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The conclusion was that consciousness is hard to define because we make false assumptions about it.
One assumption is that consciousness is a mystical reality concerning a brain’s self-awareness.
Or, we assume consciousness is a state occupied only by living creatures, animals only, “higher” animals only, or things that can recognize themselves in a mirror.
Thus, because there is no agreement on what consciousness is and who or what can have it, we have created a hard problem when, in fact, the “hardness” is of our own making.
Bacteria can communicate, and they speak multiple languages! Bacteria use chemicals as their “words.”
They use chemical communication to distinguish their own species from others and, in doing so, presumably reveal friend from foe.
Bacteria release their chemical communication molecules into the extracellular environment. When these chemicals build up to a critical level, a signal is relayed to the cell interior, which alerts each bacterial cell that other bacterial brethren are in the neighborhood and that they have reached a “quorum.”
The entire population of bacteria then acts as a large, coordinated group, carrying out tasks that would be unsuccessful if a single bacterium acted alone.
This process, called “quorum sensing,” controls bacterial behaviors ranging from symbiosis to virulence, biofilm formation, and natural product production.
By most reasonable measures, quorum sensing and other bacterial communications could be termed “consciousness.”
When a person dies, he/she loses some consciousness, but not every cell dies instantly. Often, some bodily functions continue for a time, and those cells continue to be conscious of the cells and chemicals around them.
We die, bit by bit. Even our brains die bit by bit. At what point is our consciousness gone?
A brain-dead person might be kept alive, artificially, by heart and breathing machines. His body will continue to be conscious of its internal workings — digestion and oxygen consumption. But he will have drifted down the consciousness continuum.
I suggest that rather than embracing the hard problem (actually impossible problem) of “consciousness,” we should talk about “sensingness,” the ability to sense and react to stimuli.
Consciousness is a “hard problem” only because philosophers arbitrarily have made it hard. They made the unnecessary decision that something they call “consciousness” requires life, and not just life, but so-called “advanced life,” having a human-style brain.
But why? Why does science limit consciousness to human-style brains.
It’s especially mystifying when you realize that many creatures have far superior abilities to sense their environment and to communicate than we do.
(One is reminded of geometry, where mathematicians arbitrarily decided the problems must be solved using only a compass and straightedge. Because some problems could not be solved using just those tools, the problems were considered impossible to solve.)
(One also is reminded of arguments about defining “beauty.” A bacterium might feel a warm, phosphorus laden pool is the ultimate of beauty.)
Rather than arbitrarily limiting our investigations to something called consciousness — something that has no real definition — we should decide how much sensingness each object has. “How sensing is an adult person? How sensing is a dog, an octopus, a sunflower, a virus?”
How much ability do they have to sense and react to stimuli?
Suddenly, the problem becomes straightforward. It’s a big number, a monster number, but there is an algorithm: A finite sequence of instructions to solve a problem.
List and measure every conceivable stimulus an object receives, and list the object’s reaction to each stimulus individually and in combination with all other stimuli, and you have its total sensingness.
Yes, we can argue about the relative values of different stimuli. Still, at least with sensingness, we would argue in concrete terms, not in the vague, hazy, undefined wonderworld of consciousness.
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Conscious, thinking, or sensing?
In this regard, here are excerpts from an article in the February 2024 issue of Scientific American:
The answer may be ‘ yes, ‘ thanks to new research on slime molds.’
Scientists from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University have discovered that a brainless slime mold called Physarum polycephalum uses its body to sense mechanical cues in its surrounding environment and performs computations similar to what we call ‘thinking‘ to decide in which direction to grow based on that information.
Unlike previous studies with Physarum, these results were obtained without giving the organism any food or chemical signals to influence its behavior. The study was published in Advanced Materials.
‘People are becoming more interested in Physarum because it doesn’t have a brain, but it can still perform a lot of the behaviors that we associate with thinking, like solving mazes, learning new things, and predicting events,’ said first author Nirosha Murugan, a former member of the Allen Discovery Center who is now an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada.
‘Figuring out how proto-intelligent life manages this type of computation gives us more insight into the underpinnings of animal cognition and behavior, including our own.’
Think about it. The Physarum can solve problems. Is it conscious, or is it sensing?
Slimy action at a distance Slime molds are amoeba-like organisms that can grow up to several feet long and help break down decomposing matter in the environment, like rotting logs, mulch, and dead leaves.
A single Physarum creature consists of a membrane containing many cellular nuclei floating within a shared cytoplasm, creating a syncytium structure.
Physarum moves by shuttling its watery cytoplasm back and forth throughout the entire length of its body in regular waves, a unique process known as shuttle streaming.
‘With most animals, we can’t see what’s changing inside the brain as the animal makes decisions.
Physarum offers a fascinating scientific opportunity because we can observe its decisions about where to move in real-time by watching how its shuttle streaming behavior changes,’ said Murugan.
While previous studies have shown that Physarum moves in response to chemicals and light, Murugan and her team wanted to know if it could make decisions about where to move based on physical cues in its environment alone.
Again, does that sound like consciousness or more like sensingness?
The researchers placed Physarum specimens in the center of Petri dishes coated with a semi-flexible agar gel and put one or three small glass discs next to each other atop the gel on opposite sides of each dish.
They then allowed the organisms to grow freely in the dark over 24 hours and tracked their growth patterns.
For the first 12 to 14 hours, the Physarum grew outwards evenly in all directions; after that, however, the specimens extended a long branch that grew directly over the surface of the gel toward the three-disc region 70% of the time.
