Cellular Basis Consciousness #2 Reber's Q/A - Student's Resource, transcript of highlights.

Prof. Reber's insightful Cellular Basis of Consciousness presents a key understanding regarding the actual physical facts surrounding the origins of our human consciousness.  Metaphysics-enthusiasts will sniff & resent & ignore til the cows come home.  Still, here it is.  The answers are in Evolution!   

If you "believe" in Science., you'll want to learn about Prof Reber's suggestions.

Professor Arthur Reber's Question and Answer Session

The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)”

Reber’s 2018, Institut des sciences cognitives - UQAM presentation.

{Part one, visit The "Cellular Basis of Consciousness" proposal - A Student's Introduction to Dr. Arthur Reber's CBC}

A challenging audience, Professor Arthur Reber rises to the occasion.

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I’m posting this transcript of highlights from Professor Reber's talk, because I’m stunned at how little attention Reber’s "Cellular Basis of Consciousness" conception has received since Reber started sharing this with the academic community over seven years ago. 

I believe the profoundly insightful Cellular Basis of Consciousness holds the key to understanding the actual physical facts regarding the source of our human consciousness.  

So I can well imagine how interests, who have hung their hat on metaphysical skyhooks, and human exceptionalism, would resent Dr. Reber and turning their backs while slamming their doors.  That emotional defensiveness is palpable, as demonstrated by one of the questioners.

I'm no scholar, but I can still be excited by clearer understanding via science, and I'd enjoy finding some like-minded, who see the promise in Reber's proposal.  

Folks simply wanting to discuss it.  Because seems to me, rationalists really need to start developing some solid founding conceptions that are strong enough to stand up to the disconnected faith-dependent crowd, and their malicious anti-science crazy-making games.

Biological evolution makes sense, and now we have evidence at every step in the process.

Here are my best proverbial trading cards - experts who have been at the leading edge of modern science, and capable of clearly explaining it to all who are curious to learn - David Attenborough's 1979, "Life On Earth" - Hazen, Lane, Sloan-Wilson, Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, Levin, Turin, Reber, among many others.

Anyone want to toss in their suggestion?

1:07:00  … Is Reber making a circular argument? …  

1:03:42

Reber:  Dan Dennett has bought for himself is a huge emergentist dilemma.  At what point along Evolution does, suddenly, the capacity for comprehension come in? With what point does understanding emerge? 

It’s a better scientific strategy to assume that it starts at the beginning. And just continues to evolve and get more complex … 

different functions are taken on as you get into more complex environments (and bodies) …

1:04:28

Reber:  … more complex stuff there's no goal here. There’s no teleological components to it. It’s just what happens. …

1:05:03

(I use this color to convey questioner’s blood pressure)

QUESTION:  Excuse me! That does not sound like an answer to the second question. It's a simple question: Are there degrees of consciousness? 

Reber:  Consciousness is a label for subjectivity for internal representational systems that have a, what's it like to be, now fill-in-the-blank. 

Are there different degrees of this? There are different forms of it, there are different varieties. Do you want to put them along some scale of complexity, or scale of cognitive function? 

You can. …

1:06:05

QUESTION:  Now I'm going to state the Hard Problem, to show that there is no solution to the so called emergentist dilemma, which is basically to explain when did the solution to the hard problem appear.

The Hard Problem is, if you have an organism that can do something, and you have an explanation a physiological functional explanation of how it does, it a causal explanation. You explained what it can do, how do you explain that it feels? If it feels? That is the hard problem. 

… what you need to explain. If you're gonna solve the hard problem, is how and why organisms feel.  

And what you think that you've done is by reducing the Hard Problem to just one cell way way back. Then that somehow you've made it more tractable. On the contrary you've put it in broad relief.

Why should any of that stuff that you describe for that first cell be felt?

1:07:20

Reber:  Well I think the answer is, because without it you would not get a viable organist 

And why is that?

Reber:  Because the organism needs to be able to navigate a complex environment. 

Navigating is doing!

1:07:37

Reber:  It all emerges at the same time, I don't see what the problem is.

