Biological complexity: Feedback loop importance (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 26, 2016, 20:53 (3133 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The cells do have the 'autonomy to make their own decisions'. It is a series of built-in chemical reactions using feed-back loops that work automatically. We agree to that point. Where we disagree is you want the cell to self-apply some decision making point which implies a sense of mental decision making that sets their response in motion. I think it is all automatically triggered chemical responses. Shapiro is exactly correct. The cells make decisions. His more important point is cells, with seeming initiative, make epigenetic changes, but we know that does not seem to lead to speciation.-Speciation, or innovation, is the phenomenon nobody can explain. We have a totally different concept of autonomy, so let's forget about speciation for the moment, and focus solely on the behaviour of cells and precisely what we mean by “autonomous decision-making”. Shapiro and others maintain that cells are intelligent, sentient, cooperative, decision-making beings, and not automatons obeying in-built instructions. If they are “exactly correct”, the decisions are not the result of automatically triggered chemical responses. The chemical “reactions and feedback loops” are the gathering of information and the physical implementations of the decisions, but NOT the decisions themselves, as you acknowledge to be the case with humans and other large organisms. Once again: my hypothesis (not stated as a belief or fact) is that, although most cellular behaviour is automatic, autonomous intelligence comes into play when there are problems to be solved (adaptation) or opportunities to be exploited (innovation). Autonomous does not mean automatic or preprogrammed.