whose meaning is not clear to us, or was there something else? However we look at the circumstances that have led to our present state, the progress has been anything but clear. We do not even know whether man, in his present state, represents the crowning achievement for the species. We only know that the integration of entities that were previously separate is a constant feature of our universe. Fundamentally the (relative) certainty that our fellow men are endowed like us with consciousness is merely based on the similarity of our brains. This is really as far as our certainties go. What will never be in doubt is that the genesis of thinking matter is the most surprising event of all in evolution. Is there not something miraculous in the fact that molecules which are so different from one another should have come together to form a being that is conscious of himself and of the world? When compared with the slowness of the physical and chemical processes governing matter, intelligent life really does seem to be something of an exception.

For over a century now, scientists working in various disciplines all over the world have been trying to throw light on the secrets of the brain. But the better we become at tracing its labyrinths, explaining its mechanisms and mapping its geography, the more arduous is the task of explaining it. The nature, plasticity and unrepeatability of the brain’s organization now appear much more dynamic and complex than anything we had ever suspected. To insist that the basis and substance of life is to be sought in simple matter, with all the rest being considered as merely accessory, risks leading the discussion into an impasse. Not only would a concept like “human liberty” be nonsensical; it would be like reducing Michelangelo’s Pietà to the marble it is made from.

There can be no doubt about it: every mental event, even the most abstract, is correlated to events in the brain. Just as there is no question that lesions of specific areas of the brain cause loss of, or a deficit in, some of the mental faculties which are correlated to those areas. Besides, each specific area is inevitably involved both in the vital functions (acting, breathing, walking and so on) and in mental activities (remembering, dreaming, thinking), which only partially involve motor action. Moreover, not all mental activities can be easily located. For example, many faculties which are essential to survival, like memory, are based both in the cortex and in the subcortex. Other more general and abstract faculties – decision making, reasoning, judging – which are correlated to metabolic variations in the limbic and prefrontal areas, are even more difficult to locate. Even our relations with other human beings, like the elaboration of sensorial sources and the relative behavioural responses, appear to be mediated by processes scattered across the brain; specific areas become expert so that they can ‘flexibilize’ the inborn predispositions in the interests of a progressive, albeit relative, emancipation of the organism’s behaviour patterns from environmental constrictions.

If this is the case, why does it seem that materialism, even in its most rational and responsible guise, has become totally unable to decide, bogged down in unresolvable aporias? Materialism fails to convince because it is not able to describe the complexity of the brain, presenting an image which is too simplistic and static to provide an insight into its extraordinary fundamental mechanisms.

In my opinion there will not be two consciousnesses'  like 'artificial consciousness' and 'Natural consciousness'. Consciousness is a phenomena which directs the conscious object as per the 'film change of the universe'. For that the conscious object must require some energy. In living things it takes the out side energy in the form of food and creates self energy to act according to universal film change.

In case of 'humanoids' or 'robots' It will eat metallic parts and make(develop)its system to make its necessary parts to generate energy to act according to the 'Film change of the Universe' and synchronises its positional movements according to the film of the universe.

At this processing speed the information(explained as Bio-force the Fifth fundamental force) will be associated to the body in case of  biological living matter and to the metallic body in case of 'Robots'. The above said information(program) will have all types of feelings and similar to soul. Quantum communication and entanglement plays vital role to achieve it.

Dear Mauro,

I think you are chasing false problems to a large extent.

You say the brain appears much more dynamic and complex than anything we had ever suspected. I see no reason to say that. Leibniz assumed that it was infinitely complex. As a student fifty years ago my view of brain complexity was much the same as it is now. I am not clear what extras you are trying to justify. Certainly a concept like 'human liberty' does seem to me pretty nonsensical. It sounds like the old chestnut of free will that nobody can explain the meaning of.

I think the problem may be that you are talking of materialism as being inadequate and materialism is a very naïve viewpoint that no scientists should take seriously. High level science takes a dynamist viewpoint like Leibniz. Everything we can know about is causal connection, not stuff. Real science is not about stuff. 

Evolution has led to very complex dynamic systems called brains and I think we can understand how that might come about pretty well. I see no reason to think that evolution has given rise to consciousness in the sense of phenomenal experience - as far as we know that may be everywhere.

I am not sure I understand quite what it is you think is hard to explain. I agree that a lot of popular neurobiological models of consciousness are confused, but I think there are better models at hand. 

Dear Edwards, regardless of Leibniz, could you help me understanding precisely what you mean when you write:

1) "Evolution has led to very complex dynamic systems called brains and I think we can understand how that might come about pretty well. I see no reason to think that evolution has given rise to consciousness ..."

2) " (...) I think there are better models at hand" ... ?

Certainly Mauro,

The term consciousness covers two different concepts as I understand it.

One concept is typified by David Chalmers's idea of 'a light being on' or 'that there is something that it is like to be' or the term 'phenomenally'. It is hard to find a foolproof way of describing this concept because one always makes use of metaphors but I have suggested that one way is to say that X is conscious if X has some influence from the rest of the world that is somehow 'overt' or 'manifest' or indeed 'like something' to X. 

We have no evidence that this sort of 'having a manifest input from the world' has evolved because we can only infer it on circumstantial evidence. As far as we know every dynamic unit, from photons to galaxies, have it. There is nothing unexpected about it because, as indicated, any dynamic conception of a physical world entails that 'I' have it.

The second concept relates to the type of content that is manifest to X. For us that content is manifest as rich scenarios that have a sense of time and place and value and self-identity (in adults) and more. Moreover, we have reason to think that these scenarios co-vary with the outside dynamic world in a reliable way that is useful to us. So in this more complex sense consciousness involves something close to knowing about the dynamics of the world. Inorganic units or simple life forms will not have this sort of content as knowledge because it requires inference from differences to construct it. A rock might receive influence from the world that is overt to it but without having a way of comparing two inputs it cannot have any knowledge of what the input is telling it about external dynamics - to put it most simply.

The human brain can be seen to be designed in just the sort of way that could provide some inner unit with manifest knowledge of world dynamics. There is nothing very new about this. Locke and Leibniz knew enough to understand that interconnected nerves could be used to infer differences and thereby judge dynamics. Berkeley writes on this. We have learnt a lot more detail since I was a student but basic concepts have changed rather little.

The models I have difficulty with are those that assume that experience emerges from distributed neural activity - often related to synchronisation. Tononi's integrated information theory is one and the various workspace theories are others. The problem with all these is that they are non-local so violate the most basic principle of physical dynamics. That is not a good way to try to model dynamics because without locality you cannot make any precise predictions. Everything is contingent. I prefer a local model where the dynamic unit X that has a manifest input from the world of the sort we call our experience is a mode of excitation associated with an individual cell. There will be large numbers of cells of the relevant sort so experience will be massively multiple at any one time. This approach seems to me the obvious default one since the only place where rich information is integrated in the brain is in the dendritic tree of an individual neutron. There is nowhere else that information is brought together as an input. 

The issue then is what sort of mode this would be. My preference is for an acoustic mode since acoustic modes are the ones that define supramolecular dynamic units - familiar objects if you like. There is masses of stuff on this on my webpages at UCL.

I don't know why Most of the researchers think that brain is complex and causes consciousness.

But in my opinion, Brain is also a program in DNA . So the problem of consciousness lies in DNA rather than brain. Only thing is we have to deviate from the critical thinking about the definition of consciousness. even a living cell also will have a point representing its brain. brain may be a complex system but let us leave the complexity of brain and think about co relate or to distinguish physical laws, chemical reaction and biological reaction at the fundamental level to define consciousness and then we can implement it in experimental verification.

Jonathan, for thousands of years the question of consciousness has been bound up with mysticism and materialism, metaphysics and ontology, captivating and exhausting the mind of whoever has attempted to grasp its secrets, eliciting by turns feelings of exalted enthusiasm, beguiling confusion and bleak skepticism. I think that the story continues. 

Have you asked yourself why should a phenomenon which is so familiar and yet so elusive be the mystery of mysteries? I think there are at least four factors. In the first place the use of a single word, consciousness, devoid of any empiric and conceptual demarcations, whose multiple meanings have generated a notable conceptual confusion, leading to uncertainty even in formulating problems and procedures and interpreting the basic facts. Thus the same term is used to designate such widely diverse phenomena as the condition of a patient in intensive care (in and out of consciousness), concern for the environment (ecological awareness), proper conduct (moral conscience), the activity of the ego (narrative consciousness) and a thousand other things besides. In the second place, the automatic identification of awareness – the state of openness to the world which informs our relational sphere – with consciousness. In the third place, the presence of qualitative states in conscious experience: the smell of a rose, the taste of a good wine, the sound of a piece of music and so on. And finally, the impossibility of agreeing on methodology among researchers who all take an interest in consciousness for various reasons but who have all too often proved unable to go beyond the boundaries of their respective disciplines while treating the ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ as distinct metaphysical territories.

Beyond these epistemological problems, perhaps it is useful to enter in the neurophysiological details. For example, if we intend to remain on the traditional ground the idea that the human brain generates a single stable consciousness that remains permanent through time does not seem to correspond to the multiple and intentional nature of its contents. This internal plurality requires a discussion both of the mechanisms that unify the diverse contents and of the biomolecular mechanisms underlying the conscious experience. In general a plural model of consciousness is based on two fundamental elements: a process distributed through the cortex and subcortex, which sparks the activation of the contents; and the elaboration and representation of the contents, which are then brought into consciousness.

But what is the nature of the relationship between neurobiological infrastructures and consciousness? Is it plausible that the extensive contents of experience, instead of joining the central system moment by moment (or else being integrated in one global operation) contribute to the conscious experience and only subsequently reach the brain? Herein lies the difference between a monolithic and a plural conception of consciousness. In fact it is one thing to maintain that everything depends on the brain’s elaboration of the information and contents acquired, so that they are routed, represented and finally brought to consciousness; and quite another to say that consciousness is the effect of a set of phenomena generated by precise cerebral dynamics. If the first model has the features of a hierarchic, pyramidal process, the second appears to be the evolutionary outcome of the integration of visual, auditory, tactile, proprioceptive and other experiences.

The question of whether the inorganic can be conscious arose in the 1960s with the publication of Buck's "Cosmic Consciousness". For example, Tailhard Desjardins argued that rocks have consciousness because there is a continuum from the physical to the biological. This is attractive to one interested in a unified theory of the Natural Sciences, but has been hard to demonstrate. I have argued that by circumventing the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Life strikes a Faustian deal with non-life by being able to entrain energy and reduce entropy through epistatic, homeostatic control by homeostatic mechanisms. For example, endothermy evolved in birds and mammals due to the physiologic stress of adapting to land. Endothermy is also the ultimate exaptation of the internal control of energy, conferring autonomy on birds and mammals for freely ranging over the face of the Earth. Being warm-blooded may have given rise to bipedalism, freeing the fore limbs for specializations like flight and the prehensil thumb for tool making. These skills may have ultimately given rise to higher consciousness as a consequence of defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thus, there is a continuum form the inanimate to the animate. In the Cosmologic sense, the Big Bang created a 'logic' by distributing the elements based on their Atomic Mass.....that may be the template for what we think of as human logic and consciousness. A bridge too far? I think this scenario is important in trying to find life on other Earths, let alone cope with Climate Change on this planet.

Unfortunately the RG software has erased a long post. Maybe I will have time to rewrite sometime.

Of course, Jonathan! it is a pleasure and a privilege to discuss with you.