Remarkably, the Physarum chose to grow toward the greater mass without first physically exploring the area to confirm that it contained the larger object.
The Physarum “figure out” where the larger mass was. Is “figuring out” evidence of consciousness?
How did it accomplish this exploration of its surroundings before physically going there? The scientists were determined to find out.
The researchers experimented with several variables to see how they impacted Physarum’s growth decisions and noticed something unusual. When they stacked the same three discs on top of each other, the organism seemed to lose its ability to distinguish between the three discs and the single disc.
It grew toward both sides of the dish at roughly equal rates despite the three stacked discs still having greater mass. Clearly, Physarum was using another factor beyond mass to decide where to grow.
To figure out the missing piece of the puzzle, the scientists used computer modeling to create a simulation of their experiment to explore how changing the mass of the discs would impact the amount of stress (force) and strain (deformation) applied to the semi-flexible gel and the attached growing Physarum.
As they expected, larger masses increased the amount of strain, but the simulation revealed that the strain patterns the masses produced changed depending on the arrangement of the discs.
‘Imagine driving on the highway at night and looking for a town to stop at. You see two different arrangements of light on the horizon: a single bright point and a cluster of less bright points. While the single point is brighter, the cluster of points lights up a wider area more likely to indicate a town, so you head there,’ said co-author Richard Novak, PhD, a lead staff engineer at the Wyss Institute.
‘The light patterns in this example are analogous to the patterns of mechanical strain produced by different mass arrangements in our model. Our experiments confirmed that Physarum can physically sense them and make decisions based on patterns rather than signal intensity.’
Physarum makes decisions. That much is clear. Is making decisionsa sign of consciousness, or is it simply sensingness?
The team’s research demonstrated that this brainless creature was not simply growing towards the heaviest thing it could sense; it was making a calculated decision about where to grow based on the relative patterns of strain it detected in its environment.
“Making a calculated decision” seems to involve the question of consciousness vs. unconsciousness. If you struggle with defining “conscious,” what is your bright line separating conscious from unconscious.
Is the Physarum deciding to reach out toward a specific strain pattern more or less conscious than a human being under anesthesia?
But how was it detecting these strain patterns? The scientists suspected it had to do with Physarum’s ability to rhythmically contract and tug on its substrate because the pulsing and sensing the resultant changes in substrate deformation allows the organism to gain information about its surroundings.
Other animals have particular channel proteins in their cell membranes called TRP-like proteins that detect stretching. Coauthor and Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., had previously shown that one of these TRP proteins mediates mechanosensing in human cells.
When the team created a potent TRP channel-blocking drug and applied it to Physarum, the organism lost its ability to distinguish between high and low masses, only selecting the high-mass region in 11% of the trials and selecting both high- and low-mass areas of 71% of trials.
Think about how you make decisions. Say your bottom hurts, so you decide to shift in your chair. That mechanosensing in your bottom’s cells led to your decision. How different is that from the Physarum’s mechanosensing that led to its decision to reach out?
I suggest it’s not different at all, and further, if you were under sedation and did not sense any discomfort, the Physarum was more conscious — or more sensing — than you were.
‘Our discovery of this slime mold’s use of biomechanics to probe and react to its surrounding environment underscores how early this ability evolved in living organisms and how closely related intelligence, behavior, and morphogenesis are.
In this organism, which grows out to interact with the world, its shape change is its behavior. Other research has shown that similar strategies are used by cells in more complex animals, including neurons, stem cells, and cancer cells.
This work in Physarum offers a new model to explore how evolution uses physics to implement primitive cognition that drives form and function,’ said corresponding author Mike Levin, Ph.D…. This Wyss associate faculty member is also the Vannevar Bush Chair and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University.
“Cognition” is another part of consciousness.
‘This study confirms once again that mechanical forces play as important a role in the control of cell behavior and development as chemicals and genes, and the process of mechanosensation uncovered in this simple brainless organism is amazingly similar to what is seen in all species, including humans,’ said Ingber.
‘Thus, a deeper understanding of how organisms use biomechanical information to make decisions will help us to better understand our own bodies and brains, and perhaps even provide insight into new bioinspired forms of computation.’
Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The term “make decisions” hints at some mystical factors beyond the physical, chemical, or quantum. But I suggest there are no such factors.
Conscious, thinking, or sensing?
I suggest that all your decisions are the result of your entire body’s (not just your brain’s) reaction to everything your body experiences — gravity, heat, light, motion, odor, taste, sound, every field, every chemical in your environment and inside your body — now and in the past, even at the quantum level.
The word “reaction” is crucial. It is the measure of sensingness. You do not make decisions in a vacuum. Everything you touch and everything that touches you are part of your reaction, awareness, consciousness, and sensingness.
We call that “thinking.”
Animals sense and react. Plants sense and react. Bacteria, even viruses, sense and react. And depending on your bent, we could call those reactions “consciousness,” but more accurately, they are sensingness.
And there is no transition to thinking. They are one.
By that measure, the entire earth is sensing, or conscious, as changes in global weather patterns indicate. The earth has spawned life (however you define it), and life has done things the earth senses and reacts to; we are part of an enormous, sensing, one might say, “aware,” organism that reacts to everything on, in, and touching it.
The bottom line is that consciousness is not a thing but a continuum of reactions. The greater the reactions, the greater the consciousness, i.e. sensingness.
There is no mysticism involved. There is no special feature beyond chemical and quantum mechanics.
Arguing about whether something is conscious, thinking, aware, etc. is like debating the existence of angels. Fruitless. It’s all part of the sensing continuum.
