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 seemed 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, and to share.
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 ask 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!
Sadly, I can’t ask Dr. Reber for his permission. And I was so looking forward to a fun email exchange. I’m actually struck with a sense of loss and sadness by the news. I believe he would have approved of me and my intentions—and supported me in the following personal effort—and now I see this as my memorial to Arthur Reber and his deep insights.
I’ve gone through his UQAM talk posted on YouTube and have transcribed extensive portions of it. They cover key highlights of the concept he was striving to share with others. I kept my commentary to a bare minimum.
Arthur Reber deserves to have serious students process what he had to say. Then to discuss it with each other. That is if you don’t want to get gobbled up by faith-based disconnect from reality, or philosophical worm holes. We need to come up with a better, realistic bottom up evolutionary-biological appreciation for who we are.
After that, unless you are changing minds, we are losing.
Getting to know the work of Dr. Reber feels like an arrival after a long personal educational journey that got supercharged by David Attenborough's 1979, "Life On Earth" extravaganza, where he used living creatures to tell the story of Evolution of Life on Earth. That led me to endless reading and listening, highlighted by the likes of Hazen, Lane, Sloan-Wilson, Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, Levin, Turin, Reber, among many others.
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From here on, it's pretty much all Dr. Reber's fascinating, thought provoking 2018 talk, notes in green.
0:00
Arthur Reber: I started out at the University of British Columbia in the 1960s I got a job offer from the City University of New York and then we moved back out to the Great Pacific Northwest and UBC lets me use their name …
… from my perspective it is incoherent to think of life without there being some sentience behind it. Some feeling, some subjectivity, it simply doesn't make any other sense. … The reason is because it’s essential for survival. If you're not getting feedback about what's good and what's bad, what's nutritious and what’s toxic.
If you're not having representations of this, that have a subjective component to it, you're a Darwinian dead end.
(1:20 - By the way I didn't always think that way, I think very few people thought that way, until a few years ago and now increasingly people are recognizing it’s a reasonable assumption to start with.)
… The goal of the theory is to re-solve the Hard Problem. Now the Hard Problem famously was so dubbed by David Chalmers …
The effort to solve a hard problem has proven to be difficult, it has crashed on the shoals of logic research, philosophical debate, and just plain pissiness. This from a lot of people who just really get their dander up with about it.
I'm not gonna solve the Hard Problem, no one's gonna solve the Hard Problems. Certainly not with regard to the contemporary work that we're doing.
But what I hope to do in the next hour is to resolve a hard problem. Like restructuring it and refocusing it. … The "Hard Problem” … , how do brains make minds, or to phrase it another way, how can material make the mental? The argument goes …
… in philosophy you never ever agree with another philosopher, it's just not done. The game is to criticize. I mean this is not a criticism of criticism.
This is the way you want to do it, because this keeps everybody honest, and you keep your arguments well honed and sharpened …
I’m a psychologist so I can agree with a philosopher and get away with it … (a fun digression to 1981 Summer Institute for the Philosophy & Psychology of Mind) …
… The big question, which species have minds? . . .
… philosophers have been the ones that have framed this debate and dragged the neuroscientists and the neurocognitive scientists into it. They started with humans, they started with human consciousness and the exercise went like this …
What do minds do? learn, form memories, make decisions, …
I'm gonna play fast and loose with terminology because it actually is a good thing to do in a situation like this …
… Bees …
Finding consciousness:
Bruno van Swinderen’s Fruit flies
Peter Godfrey Smith’s Cephalopods
Avian researcher Irene Pepperberg’s famous parrot
… conclusion that indeed the emergence of consciousness was documented.
Then again, Linguist MacPhail suggests only the human species has consciousness.
Anybody notice anything interesting here, consciousness seems to be where you look for it. Which tends to have been where you’ve been looking all along.
The "Emergentist's Dilemma"
The Emergentist's dilemma (…) how does consciousness appear in a species when one cosmic moment before it wasn't there? …
CBC Proposes: A Cellular Basis of Consciousness.
Here's the CBC's radical proposal, consciousness comes with life.
