Do our cells care?

C C said:
Well, so much for translating all your posts in one shot with Firefox's built-in translator. As a consequence, it also keeps altering my own [English] reply in weird ways. So it's back to translating them one at a time.
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Да, иногда искажает перевод так, что смысл меняется. Но в интернете пишут, что он всё таки лучше гугловского.
 
I can hear my cells cry out all the time, "We are Legion, we are One"
 
(Q) said:
I can hear my cells cry out all the time, "We are Legion, we are One"
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Будьте в курсе их дел. Чтобы они не изобрели атомную бомбу, и не взорвали Вас, если вдруг рассорятся между собой.
 
Well, I apologize to some extent. I did not realize that the concept of cell cognizance would be foreign to a science forum. I could understand that some might not agree with the way I related it to the idea that cells know and care about the animal they are a part of, but it seems that some here may not have been introduced to that concept.

One of the main proponents of this idea is James A. Shapiro , a biologist at the University of Chicago and author of the book, Evolution: A view from the 21st Century. Fortified. This is a new and expanded version of a book he published like 20 or 25 years ago. Anyway, the links go to a couple of articles about a paper he published called, All Living Cells Are Cognitive. I am unable to find a copy of the paper. {exchemist might find it interesting that even Shapiro anthropomorphizes when he mentions cells "talking" to each other.)


mindmatters.ai

University of Chicago Biochemist: All Living Cells Are Cognitive

Future debates over origins of intelligence, consciousness, etc., may mainly feature panpsychists vs. theists rather than materialists vs. theists.
mindmatters.ai mindmatters.ai






​

 
Concordicus said:
Well, I apologize to some extent. I did not realize that the concept of cell cognizance would be foreign to a science forum. I could understand that some might not agree with the way I related it to the idea that cells know and care about the animal they are a part of, but it seems that some here may not have been introduced to that concept.

One of the main proponents of this idea is James A. Shapiro , a biologist at the University of Chicago and author of the book, Evolution: A view from the 21st Century. Fortified. This is a new and expanded version of a book he published like 20 or 25 years ago. Anyway, the links go to a couple of articles about a paper he published called, All Living Cells Are Cognitive. I am unable to find a copy of the paper. {exchemist might find it interesting that even Shapiro anthropomorphizes when he mentions cells "talking" to each other.)


mindmatters.ai

University of Chicago Biochemist: All Living Cells Are Cognitive

Future debates over origins of intelligence, consciousness, etc., may mainly feature panpsychists vs. theists rather than materialists vs. theists.
mindmatters.ai mindmatters.ai






​

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Yes, it is interesting and I too tried unsuccessfully to get hold of the complete paper.

(I discount the first article you quote, as it is by Denyse O'Leary, who is a notorious professional misrepresenter of science. She is associated with the Discovery Institute, which is the headquarters of the deceitful pseudoscience that calls itself "Intelligent Design". I've crossed swords with her myself in the past, on an ID website hosted I think by that ghastly Bill Dembski, who thankfully seems to have faded from view. O'Leary habitually distorts science to fit her disreputable agenda. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denyse_O'Leary)

But cognition in this sense is little more than response to stimuli and some ability to learn from them. It does not imply "thinking" in the sense we use it about human mental processes. For instance there's a summary here (again only a summary, I'm afraid) from two biochemists or biophysicists at the University of California, showing that mathematical modelling of simple biochemistry can account for primitive forms of learning: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)01523-9

So sure, if one stretches the meaning of cognition enough from its everyday context, one can say cells display signs of it. But so what? In the end, all you are saying is that they respond to stimuli and display some ability to adapt to them. This is not a metaphysical revelation. In fact it can be read the other way around, as suggesting even human thought can ultimately be reduced to biochemistry.
 
Concordicus said:
Well, I apologize to some extent. I did not realize that the concept of cell cognizance would be foreign to a science forum. I could understand that some might not agree with the way I related it to the idea that cells know and care about the animal they are a part of, but it seems that some here may not have been introduced to that concept.

One of the main proponents of this idea is James A. Shapiro , a biologist at the University of Chicago and author of the book, Evolution: A view from the 21st Century. Fortified. This is a new and expanded version of a book he published like 20 or 25 years ago. Anyway, the links go to a couple of articles about a paper he published called, All Living Cells Are Cognitive. I am unable to find a copy of the paper. {exchemist might find it interesting that even Shapiro anthropomorphizes when he mentions cells "talking" to each other.)

mindmatters.ai

University of Chicago Biochemist: All Living Cells Are Cognitive

Future debates over origins of intelligence, consciousness, etc., may mainly feature panpsychists vs. theists rather than materialists vs. theists.
mindmatters.ai mindmatters.ai

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"One of the most interesting examples he gives is quorum sensing... "

Quorum sensing was submitted before as one of the items you might be referring to, and lightly addressed: https://www.sciforums.com/threads/do-our-cells-care.166719/post-3748045

"If the cell itself does not create the intelligence it embodies, what does? Panpsychists argue that all of nature participates in some way in consciousness and humans are the most highly developed example. Theists argue that only a mind outside the universe could create something like human consciousness."

