I had intended on overriding my “Take Two” essay, but there’s too much of a difference and in considering of some comments over there, I’d just as soon start fresh - there’s been a lot of work with some amazing discovers that fit right in with the rationality of looking for consciousness within biological systems.
Thanks for your patience.
Hard Problem of Appreciating Physical Reality - take three.
Philosophers ask: Why does physical processing feel like anything at all? They call this the “explanatory gap,” which I believe stumbles because it tries to force human sensibilities onto physical reality, rather than allowing the physical reality itself to dictate the story we tell ourselves.
I think that gap dissolves once we take evolutionary biology seriously — not as an abstract intellectual argument, but as the story of billions of years of interaction and feedback loops actually unfolding one day at a time that led to who you are today.
This Earth-centrist perspective is founded on a keen appreciation of science’s robust understanding of evolutionary biology which describes our physical reality with astounding fidelity. This understanding tracks a path from unawareness, to awareness, to self-awareness, to introspective-self-awareness, that is, from something to someone.
In spite of remaining incompleteness, I suggest at this point we know plenty enough for answering carefully formulated constructive questions regarding how complex biological processes developed our living world and the spectrum of awareness we witness all around us.
The Earth-centrist, bottom up evolutionary understanding starts with subatomic particles that exist at the very boundary between matter and energy. From there natural laws methodically evolved complexity, following specific defined gradients. Step by measured quantum step of exquisitely exacting configurations, eventually forming some 92 different (naturally occurring) atomic reference frames. This rigid consistency follows all the way through to yet more exotic atoms, including 24 man-made elements, each with unique qualities.
These atoms are entities. This is based on observations that they send and receive information, impinge upon, and accrete with other entities.
Of course it’s all on a quantum level. Awareness has nothing to do with it at this point. This is not “panpsychism,” nothing is imbued with anything — it simply is what it is. Energetic physical stuff in their own right, taking up their own reference frame, interacting with others’ reference frames. Nothing more, nothing less.
Of course this situation continued developing over unimaginable eons’ worth of deep-time. Atoms evolved into complex aggregates. With increasing size, gravity entered the equation, and together with time and natural laws, atomic elements grew into a bewildering variety of interacting forms. On Earth, Dr. Robert Hazen has revealed how even Earth’s minerals went through their own stages of evolution.
Throughout “interacting” was the key driver of both cosmic and Earthly biological development, even before anything was aware.
What we do know is that objects influence each other and the whole, implying there is an awful lot of communicating going on. A cosmos filled with entities constrained within their own particular physicality and cone of potential. Each oblivious to its being. Because there was no need for it, and no means to it.
Still time passes, complexity and size increase, emergence happens.
Imagine these varied increasingly complex molecular mechanisms piling on top of each other, frames of reference, within frames of reference, within yet more frames of reference – interacting with each other non-stop, building yet more complexity. For our story the most exciting were organic molecules, that is molecules built around Carbon atom chain backbone.
All of it having to interact with exquisite exactitude, driven by growth, and environmental conditions, and endless repetition. Progressing along a learning curve where complex interactions among intricate molecular configurations required recognition of one sort or other.
That conception is important because something earth-shattering (in a good way) happened half a billion years into Earth’s existence, when the Krebs cycle was hammered into existence. That is when CHNOPS (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur atoms) captured and harnessed electricity into a microscopic motive force. That is, a charge gradient across a membrane directing work to be done. (See Peter Mitchell for the details.)
Thus creating a profoundly unique category of elements that invented the foundation of biology, which eventually blossomed into dynamic molecular interactions, and life itself. The process that would lead down an unimaginably long path of deep time toward biological creatures, awareness, eventually achieving introspective consciousness.
Back to Earth, about a half billion years later, simple prokaryotic cells formed. Today we can observe images of molecular machines at work within single cells; the complexity is mind-boggling. Yet, this was simply the beginning.
After another half a billion years, a few of those original prokaryotic cells split off and evolved as eukaryotic cells, known since the 1800s with their central nucleus and teeming with organelles doing specific chores and functions. In 1967 Dr. Lynn Margulis (Sagan) published “On the origin of mitosing cells” where she presents the data that convinced her something spectacular happened to make the eukaryotic cell possible.
Namely, our cell’s energy factory, mitochondria, was once a free-living bacterium, that an ancient prokaryotic cell swallowed. Instead of being consumed, a unique deal was struck, room & board for services rendered.
Of course, it turns out to be even more complicated with other “immigrant” agents also converted to eukaryote-organelle. For an introduction see “Endosymbiosis and Eukaryotic Cell Evolution” by John M. Archibald and “Mitochondria and the origin of eukaryotes” by Viviane Callier.
This created a new and unique cell of bewildering complexity and organizational abilities, the complex eukaryotic cell.
