An exercise in Evopoetry.
Reflections of a science enthusiast’s seven decade love affair with learning about Earth; what was going on around me; and how that connected with what was going on within me.
Philosophers ask: why does physical processing feel like anything at all? Joseph Levine called it the Explanatory Gap, and David Chalmers popularized it as the Hard Problem.
I, on the other hand, have spent decades wondering how any complex creature could possibly not have had a sense of “being.” Even if originally only a most flimsy feeling lacking all introspection.
Why do I care? Well, I guess because breeding and family circumstance have had me in love with, and engaged with this planet that created me. One could even say, I’ve been invested in the scientific adventure of discovery since before entering kindergarten in 1959. I caught the last gasp of the age-old wonder that once possessed mankind because I was introduced to the wonder of humanity’s ageless questions, while many of those mysteries still existed. Then early 1980s there was Attenborough’s: Life On Earth, insightful beyond description. So I consider myself a card-carrying enthusiastic, curious, critical-thinking spectator of my world through the scientific lens. I’ve undertaken this exercise in “Evopoetry” to see if I could convey a crystallization of that adventure.
My story started with appreciating Earth’s evolution, not as an intellectual construct, but as real physical happening that produced my ‘me’ and my world, one day at a time.
Thanks to that I’ve long possessed a visceral appreciation that I possess half a billion years worth of evolving generations under my bellybutton. This attitude has fed a conviction that my body knows more than I do, so I learned to pay attention to it. It paid off. It’s why I make a point of identifying as an Earth-centrist. Here’s my story.
It’s my perspective, based on my lived experience plus the scientific understanding I have gained from among the best and brightest minds Humanity has had to offer. That’s why I share many names and sources for the curious; check ’em out, you won’t be disappointed.
We start at the beginning, where there was a rigid consistency as primal hydrogen and helium was joined by gravity, evolved our Periodic Table of Elements via star formation and annihilation. These atoms were entities. This is based on observations that atoms send and receive information; impinge upon and accrete with other entities; possess unique properties according to their composition and arrangement.
Of course, it was all on a quantum, gravitational level. Choice didn’t exist; and awareness had nothing to do with it.
This is not “panpsychism” — nothing is imbued with anything — it simply is what it is. Energetic physical stuff in its own right, taking up a specific reference frame, interacting with others’ reference frames. Nothing more, nothing less.
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. Yet a something! With a unique frame of reference and a substance of its own.
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Then Earth happened. The miracle planet. Time and serendipitous fortunes created conditions that drove complexity like nothing else we know of and we’ve been looking. Dr. Robert Hazen has revealed how even Earth’s minerals went through their own stages of evolution, without which complex life would not have had a chance.
Barely half a billion years into Earth’s existence the (Hans) Krebs cycle started getting hammered into shape, followed by a great deal of evolution that enabled the ‘harnessing’ of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur atoms (CHNOPS) through a bewildering “Citric Acid Cycle” that pulls apart molecules to harvest energy to produce ATP the eukaryote cell’s energy currency and creating a “motive force.” It can even run in reverse to build molecules instead of breaking them down. Basically the birth of metabolic life, the foundation of biology.
The Krebs cycle became central to the development and health of living cells. In short, little things could now make big things do work.
In 1978 Peter Mitchell won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for describing this chemiosmosis, which pioneered the transition from biochemistry to bioenergetics. His work highlighted the importance of membrane chemistry in directing the flow of energy between the cell (a self), and its environment, what to let in, what to keep out, and maintaining the difference between inside and outside.
That is, the first “This, not That” and it foreshadows choice.
Writing off all that, including the continually evolving intricacies of cellular activity, as simply chemotaxis doesn’t stand up to current research. We know there’s much more going on.
An important aside, there has been a fundamental revolution in biological understanding worth highlighting. Around 1990 the commitment to the Human Genome Project (not completed until 2003) drove advances in DNA sequencing and computing power. Together with the amazing microscopy advances of the day, these ushered in what’s been labeled our modern “omics” era of evolutionary-biological research. That is, scientists are now studying entire biological systems and networks as they interact. Like taking checkers and transforming it to not three- but four-dimensional chess. On a circular series of boards with many thousands of squares.
Yet I have been repeatedly told the biology is uninteresting in regards to the Hard Problem. But that misses the point that feeling and awareness are the products of living.
With constant evolution and environmental interaction driving the need to build ever more substantial layers of sensing/communication systems. Biological form was layered upon the ineffable feeling of being. Thus the engagement with the outside world and an inside self, seems as fundamental as it gets, and worth some philosophical contemplation of its own.
A creature’s feelings are born out of its doing. These days biology is revealing that it is all about cognition, all the way down.
