Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

more ..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phragmoplast

and

Phycoplast
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Schematic representation of types of cytokinesis in the green algae: 1) Phycoplast formation with cleavage furrow (e.g. Chlamydomonas); 2) Cleavage furrow and persistent telophase spindle (e.g. Klebsormidium); 3) Phycoplast and cell plate formation (e.g. Fritschiella); 4) Persistent telophase spindle/phragmoplast with cell plate formation (e.g. Coleochaete)
more.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycoplast


Now visualize what it takes to "govern" the data transfers and destinations to accomplish all these tasks with exquisite fidelity.....

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...... it boggles the mind.

Yet it also is a powerful argument in support of the notion that there is no better candidate than microtubules as the place of origin of consciousness.

It is entirely conceivable that trillions of synapses are involved in the process of "thinking", i.e. electrochemical data exchanges within the brain. At this level the action potentials for electric and chemical responses (comfort, discomfort) are generated and action potentials are a result of the microtubule data processing system. This is what makes the MT brain a complex biological data processing system that is shared by all Eukaryotic organisms and animal species on earth.
MT systems range from bacteria to plants, from slime mold to humans and whales.[/QUOTE]
Have you done any biochem units? At uni?

 

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At the next level up, many seem to apprehend that something was needed to "govern" or coordinate the behavior and organization of the first, primitive complex life -- even if it was just other, specialized cells in the "blob".

Ancient origins of brain cells found in creatures from 800 million years ago
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1001544

INTRO: A study in the journal Cell sheds new light on the evolution of neurons, focusing on the placozoans, a millimetre-sized marine animal. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona find evidence that specialized secretory cells found in these unique and ancient creatures may have given rise to neurons in more complex animals.

Placozoans are tiny animals, around the size of a large grain of sand, which graze on algae and microbes living on the surface of rocks and other substrates found in shallow, warm seas. The blob-like and pancake-shaped creatures are so simple that they live without any body parts or organs. These animals, thought to have first appeared on Earth around 800 million years ago, are one of the five main lineages of animals alongside Ctenophora (comb jellies), Porifera (sponges), Cnidaria (corals, sea anemones and jellyfish) and Bilateria (all other animals).

The sea creatures coordinate their behaviour thanks to peptidergic cells, special types of cells that release small peptides which can direct the animal’s movement or feeding. Driven by the intrigue of the origin of these cells, the authors of the study employed an array of molecular techniques and computational models to understand how placozoan cell types evolved and piece together how our ancient ancestors might have looked and functioned... (MORE - details, no ads)

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https://www.sciencealert.com/ancien...found-in-creatures-from-800-million-years-ago

EXCERPT: . . . To achieve this feat, Placozoans rely on cells that help coordinate their bodies. Centre for Genomic Regulation cell biologist Sebastián Najle and colleagues discovered these so-called peptidergic cells have a number of uncannily similar traits to the cells we owe our own smarts to.

"We were astounded by the parallels," exclaims Najle. "The placozoan peptidergic cells have many similarities to primitive neuronal cells, even if they aren't quite there yet. It's like looking at an evolutionary stepping stone." (MORE - details)​

 

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No that is way outside my knowledge. I try to find common denominators from which certain conclusions may be drawn. I leave the lab work (research) to the scientists.

 

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We're getting closer. Note that secretory cells are formed by microtubules and it is the microtubules that perform intercellular transport.

It is known that cilia and flagella in bacteria are an evolutionary result of secretory organelles.
This was established during the Kitzmiller Trial where Bahe made the argument that the flagellum and its motor were irreducibly complex and therefore proof of "intelligent design".

It was proven that flagella and cilia evolved from the earlier presence of secretory openings in the cell wall and suggesting the presence of microtubules in prokaryotes long before the advent of the Eukaryotes.