Maybe I am still not sure what the problem is for you. The last paragraph of your penultimate post seems to address specific issues of models but I cannot work out exactly what meanings you are wanting to give to words like content. I think it is best to think in specific biophysical terms - or at least specific types of dynamic relations.

As several of you have observed, the underlying challenge in the original question is to define consciousness in a manner that is consistent many of the different ways in which the term is used.

Throwing my hat into the ring, I choose to define consciousness simply as the capacity to make personally meaningful decisions. I can provide the justification for and underlying details of this definition later, if necessary. But first, using this definition to address the original question, if an inorganic entity can be provided with a sense of self, access to a world of options, a mechanism for evaluating each option in the context of its potential benefit to that self, and the freedom to select the options that maximize that benefit, the entity can be considered conscious.

Kevin: "... if an inorganic entity can be provided with a sense of self  ...''

This is the key. To my knowledge there has been no credible explanation of how an inorganic entity can be provided with a sense of self. On the other hand, there is an explanation of how a brain can be provided with a sense of self. See, for example, "Space, self, and the theater of consciousness" and "Where Am I? Redux" on my RG page.

Dear Arnold, in my paper J.S. Torday, Evolutionary Biology Redux. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 2015 I compared the bonds formed by chemicals with those formed by cells. The paradox is that the chemical bonds create stability whereas the biologic bonds form the basis for communication and novelty. The biologic process leads to consciousness, so I hypothesize that there is a continuum from the inanimate to the animate....a bridge too far? John Torday, Professor, UCLA

A bridge too far. Yes, too fur. But, speculations must go on. Because we can not leave such a big mystery untouched. 

When a ball hits the ground, it is speculated that it does so unconsciously.

When we interact with somebody or something, we do it consciously.

Where is the difference?

I have a proposition. I consciously interact when I interact with something, simultaneously being present in myself and the thing I interact with.

This can be thought to be true if we speculate that we have come from a single point and that all things are entangled.

The feature described above is only manifest in our brains in optimum quantity.

But, it is also spread everywhere. But in inanimate objects the level is so low that it can, practically, be ignored. 

 John,

In your article:  Biologic Relativity: Who is the observer and what is observed?

Article in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 121(1) · March 2016

You wrote: "In consequence, it becomes implicit that eukaryotic evolution derives from the unicellular state, remaining consistently adherent to it in a continuous evolutionary arc based upon elemental, non-stochastic physiologic first principles. Furthermore, the entire cell including its cytoskeletal apparatus and membranes that participate in the resolution of biological uncertainties must be considered as having equivalent primacy with genomes in evolutionary terms. "

While there is strong evidence for a continuum from the inanimate up to the organization of a unicellular entity, there seems to be a sharp break from the inanimate in the structural, dynamic, and functional potential at the point of the evolutionary emergence of the living cell. After this event, the later emergence of the cognitive brain enables the observation and theoretical formulation of salient aspects of the world we live in. 

Arnold, I understand your skepticism regarding my comment about the continuum from the inanimate to the animate. In my paper "Evolutionary Biology Redux" I compared the consequences of chemical vs biologic 'bonds' formed by chemical reactions vs biologic communication. In the case of chemicals, the bonds result in stability, whereas in the case of biologic bonds, they lead to novelty. The 'trick' that biology plays on physics is in making an end-run on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, allowing for negative entropy or negentropy (Schrodinger, What is Life, 1944). That 'Faustian pact' forms the vital force that distinguishes life from non-life.

 As for the emergence of the cognitive brain, I think it has its roots in the formation of micelles from the polycyclic hydrocarbons delivered along with the water from the asteroids that pelted the Earth at the beginning of life. Those micelles were warmed by day and cooled by night, causing liquification and solidification of the lipids, which were able to recover their form through hysteresis, or chemical 'memory'. I think that is the origin of consciousness. Best, John

John,

What is the origin of subjectivity? Most living multicellular organisms do not exhibit subjectivity. In my view, subjectivity is the hallmark of consciousness.

Arnold, I'll have defer to you as the psychologist. But after searching long and hard for the answer to that question I came across David Bohm's "Wholeness and the implicate order". Are you familiar with his work? He was a quantum physicist, and he posited that we hominins use our evolved senses to perceive the environment, which he called the explicate......in contrast to that, he described a continuum of true reality which he referred to as the implicate realm. I am interested in this idea because I think that the co-evolution of the visceral organs and the CNS is key to understanding consciousness. Does that resonate with you? Are you familiar with Nick Holland's concept of the skin brain.....that the CNS evolved from the neurons in the annelid skin. The skin as the homolog of the unicellular cell membrane is an underappreciated organ which I think gave rise to all complex vertebrate physiology......but I have said enough. I would be interested in your thoughts along these lines. I certainly unerstand (I think) your idea that subjectivity is the hallmark of consciousness, though I would like to think that consciousness is a continuum with the inanimate, as Tailhard Desjardins had proposed...John

that 

Dear Arnold,

How do you exhibit subjectivity? Does subjectivity need to be exhibited? Does a motionless owl with far more complex eyes and ears than ours exhibit subjectivity? Which exhibits more subjectivity, a sloth or a honey-bee? I have assumed your subjectivities for some ten years or so now through characters on a laptop screen. But how many of them are there and can I be sure they exist? 

Regards

Jo

The cues of this debate makes me wonder: what is it that gives form and order to the world? What recovers the data and, through the senses, interrogates the external phenomena? What are the grounds for the innumerable interactions between the individual areas, the exchange of sensorial traces and data among highly intricate neuronal networks, the constant re-elaboration of pre-existing information, the collaboration and competition between the cortical and subcortical structures? What biological algorithm can govern the effects of contingency and historical irreversibility, the action of non-linear processes, artistic creation, ethical systems or the scientific vision of the world? Surely only consciousness can fulfil this. Prior to being the premise for awareness, consciousness is living matter, indeed, a “living body”. Our thoughts spring from the body, or rather from the brain, which is first and foremost body. Certainly, the cortex, the physical location of fantasy and our capacity for abstraction, plays a crucial role in our relational existence, but it is consciousness that is the most authentic expression of the complexity that matter has reached in the course of its evolution.

It is only our inability to recognise our biological and psychic existences as a single whole which nurtures old and new dichotomies and prompts us to give more credit to the ambiguous messages that come from the world around us than to ourselves. Only an ideology, or faith in a particular world view, can make us deny the existence of facts and things that go beyond the physical world. Materialism – meaning literally belief in the existence only of matter – does not explain reality. What objective forms of knowledge, what epistemology based on the brain, can provide me with information about the experiences of a being who is different from me? The more I distance my "self" from myself, to ensure the objectivity of my criteria and judgements, the more my perception of things becomes hazy. Even the hypothesis of the identity between mental and physical states begins to seem fallacious. For to maintain that a mental state is a physical state requires arguments that are more convincing than a mere understanding of the workings of the verb "to be". If we fail to get to grips with materialism’s theoretical hypothesis, this will continue to be an obstacle on the path to a fruitful knowledge of consciousness.

From the very start matter has been constituted in increasingly complex forms. In its formidable mutations it has learnt to assimilate and transmit information, to become an exceptional vehicle for the non-material, whether we are speaking of stars, galaxies or human beings. Matter decays and is transformed, is renewed and divides. On the contrary, information is constantly expanding, leaving its mark in basic aggregates of molecules, and above all generating an inconceivable increase of sense in the history of the universe. If we do not recognise all this, we are bound to remain trapped in the age-old dichotomy of matter and spirit.

I am not a philosopher, I am an empiricist, and have been a working scientist for 50 years. Therefore, when I think about the meaning of consciousness it must be in the context of testable/refutable hypotheses. Much of my thinking and writing about evolution over the last 20 years has come from three sources: 1) my own research on the mechanisms of morphogenesis as cell-cell communication via soluble growth factors; 2) my frustration as a developmental physiologist with the circular reasoning and serendipity/counterintuitive nature of biological science; 3) recent studies of epigenetics in my laboratory, revealing that genetic modifications come directly from the environment, causing transgenerational inheritance by leaving epigenetic 'marks' in the egg and sperm that had been thought to have been wiped clean during meiosis, but are not. For all of these reasons I began thinking more deeply about dogmatic subjects in biology such as the cell, homeostasis, heterochrony, pleiotropy and the life cycle itself. Once I realized the primacy of the unicellular state, it occurred to me that we do not transit the life cycle from adult to adult as is conventionally thought, but from zygote to zygote. As Samuel Butler said, "A hen is just an egg's way of making another hen". And once the focus is on the unicellular state, acting through evolution to maintain its equipoise, was I able to follow that idea back to the physical environment, tieing the biologic and physical together as consciousness, since the Big Bang generated a logic through the distribution of matter in the Universe based on atomic mass. Similarly, lipids in water are the beginning of life, exhibiting hysteresis, or memory....that principle is internally consistent in the vertical integration of vertebrate evolution, all the way to the Central Nervous System as a continuum. That idea, for example, led to the thought that if there could be a Periodic Table of chemistry and physics based on atomic number, there could also be a Periodic Table of Biology based on First Principles of Physiology.

Jonathan: "How do you exhibit subjectivity?[1] Does subjectivity need to be exhibited?[2] Does a motionless owl with far more complex eyes and ears than ours exhibit subjectivity?[3] Which exhibits more subjectivity, a sloth or a honey-bee?[4] I have assumed your subjectivities for some ten years or so now through characters on a laptop screen. But how many of them are there[5] and can I be sure they exist?[6]" 

1. I can exhibit subjectivity by changing my environment to suit my needs. There are many other ways to exhibit subjectivity. For example, selecting the shortest route to a destination after exploring a new environment. The general idea is that one's behavior suggests that one has an internal representation of one's surrounding space/environment.

2. It depends on on the context of the matter, Subjectivity needs to be exhibited by a creature if we are to take to be conscious.

3. Subjectivity, as such, does not depend on the complexity of sensory input. Th motionless owl would have to engage in the relevant kind of overt behavior to say that it shows subjectivity.

4. I don't know enough about sloths and honey-bees to answer this question.

5. There is one subjectivity for each conscious creature, but its phenomenal content can be vast. 

6. We cannot be certain of the existence of anything, even though we can believe, on the weight of evidence, that subjectivities exist.

For my current opinion on the matter, see "A foundation for the scientific study of consciousness" on my RG page.

Mauro: "... the lack of means to describe the interactions between neuronal structures and qualitative experiences leads to an investigative dead end."

I have argued that the SMTT experiments described in "Space, self, and the theater of consciousness" and other publications is a means to describe qualitative experience in relation to neuronal structures. What are the counter arguments?

Mauro, regarding your suggestion that we study consciousness using artificial organisms, perhaps we haven't considered the question of consciousness 'holistically'. I have become acutely aware of the primacy of the unicell as the state that is being selected for evolutionarily. If consciousness is ultimately a means of systematically collecting epigenetic marks from the environment, then the process of consciousness must be considered as a function of the whole organism, not just the nervous system responding to the environment. I have taken this position with regard to the signfiicance of the meaning of the individual in a recent publication (Torday JS, Miller WB. Phenotype as Agent for Epigenetic Inheritance. Biology(Basel). 2016 Jul 8;5(3)) - if the phenotype is a means, not an end, then its interactions with its environment must be thought of in a holistic way. When I read the work on how paramecia respond to their environment through changes in calcium flux it is no different than the behavior of a neuron in us. My point is that to my knowledge we haven't considered how consciousness is either stimulated by interactions with the environment via the body, or absent external stimulation, it mimicks 'inputs' internally through pseudoperceptive pathways, i.e. the organism remembering how it responded to a given input in its past and then reacting accordingly. It's like Gestalt psychology, but in the framework of the mechanism of consciousness.