Which is also the title of Daniel Dennett & Michael Levin’s tight essay. Here’s a key quote that is worth sharing because of how well it establishes the appropriate frame of reference for the rest of this story:
“… This talk of signaling and information-processing is now clearly demystified thanks to computers — no mysterious psychic powers here! — and this has been correctly seen to license use of such information talk everywhere in biology.
Detectors and signals and feedback loops and decision-making processes are uncontroversial physical building blocks in biology today, just as they are in computers.
But there is a difference that needs to be appreciated, since failure to recognise it is blocking the imagination of theorists.
In a phrase that will need careful unpacking, individual cells are not just building blocks, like the basic parts of a ratchet or pump; they have extra competences that turn them into (unthinking) agents that, thanks to information they have on board, can assist in their own assembly into larger structures, and in other large-scale projects that they needn’t understand. …”
“Cognition all the way down” — Dennett & Levin — October 2020 — essay at Aeon.co
The point being that agent-like molecular machinery is biology; there is no evidentiary reason to treat the “Gap” as special. The insistence on a Gap is an aesthetic emotion-loaded judgement-call based on personal convictions and background.
About that signaling, Dr. Bonnie Bassler at Princeton University has shown “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, nutritional resources and the general environment. They can sense defense agents and calculate — actually it’s more like biochemical threshold-sensing feedback loops — that help the community decide when to engage in attack and other behaviors.
Building on those insights, in 2022, UCLA researchers published “Broadcasting of amplitude- and frequency-modulated c-di-GMP signals facilitates cooperative surface commitment in bacterial lineages.” The paper reports on findings that Pseudomonas aeruginosa signals to its descendants. As opposed to quorum sensing, these signals communicate over generations. Sounds like the beginning of inherited learning.
After a couple billion years of genetic tinkering with the original prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells appeared. These cells took organizational complexity and innovation to a whole new level.
In 1967 Dr. Lynn Margulis (then Sagan) published “On the origin of mitosing cells,” which was confirmed in the ’70s by independent genetic sequencing work of Carl Woese and others.
Dr. Woese went on to rock the biological world in 1977 when he defined the Archaea as a distinct third kingdom of life, through pioneering phylogenetic research with George Fox. The story is told with fascinating details in “The Tangled Tree” by author David Quammen, another must-read for the curious.
While exact outlines are still being unraveled, Margulis established that mitochondria descended from a free-living bacterium that somehow crashed the party of a cell. The dude was so cool that a deal was struck, room & board for services rendered.
So far scientists have established another three similar “endosymbiose” events. One a few hundred million years after mitochondria, cyanobacterium and eukaryotic gave rise to the plastids of plant and algal cells. Barely over a hundred million years ago it happened again with another cyanobacterium captured by the single-celled amoeba Paulinella. Recently it’s been established that there was another such event during that period; “Nitrogen-fixing organelle in a marine alga.”
Today’s semi-autonomous mitochondria, the descendants of those ancient symbionts, have come under renewed scientific scrutiny. In particular, Dr. Martin Picard, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University, suggests that mitochondria, though dependent on the cell, live on their own terms — for example, having their own independent life cycle and communities.
More to our point, Picard’s lab has found that psychological stress raises the amount of mitochondrial DNA floating free in the blood and saliva, where it is thought to set off the immune system’s alarms. Stress also raises GDF15, a protein believed to signal energetic stress to the brain. This information overlaps and joins the firehose of other systems’ status reports racing through the body toward the brain. All of it melds together into sense, being, awareness of mind: a reflection of our brain communicating with systems while doing the best it can to make sense of itself.
In an August 2023 talk; “What Powers The Mind-Body Connection?” Dr. Picard ventures that the evidence suggests: “… biology evolved a sophisticated integration center known as the brain. Evidence suggests that the brain did not evolve to think — it evolved to function.”
At first the brain is about coordinating the increasingly sophisticated dialogue between the body’s cells and systems, receiving and integrating data from all our senses and the rest of the body. For a rough analogy think of an orchestra, with the brain as the conductor, along with musicians and their instruments representing one’s cells, organs, bodily systems and incoming sensory data. In the process, the whole exudes and absorbs a sense of its own Being, simply from being alive.
It matters that our human body is the manifestation of half a billion years worth of generations of continuous refinement, slowly evolving our varied message pathways, from mitochondria, immune cells, gut and heart, not to mention hormonal drives — built out of cells that took billions of years to fully evolve.
A body full of systems signaling and converging on the brain, while the brain is taking a kind of running consensus via interoception, allostasis, integration, and more, doing the best it can to reach a decision and then get on with the next moment. That result is not a calculation, but a feeling manifested.
I find reassurance in the work of Dr. Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who wrote a remarkably insightful book geared to the educated reader. In “The Hidden Spring” Dr. Solms argues that human consciousness was born out of early creatures processing fundamental bodily feelings via signals streaming to the brainstem rather than the cortex.