Do prokaryotes contain microtubules?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC372974/#

and

Peptides mediating DNA transport on microtubules and their impact on non-viral gene transfer efficiency
Patrick Midoux,

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Lucie Pigeon, Cristine Gonçalves, and Chantal Pichon

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Abstract

more...... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5643739/

and

The role of microtubules in secretory protein transport

ABSTRACT

Introduction

(Fig. 1)

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Microtubule organization and polarity vary in different cell types. (A) In mesenchymal cells or fibroblasts, the microtubule network is mainly astral and emanates from the centrosome and the Golgi complex. The microtubule minus ends are, therefore, in the center and the plus ends mainly at the periphery of the cell. (B) In epithelial cells, centrosomal microtubules are rare. Here, filaments elongate towards the basal pole of the cell, forming a parallel network. (C) In neurons, an astral–central array of microtubules radiates from the centrosome and Golgi at the soma towards their periphery, i.e. the axon and dendrites. (i) Axonal microtubules form bundles of parallel microtubules with the same polarity (minus end at the soma and plus end at the periphery). (ii) In dendrites, by contrast, microtubules form anti-parallel beams of microtubules with mixed polarity and different stability, microtubules oriented from the periphery towards the soma being more stable. (iii) It is possible that Golgi outposts contained in dendrites have a role in the nucleation of microtubules with inverted polarity.

more..... https://journals.biologists.com/jcs...The-role-of-microtubules-in-secretory-protein

 

Not sure If I posted this before but it bears repeating.

 

And for those who are intrigued.

 

And now we are copying microtubules to use in AI.

Microtubule-Based Transport and the Distribution, Tethering, and Organization of Organelles.
1. INTRODUCTION

(Figure - PMC)). Remarkably, this handful of building blocks can be combined and adapted to create a myriad of finely tuned machines capable of transporting a full range of cellular cargoes.

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Figure 1.
Membrane organelles require multiple motors and cytoskeletal filaments for their distribution. (A) In a steady-state eukaryotic cell, the molecular motors kinesin and dynein transport cargo over long distances along radially arranged microtubules (purple). Actin filaments (dark yellow) are denser near the cell periphery and primarily support short-range transport events by myosin motors. (B)

The architecture of the cytoskeletal transport machinery in a neuron is somewhat analogous, with bundles of microtubules (purple tracks) extending from the cell body into the axon and dendrites (not highlighted in this figure), and with actin concentrated in the growth cone at the axon terminal. (C) Organelles are often moved by multiple motors, including motors of opposite polarity and on different cytoskeletal tracks. (D)

(Microtubule-Based Transport and the Distribution, Tethering, and Organization of Organelles - PMC).) Note that the various motors, cargoes, and cellular constituents are not illustrated here to scale.

more… Microtubule-Based Transport and the Distribution, Tethering, and Organization of Organelles - PMC

Now compare this to artificial AI microtubules.

Artificial microtubules for rapid and collective transport of magnetic microcargoes

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Directed transport of microcargoes is essential for living organisms as well as for applications in microrobotics, nanotechnology and biomedicine. Existing delivery technologies often suffer from low speeds, limited navigation control and dispersal by cardiovascular flows. In cell biology, these issues are largely overcome by cytoskeletal motors that carry vesicles along microtubule highways.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00510-7​

 

(IMG) in post #2824

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https://journals.biologists.com/jcs...The-role-of-microtubules-in-secretory-protein

 

I believe that Anil Seth is close to the right "question".

Being a beast machine


And I believe it agrees with Tegmark, in that the question also asks if all the necessary parts that produce "consciousness" are already present in the "organism".

What is it that allows a slime mold to solve problems, like "the shortest distance" from among several paths in a maze? Is that proto-thinking, "decision making"?
It uses a simple system of filling the entire maze, closing all dead ends and then from the remaining open paths, choosing the most "efficient" (shortest) path to the food.

What ability in a Venus Flytrap knows the difference between an inanimate "object" (leaf) and a nice "morsel" (insect), that just landed inside the trap?
It detects "movement" that triggers the trapping sequence. It detects movement by "counting" and "timing".