Single-cell species are conscious prokaryotes bacteria. Our conscious emerges with life, it comes with the very first species, sure we really only have very tiny minds. But they are there and actually, as we'll see in a minute, they're a little more sophisticated than perhaps most folks recognize. …
What do organisms with minds do?
Well they learn, they remember, they make decisions, and they communicate. Startlingly, bacteria do all of these things. … a quick look at one of my favorite microbes, Stentor roselli, I never heard of Stentor roselli till I got involved in this game of tracking down the origins of consciousness. …
You should know I'm a cognitive psychologist, I spent my life studying what I called implicit learning or the way in which the cognitive unconscious functions outside of awareness. (Also, apparently a poker expert) Just briefly about close to 30 years ago,
I started thinking about the origins of consciousness because of my interest in this balance between those things that we are aware of, and those things we are not …
When I started getting into this, I stumbled across some work … published in 1906 by Herbert Spencer Jennings and it’s been sitting there in the literature for a hundred and twenty plus years…
Single Celled Stentor roselli, studied by Herbert Spencer Jennings 1906.
A quick look Stentor … a complex single-celled organism. It's a eukaryote, so it has its DNA encapsulated in a membrane inside. See the little funnel, that's its mouth. Basically, what it does, is it just hangs around and waits for molecules to come into its mouth, and what it does is it evaluates.
Here I know I’m using very conscious terms. It evaluates, its significance. If it's food, it absorbs it and extracts the nutrients from it, if it's not food it ejects it. And in a very stylized way. It bends over and shakes to get the nasty little particles to come out.
What Jennings did was to drop in a red dye that he could see easily, and it is a noxious stimulus. Stentor really doesn't like it, so he dropped it in, Stentor bends over shakes and gets rid of it. He dropped some more particles in. The same ritualized responses.
He dropped in some more of it, he dropped in some more of it and then puts his hand over the little aquarium that he's working in. Stentor pulls its mouth down inside the body so that no more particles can come in. Now notice what's happening here folks.
First Stentor is escaping from noxious molecules,
so clearly it is detecting that this substance is, if not toxic, certainly unpleasant.
But it learns to avoid them.
It makes a preparatory prophylactic response by closing down its funnel to prevent any more noxious particles from coming in.
After a few seconds it goes, okay, coast is clear, it opens back up again.
Starts looking for nutrients Jennings dropped back down again, and Stentor, which is a sessile species. That is, it puts down a foot and then roots itself in a spot. Stentor tears its foot away, swims off to another location and reestablishes its sessile life over there. To get away from this environment that has clearly become a toxic environment.
This is a stunning series of behaviors for a single-celled organism and it's pretty hard to look at this and not do a little anthropomorphism.
By the way, again let me thank Frantisek Baluska (What a Plant Knows and Perceives ) this morning, for pointing out the importance of anthropomorphism.
We used to think anthropomorphism was a fallacy—we call it the Anthropomorphic Fallacy. This was driven into our brains by the behaviorists in the 1950s and ‘60s and ‘70s. But, in fact, anthropomorphism is a very powerful tool when it's used in a careful way and it's used with common sense. And a little anthropomorphism here, I think, is a good thing. Particularly what we just saw Stentors capable of.
Learning in Bacteria
But even more interesting is that the simplest species on the planet, bacteria can do some learning. In Yitzhak Pilpel’s group in Israel did a lovely series of studies. They shifted nutrients back and forth between sucrose and maltose.
Now in case you don't know this, and I didn't know it until not too long ago, bacteria make changes in metabolic function (Nick Lane has a lot to teach in this regard). In order to efficiently deal with the food source that’s in their environment. The way in which the underlying structural characteristics of their metabolism is established is different for sucrose, than it is for maltose.
So what they did was to go sucrose - maltose, back and forth, bump-bump, bump-bump. And fairly quickly the bacteria adapt, so that after they've consumed the sucrose they immediately began changing the underlying metabolic functions so that they're able to metabolize maltose more effectively than they would be normally.
