Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Friday, October 18, 2013, 20:39 (4053 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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. -DAVID: Your only proof is that it happened. The only logical explanation is that they were provided with a plan.-Or that just like the brain cells of humans, which you believe to be automatons, they came up with their own plans ... perhaps thanks to the independent intelligence your God gave them.-dhw: 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.-DAVID: Because the websites presenting these anecdotal stories are not presenting analyzed science, but stuff that is fun to think about. Transplants have a placebo effect like all treatments. You can't double-blind this stuff. But some of the anecdotal NDE's are vericidal, which makes those person's statements have validity.-Why on earth would a transplant patient lie about a change in eating habits, sexual orientation, having someone else's vivid memories? Their statements were confirmed by third parties as veridical, and I would hesitate to brand the authors and patients as a bunch of liars. Your dismissal of these experiences as unscientific anecdotes is exactly the same as that offered by atheists challenging NDEs. Could it be that NDEs suit your theory and these experiences don't? Perish the thought!-dhw: 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[...] 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.-DAVID: I am acutely aware of Shapiro's statement above, having read it in the past. I am also aware that Shapiro describes the automatic biochemical reactions that produce baacterial awareness. -I presume you are referring to the fact that bacteria, just like ourselves, "continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus." The senses work automatically, but it is what Shapiro calls the "cognitive capabilities" that enable cells (and us) to use the information intelligently.-DAVID: I have always concluded that he is using the word sentient not with its underlying suggestion of thought, but as its strict dictionary definition: "responsive to or conscious of sense impressions." -I'm glad that even with your scepticism, you yourself accept consciousness as an element of sentience and hence of cells.
 
DAVID: Sentience is "feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought". I think you are trying to stretch his meaning.-I think you are trying desperately to avoid his meaning, just as you try to make out that Margulis's references to conscious bacteria and Albrecht-Buehler's references to intelligent cells are "metaphors". 
I wish I had time for more research, but I have googled Shapiro and come up with the following:-"After a discussion of technical advances in our views about genome organization and the mechanisms of genetic change, I will focus on a growing convergence between biology and information science which offers the potential for scientific investigation of possible intelligent cellular action in evolution."-Clearly he regards intelligent cellular action in evolution as a possibility. That's all I ask, but perhaps this is a metaphor too?