When you get life, you get sentience.  When you have an organism that has to navigate a complex difficult environment, it has feelings.  It has subjective experience, it's part of the package. 

My guess is that what we'll find is that the origin of life crowd, … when these folks finally figure it out. I will bet you will discover the biomolecular components that also produce sentience. …

1:08:52

QUESTION:  So are you essentially saying that mind, conscious, or sentience is the facility? Or the process of a mechanism that allows an organism to respond adaptively to the environment over its lifetime? In which case, of course, what you're saying it’s not falsifiable. That's evolution, that's not natural selection.

Reber:  Yes. 

QUESTION:  so then basically you've reframed what a mind is …

Reber:  Yes.

1:09:42

QUESTION:  Okay, so then, it's a circular argument. Isn't it? So it's not falsifiable?

Reber:  Of course it is falsifiable.  All you have to show—

QUESTION:  Only if evolution stops!

1:09:53

Reber:  No, no, no, once we've worked out what the underlying biomolecular components are, it’s dead easily falsifiable. 

All you have to do is tweak a molecule and pull it out and see if sentience is still there. See if you still have the adaptive functions. 

1:10:10

Reber:  It’s actually the same sort of strategy that people take when they work with anesthetics. The argument is how do you know whether a specific organism is conscious? Whether its mind is operating and functioning? Well you anesthetize it. If it stops doing those things - you say, okay well, it's no longer conscious.  So it's a parallel, it's analogous kind of argument …

1:13:00

… Anthropomorphism …

Reber:  … There’s a long section on anthropomorphism because this is really a big issue. Because if you do anthropomorphism badly you really get yourself in trouble.  Like the clever Hans fallacy, the smart horse.  

That one does happen with (some) anthropomorphism, that's an anthropomorphism gone wrong.

But on the other hand, as people like, Frans de Waal have pointed out -

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

1:13:15

Reber:  Anthropomorphism is one of the intuitive pumps. It's a driving engine of a lot of comparative work in comparative ecology and so you know I try to balance these things. Because you know, your points are exactly right. They are good and these are complex issues.  …

… with regard to robotics …

Reber:  1:17:ish solve v. resolve.

Reber:  … the panoply of work done over the last hundred fifty years, a lot of problems that really energize and exercise people faded away.  They were resolved.

And they were resolved, not because they were solved. But because another framework was created within which to see them.  Another scaffold was built upon which to hang these ideas—and more progress was made taking that approach, than the previous one. 

So, I wouldn’t say that the issues that are raised by behaviorists were solved—but they were resolved. 

They were resolved by reconstituting them in more cognitive and neural cognitive frameworks …

1:17:55

Reber:  … the way in which Chalmers and and others,he’s certainly not alone, have approached the hard problem is that it cannot be resolved, solved, within that framework. Which is why they ended up themselves in this mysterionism. They ended up a dualists, they end up as panpsychics, … 

1:21:25

QUESTION:  I guess it's a bit of an emergent is dilemma, then how does unconsciousness exist? Does it exist in all conscious beings? How did it come to be?

Reber:  Well I think what happened is what I hinted at earlier, which is, when you get a multicellular organism, you start getting this functional specificity. Then certain groups of cells begin to take on particular functions, some are sensory, some are control of locomotion and movement, and some handle conscious experience. What it's like to be that organism function. 

And so, the other stuff is the unconscious stuff. What really captures the functions of the cognitive unconscious is the detection of patterns of covariation among elements in the world around you. 

What you're picking up is the relationships between an event here and the probability that some other events will occur afterward. The more sophisticated the system that you have, the more complex and more tenuous these statistical relationships, these stochastic relationships can be detected. 

But that's taking place unconsciously and it's taking place unconsciously because these are based upon fundamental function. They have to take place before this kind of top-down component is there, 

But, the thing is a top-down component the way we view it for a complex species like us, has to do with the fact that we've evolved these specified functions, these units, these modules. 

When you go back to a primitive organism you don't have these. What you have is the singular representation which is the conscious subjective experience.