Mauro, and just to follow up if I may, on the notion that there is a continuum from physical perception to physiology expressed as consciousness, in the paper (Torday JS. The Emergence of Physiology and Form: Natural Selection Revisited. Biology (Basel). 2016 Apr 1;5(2)) I show the vertical integration of the physiologic balance between calcium and lipids, which can be seen as the vertical integration of physiology and consciousness.....I hope this is clear enough to sustain this conversation. John

Arnold, really interesting experiments, seems to me particularly focused on perceptive sphere. I was referring to qualia – qualitative experiences which are elusive, private, immediate and not inference-based, that make us see things they way they appear to be. We have to ask whether it is possible to study consciousness and its properties using the tools and methods of the natural sciences. But since the mind can only be studied if it is a physical substance, the answer must be affirmative. The natural world is physical and, therefore, accessible to all. For example, anyone possessing the appropriate instruments could ascertain that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. But no one can gain access to the universe of the mind because only the subject of the experiment can probe it. It is true that the neuronal structures of an organism can be scanned at the precise moment in which something is being experienced, but we shall never know the real meaning of that experience. When we describe states of the brain we are only describing the state of the neuron populations, not the qualitative experience or intentionality of the subject whose brain is being scanned. Intentional objects elude the biological models which refer to neurophysiological values in the brain (for example, an increase in the blood flow, metabolic variations, or whatever) that can be instrumentally registered. Only once consciousness is naturalised can we break free from the paralysing interpretative dilemmas. And what does this naturalisation involve? Making sense of the nervous mechanisms of the intentionality and qualitative awareness which enable us to relate to our peers, to convey our desires and beliefs to them, and ultimately to understand what others are doing and why.

John, I answer to your fascinating observations below. First of all, let me to make some considerations. I think that the problem of consciousness is basically a tautology. In common usage it indicates a broad spectrum of phenomena and psychical processes, even extending to the organization of our relational life. In its etymology, it evokes a relationship with another being or with the external world. Obviously, according to this definition any behaviour devoid of relational or communicative significance would reflect an absence of consciousness, although this inference does indeed appear questionable. The term consciousness can have widely differing meanings the world over.

What are we to do about a term like consciousness that designates, at one and the same time, the highest manifestations of human ability and the normal state of everyday living? Should we use the term to indicate subjective consciousness, the oriented vigilance of a subject, or something else again? In medicine, for example, it can only be used in certain precise conditions: there must be an adequate state of wakefulness, an appropriate functioning of memory and attention, a good capability for discernment and decision-making, and correct temporal and spatial orientation. Another approach to consciousness takes account of the ability to have qualitative experiences, or again of a moral dimension. In everyday speech it is not uncommon to hear expressions like “I have a clear conscience”, “the voice of conscience”, “you’ve got a strong environmental conscience”, “the character’s conscience”, “your conscience is troubling you” and so on. Similarly, in religious experience the term conscience alludes to a secret, intimate space, an inner recess where human beings find themselves alone before the transcendent. As in the context of qualitative experience, here too consciousness is an interior sphere that cannot be traced back to any roots. One further approach identifies consciousness with the mind, so that any intentional mental state is “conscious”: a thought, a desire, a belief, a hope, a memory and so on. Strictly memory cannot automatically be attributed to consciousness, even though in the absence of consciousness memory would be fragmented in innumerable discrete experiences, without duration, brief instants of existence, as happens to patients affected by serious memory impairment. And so we could go on, but it is enough to recall a study by Miller (1950), still highly relevant even over half a century on, which listed no less than 17 definitions of consciousness in the scientific sphere alone.

Can a single word give expression to all these levels of meaning? I have some doubts. Not surprisingly, for many researchers this multiplicity of meanings has strengthened the conviction that consciousness is too difficult a concept to begin to investigate. In reality, however, it is not impossible to identify a shared meaning, as long as one is careful to delimit the relative semantic field. Science differs from the other forms of knowledge for its ability to scrupulously define the objects of its enquiry. Certainly words have the task of indicating an object’s function, but they also have to help us avoid the confusion that derives from semantic mistakes and from an ambiguous use of language. In common parlance, as in science, expressions and statements can be the source of ambiguities. To the best of his or her ability a scientist, much more than a philosopher, has to throw light on the grey areas of language. Making an accurate definition of an object or a method of research has fundamental consequences for the import of a discovery. Of course no one can establish the limits of language, not least because they are inherent to language itself. Nonetheless, drawing a boundary between what can and cannot be said is perfectly within our capabilities.

John, your questions can’t be circumvented. They questioned me for decades, both in the laboratory and in clinical contexts. For example, how does the brain generate states of awareness? Do the activities of consciousness involve only limited zones of the brain or is it a global phenomenon in which the brain plays only a part, albeit a highly significant one? Or again, if consciousness were due to the activity of specific regions, would it involve the activity of specific types of neurons or a variety of anatomical substrata? In this case, which level would be correlated: the intracellular structures, the synapses, or specific neuronal stratifications? We shall not be able to make much progress until we can throw light on these questions.

Mauro: "I was referring to qualia – qualitative experiences which are elusive, private, immediate and not inference-based, that make us see things they way they appear to be. We have to ask whether it is possible to study consciousness and its properties using the tools and methods of the natural sciences."

I too was referring to qualia -- immediate qualitative experiences that are not perceptions and are not inference-based judgements. In the SMTT experiments the subject has an immediate vivid conscious experience of a triangle out in the space in front of him when there is no such object in his visual field. This is a true hallucination with its own distinctive quale. Furthermore, a second person, looking over the subject's shoulder as the subject changes the hallucinated shape of the triangle to achieve base-height equality, experiences the same changing hallucinatory qualia. See the figure attached below.  

Sorry. This is the figure that should be attached to my comment above:

Mauro, I appreciate your in depth comments about how difficult it is to pin down consciousness. Yet when I read the work on how calcium fluxes change in response to stimuli in paramecia (see Helmut Plattner) I am encouraged to think about the vertical integration of that simple mechanism to the CNS of vertebrates., i.e. how consciousness in paramecia translate to axonal conduction in vertebrates.  I have published a paper on the misconcept that we complicate physiology by seeing it in the here and now, whereas the fundamental principles are simple by comparison (Torday JS. Life Is Simple-Biologic Complexity Is an Epiphenomenon. Biology(Basel). 2016 Apr 27;5(2)). After all, the entire physiology of a human being can be packaged in the zygote, so why not think that the problems of physiology, including consciousness, could also be simplified? My encouragement in this vein comes from emerging knowledge about the mechanism of epigenetic inheritance that was catalyzed by the realization that the epigenetic marks acquired by the organism are processed during meiosis, some of which are retained, re-centering our focus on the unicellular state as the primary level of selection. The life cycle is actually from zygote to zygote, not adult to adult.....the latter, like our understanding of consciousness, is an anthropomorphism. I welcome your comments

John: "... I am encouraged to think about the vertical integration of that simple mechanism to the CNS of vertebrates., i.e. how consciousness in paramecia translate to axonal conduction in vertebrates." 

If you believe that paramecia are conscious organisms, I would be interested in the working definition of consciousness that justifies the claim.

Arnold, thanks for your reply. Helmut Plattner has shown experimentally that if you put glucose in the water paramecia will be attracted to it in conjunction with increased calcium flux, like a neuronal transmission. In my own writings, I have hypothesized that the epistatic balance between calcium and lipids is the essence of vertebrate evolution, starting with the protocell and culminating in the CNS, lipids ensuring faithful transmission of calcium flux for consciousness. On a grander scale, there is a continuum from the physical environment to biology, the latter having defied the Second Law of Thermodynamics by generating negentropy (Schrodinger, 1944). The physical environment has a 'logic' that was generated by the Big Bang dispersing matter based on atomic mass (~ The Periodic Table). That logic is exploited by biology, which entrains factors in the environment like oxygen, nitrogen, heavy metals that would otherwise have killed us off long ago, instead compartmentalizing them and making them useful as physiologic traits. That enterprise is part and parcel of what I think of as consciousness. In your realm of psychology, I think that Gilbert Gottlieb's 'probabilistic epigenesis' is analagous to what I am talking about. I would appreciate your thoughts.....John

Arnold, here's another way for me to express my take on consciousness in a recent publication...

Biology (Basel). 2016 Jul 8;5(3). pii: E30. doi: 10.3390/biology5030030.

Phenotype as Agent for Epigenetic Inheritance.

Torday JS1, Miller WB2.

Author information

Abstract

The conventional understanding of phenotype is as a derivative of descent with modification through Darwinian random mutation and natural selection. Recent research has revealed Lamarckian inheritance as a major transgenerational mechanism for environmental action on genomes whose extent is determined, in significant part, by germ line cells during meiosis and subsequent stages of embryological development. In consequence, the role of phenotype can productively be reconsidered. The possibility that phenotype is directed towards the effective acquisition of epigenetic marks in consistent reciprocation with the environment during the life cycle of an organism is explored. It is proposed that phenotype is an active agent in niche construction for the active acquisition of epigenetic marks as a dominant evolutionary mechanism rather than a consequence of Darwinian selection towards reproductive success. The reproductive phase of the life cycle can then be appraised as a robust framework in which epigenetic inheritance is entrained to affect growth and development in continued reciprocal responsiveness to environmental stresses. Furthermore, as first principles of physiology determine the limits of epigenetic inheritance, a coherent justification can thereby be provided for the obligate return of all multicellular eukaryotes to the unicellular state.

KEYWORDS:

Darwin; Lamarck; epigenetic; germline; life cycle; niche construction; phenotype

John: "Helmut Plattner has shown experimentally that if you put glucose in the water paramecia will be attracted to it in conjunction with increased calcium flux, like a neuronal transmission."

Do you consider chemotaxis to be an example of consciousness? This is where what we consider to be exemplars of consciousness is critical. As for Plattner's observation, it would be a simple matter to build a device that is attracted to high concentrations of glucose. Nor is increased calcium flux or neuronal transmission, as such, an indicator of consciousness. These are obviously present in patients in deep coma. In my view, consciousness does not exist with the absence of subjectivity. See "Evolution's Gift: Subjectivity and the Phenomenal World" on my RG page.

OK, I understand your point with regard to a mere 'reflex' vs something more nuanced. I was focused on the relationship between the behavior and the calcium flux being homologs of the axon-dendrite. There is evidence that planaria exhibit avoidance, so there is opportunity for more than just a reflexive response to stimuli. And there are the data on planaria being able to 'learn'. My point was that the calcium flux is common to all behavioral traits. And when yeast are put in 0 x G conditions they lose their ability to polarize, resulting in loss of calcium flux, linking the most ancient effector of life, gravity, with calcium flux.

John,

Avoidance of noxious stimuli  is a common reflexive act found in simple organisms as well as in humans.

But what if the response is a nuanced combination of 'pleasure and pain', particularly in a novel context, i.e. memory? Is that still reflexive, or is it consciousness? As an amateur, it seems as if consciousness is the ability to understand stimuli as past and present.....and that higher consciousness is the ability to understand stimuli in the past, present and future simultaneously? too glib? John

John,

Memory is a product of learning, and learning is an unconscious neuronal process. What we remember is not consciously experienced unless it is represented as something somewhere in spatiotemporal relation to our self (subjectivity). As far as I know, there is only one kind of neuronal mechanism that can do this job. I call it the retinoid system and I have detailed its minimal structure and dynamics in The Cognitive Brain.

