Brain complexity: circadian controls (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 02, 2015, 12:28 (3341 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Our 24 hour rhythm helps us sleep and is clocked by the sun's 24-hour day/night arrangement. Molecular controls have been found:-http://phys.org/news/2015-10-body-scientists-mechanism-circadian-clock.html-DAVID: Comment: these molecular controls are automatic. Why can't it be understood that if our multicellular bodies have so much automaticity in our cellular activity, that it is obvious can bacteria simply work automatically? Automaticity if properly regulated will look just like intelligent action from the outside of all bacteria.-We've had a flurry of these articles in the last few months, with similar comments from you, and they've sent me scurrying back through the files. Eventually, I found the one I was looking for, under “Wound repair” (which again you would regard as automated behaviour), and in particular my posts of 20 and 21 April, talking not just of bacteria but of cells and cell communities in general. Here is a small selection of the relevant quotes (my bold):-QUOTE: “We discover that our highest capacities — our thinking, our formulation of goals and plans, our strivings and passions, our sense of well-being and illness — are objectively imaged in our own biological organism right down to the molecular activity of our cells, as also in the cells of every other living creature." 
“Where molecular biology once taught us that life is more about the interplay of molecules than we might have previously imagined”, writes biologist and philosopher Lenny Moss, “molecular biology is now beginning to reveal the extent to which macromolecules, with their surprisingly flexible and adaptive complex behavior, turn out to be more life-like than we had previously imagined” (2011). -QUOTE: “I cannot do justice to Talbott's article in this short summary. I urge you to read it yourself. The upshot is that organisms are not machines and it is a mistake to think of them as if they were. But if they are not machine-like, what are they? How do they function?-QUOTE: “We can certainly understand how an organism can have a mind, because we ourselves are organisms and we are each directly acquainted with our own mind. But what does it mean to say that the idea of the arrangement of the whole is at work in each of the parts? For this to be true, each of the parts must have the ability to entertain an idea, i.e., mind. [...] Talbott asserts that the binding together goes both ways, not just from part to whole, but from whole to part as well. The higher-level mental unity of the whole informs the mentality of each of the parts and gives direction to their growth and development.”-Your comment then was that [Talbott] “asks questions to which I have answers satisfactory to me. I have the right to my own interpretation of the evidence.”-Quite right. But the fact that “Automaticity if properly regulated will look just like intelligent action from the outside of all bacteria” works both ways: intelligent activity can look like automaticity. We don't know where the borderlines lie, even within ourselves (some people even go so far as to say that we humans are nothing but automatic machines). You accept that our fellow animals are intelligent in their own way; you have, I believe, grudgingly admitted that ants may be intelligent in their own way. Well, perhaps all living organisms are intelligent in their own way. You have often used the expression “programming” in relation to the behaviour of our cellular communities. Computers are programmed, and we call such machines artificial intelligence. Cells are not artificial. Many biologists are convinced that cells have natural intelligence. I only ask that their findings should be taken seriously, as should the possible implications of those findings.