Consciousness: is sentience everywhere? (General)

by David Turell , Friday, March 15, 2024, 18:01 (43 days ago) @ David Turell

A review of a book:

https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/library/item/15_march_2024/41803...

"Since the early 2000s, the world of plant science has been ruffled by a spirited debate about whether plants are sentient. For proponents of “plant neurobiology,” plant behaviors such as learning, habituation, and responsiveness to touch or wounding are evidence of a conscious mind. For the naysayers, these are mere stimulus-response phenomena lacking mental mediation. ( my bold)

"It is not a new idea. Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis wrote an article titled “The conscious cell” in 2001, and philosopher Evan Thompson has been a prominent advocate of this “biopsychist” position. In some ways, the putative universality of mind can be traced back to the German Naturphilosophie of the late 18th century.

***

"If that argument sometimes seemed tendentious, The Sentient Cell may provoke much more. In it, cognitive psychologist Arthur Reber, plant biologist František Baluška, and medical scientist William Miller claim that consciousness is everywhere in life, even down to the level of single cells. “Life and mind are co-terminous,” they say.

***

"To debate that proposition, should we first clarify what we mean by sentience, consciousness, and mind? Reber and colleagues decline to offer definitions beyond saying that they use the terms more or less synonymously and “in a folk psychology fashion.” Given the lack, and perhaps impossibility, of precise formal definitions, their approach is understandable but makes it harder to see what is at stake.

"It is a measure of the permissiveness of the authors’ view that they are willing to entertain a flicker of sentience even in individual proteins, such as the kinase mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin). This protein has so many different roles in the cell—in motility, cell division, protein synthesis, transcription, and more—that Reber and colleagues want to ascribe to it a kind of agency. “Is mTOR independently alive? Does it have ‘mind’?” they ask. Only, I think, if one is willing to risk making those words so vague as to be useless.

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"The Sentient Cell comes perilously close to making its proposal of consciousness in all living things axiomatic rather than a hypothesis to be demonstrated. What starts as a postulate morphs into a statement of fact (“we securely know…all cells are conscious”) without having demonstrably earned that status.

"Reber and colleagues might reasonably respond that the position of “mindless until proved mindful” has proved not only flawed but also damaging in the study of animal behavior. Human exceptionalism might seem to be the sensible null hypothesis, but there comes a point where it is simply a more economical explanation to attribute mind than to suppose that some complex behavior is the result of an intricate stimulus-response mechanism that just so happens to closely resemble what we humans do. ( my bold)

"That is all very well for a chimpanzee or a bird—but really, is anything a bacterium does so smart as to warrant the benefit of the doubt? Reber and colleagues make a compelling case that prokaryotes and even individual cells of our own body regularly display behaviors that we should call, at the very least, intelligent. Nominally identical cells can show different responses to identical stimuli, in part because their internal states differ: They have memories of a kind, and so history matters.

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"What is more, it is useful to talk about such behavior using those quasi-taboo words in biology: purpose, goals, meaning. In such ways, The Sentient Cell adds to the growing argument that the proper language for discussing the properties of living systems is not that of machines or computers but of cognition. (my bold)

"Yet cognition is not consciousness. Feeling pain, say, is a very different matter to possessing an electrical system for signaling stress and damage, as plants do. For humans, pain is constructed in neural circuits. Where in the plant are the equivalent? For this reviewer, the authors’ “Cellular Basis of Consciousness” theory seems mostly to reflect the fact that we lack appropriate words to talk about the complex competencies and agency of living things without anthropomorphizing.

"But if its thesis fails to persuade, The Sentient Cell might nonetheless provoke a long-overdue conversation. To understand life, we need to find alternative models besides “automata” at one pole and “sentient beings” at the other. We need more-sophisticated views of mindedness and intelligence, in which consciousness does not feature as a sauce with a single flavor that spices life with awareness and experience." (my bold)

Comment: my bolds simply reflect my position. Just because they act 'intelligently' doesn't mean they are intelligent, since it can all be explained by coding in their genome from the designer. Thus, all actions are automatic. Or alternately, the designer's mind is actively running the processes. 'Purpose, goals and meaning' are so obvious in biology, they cannot be ignored. Every action, every reaction has obvious purpose.