As for the next step, Dr. Bonnie Bassler at Princeton University has demonstrated “Quorum sensing” in bacteria. It turns out that bacteria produce and release chemical signals called “autoinducers” that maintain “conversations” within bacterial communities. These conversations track population, nutrition resources and the general environment. They can sense defense agents and calculate when to engage in attack and other behaviors.
Incidentally, mitochondria have recently come under renewed scientific scrutiny, with further startling discoveries. Dr. Martin Picard, associate professor at Columbia, has published icon-shattering research on mitochondria that goes well beyond beloved power plants. Like the bacteria they descend from, mitochondria divide on their own schedule, independent of the cell’s own division cycle, and live in their own communities that cluster around the nucleus.
But where it gets really interesting is that his lab has identified stress-inducible molecules in blood and saliva tied to mitochondrial signaling. Picard has created a mitochondrial health index to study the mind-mitochondria connection in brain and immune tissue, and it shows how chronic stress accelerates cellular aging by raising the energetic cost of staying regulated. They uncovered a two-way street with psychological states measurably altering mitochondrial function and vice versa.
In 2022 Dr. Ernest Lee and Professor Gerald Wong at UCLA published, “Bacteria Build Communities Using Chemical Signals Comparable to Radio Waves.” The paper reports on findings that bacteria create chemical signals analogous to radio transmissions, and that these signals influence the behavior of other bacteria in their community.
Dr. Michael Levin takes it from there and has demonstrated that bioelectrical fields enable cells and tissues to solve problems collectively before nervous systems existed! See Michael Levin, “Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue” (Entropy, 2024).
None of this carries a banner “Awareness Factory.”
But it does show that complex communication and self-referencing were happening simply by virtue of supremely complex molecular machinery having to interact with consistent precision. The complexity of which makes our simple mind want to run for cover. But that’s no good. This is the stuff that makes us who we are. We can’t understand ourselves by turning our back on it.
So, where does that leave this conception?
It leaves us with an outline of amazingly organized, self-sustaining systems jostling together, driven by interactions that learned to engage in ever more complex interactions, leading to emergence of original systems that enhanced complexity.
Dr. Arthur Reber brings this reality alive with his Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC). His book “The First Minds: caterpillars, karyotes, and consciousness” is another must read.
At the same time, Dr. Nick Lane can vividly compare and explain how a single eukaryotic cell is analogous to the largest of Earth’s megalopolises and then some.
Dr. Nick Lane’s first book was published in 2002, followed by four more books over the next two decades. The series provides perhaps the best introduction to this evolutionary, energy-exchanging, reality that science has been revealing for all serious thinkers to feast upon.
Where the “magic” happens is when we have a bazillion reiterations of entities; complexity building upon complexity; hitting upon the limits of growth; then having to find a workaround if increasing growth was to be achieved. And finding it!
What scientists are observing, down to the earliest tiniest levels of living organisms, is that it’s all about successful organization demanding exactingly accurate interactions with other distinct entities. Point being, call it what you want, life has been communicating and cooperating since the beginning.
Physics and chemistry simply happen. While consciousness is fundamentally all about processing interaction and feedback loops.
Creatures, on the other hand, are in a constant dialogue with prediction, observation, evaluation, reaction, endlessly unfolding within their unique dynamic environments. For an understanding of the centrality of “prediction,” the go-to person is Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her theory of Constructed Emotion.
Thanks to Earth’s unique character, biotic molecular arrangements found themselves within significantly fertile dynamic complex environments, with interactions becoming ever more involved and specific.
The increasing complexity of molecular systems created the differentiation that evolved specialized biological units for handling the various tasks required for accommodating this increasing size and complexity — including inner-cell, and later inner-creature, communication systems. Keep in mind there is no denying — emergence happens.
These unprecedented layers were built upon the nuance of already existing atomic/quantum interactions, communication, and cooperating systems.
My point being that Earth has long been populated with entities, incredibly complex molecular entities that were something, simply by virtue of their composition and specific dynamic interactions. But nothing was at home to perceive, or care.
What gets overlooked too often is that being “something” is only half of life.
It is our interactions with other creatures and environments that make all the difference to one’s life.
Your biological being only takes on meaning as a “someone,” in regard to your interactions with other someones and circumstances.
“Interaction” is what is actually driving evolution, awareness, and sense of self — with that important detail getting way too little attention in philosophical circles.
Connection and awareness of “Self” was gradually built up over deep time generations — no switch was flipped; neither biological nor mythical. It simply required an evolutionary edge; time took care of the rest.
To recap before moving on to Zombies, Earth was formed basically 4.5 billion years ago. Some 500 million years after that, the Krebs cycle was hammered out, when molecular machines figured out how to capture and eventually harness electricity to produce power.