John, I think that the problem is not to widen the semantic field of the term consciousness. On the contrary, it’s to narrow it down to something very precise. My proposal is to restart from the Ascending Reticular Activating System functions. The cruciality of the ARAS in the organization of the central nervous system does not correspond to a hierarchical superiority with respect to the cerebral hemispheres: given their high specialisation and greater selectivity, they do their work at a higher functional level. Moreover, for specific anatomical and physiological reasons, systems with a specific projection (olfactory, gustatory, visual, auditory, somatosensory) have functions which are quite different to those of a system with general projection. The former are made up of a peripheric receptor, afferent pathways and relay nuclei for these pathways which access a small portion of the cortex; and the latter of cellular aggregates distributed throughout the brain stem whose stimulation has a widespread influence on the electrical cerebral activity. The ARAS is not limited to the brain stem: it projects upwards towards the cerebral hemispheres and downwards towards the spinal cord. Its functions are much more complex than simple cortical desynchronization, even though this is essential in the state of alertness and attention. Its thalamo-cortical projections, which are a-specific with a high oscillatory frequency, are fundamental for some essential functions of consciousness.

Studies of cerebral activation have shown that in patients in a vegetative state (i.e. wakefulness without content) the connectivity between areas that are normally connected is lost: in particular between the primary cortical areas and the associative multimodal areas (prefrontal, premotory and parieto-temporal, cortex of the posterior and precuneo cingolate gyrus); or between these areas and the thalami. This evidence taken together suggests that the vegetative state is a sort of disconnection syndrome in which an isolated neuronal activity is associated with a reduction of the cerebral metabolism. Conversely, in patients in a minimally conscious state the connectivity between primary areas, associative cortexes and thalami is maintained, so that the anatomo-functional apparatus required for conscious activity is intact. These studies of cerebral activation are opening up new scenarios. Recent research has shown how, in a sub-group of clinically vegetative patients, cortical activities of information analysis persist in such a way as to make the existence of levels of minimal consciousness plausible. On the contrary, the verbalisation of words − which automatically excludes a diagnosis of vegetative state − could represent a complex or automatism generated by little ‘archipelagoes’ of neuronal activity without consciousness. This however brings us back to a crucial question: how small do these little archipelagoes have to be for them to be non-thinking?

Mauro, I appreciate your in-depth knowledge of brain structure-function. However, I do not think that looking at the brain in its present state will reveal the nature of consciousness, which enables us to experience the past, present and future simultaneously. It's the difference between the synchronic, or 'snap-shot' perspective vs the diachronic, or across space-time view. The latter requires an analysis that simultaneously accounts for both the developmental ontogeny and long-term phylogeny of the brain mechanistically. Are you familiar with the paper by Mashour GA, Alkire MT. Evolution of consciousness: phylogeny, ontogeny, and emergence from general anesthesia. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Jun 18;110 Suppl 2:10357-64 showing that when patients come out from under general anaesthesia they seem to recapitulate the phylogeny of the brain? This may be anthropocentric but I mention it because it engenders the way I think consciousness must be addressed. The big breakthrough in brain evolution occurred when Nick Holland published his paper on skin brain (Early Central Nervous System Development, 2003). I mention that paper because it offers an opportunity to study the evolution of consciousness longitudinally.....John

John,

What is the evidence that consciousness "enables us to experience the past, present and future simultaneously"? The evidence that I have suggests that consciousness can only give us an experience of an extended present. We can, of course, contemplate past, present and future within the time span of our extended present.

Mauro:  "This however brings us back to a crucial question: how small do these little archipelagoes have to be for them to be non-thinking?"

Most of our thought proceeds unconsciously. Our cognitive productions seem to become part of our conscious experience only after a delay of approximately 500 milliseconds. You experience the meaning of these words after they have been processed pre-consciously. The little cortical "archipelagoes" are really mini cognitive mechanism that can think in their own limited domain, but cannot give us the global egocentric binding that is our personal conscious experience.

In the retinoid theory of consciousness, ARAS is critical in that it provides the diffuse excitation required to push the autaptic cells in retinoid space above the threshold of consciousness.

I believe it is not possible to address the problem of consciousness, without taking into account the problem of living matter.

in truth we do not know how a pull of organic molecules becomes a living structure that interacts with the world.

under the profile phenomenological, consciousness arises in the interaction with the environment.

I think that only living matter can interact with its environment. A computer system does not interact with its environment but it is the world that acts on the machine. At best, the machine responds to the action of the environment but always in one direction in the final pre-established measurements from the other will.

Is pjysics unable to explain? I do not agree . To day we have high and valuable neuroimaging sytems. They are giving excellent results every day in understanding brain regions and functions. On the other hand we have a lot of " empirical studies and results". May I se that they pertain to psychology and often also to psychiatry? In the background we have also the arising psychophysiology that is often dismissed in our current standard universitary courses and it represents another missing possibility to accreditate new discoveries. The question : the reductionistic position of some neurologicla tendecny is to retain that adding piece to piece one day we will arrive to understand the mind , consciousness and its evolution. At the moment the results obtaining by such studies often result conflicting with those of the "empirical " field. The situation is a gap between the two current field. What is missing ! It is prevailing the missing of a theoretical model and a theoretical model may be based only on physics.Again.. have we the appropriate physics. I have devoted so much interest to this field. We have quantum physics that is revolutionary and dismissing all the old ideas that we had about our reality a formulated in classical physics. Quantum mechanics is THE FIRST THEORY of perception and of Cognition  and if one looks to the lot of results that result , as example, in my profile  could agree with such position. We were in error and we continuw by this way. Quantum mechanics has its peculiar origin in the logic and in the knowledge not in the matter. If we use logic statements we may obtain quantum interference as well as  using atomos or physical particels. The cosnequence is that there are stages of our reality in which we no more may conceive matter per se .. and this is to say .. indepnendetly from the cognition we have about it. Consciousnes..... we have a book of Nova Science Publishers entitled Advances in application of quantum mechanics in neuroscience and in psychology where the basic foundations of consciousness based on an abstract formalism   arises...So inconclusion... are we not discovering so much or often we have resrevations in relation to some disciplines so that our eyes remain closed ?

At best, the machine responds to the action of the environment, but always according to a line created by an other will.

I think that the problem of consciousness is one of scale. Once you are able to reduce the biologic to its interface with the physical, consciousness can be seen in its true form. The interface between biology and physics lies in the unicellular state, able to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics by being able to regulate its internal energy using homeostatic principles. Those homeostatic principles, in turn, reduce to the epistatic balance between calcium and lipids.......therein lies the true nature of consciousness as the functional interrelationship between the external environmental conditions and the internal physiologic milieu. Whether we are talking about unicellular organisms or neurons in the brain, the same process holds true. Perhaps you are thinking this is overly simplistic, but I maintain that we humans over complicate biology by seeing it in its physical state in the here and now rather than as the mechanism by which life exists in the past, present and future simultaneously.

John,

I think that you  are correct it is all a matter of scale.  This and the fact that all natural processes have limits.  In the lab I see the scientific side of things and how most of what I learned in school never talked about limits.  Other than in integrals so the math side of things.  We ignored the limits that all things have.  Even math has its limits. 

it is not matter of scale, I retain. It is matter of basic foundations of reality and quantum mechanics speaks about such new foundations inverting the so much old fixed statements of classical physisc. For the first time it explains that reality is interfaced as a Giano two faces God. This is the starting point to discuss... about the logical origins of a discipline that was realized to explain atom mechanism. There must be a profound reason to have quantum mechanics such so peculiar feature .. its origin in the logics... Finally .. open biological systems are far from thermodimnamic equlibrium and this opens the way to account for theur evolved complexity. Finally we canot forhet , speaking of origins of life, its profound intrinsic asymmetry.. parity violated symmetry.. starting with amino acids all they have the Lform .. and this is a quibit  ..a quantum abstarct elemnt of reality.

George, thank you for the approbation.......just to be clear, I think that the properties of lipids suspended in water at the beginning of life are no different in kind from consciousness. That is to say, the warming and cooling of those lipids by the sun, derived from the asteroids that delivered frozen water to the nascent Earth, exhibiting hysteresis (= memory) is the origin of consciousness. And once atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean it formed carbonic acid, causing the leaching of calcium from the bedrock, assaulting the emerging life forms since calcium gums up lipids, proteins and nucleotides. But the lipid micelles were able to entrain and compartmentalize the calcium, forming the basis for regulated ion fluxes that constitute consciousness at ever-higher levels. For example, when yeast are subjected to 0 x g microgravity they lose their ability to polarize, so they no longer exhibit calcium flux. Bear in mind that gravity is the oldest environmental factor that affects life.

Elio, I understand your desire to equate Quantum Mechanics with biologic principles. But with all due respect, I don't think it's a one-to-one relationship. Biology is pseudophysics, so the key is to reduce the biology to the working level at which it interfaces with the physical, i.e. at the unicellular state where entropy is entrained and regulated by homeostasis. From there on forward the system can be scaled up based on cellular-molecular principles of paracrine growth factor signaling, culminating in homeostasis. But I would maintain that the evolved multicellular forms are all epiphenomena since the system always returns to the unicellular state, that being the primary level of selection- we only think we go from adult phenotype to adult phenotype because that's the way the life cycle appears to us, but it is actually zygote to zygote. I say that because we now know that the epigenetic marks that modify DNA readout are processed by the germ cells (egg/sperm) during meiosis, determining the phenotype of the next generation offspring. Another way to think about that is by looking at the slime mold Dictyostelium. Under high food abundance conditions it exists in a free swimming amoeboid form; but under low food abundance conditions it reverts to its sessile sedentary colonial form. I assume that the slime mold evolved under high food abundance conditions, but discovered a way to survive under low food abundance conditions by reverting to the colonial form. In the case of both phenotypes, the organism is able to collect epigenetic marks in order to determine the state of the environment, either more actively as the amoeba or more gradually as the colony in order to survive and evolve. I hope that makes some sense.....John

John,

I have seen the action of the CO2 being a big part of the backbone of life.  your work seems to find the actions that are there naturally almost must form life!!!  I have thought this over the last several years myself.  It also lends itself to the theory that I am working on now about the beginning of the Universe.  I think maybe we should talk sometime about this.  The CO2 also makes up the back bone of all the other parts of life including all the Protein structures and much much more. 

There is a thought in my mind that none of this would be possible had it not been for the other thing that most scientists ignore like it was not there and that is the constant flow of Neutrino's that are flowing through everything.  I wounder if the living things change the flavors of the Neutrino's?

That one may be too far out there to be of any consequence but it sticks in my mind as a possible problem for life as we move through space farther away from the sun and how that may affect life.

Gravity is however the one factor that is not constant and I wounder if the formation of life could be a mix of all the factors that we are talking about. 

George 

I do not equate q8uantum mechanics with biologic principles. Never I thought a thing of this king. I only did some consideration on the fact that to speak about some fundamental questions  the discovery of the basic principles structuring our reality are important. Quantum mechanics, in the limit in which a theory holds, has indicated such principles. That is all!

