Here I share extensive quotes from Dr. Nick Lane’s recent book Transformer, specifically its epilogue, “Self” — which seems to me a potentially seminal summary of the current scientific state of understanding regarding our physical body as the source of our thoughts and feelings.
Why do I do this? Because I keep interacting with too many people who confine their discussions about mind to the bubble of theological and philosophical thought.
“Evolution” and biological realities receive lip service, but it’s akin to poking at a membrane, when what we need is to break on through to the other side. (Okay, that’s simply a dramatic flourish, with a hint at a melody for those of a certain time and place.)
Of course, we — that is, our minds — can never break through to the other side of our human conundrum, that is our Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide. This is why humans invented science, an honesty-based discipline that strives to eliminate human ego-driven bias from its processes as much as possible.
Although science, like philosophy, religion, and all our other institutions, is a product of the human mind, science alone follows a set of rules intended to eliminate human ego and bias from its deliberations. Its practitioners don’t always live up to those standards, but the standards remain, and science is self-correcting like no other human endeavor; malfeasance has consequences.
The point is that while science can’t help humans step through to the other side, science can poke through the proverbial bubble and shine a mirror into the realm of physical reality.
What follows is offered as food for thought and as encouragement for the curious to explore Nick Lane’s work more fully, and to gain a deeper understanding of how the interaction between body, brain, and life itself gives rise to our consciousness — and while all the details aren’t filled in, the outline is clear enough and backed by a consilience of scientific evidence.
As Dr.Solms points out elsewhere: the best way to understand consciousness is as a reflection of our body/brain communicating with itself. ) It's time for philosophizers take notice.
Professor Nick Lane PhD writes in his epilogue to the book “Transformer”:
¶1 “ ‘I think therefore I am’ said Descartes, in one of the most celebrated lines ever written. But what am I, exactly? … What is a quantum of solace?”
¶2 “In this book, we’ve explored the dynamic side of biochemistry, the continuous flow of energy and matter that makes us alive. …”
{Here Lane shares a quick review of his book, and discoveries made around hydrothermal vents at the tiniest of scales.
An amazing dance of protons across molecular barriers and membranes that are at the root of metabolism. The mind bogglingly complex proton-capturing electricity-harnessing Krebs cycle — a tiny factory dedicated to building the components of life (amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, nucleotides).
Where chemistry harnessed electrical energy, thus creating biology.}
“It might seem uncanny that whole metabolic pathways can spring into existence in this way, in the absence of genes and information, but this is what recent experiments are telling us.
There is something thermodynamically and kinetically favoured about the innermost chemistry of life.
I find this unsettling, but that’s how it is. …”
¶3
{A quick sketch of chemistry self-organizing to form protocells. Then animated by the same flux of gases into living matter, with one thing leading to another, eventually creating genes that further streamlined internal chemistry/metabolism and build upon it. …}
From the beginning, the flow of energy and matter through the Krebs cycle was bound to the electrical potential on membranes. Flux is movement. The electrical potential humming away on cell membranes is movement too, dancing charge, electrons and protons, the elementary particles of life.
Moving charge generates electromagnetic fields that permeate our being. And clearly, the flux of metabolism generates electromagnetic fields on cells.
Could feelings somehow be related to this dance of charge, the ephemeral states of cells?
¶4 The idea is pleasing, but I wouldn’t have given it any more thought but for a visit from a scientific seer, Luca Turin, a biophysicist interested in quantum biology
{Lane, unfamiliar with the details of quantum biology, which Lane feared Turin wanted to discuss.}. …
… (Thankfully) Turin had mitochondria on his mind.
I could judge what Turin had to say about mitochondria, and it was thrilling..
{Lane spends some time introducing Luca Turin, a maverick who had been working on the sense of smell and finding evidence that it was not simply molecular locks and keys, but also involved the specific spin of said molecules.}
.… Turin’s papers convey this clarity, coupled with wry amusement. ‘Almost the only thing we know for sure about consciousness is that it is, so to speak, soluble in ether, chloroform and a variety of other solvents.’
{Lane points out anesthetics has the same effect on simple animals down to single-celled paramecium.
This has Turin concluding that consciousness is something fundamental starting down at the level of cells.
Then the gas xenon is introduced, molecularly it is a perfectly packed sphere of electron density, meaning it has no shape. One of the inert gases. While it has no chemistry, it does have physics, vibrations that are capable of facilitating electron transfer between conductors. Back to flux.