It took another half billion years of time unfolding one short day after another, for the first simple cells to organize. From there it was another 2 billion some years before eukaryotic cells unlocked the secrets for creating complex creatures. Part of the reason it took so long is that Earth’s resources and conditions needed to catch up to biology’s potential. Thanks to geology and changing climate, those conditions finally appeared over 600 million years ago. The rest is history, starting with the Ediacaran and Cambrian “Complexity Explosion” of creatures. Entities who were on a whole new level, demanding whole new body plans and efficiencies if these animals were going to thrive.
Wouldn’t “awareness” efficiency seem like the next logical step offering great advantage as Earth’s complexities and competitive battles expanded?
Mammals are some 225 million years old, first apes are about 25 million years old, with gorillas about 8 million years old — roughly the same age as first Hominids. As for modern humans, new findings are regularly pushing the date deeper into the past, now possibly as old as 350,000 years ago. Consider for a moment the experience and learning curves that unfolded over those eons of deep time.
For me it is inconceivable that a Zombie, indifferent, simply reacting mechanically could ever have out-competed critters with skin in the game who were engaged with gusto.
Think about it, the basis for philosophy’s Zombie mind experiment is akin to believing you can get rich gambling at the casino. The game offers hope, you can win, you do win, but in the long run, the house’s edge will suck every dollar out of your wallet just the same. Ignoring the process and accomplishments of Earth’s evolution is fatal if clear understanding is the goal.
The Hard Problem simply assumes, for argument’s sake.
Still, presuming conceivability without contradiction is not the same as a demonstrated possibility.
The lesson I’ve gained from Earth sciences is that “feeling like something” isn’t a philosophical mystery layered onto biology after the fact, it is an inevitable product of evolution and increasing complexity within nonstop feedback loops and interactions.
I find reassurance in the work of Dr. Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who wrote a remarkably insightful book geared to the educated reader: The Hidden Spring. Dr. Solms argues that human consciousness was born out of processing fundamental bodily feelings and emotions via signals streaming to the brainstem rather than the cortex.
Evolving biological entities jostling together are exactly what started the path to consciousness out of the biological structures that process these interacting loops. “Awareness” was the very trait selection that made living complexity and introspection possible.
I have been sitting with the above essay for a few days, while my sleep has been disrupted by legions of Zombies marching through the night. Until one morning I woke up to a curious realization: Earth actually does host physical analogues of Chalmers’ p-Zombies.
Biological-Zombies to be specific. They contain all the molecular machinery needed to sustain, and engage in active lives. Specifically, the Archaea, Bacteria, Fungus, possess no awareness of self or others (though fungus seems to push against those limits with demonstrated “Basal Cognition.”). These entities have mastered all the functions needed to sustain thriving lives - thing is, it never got them past the bio-slime stage. Philosophers should learn something from that.
I share these two graphs because I believe they vividly show Earth’s biological evolution at work. I myself am in utter awe at the shear vastness of Life’s achievements via exploratory research, development, culling, and reproduction along the inescapable arrow of time.
From something, to someone’s. With curiosity and a drive to thrive, which hold for all complex creature life on Earth, not simply us hubristic humans, we would be nothing without all that foundation supporting and sustaining us
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Back to philosophy’s hard problems. How did mind evolve from rock?
The way everything does, from a few serendipitous flukes here and there.
Some feedback memory loop did something new, who knows, crossed signals, a code copied too often, looping in on itself, slamming smack into arriving sensory signals. A spark, not a thought, but enough to offer an edge. A waking up to surroundings. A nudge of curiosity.
This in turn triggered a slightly better way of sensing the situation of the moment and closing “the deal” faster than the competition. It doesn’t even matter how much of an advantage it was, time would be sure to enhance it.
I believe it’s a fair bet the Rubicon crossing to “awareness” was reached during the epoch when eukaryotic cells started constructing complex creatures out of themselves.
First experiments with awareness would be followed up with improvements in bodies and strategies. If conditions remained conducive, the experience and mastering of awareness would lead to self-awareness, and eventually (that is “deep time” eventually) to introspective-self-awareness.
Fascinating as all of that is, it still doesn’t touch on the big question, the explanatory gap between being something - and being someone.
Here I think Dr. Michael Graziano, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University is the man who’s ideas (consciousness) thinkers in general, and particularly philosophers should want to become familiar with.
Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory (AST) brings to the table a refreshingly original, yet scientifically grounded, perspective, that boils down to: “subjective awareness and consciousness are the brain’s simplified, internal schematic models of its own attention process.”
My discovery of this body of work is too fresh for me to do his work any justice, so I’ll end it here. After this project is finished I’ll get back to him, study up and then hopefully write another article to share what I‘ve learned about Dr. Michael Graziano. Don’t wait for me, all of us need to do our own homework.
Best wishes,.
{I need to acknowledge that I have been using Claude.ai as a writing coach, research librarian, egoless debate partner who actually answers questions and explains it own thinking. But I’m too much of a SOB to allow it to do any writing for me.}