So what they then did, was to go continuous sucrose, maltose, back and forth and then follow the last maltose with more maltose. Now, if they're simply in a state where they are processing the maltose, then they should be fine.
But, if they're in this go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, they are learning that there's a sequence here. That they have to anticipate. They should have trouble with it because now they've shifted their metabolism back. They’re handling the sucrose and that's exactly what they found. When they presented maltose alone, the metabolic changes were not seen. They are back looking for sucrose and they're not getting it.
Memory in Bacteria
Memory. Mathis and Ackermann’s group exposed bacteria to near toxic levels in a water solution, they use high levels of salt. The species that they work with is a sessile species and what they did was, to use such a high concentration that it caused cell death. Those surviving cells then divide, because of the sessile stationary species, the mother cell stays there, the daughter cells then separate, they swim away.
So they leave the environment. But the mother cells they stay in the same environment they then reintroduce the salt solution, and we can anticipate what they find.
The mother cells the ones who stayed behind in the same location. They remember the salt solution and they had relatively high survival rates, because they made the adjustments in their metabolic function to be able to protect them against the salt solution - but the daughter cells the ones who relocated, they suffered much higher cell death rates despite having the exact same DNA.
So we know we're dealing with something that's learned. We know we're dealing with something that has a memory, …
Decision-Making in Bacteria
Decision-making in bacterial DNA. Jané Kondev group discovered that bacteria switched genes on and off depending upon the food source.
Well we already saw that with the sucrose shifting back and forth from Pilpel’s group. The mechanism is likely the one that lies behind Pilpel’s findings. The fascinating thing is, that in these studies Kondev has done a number of series of studies on this. and finally in a review paper he wrote: “It is not crazy to say that bacteria have free will.”
Now when you start getting biologists using terms like this, it's really quite, quite engaging. I rather enjoyed that one.
Communication in Bacteria
Bacteria communicate on often surprising ways. Gürol Süel's group found the bacteria at the center of a colony can ask the ones on the edge to control cell division.
Now let me briefly explain it. … as the bacterial mats grow, the nutrients are out there in the environment at the periphery of the unit. The cells in the center are having difficulty getting nutrients because not enough is flowing into the center of the film at this point.
They will send out a signal. A molecular signal asking their brethren and sistren on the periphery to, slow down guys, stop the cell division, and stop eating everything. Because we're not getting enough in here, and they do!
You get this very nice cooperative response from the cells in the periphery, they slow down metabolism, they stop dividing. The food flows in, the cells in the center are now getting sufficient nutrients. They change the metabolic output, they change the molecules that then release, this information. It gets to the periphery and the guys on the periphery say, okay it's time to start eating again and they begin to consume. Fascinatingly … it happens between colonies also …
… but the more we thought about it the more we realized that this is probably a general mechanism and in fact it is, and it turns out that it occurs across bacterial species. They will cooperate with each other …
(And I can easily imagine this behavior leading to first circulatory systems)
First Occurrence of Altruism?
… and now this fascinating little piece of anthropomorphism.
Is this the first occurrence of altruism? It really looks like altruism cells at the edge of the colony are acting to save the lives of those in the center and this is important, they're putting themselves at risk.
See one of the things about being in the center of the colony is you're protected. The toxic substances aren't getting to you. You’re less likely to be attacked by predators. It is cells in the periphery that are in most jeopardy, so when they reduce metabolic rate. When they stop reproducing, they're putting themselves at risk. They’re putting themselves at risk for the benefit of other members of the colony …
… right off the top of my head that's exactly what anthropologists have determined our true altruism to be. Do I think that that they're thinking out heuristically? So I think that they have thoughts like, oh we gotta save our friends? No, of course not!
But all of these cognitive functions, all of these social functions, have their roots in basic biological functions and I don’t think it's crazy to refer to this as the fundamental biological basis for—or ultimately becomes—altruistic behavior in more complex species.
Because, remember my hypothesis. The basic fundamental principle here is that all of the instantiations of cognitive and affective social functions that we see in complex species have their evolutionary roots in more primitive and more basic, more fundamental, components within simple organisms—right down to the prokaryotes.
