Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Thursday, October 17, 2013, 14:29 (3842 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I'm sorry, but first of all, I don't see how you can be conscious without having consciousness. Secondly, all you have been saying up until now is that ant automaton cells can't make ants intelligent/conscious, because cells and ants are automatons, but human brain automaton cells can make humans intelligent/conscious, only we don't know how.-DAVID: 'Secondly' is exactly my thought. 'Firstly', consciousness is not the same as conscious.
 
One is a noun and the other is an adjective, and the noun consciousness means the state of being conscious. This is a non-argument. Self-awareness is a heightened state of consciousnessAVID: Two different levels completely, as I have explained in an earlier post today. All animals with a brain are conscious. Their slight degree of consciousness is nothing like ours. Only we have consciousness at the level of self-aware abstract thought that is proper for planning for the future development of whatever.-I have never said that animal or plant or cell consciousness is like ours. I am suggesting ... yet again ... that when billions of "intelligent" organisms (cells) combine their intelligence, they are able to produce astonishing inventions. The ant colony is a vivid example, which may be used as an analogy for what cells can produce. Automatons can't produce anything new. Organisms must therefore have an inventive intelligence of their own, though I don't know how it originated. Your automaton alternative is that they are preprogrammed, which leads me back to a single example among zillions:-dhw: Did God also preprogramme the first organisms to produce ants which when attacked by a mantis would have one large individual sacrifice itself by getting into the mantis's jaws to block them while the rest climbed aboard and bit off its head? Was each of these ants preprogrammed to deal with every imaginable type of attack? And ants are just one of the billions of species whose behavioural patterns your God must have preprogrammed into those first few cells. And this, you say, is a belief based on your knowledge of biochemistry.-DAVID: I spent a whole chapter on animal instincts. All automatic, if you remember. I don't know how it is biochemically coded. I never tried to answer that question, because there is no answer known to us at this time. We may never know. That does not mean I am wrong in my theories.-You say they are all automatic. That does not make them automatic, and that is what this discussion is about! I have never said that you are wrong. I have offered an alternative explanation to yours, but even though there is no answer known to us, and we may never know, you insist that my alternative is wrong. Your only justification is that you know enough about biochemistry to be able to categorically deny that cells have any sort of consciousness/intelligence, any biochemist who disagrees with you is kooky, and the only alternative is divine preprogramming of all organs, organisms, and behavioural strategies ... a theory rejected by 90% of biochemists.-I'm a little surprised that you have not yet commented on the anecdotes I have posted on this thread, indicating that cell communities (particularly the heart) have memories of incidents, tastes, forms of behaviour, and are able to transfer all of these to other cell communities, even teaching them new forms of behaviour as well as historical facts. Why would one set of cells impose its tastes and memories on other sets of cells? After all, cells are automatons with no individual identity, intelligence or consciousness of their own ... so you tell us. Meanwhile, I found this on another website: Shapiro thinks even the smallest cells are sentient beings, which is a far cry from their being automatons:-Shapiro: 40 years experience as a bacterial geneticist have taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the 20th Century. Analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation of protein synthesis, and DNA repair established that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. Studies of genetic recombination, lysogeny, antibiotic resistance and my own work on transposable elements revealed multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules. Examination of colony development and organization led me to appreciate how extensive multicellular collaboration is among the majority of bacterial species. Contemporary research in many laboratories on cell-cell signaling, symbiosis and pathogenesis show that bacteria utilize sophisticated mechanisms for intercellular communication and even have the ability to commandeer the basic cell biology of "higher" plants and animals to meet their own needs. This remarkable series of observations requires us to revise basic ideas about biological information processing and recognize that even the smallest cells are sentient beings.
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/2006.ExeterMeeting.pdf
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/bacteria.html