These are organic machines. Is the human organism an organic (beast) machine? Physically not the greatest athlete and vulnerable, lacking real physical power, humans are the "smartest" (best informed) bio-organism and is able to alter its own environment for safety and comfort.

But that evolutionary process started here:

Borderline consciousness?
SelfAwarePatterns Zeitgeist October 8, 2023 4 Minutes

https://selfawarepatterns.com/2023/10/08/borderline-consciousness/

 

It's not research, it is learning about cells, cell organelles, tissues and organs and how they work.

 

Simply using the word "consciousness" at all for a narrower domain like the experiences themselves will still result in people (especially opposing camps) conflating it with cognition (identification, understanding, memory). While I prefer alternatives like "manifestations" or "presentations", the English language doesn't seem to sport anything that solidly detaches such from psychological inclusion or classification.

Since "panpsychism" is one of the items addressed in there, note that the term blatantly uses the "psyche" root which implies the baggage of mental capacities, rather than purely proto-phenomenal events that have no association with intellectual activity (they should be classed as ontological rather than psychological).

And that's the rub. You can't solution-wise disassemble and correlate the complex "phenomenal events" of the brain to more ubiquitous, primitive precursor sources if the slipshod language wants to keep associating _X_ with dependence upon a memory system (i.e., with cognition). Which obviously isn't available at a systemically undeveloped level of feral chemical activity or lower down yet into elemental physics.

Thus, many if not most proposed solutions to the hard problem of consciousness still result in appearing to be magical conjuring acts -- where if biological, electronic, clockwork, or hydraulic structure at a higher level performs the correct algorithms or relational procedure -- then abracadabra, a radical new stratum of be-ing brutely emerges that "shows" itself as visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile or unknown/alien properties. (In contrast to the usual not even "nothingness" that the non-phenomenal and non-cognitive universe at large basks in -- what becomes the case again after death, at least in materialism context.)

 

I like the distinction there, ontological v psychological. There could be a (a la Nagel) condition of being an earthworm, say, a sort of dim string of phenomenal events without any cognition or connecting of those events via memory or a model of a "self." Slugs, worms, bugs et al could experience sensory inputs without being informed by them - sensory events simply are. A cold probe causes contraction, but no thought. Perhaps even a rock could feel warm when sun shines on it, though that begs the questions of science, like what exactly it feels with absent a nervous system. Rocks hit rock bottom (ha) in such a panpsychist scheme, because once you get to the level of atoms only loosely organized you have to hypothesize some proto-phenomenal aspect to atoms themselves. Kind of a modern animism.

Panpsychism certainly has tended to cast a shadow of soul or psyche, from Plato to Leibniz and on through Charles Sanders Peirce and Russell's neutral monism. Russell was clever in replacing dualism with a sort of aspect dualism that preserved monism, though it's a weird reality that is neither mental nor physical but uncommitted until the chemistry is right. Current thinkers like Galen Strawson equate panpsychism with a sort of physicalism, which will continue to baffle me until I have more time to read him maybe.

Anyway, I understand the seductive power of panpsychism, given all the coherence problems with emergentism and, in AI research, functionalism.

 

I believe there is debate about the level where "cognition" resides and if it can viewed as a sensory function, like vision, or hearing.


AFAIK, cognition and cooperative responses start at the cellular level. Can Slime-mold be used as proof of cellular cognition and communication? How about the Venus fly trap?

These organisms respond to data input in consistent ways that show a self-referential value processing system that relies on "logic" rather than memory. This is how Lemurs can tell the difference of "more" from"less".

Here is where I have the most trouble in finding clarification.
Mathematics does not rely on memory, it is the way values interact and produce autonomous responses

 

One peril here might be framing consciousness as a property, rather than a group of processes of varying complexity and causal power.