Interim Summary
Bacteria are pretty impressive, I think that's pretty clear. Prokaryotes show all other behavioral features typically cited as the requirements of consciousness. These findings are just a few of the many reports in the literature and from my point of view they're all supportive of CBC theory.
Now, next question, are there any entailments of taking the stance recommended by the CBC, and the answer is absolutely. And this is going to get a little into some other issues because they have both philosophical and scientific components to them.
Briefly, a little autobiographical information (re philosophy background) … now I have to get my philosophy chops back.
… (reminiscing about the 1981 Summer Institute session, & philosophy) - I didn't know words, I thought I knew the meaning to. I didn't have a clue about concepts, I thought were simple, and had already been resolved, would turn out to be far more complex than I ever imagined. This book of mine is coming out soon.
I don't think I could ever have written it, if I knew anything about philosophy when I started. Because I would have found myself caught up in this kind of, you know, picking at your navel until it bleeds.
Because you just can't get out of this sort of philosophical whirlwind that you found yourself in. (Cocooned within our Mindscapes. )
But, by being a little naive, and by being a little arrogant, I was able to make what I think are serious inputs. (I’ll) talk about a couple of them here because I honestly think that taking the CBC stance, the Basis of Consciousness stance, we can actually resolve a number of difficult problems that have bothered philosophers. Particularly those in the philosophy of mind for some time now.
Philosophical Conundrums, Resolved or Reformulated
Looking at some conundrums, resolve or reformulate it, as opposed to sort of cleared up completely.
The Emergentist’s dilemma is simplified. (Because) as long as we're looking for the species where this magical thing called consciousness emerges, we're always gonna be stuck with a really complicated issue.
Why worms but not sea anemones … if it starts with life, if all forms of consciousness emerge with the simplest emergence of life, you've got an Emergentist’s dilemma. It’s still there. But, it's a tractable one, it's a relatively simple one.
My guess is that when we figure out how life itself emerges, and again that's another subfield within biology. We will discover that the events that occur there, are the same ones that underlie sentience. That sentience emerges with life. You can't get life without sentience, and you can't get sentience without life! But those linkages are completely fixed. It only happened once. That’s it!
What this leads us to, is we don't commit the category error.
One of the problems that David Chalmers dragged us into with the way in which he structured the Hard Problem, is that it treats human consciousness as special. It treats it as though it's a different type. (A holdover from Abrahamic Religious traditions, with their philosophical certitude of human exceptionalism and mastery over all of Earth.) But (we’re) not. (We are evolved animals, spectacular animals. Still, we are related to all others just the same. All the created products of Earth’s systems and deep-time processes.) It's just another token of a singular type.
Human consciousness isn’t different from other forms of consciousness, except in that it is capable of carrying out certain functions that other (body types and) forms of consciousness are not.
Our memory systems are more complex and involve a variety of different functions that are separate and distinct from the memory systems that we've seen in bacteria. But no one doubts that they're not the same. It’s an interesting tidbit, this kind of approach which has been anathema to philosophers for a long time, is accepted as a perfectly legitimate strategy for research by people in the biomedical sciences.
Eric Kandel's work on memory, for example he discovered that the underlying molecular components that take place at the synapse can be found in sea slugs.
… his autobiography says when he decided to do this work, his friends all said, don't do this. There’s no possible way that anything you can find in sea slugs, will generalize to the human memory. Kandel received a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work.
… this tendency to think of the human functions neurobiological and cognitive as separate and distinct. It’s gotten people into a great deal of trouble. All minds lie along a singular continuum …
41:00 … other minds problem …
42:30 … mysterianism is avoided …
What’s been happening here is people like Chalmers. You know, I pick on Chalmers a lot in my book. So much so, that I've had to put it in a footnote apologizing for picking on him. But, it’s his damn fault, cause he's the one who named the hard problem the Hard Problem. So he deserves to be the target of criticism.
He's become a duelist, because he can’t figure out how the brain makes the mind, and so therefore, the mind must be made by things that are not material. If it’s made by things that are not material, then we have to have two kinds of stuff out there.