I think that the our interesting dialogue must extend to the decisive question of awareness. Indeed, we do not really know what awareness is, nor what it has to do with the tangible world. Even if we grant it a biological function, we do not know if it is merely the surface effect of a brain that evolved for other purposes. In practice, evolution has often produced mismatches: biology invented culture, but culture has not done much to improve human nature: one only has to think of the impossibility of eliminating aggressiveness, violence, warfare. In spite of the rapid and extensive corticalization of the human brain, its subcortical structures have remained more or less identical to those of our ancestors. For our good fortune, however, the extraordinary quantity of rational decisions which has led to the formidable edifice of human knowledge has been underwritten by a natural logic whose rules, for the most part unknown, have proved highly advantageous in evolutionary terms. In any case, even if the neurophysiological models appear insufficient to explain the function of awareness, it does have precise neuronal correlates which have enabled man to achieve a sort of extended adaptivity.

It is surely reckless to maintain that awareness plays only a marginal role in human behaviour. This claim is the exact counterpart of the claims that attribute to awareness an excess of importance in our relational existence. The beam of awareness only spasmodically throws light on our actions. Certainly we produce the most logical explanations on the basis of experience. We distinguish what is conscious from what is not – an individual from a chair, or a person who is awake from another who is sleeping – but we overestimate the length of time in which we are really conscious of our actions. When you think about it, we are not even conscious of our non-awareness.

To give a schematic account, there are two types of awareness, one characterised by qualitative sensations, the other lacking them. Although perception makes us (qualitatively) aware of objects or facts in reality, this does not make it a particular experience. For example, we could be grappling with an abstract problem or a difficult algebraic equation and be conscious of it without any specific qualitative or emotional experience. In reality any number of the memories of our past life are devoid of affective resonance. But why are there experiences that are qualitative and others that are not? What is the essential nature of awareness? We have no idea. We only know that awareness enables us to understand our behaviour and match it to the most diverse situations. If we fail to grasp its multiple essence, we shall never succeed in understanding its true nature.

It is difficult to answer.. so much questions. Some comment is possible . I continue to think about the foundations of our reality. Without a correct approach to this question I have doubts that we may understand .

What is the scheme of reality that we are considering ? Is that one of the classical physics on which of course all the standard biology and , for extension, medicine are based ? It has given us a lot if results but resarch has evidneced that it is so approximated. So, how may we hope to solve a so basic problem as awareness...? Classical approach to our reality is in a separation based on our empirical approach. Matter world is here , in this sppace .. in this time , with past and future ,, I see it from the outside....I measure ... I perceive and I have  cognition of it ..... but with what elemenst of reality..... My perceiving  and cognitive entiteis... the entities of mind that are ...where? .. I do not know... I only know that trhey exiist and are existing outside of the external matter that is there and that I observe . So we have the first net separation    THE IT that is there  in the soace ... I have mental entities that are separated but intercaed .. and that are vanishing since I feel they exist but no other. So, problems  from problems... IT SEPARATED FROM BIT ... feel because  another imprtant property exists ...SELF-REFERENCE .There is another question. Human being is feeling, has cognitive possibiliyies, runs abot a logic that has only two values .. yes or NOT... Two values.  A traffic light .. red   or green. These were the elements and we realized a scheme of reality. Call the matter IT and the mental entities BIT. The simple explanation is that BIT arises from IT. When reaching , by evolutionary steps, a high level of complexity .. as a miracle .. BIT arises  and mental entities . We arive at 1927, the advent of quantum mechanics. A turning point. Separation matter -mental entities does not exist at the levls of reality decsribed from this theory. So....It is not BIT from IT ....  May be It from BIT ? Selfreference. We are accustomed to think Mathematical functions as y=f(x)... no.. we have also x=f(x) .. self-reference awareness... Still. No!!!!! The previously two values logic no more holds..... There stages of our reality in which both red and freen coexist...... Take a bipolar disorder as approximate analogy  .. stafes his/mood ON .. stages  his/her mood DOWN   but also stages  in which both ON-DOWN coexist ... as the spin of a particle up and down simultaneously   before to be observed....In conclusion .. have we elemensts to think again abouit the foundations of reality in the tentative to understand something about it..

Mauro,

It seems to me that awareness corresponds to what we call perception -- that part of our global conscious content that is selected and captured by attention and subject to cognitive analysis. It is interesting to find in the SMTT experiments that the slit in the concealing screen and the vertically oscillating dot are continuing visual stimuli that are initially perceived by the subject, but are no longer perceived (outside of awareness)  as soon as the hallucinated triangle is induced.

Mauro, I wanted to respond to your earlier commentary about 'artificial intelligence'. I too am deeply concerned about relinquishing our control as humans of the one attribute that facilitates our evolution- intelligence/consciousness. If we delegate that property to computers I fear we will dissociate ourselves from our evolutionary trajectory, starting from unicellular life. It was at the beginning of the process of life that we, as life forms, were determined by defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The subsequent interactions with the environment fashioned us and all of the biota into what we see at present. But if we now authorize computers to begin making decisions for our species, the process of evolution is at risk because it may not remain faithful to our evolutionary trajectory. Consider the fact that all life forms use nucleotides (RNA, DNA) for their 'memory'. That is probably not a coincidence. Furthermore, I hypothesize that those organisms that failed to use nucleotides to remember their past in fashioning their future are extinct. If we delegate our evolutionary fate to computers that decide that DNA is superfluous because they can perform that task, we may become a silicon-based life form instead of being a carbon-based species, i.e. we may become an artificial tautology.

Title: Vertical Integration of Physiology from Micelles to Consciousness

Or From Lipids to Lascaux, Literature, and Leitmotifs

Author: J.S.Torday

Department of Pediatrics

Harbor-UCLA Medical Center

1124 W.Carson Street

Torrance, CA 90502

Ph: 310-222-8186

Fax: 310-222-3887

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

There is great interest in understanding the nature of consciousness, but the challenge is that it is not material. Tracing the evolution of consciousness from its origins in lipid physical chemistry as hysteresis, or ‘memory’, to cell-cell communication forming complex physiologic traits offers the opportunity to understand consciousness from its Physiologic First Principles. The stress of transitioning from water to land gave rise to endothermy, bipedalism and the specialization of the forelimbs of birds and mammals, requiring higher order central nervous system control, or consciousness. This novel approach to the question of what consciousness constitutes is testable and refutable.

Key Words: consciousness; lipid; endothermy; bipedalism; vertical integration

Introduction

The hallmark of a durable scientific theory is its capacity to resolve the paradoxes and inconsistencies of the prevailing theory in an unconditional, scale-free manner. The cellular-molecular approach to evolution is just such a concept (Torday and Rehan, 2012), able to predict many properties of biology that are currently dogmatic, based on a common mechanism that integrates all aspects of biology in a scale-free manner, starting from the unicellular state (Torday, 2015a). Thus far, it has given insight to the evolution of the lung (Torday and Rehan, 2007a), providing an algorithm for the evolution of many other physiologic traits such as the kidney, skeletal system, skin and brain (Torday and Rehan, 2009). The key to tracing the evolution of the lung from its unicellular origins was in focusing on the physicochemical properties of the surfactant system and how it has been modified to accommodate oxygenation for metabolic drive (Orgeig et al., 2007).

Cholesterol is the most primitive lung surfactant (Orgeig et al., 2001), having evolved in response to rising levels of oxygen in the atmosphere- Conrad Bloch hypothesized that cholesterol emerged because it was contingent on excess oxygen in the nascent atmosphere, requiring 11 oxygen atoms for each cholesterol molecule (Bloch, 1992). Based on that hypothesis, he was able to determine the biosynthetic pathway for cholesterol, biochemically formulating the incorporation of oxygen into cholesterol’s sterol precursors. Interestingly, bacteria also use sterols to cope with oxidative stress (Saenz et al., 2012), suggesting that the use of cholesterol to cope with hyperoxia was an exaptation. In both cases, the way these lipids do so is by making the outer barrier more compliant. In the case of cholesterol, its insertion into the phospholipid bilayer thinned the membrane out (Ohvo-Rekilä et al., 2002), increasing oxygenation, metabolism and locomotion, the ‘trinity’ of vertebrate evolution (Carrier and Perry, 2006).

Even though Bloch’s hypothesis culminated in the determination of cholesterol biosynthesis, he was reasoning after the fact; conversely, there must have been some pre-adaptive ancestral use for cholesterol, given that evolution is characterized by serial exaptations, or pre-adaptations (Jacob, 1977;Gabora et al., 2013). So what was the atavistic trait that gave rise to cholesterol in the face of oxidative stress? At the first instantation of life, the lipids derived from the asteroids that pelted the primitive, atmosphere-less Earth, were suspended in water and spontaneously formed micelles, or semi-permeable spheres (Hanczyc and Szostak, 2004). Such protocells set life in motion by reducing entropy within them using chemiosmosis (Martin et al., 2014), maintained by homeostasis (Torday, 2015b). These First Principles of Physiology have fended off oxidant injury throughout vertebrate evolution, instead exploiting oxygen for metabolic drive (West, 2003). Therefore, looking at evolution in the forward direction, cholesterol is an innate means of coping with the environment. Moreover, cholesterol has facilitated the evolution of complex physiology, beginning with lipid rafts as the basis for cell-cell signaling, telescoping to the endocrine systems of complex organisms (Melmed et al., 2015). The physiologic stress presented by the greenhouse effect caused by rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was similarly resolved using cholesterol. The Romer Hypothesis (1949) states that the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere some 400 million years ago dried up large bodies of water, forcing some water-borne organisms onto land. This put tremendous stress on such organisms for gas-exchange in air (Maina and West, 2005), the increased gravitational effect of terrestrial life relative to the buoyancy of water, and barriers against salt and water loss as well as microbial infection (Wu et al., 2004). The evolutionary reply to this challenge came from exapted cholesterol traits in the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPAA). The saltatory evolution of the lung alveoli (Torday and Rehan, 2004s) was mediated by cell-cell interactions fostering increased gas exchange. Periodically, the evolving lung would have been relatively inefficient, causing systemic hypoxia, the most potent physiologic stimulant of the HPAA. As a result, increased ACTH production by the pituitary stimulated adrenocortical production of glucocorticoids, stimulating catecholamine production by the adrenal medulla by catalyzing the rate-limiting step in its synthesis, Phenylethanolamine-N-Methyltransferase (Melmed et al., 2015). Systemic catecholamine stimulated surfactant secretion by the alveoli (Lawson et al., 1978), transiently increasing gas exchange by lowering surface tension, allowing greater distension of the alveoli. Over-distension of the alveoli would ultimately have increased the number of alveoli by stimulating Parathyroid Hormone-related Protein secretion (Rubin et al., 1994). These physiologic properties evolved from cholesterol in the cell membranes of unicellular eukaryotes- increased compliance, oxygenation, and the formation of lipid rafts (Torday and Rehan, 2012).

In parallel with the effect of catecholamines on surfactant production, they also caused lipolysis in peripheral fat cells, releasing fatty acids for increased metabolism, resulting in increased body temperature (Celi et al., 2015). This has been hypothesized to be the origin of vertebrate endothermy/homeothermy (Torday, 2015c), the stress-based mechanism giving way to constitutive elevation of body temperature and thermoregulation by such thermo-regulatory mechanisms as oxytocin (Kasahara et al., 2015) and thyroid hormone (Solmonson and Mills, 2016) due to positive selection for endothermy/homeothermy: ectotherms require many isoforms of the same metabolic enzyme for efficient metabolism (Zakhartsev et al., 2007), which is costly compared to having only one form of the enzyme in endotherms (Hochachka and Somero, 2002). Therefore, endothermy is much more metabolically efficient than ectothermy, creating positive selection for bipedalism, which is much more energetically costly than quadrapedalism (Nakatsukasa et al., 2006). Walking on two legs freed the forelimbs of endotherms for specialization in birds and mammals, the only two warm-blooded species, such as flight and the prehensile thumb for tool making, respectively. This constellation of physiologic traits may have given rise to higher consciousness a priori because of the need for equal or greater complex integrated control by the central nervous system.