From there we learn anaesthetics do accumulate in membranes, and “the strength of anaesthesia depends on their concentration - more than their structure.”
Anaesthetics also accumulates in the mitochondrial membranes too. Here Turin has recorded radio wave signals associated with the electron transfer in respiration. …}
¶6 Even more intriguingly, Turin has detected a radiowave signal associated with electron transfer in respiration. …
Don’t worry about the details here. The point is that these radiowave signals increase when brain areas are active, and are suppressed by anesthesia, again implying an effect on respiration. …
Even Turin admits that brains emitting radio waves sounds like the stuff of science fiction.
But it seems they do.
{Cc, in reading up on Luca Turin I’ve seen his work has received respectful pushback on his “quantum theory of smell”. Though it seems of the, ‘this needs more research. Something is there, but there’s much more to learn.’
I bring it up because controversy over this aspect of Turin’s research does not imply controversy concerning Mitochondria’s newly discovered bioelectrical activity.
Quantum explanation for how we smell gets new support
by Lisa Zyga, Phys.org, MARCH 28, 2011
Smells, Spanners, and Switches
Secret of scent lies in molecular vibrations
Luca Turin - January 28, 2013
The most recent video I could find:
Dr. Luca Turin detects quantum clues to consciousness
Rational View - Nov, 6, 2024 - YouTube
I bring it up because I don’t want the “smell” issue to overshare the significance of new Mitochondria insights.
https://mitoworld.org/spotlight/craig-thompson-a-new-kind-of-mitochondria/
(04:33):
And so we asked the question, why does a cell burn everything to CO2 and water?
If it’s under stress, how does it reserve some of the building blocks to actually synthesize things?
We discovered the most important amino acid for building structural integrity during wound repair, the amino acid proline, which is special for building the connective tissue that provides bone or cartilage, tendons, as well as what’s called the extracellular matrix.
We discovered that proline was uniquely dependent on the mitochondria for synthesis.
¶7 Let’s get back to xenon. All this suggests that xenon concentrates in the hydrophobic pockets of proteins sitting within the mitochondrial membranes, and fits respiratory electrons straight to oxygen. …
What next? Instead of electron transfer to oxygen being coupled to proton pumping and ATP synthesis, some proportion must hop on a xenon bridge straight to oxygen. That oxygen is presumably still bound to cytochrome oxidase at the end of the respiratory chain in the normal way, so the electrons are not escaping as free radicals.
Even so, short-circuiting the respiratory chain must affect the electrical membrane potential, which should be measurable (though these are not easy measurements to make). So … could it be that a change in mitochondrial membrane potential affects our conscious state?
¶8 I mentioned electromagnetic fields. We have long known that the brain generates electrical fields, which we measure in the EEG. …
Plainly the EEG is produced by changes in electrical voltage, and these changes are big enough to incriminate large networks of neurons firing in synchrony (rather than individual cells).
But these neural networks … are still composed of individual neurons, which behave in similar ways. The question is, at the cellular level, which electrical charges are involved?
The glib assumption is that charges on the cell membrane (or action potentials) are responsible.
But if Turin is right, then a big part of the answer might be mitochondrial membrane potentials.
Not only is electron transfer to oxygen implicated in consciousness, but the mitochondrial membrane potential is twice that of neural cell membranes, and the convoluted folds of the mitochondrial inner membrane (the cristae) offer a much larger total surface area of charged membrane.
¶9 Moving charge necessarily generates an electromagnetic field, and the mitochondria clearly do so – not only with the transfer of electrons to oxygen but even more dramatically in the circuit of protons across the membrane, looping from the respiratory complexes to the ATP synthase and back round. … Doug Wallace …
… there’s evidence that electrical fields can and do play a direct role in brain function.
…
If so, the key point is that the electrical fields generated by neurons do have motive force. They are not too weak to change things physically, as long assumed.
{From here Lane gets into more detail about what’s known and unknown about the source of EEG emanations.}
¶10 This kind of statement might have pushed the boundaries of respectable science until recently, but the extraordinary work of the developmental biologist Michael Levin and others shows that electric fields can control the development of small animals such as the flat worms known as planarians.
I suspect that twenty-first-century biology will be the biology of fields.
So, let’s take it to be possible that the electrical fields generated by mitochondria do have motive force.