Getting what we needed started feeling good. That feeling was worth pursuing. Evolution did the rest.
Why wouldn’t awareness of feeling make awareness of self inevitable?
Through the evolutionary lens, it sure seems like the trait selection that made increasing development possible.
After all, complex creatures 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.
Seems to me, science is showing us that existing entities, by virtue of their evolving complexity, built up systems that learned to recognize their own being, their own existence. Not as a thought in a mind, but as a tingle within the whole of the being. Skin in the game — driven, not calculated.
What should we make of all that? For me, it seems reasonable to assume there were untold evolutionary experiments along the entire spectrum of possibilities. But only a very rare few survived, because they had an edge. The right stuff.
What, besides a sense of self, could account for the multigenerational observed drive to thrive witnessed everywhere scientists have looked? Those driving impulses, even if without a destination, within the eukaryotic cells went on to build ever new layers of physical complexity. Building the interwoven layers of biological hardware that would, in partnership within a dynamically changing biosphere, eventually give form to creatures, along with a sense of being, evolving into ever more sophisticated sense of self.
Eventually Earth’s endless geological processing and resource distribution — that is, mineral evolution along with continent-scale mountain erosion that enriched the oceans — provided the resources eukaryotic cells needed to reach their full biological potential.
Over 600 million years ago the first creatures appear in the record; then differentiation; with its branching and weaving cornucopia of complex animals and environments in-step with Earth’s ever-changing conditions. With distinct stages of emergent properties appearing along the way, this in turn led to yet more complex systems over the course of deep time.
Dr. Michael Levin builds upon that understanding with further research, pointing out that:
“Evolution was using bioelectric signaling long before neurons and muscles appeared, to solve the problem of creating and repairing complex bodies.”
(“Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue”)
“I explore a view of life as a diverse set of embodied perspectives — nested agents who interpret each other’s and their own past messages and actions as best as they can (polycomputation). This synthesis suggests unifying symmetries across scales and disciplines, …”
(“Bioelectric networks: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind”)
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 and cells having to interact with consistent precision — of sorts, it gets complicated. The sophistication of which makes the human mind want to run for the cover of religious certainty. But that’s no good. This is the stuff that makes us who we are. We can’t understand ourselves by turning our backs on biology and remaining stranded within our imaginations.
In 2002, Dr. Nick Lane published “Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World,” 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.
Dr. Arthur Reber brings this reality alive with his Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC). His book “The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness” is a must-read.
Likewise, in 2023 Philip Ball, former editor at the scientific journal Nature, published “How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology.” Ball takes us on a deep dive into how gene-centric reductionism has been superseded by a growing appreciation for context and environment. Besides genes, there are complex interwoven interactive networks of subsystems, proteins, cells, tissues, along with body-wide systems, each with a degree of autonomy, yet following a game plan focused on creating a functional living animal — a single self, . . . always anticipating and reacting to circumstances, that is experiencing!
The “magic” happened when we had a bazillion reiterations of entities; sophistication 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 life has been communicating and cooperating since the beginning. There is an evolutionary biological pageant running through from unaware entities, to awareness, to self-awareness, to introspective-self-awareness. That is, from a something to a someone.
It also helps to appreciate this was a deep-time multigenerational, ever so slow progression, with awareness being on a spectrum, and the consciousness threshold itself probably having been reached by various independent origins in different animal groups, each according to type, lifestyle, and environment.
This brings us around to philosophy and David Chalmers’s p-zombie, an imaginary conception, physically identical to us but with no inner life — no feeling. The claim is that, because of its “logical conceivability” thinkers are obliged to take it seriously.
For me, these past eight years wrestling with the cognitive dissonance has turned into this project. I’ve tried to reach out and find some constructive feedback and pushback, via philosophical venues. I won’t belabor the experience. Though I need to at least mention that the experience reminded me more of my sixth- and seventh-grades at Tabor Lutheran Elementary where I was introduced to certainty and dogma.
The experience certainly wasn't anything resembling my early experiences with museums and libraries and enthusiastic smart research librarians and books filled with curiosity, and facts, and ideas, where questions and constructive debate was made relevant and accessible to me. But I digress.
Fortunately, I recently discovered Marcus Abundis’s formidable critique in Intelligence and the Hard Problem of Consciousness — With ‘Dual-Aspect Theory’ Notes.” It focuses on the writing of David Chalmers, specifically his 1996 “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.” Its scholarly precision is inspiring. Anyone who feels uncomfortable with the Hard Problem wants to read Abundis’s paper. (My next goal is to write a detailed review, actually more of an extensive introduction, for other’s who also question the Hard Problem’s imaginative construct and who seek solid scientific grounding.)