 

But this is along the line of the "competence without comprehension" idea that Dennett introduced. There are no conceptual, principle, and theoretical understandings being devised and retained like in brains (full-blown cognition). Even a computer or robot navigating in its environment can't identify anything without memory, including the applicable program and its methods stored in the latter.

Life is one of the higher level affairs. It's dependent on information storage from the beginning. Retaining molecular patterns or instructions at the genetic stratum on how to assemble the organism and how it is to behave.

However, this does reflect how the mechanistic nature of intelligence and cognitive abilities have less complex precursors all the way down to particle interactions and relationships. A bent closer hanger isn't alive, but is retaining a shape or recorded event that happened to it (primitive memory).

[CAUTION: But the building block entities and properties of physics don't just give rise to life and brains, but everything else. That's why it would be kind of wonky to call this panproto-biologism (or something). Life and intelligence are just a minor item on a particular planet that fell out of the basic attributes and capacities of matter.]

Which glaringly points out how -- while there are less complex basic affairs of nature to incrementally give rise to full-blown cognition, there is nothing posited for manifestations (phenomenal consciousness) to developmentally emerge from. Just the ludicrous "conjuring spell" approach of if _X_ configuration of components performs _Z_ coordinated operations in response to inputted sensory and personal memory signals, then "stuff" magically appears in private (qualia organized into representations of the outer environment, body states, and mulling thoughts).

That said, however, since how an atom or particle would exist to itself (independent of observer representations) is no more available to science than how a bat or a robot claiming that it has experiences is available for public scrutiny, we're usually just engaging in a pretend game of "what If science really could explain phenomenal consciousness in a completely sufficient manner?" rather than it being left to philosophers of mind. Or these explorations and complaints serve as a frustration outlet for that inadequacy.

Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains. --Time Reborn ... page 270

Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five sense, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity. --“The Enigma of Sentience”, 1998​

_

 

Yesss... that's where it begins. Evolution does the rest.
A constant refining of the sensory organs and the organism's physical relationship to its environment.
Chameleons use triangulation to unerringly catch that bug a whole body length away.
Predators use all kinds of metrics to catch their prey or construct efficient habitats.

But these "abilities without comprehension" provide the basis of what Seth advances as the tools necessary for acquiring cognition and comprehension via the process of comparing incoming data against "known" prior stored data that informs the "thinker" what happened then and if that is desirable (compatible) now. We learn to recognize differences and from that information be able to arrive at a future expectation, good, bad?
These are the "engrams", a memory forming event that has become part of the networked neural networked pattern.

A perfect example is the "checker board" optical illusion that persists in spite of knowledge that what you see is not real to other observers.

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Squares A and B are the exact same shade and color but you cannot match them up.
Your brain won't let you. It's a "hardwired" cognitive (survival) function that you cannot consciously override.

The human brain has learned to see an object in the shadow as lighter than it actually is. This is a remarkable example of evolution of "competence without comprehension" into a gradually "increasing competence with emergent self-referential comprehension".

As Seth says: "We actively generate our reality", inside our brains. And that's remarkable.

 

Absolutely. There is no "irreducible complexity" and that allows for the concept of a singularity.

 

Question: Does the observer need to be physical?

What if the observer (guiding principle) is mathematical in essence?
After all, a singularity is a mathematical value. A dynamic singularity is a force.

 

According to Robert Hazen it may not be all that complicated given the availability of time for experimentation and surface area for number of experimentation.

He estimated that Earth alone, an average planet with similar chemistry to other planets in the universe, has performed some (2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion) experiments in its relatively short lifetime.

 

I used to say, elsewhere in cyberspace, that neuroscience is what brains look like from the outside while qualia are what they look like from the inside. C C quote of Michael Lockwood reminds me there are better ways to say this. (also one can take "inside" too literally, and easily satirize such aphorisms)

I like the way Lockwood answers the classic thought experiment called Mary in the Black and White Room. There is an intrinsic knowledge of seeing red that Mary can only have when she emerges from the room for the first time and sees objects that are red.