A posteriori, Hobson and Friston (2012) have shown that head cooling is necessary for higher consciousness in hominins, a property of birds as well (Porter and Witmer, 2016). Implicit in this mechanism is endothermy, since in order to cool the brain it must have been warmer.

Pleiotropy (taken from paper….needs to be edited)

In contrast to the probabilistic way of thinking about pleiotropy as the random expression of a single gene that generates two or more distinct phenotypic traits, it is actually a deterministic consequence of the evolution of complex physiology from the unicellular state (Torday, 2015a). Pleiotropies emerge through recombinations and permutations of cell-cell signaling exercised during reproduction based on both past and present physical and physiologic conditions, in service to the future needs of the organism for its continued survival (Torday, 2015d). Functional homologies ranging from the lung to the kidney, skin, brain, thyroid and pituitary exemplify the evolutionarily mechanistic strategy of pleiotropy. The power of this perspective is exemplified by the resolution of evolutionary gradualism and punctuated equilibrium in much the same way that Niels Bohr resolved the paradoxical duality of light as Complementarity (Bohr, 1928)- that the seeming wave/particle nature of light was due to the way light was measured.

Hibernation as the Inverse of the Evolution of Endothermy

During the evolution of endothermy, catecholamines facilitated the use of oxygen in the lung and systemic periphery. In the lung, the surfactant was modified such that its phase transition temperature became optimal at 37oC, making it 3-times more active in surface tension reduction than it was at 25oC, the ambient temperature of the environment in temperate climates. In the periphery, catecholamines increased the unsaturated fatty acid composition of cell membranes, making them more ‘fluid’, allowing for more oxygen uptake. However, under the low stress conditions of hibernation, we see the opposite effects of decreased circulating catecholamines. The surfactant reverts back to its cold-blooded ectothermic composition (Suri et al., 2012), and the unsaturated fatty acid composition of the peripheral cell membranes decreases, making oxygen uptake less efficient. The net result is the maintenance of oxygen under the lowered metabolic conditions of hibernation.

Cholesterol, the Arc from Matter to Consciousness

Thus far, we have seen how cholesterol has vertically integrated vertebrate physiologic evolution from the inception of life itself to the complex physiology of terrestrial adaptation. This attribute is indicative of a diachronic, across space and time approach to evolution, as opposed to a synchronic ‘snapshot’, which is the conventional way of thinking about physiology. As a component of the cell membrane, cholesterol can also be seen facilitating consciousness, beginning with the partitioning of the external physical environment and the internal physiologic environment, or milieu (Bernard, 1974) by forming micelles (Hanczyc and Szostak, 2004), followed by negentropy (Schrodinger, 1944), defying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as described above. That deception of Nature (Torday and Miller, 2016) determines the basis for all of life, from unicellular organisms to higher consciousness. For example, the cell membrane of amoebae is used to detect metabolic substrates in the environment, affecting their behavior through calcium signaling (Plattner and Verkhratsky, 2015). That same relationship is seen in vertebrate physiology (Case et al., 2007), calcium flux dictating both central and peripheral nerve activation. Furthermore, the pleiotropic relationship between cholesterol and endothermy can be discerned in the Central Nervous System (CNS), myelination of neurons insulating them against the deleterious effect of temperature (Cullen and Webster, 1977).

Another such pleiotropic homology can be seen between the lung and brain, Neuregulin, a member of the Epidermal Growth Factor signaling pathway, mediating lung development (Fiaturi et al., 2014), and in the brain mediating the myelination of neurons by Schwann cells (Gambarotta et al., 2013) to form the nerve tracts that ultimately constitute intelligence and consciousness (Chevalier et al., 2015).

Similarly, nicotine affects both the lung and brain through a common molecular mechanism, but with opposite adaptational and maladaptational effects. In the CNS, nicotine stimulation of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors increases memory (Blake et al., 2014). In the lung, it stimulates nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the upper airway causing asthma (Sakurai et al., 2011). In both cases, stimulation of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor increases calcium flow across the cell (Vernino et al., 1992); in the lung upper airway, increased calcium flow causes increased contractility of smooth muscle, whereas in the CNS increased calcium flow enhances neuronal transmission, enhancing brain function.

Homology between the evolution of endothermy and myelinization? Exaptation of lipid hysteresis?

To understand why lipids facilitated the evolution of the CNS, we have to refer all the way back to the inception of life. The formation of micelles by lipids immersed in water would have been affected by the recursive heating and cooling of the Earth by the Sun. The lipids would have been alternatingly liquefied and solidified, changing their conformation, but returning to their original state due to hysteresis, the ‘memory’ property of lipids (Salcedo et al., 2014). It is that ability of lipids to remember that ultimately evolved into the CNS.

Evidence for such interrelationships can best be seen under pathologic conditions. For example, there is a homology between coat coloration and asthma in both humans and dogs, interrelating the skin and lung as barriers. The host defense peptide CD103 is polymorphic in both the lung and skin of dogs, pleiotropically causing asthma (Bernatchez et al., 2015) and determining fur color (Ollivier et al., 2013), respectively. Since coat color is important for both camouflage and reproduction it supersedes the compromised breathing effects of asthma. A similar phenomenon is seen in hominins (Leung et al., 2006).

An analogous relationship between skin and brain is seen in neurodegenerative diseases such as schizophrenia, Paget’s Disease, Nieman-Pick Disease, and Tay-Sachs Disease. In all of these conditions, the neuronal abnormality is associated with atopy, a skin rash. This pleiotropic effect is a consequence of abnormal myelination in the brain (Nave and Werner, 2014), and disrupted lipid barrier function in the skin- in both cases lipids are used to ‘insulate’ these structures/functions to optimize the efficiency of ion flux (Slazer, 2015). And the pleiotropic relationship between the lung and skin brings this interrelationship full circle. In both cases, lipids and host defense peptides are packaged in lamellar bodies that are extruded into the extracellular space, forming a lipid-host defense barrier in the stratum corneum of the skin (Aberg et al., 2008), and the alveolar hypophase of the lung (Fehrenbach, 2001). It should be borne in mind that the skin is the most primitive of gas exchangers (Hsia et al., 2013), and the CNS evolved from the skin (Holland, 2003), so there is a fundamental pleiotropic interrelationship between the skin, lung and brain that likely evolved from the cell membrane of unicellular eukaryotes (Torday, 2015a).

The Logic of the Big Bang as the Template for Consciousness

Having made the case for the pleiotropic relationship between the skin, lung and brain emanating from the unicellular state offers the opportunity to trace these traits all the way back to the physical environment. The Big Bang distributed matter in a pattern largely determined by atomic mass (Hawking, 2011), forming a ‘logic’ in the Universe. That logic can be seen in the periodicity of the elements (Scerri, 2006), for example. Therefore, when lipids formed micelles with the capacity for memory (see above), they evolved in compliance with the logic of the physical principles of the environment, circumventing it in the case of thermodynamics. And as has been shown above, the vertical integration of lipid homeostasis can be traced from the protocell to consciousness. Therefore, there is a continuum from the logic of the physical environment to consciousness (Bucke, 2010), forming the integrated, scale-free basis for the long-awaited understanding of the ‘singularity’ (Torday and Miller, 2016).

Conclusion

Ever since Aristotle formulated his concept of entelechy, a hypothetical agency not demonstrable by scientific methods that in some vitalist doctrines is considered an inherent regulating and directing force in the development and functioning of an organism, there have been efforts to determine this property of Nature. Entelechy, taken from Aristotelian metaphysics, is assumed to be a factor that directs the individual regularities of organisms, specifically their orderliness, harmony, plan, or goal. Entelechy would arise from the pre-established harmony of living organisms, which is outside the realm of science. Instead, scientists tend to discount this perspective as orthoganalism. They even claim that there is no place in the modern synthesis for such an internal principle (Solum, 2011). However, it is important to note that even the authorities on this viewpoint, such as Dobzhansky, Kosswig, and Mayr, acknowledge that the epigenetic system confers a fundamental, but not fully understood, ordering effect. They also question whether this pattern of mutual gene effects can ever be understood because of its complexity (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Polanyi, 1968).

Rupert Riedl referred to this internal order as burden (1978), the responsibility carried by a feature or decision; Wallace Arthur called it bias (2004); L. L. Whyte referred to it as coordinative conditions - “The coordinative conditions hold the clue to the relation of physical laws to organic processes and to the unity of the organism” (1949). Many have invoked the existence of an internal principle as the basic problem of evolutionary theory—Remane, Ludwig, Hennig, and Hartmann—without providing
a mechanism. Yet, we do not think of evolution as being a conscious process. However, in the current paper the link between the physical and biological is traced through the formation of the protocell, circumventing the Second Law of Thermodynamics by generating negentropy (Schrodinger, 1944) using chemiosmosis (Martin et al., 2014), regulated by homeostasis (Torday, 2015b). It is posited that there is a logic in the inanimate Universe resulting from the orderly distribution of matter based on atomic mass (Hawking, 2011), providing a template for the logic of Biology (Torday, 2016).

The vertical integration of lipids traces the evolution of vertebrates, from their presence in the primordial oceans to their insulation of the CNS. The recursive liquefying and solidifying of lipids due to warming and cooling by the Sun as the Earth rotated, eliciting the hysteretic memory of these molecules that ultimately culminated in the complex hominin brain. The dynamic relationship between the physical and biological bridged the external logic of the Universe and the internal logic of the cell as one continuous process, or ‘singularity’ (Torday and Miller, 2016).

One experimental observation consistent with this concept for the vertical evolution of consciousness is that when patients come out from under general anesthesia, they recapitulate the phylogeny of the brain (Mashour and Alkire, 2013), offering the possibility of tracing this phenomenon back to its origins empirically.

Acknowledgement

J.S. Torday has been a recipient of NIH Grant HL055268

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John, I read your paper with great interest. I think that it enriches our discussion very much. However, I still believe that our difficulties depend on our struggle to demarcate the meaning of consciousness semantically. If we do not it, we will have huge problems to understand each other, as our even interesting dialogue on RG shows.

Mauro,

My working definition of consciousness is this:

Consciousness is a transparent brain representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective. 

Do you agree? If not, what are your objections to this formulation of consciousness?

Arnold, I find that your definition is very persuasive: but for the awareness. As I tried to say in my previous interventions, I think that consciousness is a phenomenon related to specific cortico-subcortical structures.

Mauro,

I think we agree that consciousness is generated somewhere in in the brain by particular kinds of neuronal mechanisms. My candidate is the mechanism of retinoid space in the brain's putative retinoid system. However, I am puzzled by your concept of awareness. How would you distinguish awareness from consciousness? As I see it, awareness is that part of our global conscious representation in retinoid space that has been selected and potentiated by attention and subject to further cognitive analysis. In the SMTT experiments, we are able to distinguish awareness from consciousness even though consciousness is a necessary condition for the existence of awareness.