This is why I'm using the term sentience because you can see the mess you get into when you start trying to call this a mind. Is this consciousness? No, it’s sentience … there is something it’s like to be a bacterium in pain. …

1:24:34 

… swarm behavior, and there's what's called quorum sensing … I would not want to say that a termite colony itself had consciousness. But I'm comfortable saying that the individual consciousnesses of each of the termites, coordinate in a social way that produces a large panoply of functions and behaviors. But, I would not want to say that there's any sentient outside of the combined sentience of the individual organisms …

The "Cellular Basis of Consciousness" proposal - A Student's Introduction to Dr. Arthur Reber's CBC

Recently I finished listening to Nick Lane’s “Transformer,” with its significant molecular and mitochondrial insights, and its superb epilogue titled “Self.”  Then, someone at medium.com suggested Arthur Reber, and I was amazed by Dr. Reber's 2018 presentation at Institut des sciences cognitives – UQAM. It seems to me to dovetail with Professor Lane's exposition and it feels to me like I've found the last major missing piece of the puzzle that I've been putting together for myself.

An Introduction to Dr Reber's thoughts: 

The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)”

Reber’s 2018, Institut des sciences cognitives - UQAM presentation.

Where, Nick Lane took me down into our physiology and beyond—into chemistry, then into physics, and the Kreb’s cycle—before bringing it around to mitochondria and some mind-blowing new insights. Finishing with an elegant, most informed deconstruction of the so-called Hard Problem.

Arthur Reber took me back into deep time, origins, and to first functional cells. 

Why did only one type of genetic structure succeed, out of what must have been bazillions of reactions over three billion years? Reber’s “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)” points the way to where to look for answers.  I find it is consilient with the treasure trove of scientific information I’ve already accumulated. It’s harmonious with my perceptions as a lifelong deep time Evolution enthusiast. Then Reber finished with an impassioned, spot-on deconstruction, and a resolution, to Philosophy’s misguided meta-physical “Hard Problem”—What’s not to love, I ask?

How we formulate our questions often says more about our own expectations, than about the topic.

I want to state that I believe Arthur Reber’s (who died a couple months ago) presentation deserves to be in the public domain and receive a hell of a lot more exposure than it has received!

Philosophy Embrace Evolutionary Biological Sciences.

  When will philosophy departments catch up and embrace evolutionary biological science?

Random musing on the topic and achieving milestones.  In the spirit of "hope as a survival strategy in hopeless times" - the following started as a letter to a specific person.  I've decided to expand and turn it into a sort of message in a bottle, simply because I felt a need to put it down.  Hope springs eternal and there's the satisfaction in sharing.

Okay so, what the hell, after a great many years of effort, questioning, searching, gathering, learning, I'm feeling good that my line up of experts and lessons is getting pretty complete, for the story I've been striving to visualize.  From the grand deep time Evolutionary overview, down to the mitochondria and Kerb's cycle coursing through our bodies, and even the mineral evolution that needed to occur, before biology had the building blocks to go wild.

I was always a dreamer, watching, and asking why, being raised a science enthusiast, it was easy enough to keep up on the news, and learn profound lessons along the way.  Followed my curiosity and learned within a skilled-labor workingman's life.

I think it was David Attenborough who really focused me with his 1979 tour de force, Life on Earth: A Natural History, step by step retelling of biological evolution, using real life examples, and so on.  In the past couple decades with more time on my hands, I've been amazed and informed by the likes of Hazen, Lane, Sloan-Wilson, Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, Levin, and recently Turin bringing physics (vibrations rather than chemistry) into sense of smell, and now my belated discovery of Arthur Reber with his model of the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), among many others whom I can't recall off the top of my head right now.  

Bottom up, evolution and science appreciating.  All I know comes from them, digested and reprocessed through my own experiences and perceptions.

Side note, I was saddened to find out that Arthur Reber passed away two months ago, though I was consoled learning about highlights from his amazing 85 years of living.   

Is it Folly Searching for Mind Within the Brain?

 Let me lay out the chain of reasoning that drives this challenge.