What can that tell us about consciousness? …
Well for a start, it might tell us why the brain is so hooked on glucose as a fuel. …
{Thereafter, another dive into metabolism, calcium flux, pyruvate dehydrogenase, Kreps cycle flux, ATP synthesis - this is stuff that powers work, constructing and transforming molecules. Resulting in varying electrical field that create a “unifying force to bind the disperate flowing molecules of a cell together to make a self with moods and feelings.”}
Plainly that powers work, but it also gives scope to the full dynamic range of mitochondrial membrane potential. To the full range of electrical fields. To the full music of the orchestra.
Until now, biology has tended to study the materials that make up the instruments.
The time has come to close our eyes and listen to the music.
I want to suggest to you that this music is the stuff of feeling, of emotion.
¶11 Let’s put aside multicellular organisms with their nervous systems and think about protists such as paramecium, which also generate electrical fields on their mitochondrial membranes.
{Here Professor Lane shares from his experience at the lab bench, spending hours peering through his microscope at single celled paramecium, who were mirroring the same range of “marvelous and sophisticated” goal oriented behaviors expected from a much more complicated creatures.
Then he brings it back to Mitochondria, oxygen uptake, producing electrical fields, … }
What unifies the whole? What coordinates it as a ‘self’?
Once you think about electrical fields, it is hard to imagine anything else.
But then we are faced with another problem. …
Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self? …
{To learn more you’ll want to read Nick Lane’s The Vital Question}
{Interestingly, mitochondrial membrane’s electrical potential is the same as the plasma membrane of bacteria. This relates to the primal origin of Eukaryotic cells when they engulfed a foreign germ without digesting it.
Instead, a mutual arrangement was evolved, cell provided a home and resources while the mitochondria focuses on becoming a factor to produce fuel and, it turns out, much more
Lane asks, “Why would electrical fields in mitochondria, generated by flux through the Krebs cycle, equate to the strivings of the self?”
{Which circles right back around to ramification from mitochondria electrical fields and potentials influencing the entire cell, and beyond, to neighboring cells.}
¶12
{Tells us more mitochondria details covered in detail in Lane’s book “The Vital Question”, including the importance of the membrane separating inside from outside.}
¶13 “Let me give you an example of how important this membrane potential is to bacteria. …”
{ p.216 - I won’t be a spoiler on this story. Too interesting and well told to summarize.
Main character ocean bacteria under attack by bacteriophages, evolved strategies for group survival. For more, there’s The Vital Question}
¶14 I have long wondered if that collapsing membrane potential ‘feels’ like something to a bacterium.
More than anything else, the humming electrical potential on the membrane betokens the living force.
And if it feels like something for a bacterium to die, its living force sucked away, …
… “All operate through much the same mechanisms, collapsing electrical membrane potential to induce death. Presumably, there must also be some ‘pre-death’ state, where the living processes are tenuous.
Beyond that, membrane potential is needed for far more than the basics of ATP synthesis and CO2 fixation. It powers the bacterial flagellum, allowing cells to move around and seek better conditions, as well as pumping all manner of things in and out of cells, maintaining their homeostasis.
Most strikingly, bacteria need their membrane potential to find their own midpoint, to divide in two and generate offspring.
Nothing in biology is more sacred than reproduction, and the simplest form of reproduction does not happen without an electrical charge on the membrane.
All these states of living and dying are linked with electromagnetic fields.
Do they all feel different?
How could they not?
Metabolism and electromagnetic fields on the membranes bounding cells are intimately entwined and intrinsically meaningful.
These are the living states of cells, the stream of consciousness in its most elementary form.”
¶15 {Professor Lane challenges with a mind-experiment.}
“Shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule in the Krebs cycle. For instance, Succinate. …”
{This reduction enlarges the cell to the size of a mega city, New York, or Toyko, while the molecule succinate, you, is the size of a person.
Then Nick takes us on a mind boggling, even thrilling, Krebs cycle ride of change, down at the level of cells and complex molecules, finishing with,}
“… Changes in the outside world – in food, electrons, protons, oxygen, heat or light – all are converted through metabolic flux into dancing electromagnetic fields, shifting the mood, the living states of a bacterium.
You have just been part of something magic, the flow of life through a living cell on this restless planet of ours, the rush of change that forges the oneness of self. You are a moment in a life.”
Student’s Resource, Nick Lane explores the source of consciousness
Hazen, Lane, Sloan-Wilson, Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, Levin, Turin, Reber
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