Mauro, I understand the need to define what consciousness means. But with all due respect, like all of biology and medicine, defining it based on its current appearance is, by definition, reasoning after the fact, whereas tracing it from its origins across space-time diachronically provides objective evolutionary evidence for what consciousness actually constitutes physiologycially. My point is that by determining consciousness's functional 'meaning' from its simplest forms forward, that we can define it as a process without the subjective anthropocentric subjectivity that we are now burdened with. Moreover, starting at the beginning of the process offers the opportunity to understand consciousness in the context of its physical origins in the Cosmos, which I earnestly think is the ultimate arbiter of what consciousness constitutes (see attached). That idea is expressed in the attached.I hope that that was helpful, and not too over the top. I welcome your responses, the good, the bad, and the ugly. John

John: "This perspective on life is a “game changer”, mechanistically rendering transparent many dogmas, teleologies and tautologies that constrain the current descriptive view of Biology."

Would I be wrong to assume that you take life to be the simplest form of consciousness? If this is the case, you would have to claim that a person in deep coma is conscious -- a claim that would be widely disputed. 

Arnold, I am taking the position that by defining consciousness based oney on its current form, we fail to understand its true underlying principles. By analogy, it was only once Astronomers realized that the Universe had an origin in the Big Bang that they were able to understand causal Cosmologic interrelationships. To carry that one step further, it's like the difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian Gravity Theory, the former describing the interactions between bodies, the latter integrating gravity into the Unified Field Theory by explaining gravity as the result of the distortion of space-time. Similarly, the comatose patient is descriptively unconscious, but it is still aware of its surroundings, and responds metabolically through its cellular components. In other words, the patient may not be able to communicate, but an MRI would reveal visceral 'cognition'.

John 

John,

Current concepts of cognition assign its contents into conscious and unconscious processes. Metabolic/visceral "cognition" would fall into the unconscious or preconscious domain. Can you give us a succinct definition of what you take to be awareness?

Arnold, I see a continuum between visceral and neuronal 'consciousness', based on the unicellular origin of multicellular organisms. There is probably no fundamental difference between the calcium flux caused by stimuli in unicellular organisms and what happens in neurons. In the book we published, "Evolutionary Biology, Cell-Cell Communication and Complex Disease."  (Wiley, 2012), we made the case for the balancing epistasis between calcium and lipids as the central driver for vertebrate evolution. That mechanism holds true for all cells, neuronal and non-neuronal, in kind. The difference is in the response time. For example, in our own research on the physiologic effect of nicotine, it increases nicotinic acetylcholine receptors 3 and 7 alpha in both the upper airway, causing asthma, and in the CNS, enhancing memory. So the homeostatic mechanisms that control cellular balance are one and the same as the allostatic mechanisms that control whole organism physiologic balance. Therefore, why not consider the commonalities between visceral and CNS signaling as part and parcel of what we think of as consciousness. John

may be , as siad, that one basic feature of awareness is self-reference attitude? There was a long debate about what self-refernce was and on the impossibility to represent it in our currentlt tudies on biological , organic and inorganic matter.. Let us take a set of symbols or quantities. Call it X. Call another set by Y. Often we find in our studies a law of correspondece coupling each element of X with one or more elemnets of Y.  We have Y function of X. y=5X+2 is an example. Self-refrential systems are thos in which instead X=f(X) or X=f(a,X) with a parameters. These are systems that in their structure contain an image itself.. Spin is an example of self-referential system....To represent the spin of one single particle we have three basic operators.... that we call e1,e2,e3....The situation changes we we nedd to represent the spin of a couple of particles. Here we have E01,E02,EE03  for a particle and E10,E20,E30  for the other particles. We have the same properties of spin for both the particles ... Howevere each one contains in itself the self-image of the so collaed initail spin operatror....Increasing the number of the particles.. the same thing happens .. we have an increasing mechanims of ampliphication in evolution..... where now the basci mechanism is the self- referntial condition..... It is kbnown that several studies of the elective feature of the self- referenetial image in sytems have been conducted.... when considering the problem of awareness....I have spoken of spin ad hoc since it represents just a self- referential PRIMORDIAL element of bit. 

Dear Elio, I am not familiar with the literature you are referring to regarding self-reference. Could you cite some of that work? I am familiar with the concept of self-reference and self-organization in biology. It is used to explain the origins of life, lipid micelles forming from the lipids and water (frozen) that were contained in the asteroids that struck the primordial Earth and formed the oceans. So the self-referential, self-organization of a semipermeable membrane forming a protocell, fueled by chemiosmosis, reducing entropy to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics, regulated by homeostasis was the origin of life. And this is also the First Principles of Physiology, forming the basis for all of life, beginning with unicellular organisms that dominated the Earth for ~4 billion years, multicellular organisms only existing over the last 500 million years. But the return to the unicellular state during the life cycle is indicative of the primacy of the unicellular state, i.e. it is the sustaining of the equipoise of the unicell that is the point source for evolution.....all the other aspects are epiphenomena in support of that. I have attached a few papers if you want more detail, in the hope that perhaps we can find 'common ground'. John

two different sections to answer.

The first about the origin of life. I have my opinion. It is that in order to discuss the origin of life we have to start not from the protocell but from the amino acids...It is not a trivial question. On the contrary a fundamental step. The question of chirality is essential. In laboratory only D.L mixture is possible to realize. The reason is that a fundamental rule of nature is in the symmetries. We have three fundamental kinds of symmetry, time, parity, charge conjugation... these are basic rules. Exploring prebiological matter we find that mainly onlyL amino acids are used. This was the event at the origin of life. The selection of a pure enantiomer...How did it arise How was it possible in clear violation of the basic principles of physics? The possibility of parity violation in Nature was discovered years ago when weak intercations are acting and as consequence we performed a number of studies that you find inmy profile as well as contributions of various authors were of great importance . In systems far from thermodynamic Equilibrium I found this is possible but the selection of only one enatiomer was found to me to be evident in restricted volumes in prebiotic cobditions while instead  we had really a cascade indicung a genral and universal selection. The mechanims of course holds. The other important result was to have found that amino acids have a net helicity   and thus this is the first example of bit or of qubit .... so that we had AB INITIO  logic unities that evidently found a mechanism of amplification inducing LOGIC in the subsequent prebiological and logical more complex structures. The question remains.... how selection of only one enenatiomer arose  at the origin of life .

Self. reference... it is a system that has in its inner structure AT AN HIGHR ORDER the "image of itself" being at a lower order. I dismiss tio suggest to read my papers ... I do not like self-citation but in my profile  and in particular in the papoers entiteld .. on the possibility that we think in a quantum mechanicalk manner as wellas in other my papres and books  such other basic question are well explained... or I hope... Zak is another important authors about systems having self.-images...  So much important!

I believe that the question of time, mentioned in our discussion, is absolutely important. I would try to discuss it with you. In the course of evolution, biological life on our planet has activated two strategies for adapting to the passage of time. First of all it inscribed elements in the genetic code which could facilitate an adequate flexibility in the face of environmental changes (light, temperature, precipitations); in the second place it endowed the animal nervous system with structures which can guarantee the sensorial and motor activities triggered over time. Compared to the higher order of animals, consciousness has also enabled humans to develop the capacity for an inner representation of time which has had great benefits in terms of adaptation and reproduction. In fact, the consciousness of time took longer to form than the consciousness of space. Now, if it is true that the experience of time is different from the experience of space, it is nonetheless of the same essence. The sense of time and, more in general, temporal experience is a quality of consciousness and should be investigated as such. There is general consensus among neuroscientists today that our perception of time originates in the different pace at which we perceive changes over a specific interval, relying on minimum correlation thresholds between neural processes and cognitive events supported by wide-ranging integration with diffused synchrony. More accurate knowledge of these correlations could clarify both the nature of the local events and the process of global synchrony which lies at the heart of an experience.

There is still no agreement about the nature of the processes underlying the phenomena of succession and duration. For over 150 years it was believed that the extent of the interval between certain events was the real key to the cognition of time, and enquirers failed to grasp the difference between the succession of neuronal events and the order of this succession. The succession of acts of consciousness is not the consciousness of their succession. We need other models to explain why our states of consciousness are accompanied by the consciousness of their succession. 

Mauro: "We need other models to explain why our states of consciousness are accompanied by the consciousness of their succession."

I have proposed a neuronal clock mechanism to give us a representation of before and after for episodic learning and memory. See "Accessory Circuits" (Clock and Sequential Priming Circuit), pp. 93 - 97 on my RG page.

concerning the question of time may I suggest also to consider the celebrated Libet experiment ?  and also the connected quantum mechanical interpretations?

You're right, Elio. We confront again with Libet. As known, but perhaps it is useful to remember, in a series of brilliant experiments conducted between the late sixties and the end of the eighties using electrical stimulation of the premotory cortex in patients undergoing neurosurgery, Benjamin Libet demonstrated that although stimuli lasting less than about half a second trigger the expected neurophysiological reactions, they are not consciously perceived. In particular he observed that our brain seems to know that we intend to perform a certain action half a second in advance.Thus consciousness is delayed with respect to one part of our brain, and the impression of having decided to perform an action is totally illusory. Libet put forward the hypothesis that consciousness arrives when the action is completed, whether in terms of the sensorial input or the motor output. The “readiness potential”, an expression of the electrical activity in the brain that immediately precedes the performance of a complex motor act, sets in motion the codification of the programme of muscular-skeletal actions necessary for the action. In an ingenious experiment Libet demonstrated that if a movement is preceded by the decision to act by about 200 milliseconds, the readiness potential is preceded by about 550 milliseconds. Over the years Libet’s findings have met with significant objections. The first concerns the fact that subjective verbal reports do not tally with evidence concerning the action potentials of cortical activation which correspond to sensations and movements. It is difficult to identify free will with a mere veto on a motor act already in course without an empirical validation of a conscious process. The second objection queries the plausibility of the experimental task, involving a ballistic movement that is to some extent pre-programmed, having a veto as a congruous voluntary act. Attention was focused once again on consciousness as the causal agent of events by Patrick Haggard in his work on reaction times. This research was based on the premise that the intention, programming and performance of a movement and the anticipation of its sensorial consequences are in a sequence made congruous by the brain activity. To verify this hypothesis the authors, like Libet, used a clockface and reports in which the subject communicated the instant at which a conscious experience began. Four phenomena were examined: a) a voluntary act (the subject had to press a button registering the performance time); b) an induced contraction (the subject had to register the starting time of an involuntary contraction provoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation); c) an induced sensorial phenomenon (the subject had to register the time in which an auditory sensation took place, a sort of click produced by transcranial magnetic stimulation): d) a naturally induced sensorial phenomenon (the subject had to register the time in which a normal auditory sensation took place). In a second series of experiments, the same events were related to the subjective perception of the time interval that passed between the event itself and an audio stimulus administered 250 milliseconds later. The overall results of these experiments showed how, in the case of voluntary actions, consciousness of the motor act was delayed, while consciousness of the related audio event was anticipated, making for a substantial bracketing of the two events. Whereas in the case of an induced contraction, there was an opposite effect to the delayed perception of the related audio event. In this process the single events are apparently integrated and unified into a coherent conscious experience. These experiments show how, in temporal perception, our brain constructs parts of reality and how, for its part, consciousness supports the self as the actor (albeit often arbitrarily) of the events in an action or sensation. Irrespective of their historical importance, the findings of Libet and Haggard (and many others too numerous to mention here) suggest that at the basis of consciousness there is a sort of synchronization between different regions of the brain, and that this temporalization is decisive in the processes of integrating the information received from the neurons. However, no one is able to say anything about how the passage from the neurons to consciousness takes place. This is why it is vitally important to seek new experimental proofs for the hypothesis that at the origin of “global objects” there is a causal implication of the local events and a minimum time required for the neuronal events related to a cognitive event to transpire. When viewed as the origin and structure of consciousness, time is the direct link joining up the various levels of neurobiological research and phenomenological reflection. This is why we now need a significantly different terminological and conceptual register.