Abundis writes in his introduction: “To begin, Chalmers sees consciousness as “a scientific problem that requires philosophical methods of understanding before we can get off the ground”, but arrives at “conclusions that some people may think of as ‘antiscientific’: I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible.”
The problem is, the more we learn about the reality of modern biology, the less conceivable the p-zombie becomes. I know Chalmers concedes that zombies probably are empirically impossible, yet he insists they are “logically conceivable.” I don’t get the rationality being employed. It’s a clever puzzle, a brain teaser, a Gordian knot.
Philosophy's Hard Problem certainly isn’t a new window to understanding — it’s a monument to human cleverness.
I fear p-zombies have distracted us too much from our own and Earth's physical reality. In a time when Humanity really, desperately, needed to start taking our responsibility for Earth’s physical/biological health seriously, for a change. Even though that required some deep, even painful, soul searching about our personal and societal assumptions, desires, expectations, the future and where we were driving ourselves and this Earth to.
Instead philosophers offered humanity imaginary zombies.
Evolution is what created us, so leaving that out of their discussions seems to me a most costly mistake.
Treating human experience as something apart from our biology and Earth’s evolution also leaves our minds estranged from our natural life sustaining miracle planet. But enough of what compels me to complete this project.
Dennett and Levin’s 2020 essay “Cognition all the way down,” provides one excellent response to philosophy’s heralded Hard Problem. While, Dr. Michael Graziano professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton is refreshingly more to the point when he classifies the Hard Problem as a misconception.
Graziano finds more meaning in efforts to understand the source of mind. His Attention Schema Theory (AST) is scientifically grounded and logically has more traction than anything else that’s been offered. Since it appears capable of integrating the best elements of many, if not most, of other well-known theories.
What it boils down to is that: Subjective awareness and consciousness are the brain’s (by necessity) simplified, internal schematic models of its own attention process. Ironically, AST wonderfully explains why we think and claim a Hard Problem exists to begin with.
Professor Picard points out our human brain evolved to make complex fast close-enough accuracy possible. Our brain did not evolve to think, it evolved to function, to successfully operate a complex creature in an unforgiving dynamic reality.
Only later with increasing creature sophistication did the need for a conception like mind arrive.
Try imagining all the internal signaling the body produces every moment, most of it channeled to our brain, how could it decide anything, without having a solid conception of itself? Cue up Dr. Graziano.
Graziano makes the point that our brain has evolved to find mind.
Not simply our own ego reflecting back upon itself, we have also evolved to look for mind in everything. Check out his “Consciousness and the Social Brain” (2013) and “Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience” (2019) for the rest of that story.
In closing there’s a brand new interview, as in posted the day before I wrote these last paragraphs at YouTube “Why Consciousness Needs a Body” with Dr. Antonia Damasio who does a wonderful job of describing the state of consciousness studies, plus handing me the perfect closing quote;
Q: “The hard problem, it seems to be asking; what’s it like to be the wiring?”
Dr. Damasio: “Yeah. And to me that seems like a conceptually problematic question to even ask.” (46:50)
This eloquently underscores my intuitive distrust of the philosopher’s Hard Problem (mind you, I read Nagel’s Bat essay during its media debut, etc. so have had time to stew on these questions that have gotten more than their share of media attention these past decades).
This essay was undertaken for my own edification. It’s consistent with my life long method of learning as adapted around my street-level workingman’s fate (we do the best we can with what we have) — it rings clean to me like nothing I’ve written before.
Cheers, here’s to appreciating the physical reality ~ human mindscape divide.
To be clear, none of the scientists I’ve highlighted claim to have figured it all out and there are differences and disagreements — and a guarantee of future surprising revelations. “Certainty” isn’t what I’m trying to peddle here, this is about simply appreciating the state of the science and trusting in the wisdom of Earth and nature — above our ego-driven human cleverness.
It’s also about appreciating that the answers to how we got from a something to a someone are to be found in a rational study of evolutionary biology with all its glorious intricacies.
As for my motivations besides seeing if I could do it? I’m hoping some students find this essay valuable food for thought along with a who’s-who resource for learning more, thus becoming better prepared to defend science’s materialist legitimacy.
Thank you for your time.
Responses are welcomed.
citizenschallenge at gmail com
Featured:
— Robert Hazen — Hans Krebs — Peter Mitchell — Carl Woese —
— George Fox — Nick Lane —Michael Levin — Bonnie Bassler —
— Lynn Margulis — Martin Picard — Mark Solms — Antonia Damasio —
— Lisa Feldman Barrett — Arthur Reber — Michael Graziano — Marcus Abundis —
David Quammen — Philip Ball — David Attenborough’s “Life on Earth”
Lessons learned along the journey:
Theology is to the glory of god and human domestication.
Philosophy is to the glory of the human intellect.
Science is to glorying in doing the best we can with what we have.
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