It starts with accepting the reality of this physically evolving Earth around me. I know I’m not imaginative enough to conjure up this vision of the miracle planet I live on. Seems to me, it has to be one or the other. If it’s real, it goes back billions of years, and evolution actually happened one day at a time.

Once that’s out of the way, the rest ought to be easy. Evolution, that is — change over time. First Earth, geology, and chemistry, working together with time — lots of time.

Then geology and chemistry figured out how to harness electricity, via the Krebs cycle and such.

I believe it’s honest to suggest this is the birth of biology. By and by, chemistry, geology, and biology created ever more complex “electrified” molecular components — that is, molecular biology — eventually figuring out how to colonize themselves. Up to here, it’s all pretty much spontaneous electro-magnetic interactions.

About the same time, that is, four billion years ago, something else astonishing happened. “Membranes” started showing up. I believe it is reasonable to suppose that this is where “awareness” made its first appearance. The membrane must know what belongs on the inside — and how much of it — also what needs to be excreted. It must also know what to allow in and how to keep the whole cell on an even keel, so to speak.

Since writing those words I've gotten to know the work of Arthur Reber, and it fits right it:

Where We Get Serious: The Cellular Basis of Consciousness. 

Reber, Arthur (2018) Chapter IV of Reber (2019) 

A novel theory of the origin of mind: Conversations with a caterpillar and a bacterium. Oxford University Press.

Arthur Reber: A Novel Theory of the Origin of Mind...Institut des sciences cognitives - UQAM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQy92VjtwZ8

Side note, I was saddened to find out that Arthur Reber passed away two months ago, though I was consoled learning about highlights from his amazing 85 years of living.   

With growing complexity, sensing, processing, motion, and strategy become increasingly important. And we haven’t even made it out of the microscopic scale.

As creature bodies become ever more competent at basic survival functions, they have an increasing amount of processing space and energy available for doing more. We come from a line of animals with increasing skills, physical and mental. Consider our mammalian forbearers with their family bonds and ability to communicate and cooperate with each other. We are a continuation of that trajectory and gene pool.

This brings us to the title question and why I suggest that searching for the mind within the brain is a dead end.

Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Mind (consciousness).
Remove any of those and consciousness collapses. What are we left with?

A realization that our consciousness is best understood as an interior reflection of our body dealing with life. (See Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, Wilson-Sloan, etc. for details.)

Everything we know and experience is filtered through our body and its many sensing organs and systems. Our body is the only connection to the physical world we have — be it a calculator or a lover. Our body is the instrument through which we present ourselves to the world, and our physical self is what the outside world is looking at and talking to.

Scientists have shown us how our senses work in excruciating detail. Our brain may be our central processing organ, but within our body scientists have discovered other discrete information processing centers, along our spinal cord; in our guts with the enteric nervous system; our immune system’s cytokine signaling; and the heart’s sinoatrial node.

Not to be overlooked is the newly recognized functions of fascia, the connective tissue between muscle bundles that sports curious communication channels running throughout our musculature, communicating with itself, and reporting — helping our brain know what our body is doing.

It’s mind boggling, and I bet I’m missing some, and that scientists still have some to discover.

When it comes to understanding the so-called “hard problem of what gives rise to subjective, qualitative experience,” we need to realize that it takes a whole lot more than simply a brain to create an experience. It requires a holistic, spot-on biological symphony.

The bat feels like the bat, and being there feels different from looking at the postcard, because it’s a whole-body experience — a series of momentary, unique, vital connections to the living experiences as they race through your living body.

Mind is the product of the entire body-brain system interacting with the living moment, interior and exterior. What else can it be?

Philosophically fixating on the brain as the source of consciousness feels to me like a reflection of our own all too human self-absorption, and it is emblematic of our general disconnect from the rest of this planet Earth that created us to begin with.

This is a good place to put in a plug for appreciating the Physical Reality–Human Mind divide, along with its cascading implications. Seems to me it’s a first-base concept, a prerequisite before the rest of our human condition can start making rational sense. Then we can start taking responsibility for the consciousness that our evolved biological body produces.

What do you think?

Thank you for your time and I hope interest.