I continue to insist on the missing theoretical foundations to understand scientific and experimental reults. And I continue to retain that the basic refernce must be the physics... the quantum mechanics as indicated in my studies. Still I remember when so much years ago Rosen and aI started to study systems with an anticipatory behaviour  of themseves and of their dynamics. I cannot understand the reason for so much resistence to consider also physical theories. Wolf, as example, has given excellent interpretation of Libet results using quantum mechanics and recently I have given some modest contributions... Celebrated physicists have contributed... and the question remains.,.. why to ignore such contributions.... 

Mauro and Elio, I think that there is a basic problem with understanding consciousness. Without knowing the fundamental principles involved, you don't know what is cause and what is effect, with all due respect. It would seem to me that studying a simpler system that exhibits consciousness would be a way to understand such principles at the cellular-molecular level and find homologs in the human brain. That assumes that there is an evolutionary continuum.

One of the most important aspects of temporal processes in consciousness is our extended present. As you read this sentence, you must have a continuing brain representation (selective excitation) of earlier words as well as later words to understand its meaning. The same is true for our ability to have a conscious experience of a melody. The short-term memory properties of the sheets of autaptic neurons in our egocentric retinoid space can enable this kind of temporal binding so that we are conscious of extended sequences of related stimuli that can span many seconds.

To continue our interesting discussion, I think it is useful to have patience and, above all, consider that we have very different backgrounds and languages.

Many years ago Erwin Schrödinger (1958) observed that physics has no theory to account for sensations and perceptions. In order to pursue its research, it has to maintain that such phenomena lie beyond the realm of science. There is an even more urgent need for a physics able to recognise the radical difference of time. A physics that helps us to understand how mathematical abstractions, aesthetic preferences, moral judgements and other conscious activities trigger dynamics in our brain that go beyond pure computation. But if our mind works in non computational terms, then we are in a different domain to the physics we are familiar with. Roger Penrose fully grasped this problem, which concerns first and foremost the radical difference between our perception of the flow of time and the theories of physics.

"A good part of the reason for believing that consciousness is able to influence truth-judgment in a non-algorithmic way stems from consideration of Godel’s theorem. If we can see that the role of consciousness is non-algorithmic when forming mathematical judgments, where calculation and rigorous proof constitute such an important factor, then surely we may be persuaded that such a non-algorithmic ingredient could be crucial also for the role of consciousness in more general (non-mathematical) circumstances. (...) Whatever algorithm a mathematician might use to establish a mathematical truth, or whatever formal system he might adopt as providing his criterion of truth, there will always be mathematical propositions (...) that his algorithm cannot provide an answer for". (Penrose, 1989, p. 538)

We have a huge need for a biology and a physics to clarify all this, otherwise still will walk long in the dark

Schrodinger realized his celebrated equation and at the time of his book he was very distant from the currently known advances of every day accepted quantum physics....We cannot compare things happened with a distance of fifty years. Presently quantum mechanics is realized about a basic foundation of reality... that IT arises from Bit..... this is , just to give only one example, a turning point fully unknown to Schrodinger ... as well as the presently known advances on quantum computing .. ON QUANTUL LOGIC ... on Eccles BASIC advances in explaining synaptic conjunction by quantum mechanics   as well as OTHER BASIC SCIENTISTS..... and the explanations of quantum mechanics arising from LOGIC? as I have attempted to evidence in accord with one of the greatest Gogic reseracher in the world, the great Yury Orlov...    start to apply it .. we will see after if improvements are necessary...

I dont´know if you read the below from New Scientist :

Brain imaging spots our abstract choices before we do

By Caroline Williams

When it comes to making decisions, it seems that the conscious mind is the last to know.

We already had evidence that it is possible to detect brain activity associated with movement before someone is aware of making a decision to move. Work presented this week at the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) conference in London not only extends it to abstract decisions, but suggests that it might even be possible to pre-emptively reverse a decision before a person realises they’ve made it.

In 2011, Gabriel Kreiman of Harvard University measured the activity of individual neurons in 12 people with epilepsy, using electrodes already implanted into their brain to help identify the source of their seizures. The volunteers took part in the “Libet” experiment, in which they press a button whenever they like and remember the position of a second hand on a clock at the moment of decision.

Kreiman discovered that electrical activity in the supplementary motor area, involved in initiating movement, and in the anterior cingulate cortex, which controls attention and motivation, appeared up to 5 seconds before a volunteer was aware of deciding to press the button (Neuron, doi.org/btkcpz). This backed up earlier fMRI studies by John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany, that had traced the origins of decisions to the prefrontal cortex a whopping 10 seconds before awareness (Nature Neuroscience, doi.org/cs3rzv).

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“It’s always nice when two lines of research converge and to know that what we see with fMRI is actually there in the neurons,” says Haynes.

STOP sign for the brain

Kreiman told the BNA conference that he is now working on predicting decisions in real time, and to see if it is possible to reverse a decision before it hits consciousness – by flashing up the word “stop” on a screen as soon as telltale activity shows up in the brain.

There are no firm results yet, but Kreiman suspects there may be a measureable “point of no return” in the brain. “So far all we have is people saying, ‘that was weird, you read my mind’,” he says.

If this kind of “mind-reading” is possible, a new study by Haynes, published this week and also presented at the meeting, suggests that it may not be restricted to decisions about moving a finger. Using fMRI, Haynes has found that the very brain areas involved in deciding to move are also active several seconds before a more abstract decision, like whether to add or subtract a series of numbers.

He suggests that the prefrontal and parietal cortex may be general decision-making circuitry, passing activity on to different parts of the brain depending on the task at hand (PNAS, doi.org/k6b). “Perhaps decisions arise from a similar set of areas, then either flow into motor systems, for pressing buttons, or the parietal cortex for doing calculations,” he says.

Not hijacking the mind

Unless you happen to have electrodes inserted into your brain, there is no chance of decisions being hijacked by unscrupulous scientists, and Kreiman is keen to point out that he is not bent on world domination. “We’re not trying to do mind control; we are trying to find out the mechanisms of volition,” he says. “It might help people with Parkinson’s disease, where people lose voluntary movement.”

As for what it means for one of the longest-running debates in science – the question of whether we do or do not have free will – Haynes is pretty clear. “What we need now is 20 years of serious neuroscience, not more speculation about the handful of studies that have been done so far,” he says.

Kreiman agrees, but says that these early results at least bring the question of free will out of the realms of magic and mystery. “There is no magic. There are neurons, and there are ions that flow through membranes, and that it what is orchestrating our decisions,” he says. “We don’t need to invoke freedom.”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23367-brain-imaging-spots-our-abstract-choices-before-we-do/

A lot of strong and very impèortant results, Dina . Ok ... The question in my view point is ..... have we now a theoretical model to comment such results? Possibly scholars will answer us ... let us continue with this "reductionistic like" work...one day , collecting every day pieces of new advances, we will arrive to understand. My modest opinion is different. I say that we have not no way if a basic theoretical model   for reasoning is missing  and I add.....In spite of a lot of results confirmations that we have obtained ....in the last ten years , as example in the field of quantum cognition.. the field in which of course I have a little of competence having started with theoretical formulations and experimental confirmations and still continuining every day, Certainly brain knows more than it admits and I wrote an article on this for the first time giving confirmation of priming as example .... and giving quantum mechanical interpretation..... recently I reused ambiguous figures... evidencing as quantum states of consciousness and awareness in substance could give an initial explanation of such apparently conflicting results...... In conclusion... I do not intend to support ..... we have quantum mechanics ... we have all that is necessary to start to discuss neurological and emtirical results.... finally we have the sky in our hands.. it is not so ... my reasoniing .. on the contrary .. just recalling the titel of this discussion.. I start to observe that we have indicative results  of the utility of the basis of a physical theoretical model........ It remains there .. suspended ....if at neurological and psychological level .. no one attempts to contribute ALSO connecting thsi possiibility.

to continue the discussion at perceptive level..... I would ask your opinion. Let us submit a subject to an ambuguous figure at a time that I identify as to . I use ambiguous figures since I use such figures in my experiments. Ok. The subjects look and according to the initail quantum model that I formulated years ago , he remains suspended in a superposition of two alternatives and finally he arrives to select one of the two alternatives (decison). Thus we have under our eyes the most complex process a percepptive - cognitive mechanism to identify......Now let us admit that we have three other possibilities .. three times to look at the same figure ... one at tuime t1  , one at time t2 and another at time t3.. t0

Sorry I forgoit... obviously I have considered the case at t2 and t3 asking what it happens at perceptive and cognitive level at t1 but the experiment needs to be completed asking what it happens at t2 when asking at t1 and t3 and what it happens at t3 when asking at t1 and t2 .

In my opinion the inorganic maybe driven by consciousness (or energy) which is observed in the self assembly of subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, proteins, etc. Consciousness is the life that is introduced within the in organic, it animates only when it organizes itself to sustain within. A rock may not be visibly conscious because of its architecture but the body definitely is.

Arnold, I think of consciousness as awareness of one's surroundings.

Mauro and Arnold, I agree that there must be a definition of consciousness in order to determine its ontology and epistemology. But it has to be a definition that is durable, and not merely one that reflects human intelligence/consciousness- that exercise is tautologic and teleologic. Consciousness is a physiologic phenomenon that must have it's origins in physiologic evolution. It is only by reconstructing consciousness from its origins, particularly when coupled with genes that determine consciousness that we will be able to understand what consciousness is in my opinion.

Mauro, with all due respect, the consideration of time as it applies to consciousness is a 'red herring'. If you accept the fact that there is a continuum from the physical to the biologic, Einstien and Feineman have unequivocally stated that time is an artifact. So I would submit that time is a human subjective perception based on our way of seeing the life cycle as culminating in the adult form......I have proposed based on epigenetic mechanisms of inheritance that it is the zygotic state that is the primary level of selection, in which the epigenetic marks acquired during the life cycle are processed, determining gastrulation (which Wolpert said was the most important thing you'll do) embryogenesis, and the length and depth of the phases of the life cycle itself. If the unicellular state from which we evolved remains the principle state of being, then it behooves us to understand consciousness in that context.

Consciousness is not a miraculous essence or energy and we also do not need quantum hocus-pocus. Consciousness is a state of information of a information processing system. Organic systems have reached a level of information processing which is able to emerge the phenomenon of consciousness with wet computing but it is not because of organic substrate. 

If we would have an idea of the kind of process which results in consciousness it would be no problem to build artificial inorganic systems with consciousness. The only problem is the lack of an idea.

Wilfred, as I have stated before, and with all due respect, I don't think that consciousness is what it appears as in its present form. It is the serial consequences of the mechanism of 'awareness', beginning at the first instantation of life, distinguishing internal from external, maintaining and sustaining it through the auspices of the First Principles of Physiology, particularly homeostasis. Without such a transcendent perspective, the true nature of consciousness is untenable.

John,

The results of the SMTT experiments tell us that consciousness is a product of autaptic cell activity in a particular kind of egocentrically organized brain mechanism -- retinoid space. It also gives the interesting finding that we cannot be aware of everything that is encompassed in our current conscious