Which exemplifies (in other circles) why "panpsychism" is probably the wrong term for some philosophers to use in association with schools of thought like Russellian monism. Due to the "psyche" root form, people inevitably associate it with intelligence rather than just mindless qualitative states.

And that's the MindMatters site. Which arguably or ideally shouldn't result in automatic dismissal via the genetic fallacy. But in the real world (i.e., not a refereed classroom environment) formal and informal fallacies are employed by everybody as weapons and tactics of war (courtrooms, politics, etc). Skeptics may contingently and pragmatically use the "origin of _X_" as a red flag to save endless time "squandered on every putative crank eccentric (in a long line) that comes along".
_
 
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TheVat also said:
Please look up cognition in a dictionary of encyclopedia.
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I did that and found, Wikipedia for example, goes back to 15th century attempts to explain cognition by purely reasoned (philosophical) processes. And it was completely devoted to human cognition. One would hope that in 5 to 6 hundred years, we might have advance to a point that we can recognize there are many kinds of cognition, some of which has nothing to do with the human thinking processes.

The simplest form of cognition, according to ChatGPT: "Cognition, in its simplest form, is the process of acquiring, understanding, and using knowledge [ie. information, my insertion]. Almost all living cells are capable of doing this. I wanted to say 'even the simplest living cell," but there is no such thing as a simple living cell.
 
Concordicus said:
TheVat also said:


I did that and found, Wikipedia for example, goes back to 15th century attempts to explain cognition by purely reasoned (philosophical) processes. And it was completely devoted to human cognition. One would hope that in 5 to 6 hundred years, we might have advance to a point that we can recognize there are many kinds of cognition, some of which has nothing to do with the human thinking processes.

The simplest form of cognition, according to ChatGPT: "Cognition, in its simplest form, is the process of acquiring, understanding, and using knowledge [ie. information, my insertion]. Almost all living cells are capable of doing this. I wanted to say 'even the simplest living cell," but there is no such thing as a simple living cell.
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The whole point of our comments are that cells do not have a CNS or brain or mind or consciousness. Responding to the external environment like chemotaxis is not the same as "knowing" or feeling or being conscious.
 
Concordicus said:
That is a really intelligent comment, comparing an inanimate object to a living cell.
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That ice is inanimate was rather the point. Which was to underscore that processes of reactivity or replication do not necessarily entail thought or understanding. A point made so many times by others that I will assume either you're grasping the issue or not.

Pinball, your failure to remove "the vat also said," from your previous quote, creates the false impression that the words quoted below that are mine, which they are not. My quote, being nested, was removed when you quoted Concordicus. Perhaps others can see through this confusion.
 
Concordicus said:
I did that and found, Wikipedia for example, goes back to 15th century attempts to explain cognition by purely reasoned (philosophical) processes. And it was completely devoted to human cognition. One would hope that in 5 to 6 hundred years, we might have advance to a point that we can recognize there are many kinds of cognition, some of which has nothing to do with the human thinking processes.
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A ridiculous strawman. No one is arguing that other species do not engage in some process of cognition. The issue, if you can keep up, is if individual cells do.
 
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Consular Corps said:

They don't possess a memory system like a brain or computer, so any "identification" and "understanding" of the "message" would be purely reactive behavior. Akin to one of those old-fashioned toy trains (without the tracks) bumping against a wall and then reversing or changing direction. The wandering toy train did not grok that there was an obstacle in its path via any kind of language, conceptual, and experience context, but solely as an outer action response to its environment.
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Again we have this misapplication of trying to compare the reaction of an inanimate object to that of a living cell. If your train breaks down, can it fix itself? If a cell breaks down, it can often identify the problem and fix itself. If your computer program breaks down, can it fix itself? If there is a loss of DNA strands in a cell, it can often restore the missing code -- a phenomenon discovered by Barbara McClintock prior to WWII. In both these instances, how does the cell "know" something is wrong and "know" the processes needed to fix it without some level of cognition?
 
Concordicus said:
Sarkus said:



Do people here understand the difference between living cells and inanimate objects?
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Наверняка понимают. Но не могут объяснить, чем же живое отличается от неживого. А Вы сами это знаете?
 
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