Material stuff that operates according to mechanistic principles - non material stuff that operates according to other principles. Which we haven’t figured out yet and we are in the realm of mysterionism.
Owen Flanagan called Chalmers, and those who agree with him, the new mysterion’s. The old mysterion's were the ones that inserted supreme beings, and broke things down in terms of whether or not they had spiritual components, or whether there were secular components.
The new mysterion's are the ones that have essentially done the same trick, but instead of bringing in a Supreme Being, they simply deal with some other way in which mental events are caused without having to have material components behind them.
Believe it, or not, this is actual, drag some very smart people into taking on an even more current, sorry for being so critical, crazy position of panpsychism. Because they can't figure out how consciousness emerges because they don't have the immersionist's dilemma tucked into their back pocket, with a solution, they've decided that it's everywhere. That panpsychism principles are the right ones.
A recent paper was published by a well-known philosopher on this title “panpsychism is crazy, but it's probably right.”
But it's not right, it's crazy! …
Okay, … into the gory detail of panpsychism and animism. …
46:36 … Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch they're first-rate neuroscientists, but recently they've embraced a form of panpsychism within their Integrated Information Theory.
… this is an interesting road if you're an AI researcher, it’s an interesting game to play if you're in robotics— but it's not a particularly interesting game, if you're trying to really understand what the underlying conscious consciousness is.
The Hard Problem is Resolved
… anyway, mysterion is avoided, if we go with a CBC model.
Minds are biophysical machines.
There’s no need for dualism, there's no need for panpsychism, the hard problem is now resolved.
Current efforts, start and end with human consciousness,
or start with humans and look for analogues in other species.
This is what's gotten us in trouble.
With the CBC Model the Discovery Process Changes
Neither has gotten us close to solving the Hard Problem.
But, on the other hand, with a CBC model the discovery process changes,
search for the initial conditions for the creation of life.
Consciousness, sentience will be there, it's waiting for you.
Go find it. Because without sentience, a species just will not survive.
Problems Not Resolved
There are things we haven’t solved with this issue.
Plants. Well we just got a full hour and a half on the sentience of plants (Frantisek Baluska).
Plants are eukaryotes, here's the problem with CBC model. …
You have to be honest if you're gonna do this kind of work.
Plants are eukaryotes, they appear some two billion years after the prokaryote.
Evolution is conservative, if it works, keep it. You don't jettison something, if it's been functional.
Sentience is metabolically expensive.
Now here's the question if I'm arguing prokaryotes are conscious and the eukaryotes emerge later and plants are eukaryotes and plants are not sentient that means that they must have jettisoned, given up on sentience, when they emerged.
This is unlikely because evolution is conservative. It’s very rare in evolutionary biology to find a species that gave up something.
I only know of one case of evolutionary degeneration … hagfish …
… so if plants aren't conscious,
if they don't have sentience, it means they gave it up.
Why would they do this when it's so useful?
Well for one, sentience is metabolically expensive, motility, this is the issue I raised earlier, … sentience is expensive. Did they give it up?
( Perhaps, plants are on a more subtle level of awareness. Same starting hardware, reworked for vastly different challenges of uniquely plant-centric problems. )
Ultimately the CBC is agnostic on this issue.
Scientific Problems to Focus on
How multicellular species evolved, this is a big one. How do multicellular species evolve …
How do multicellular species came to have singular conscious experience?
Probably began with “function sharing” in the first multicellular species.
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Questions / Answers 58:30
A challenging audience, Professor Arthur Reber rises to the occasion.
Student's introduction & reference
Excepts from:
Professor Arthur Reber's
The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)”
Reber’s 2018, Institut des sciences cognitives - UQAM presentation.
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I’m posting this because I’m stunned at how little attention Reber’s "Cellular Basis of Consciousness" conception has received since its recording over seven years ago. I believe it's profoundly insightful and key to understanding the actual facts of our human consciousness.
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 develop 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.
Here are my best trading cards, 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 there's?
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