Arthur Reber:
A Novel Theory of the Origin of Mind: Conversations With a Caterpillar and a Bacterium
A Novel Theory of the Origin of Mind: Conversations With a Caterpillar and a Bacterium
In a soon-to-be published book I put forward a radical theory on the origins of mind, dubbed the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC). It begins with a simple assumption: that sentience is old, very old, as old as life itself -- in short, consciousness, phenomenal awareness, is an inherent feature of life. Prokaryotes, the simplest of organisms, have minds -- though they are very tiny and don't do much. There is a surprisingly large literature in the microbiology of unicellular species that supports this position and we'll take a quick look at it. The CBC model also has philosophical implications and resolves a number of vexing problems in the philosophy of mind including the (in)famous Hard Problem, "How do brains make minds."
Reber, Arthur S. (2016) The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness. Animal Sentience 11(1)
Bray, D. (2012). The cell as a thermostat: how much does it know?. In Advances in Systems Biology (pp. 193-198). Springer New York.
Reber, Arthur (2018) Where We Get Serious: The Cellular Basis of Consciousness . (Chapter IV of Reber (2019) A novel theory of the origin of mind: Conversations with a caterpillar and a bacterium. Oxford University Press . For an advance copy of the chapter, email the author at areber@brooklyn.cuny.edu
My question is, I guess, pretty basic but you said that the organisms with minds do : learn, remember, make decisions, communicate. But how do we know that a bacteria communicate? I just can't figure out how we can observe and know that they do communicate?
ReplyDeleteAs noted in my talk, when bacteria form a colony a problem often emerges where nutrients fail to get to the cells at the centre. When this happens they release molecules that signal distress to the bacteria on the periphery -- where all the food is. These cells respond to the signals by slowing their metabolism and reproduction rates allowing nutrients to get into the centre where the "hungry" bacteria are. When their metabolic functions are restored they emit a different molecule that tells the cells on the periphery that "it's okay to start reproducing and eating normally again." This is clear communication using molecular signalling. The same process occurs between colonies of bacteria.
DeleteSounds like biological signalling rather than feeling.
DeleteIn his talk, M. Reber argue that the other mind problem as well as the hard problem are resolved: at the moment you accept that every form of life has a mind, there is no more problems. In the way I understand those problems, attributing mind to different forms of life doesn’t explain the fact that it is impossible to know what it feels like to be, for example, a bacteria. Therefore, the hard problem isn’t solved: we still can’t know how other minds feel.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's not really the Hard Problem. That's "The Other Minds" problem or sometimes the "First Person Perspective" problem and, yes, you're correct we still don't know what it's like to be anyone or thing other than ourselves. My stance on this is simple: we'll never know so stop worrying about it and get on doing good philosophy and serious microbiology.
DeleteI think the other-minds problem (for bacteria) is whether and what bacteria feel and the "hard problem" is how (causally) and why (adaptively) bacteria feel (rather than just function).
DeleteDo we now know whether (or what) bactreria feel? (How?)
Do we know how or why? (How? and Why?)
I find it bizarre that you dismiss panpsychism, as to me it seems like it accomplishes everything you want to accomplish. Instead of an emergentist dilemma, it includes everything. Instead of categorizing arbitrarily, it includes everything. What you have done, on the other hand, is make another categorization, only a broader one which includes more objects. I don´t think you can claim to have resolved anything until you can explain what it was exactly about the moment the first cell came into being that instantaneously differentiated it from everything other thing in the known universe.
ReplyDeleteFirst, panpsychism has huge problems from:
Deletea) A really serious "emergentist's dilemma": "Where did the pan'ish sentience come from in the first place?"
b) The "everywhere problem" or if something is everywhere it might as well be nowhere. It is when there are differences in existence and in causal force that things make sense. Or, as the old line goes, "the fish will be last to discover water."
c) Finally, if everything (including rocks and toasters) are sentient how come they don't show it?
As for that first cell ... here we have a scientific problem, not a philosophical one. It is akin to the "origin of life" problem -- what, precisely, are the conditions that gave rise to the first living organisms (the prokaryotes)? We don't know but there are lot of biochemists working on the problem. When they find out I suspect they also discover that these biochemical factors also produce the primitive forms of consciousness my CBC model predicts.
Panpsychism solves no problems. It is just an ad-hoc posit: "Every 'thing' and every 'part' of every 'thing' and every combination of parts or every thing, feels. Just take my word for it!"
Delete(If that's all I need to do to solve a problem, give me some more: I'll solve them for you!)
No, panpsychism is not only arbitrary, it is incoherent. It produces a mereological explosion. Whatever the problem was, the "solution" is worse.
Positing that "all cells, and all combinations of cells, feel" is not as profligate as that. But does it make sense? And is it true?
I guess another thing to explain would also be:
DeleteIf all cells feel, then does that mean at least some cells of my own body, if detached from it somehow, should be capable of individual suffering?
What are the implications if (first example that comes to mind, but I'm sure you can come up with better ones), I go through some surgical operation and they take out a little part of my brain along with the tumor (just to maximize potential pain, let's say it happens to be some of those cells specialized at "feeling" that Prof Weber hypothesized). Is it agonizing if we incinerate it or drown it in formaldehyde?
I'll have to agree with Stevan on this: if resolving one problem generates new problems, it's indeed problematic.
Interesting point of view and arguments.
ReplyDeleteAt the beginning of your presentation, you establish four assumptions: (1) Sentience accompanies life, (2) Sentience is a requirement for survival and (3) All sensory experience is subjective and is felt.
Later in your talk, you attribute learning, memory, communication and even altruism to bacteria, based on some particular phenomenons. However, I think there is no necessity to appeal to the existence of minds, consciousness, or intentionality to explain some of these phenomenons. For example, we could explain these “altruisc behavior” from the gene perspective, as Dawkins did.
What would you say to those who could argue that your conclusion has been assumed in your premises?
I agree with you that it is not very clear whether we need consciousness or intentionality to “struggle to survive”, especially when using the selfish gene perspective. Dawkins wrote a book following the Selfish Gene called the Extended Phenotype. I haven’t read the book, but talked about it in an epigenetics class, and from what I retained, behaviour might not always be dictated by the individuals themselves, or in other words not be dictated by intentionality. I would need some explanations on that to say otherwise.
DeleteI might be completely wrong too...
DeleteEtienne: First I didn't really "attribute" learning, memory, etc. to bacteria. I simply provided the data that show that these "cognitive" functions are present in unicellular species.
DeleteSecond, your suggestion (with which Simon agrees) that these functions might be handled by basic operations that don't have sentience as a property is a common argument. You and Simon cite genetic processes, others like Dennett have proposed simple mechanical associative operations. As he put it first there is "competence" then later "comprehension" emerges. There are serious difficulties with this approach. The most basic being another version of the Emergentist's Dilemma -- where and why in evolution does this "comprehend" thing show up?
Finally here, Dawkins model doesn't identify the causal factors that lead to altruism. It is a model that points to specific features of kinship that predict when it will appear and how strongly it will be manifested.
Why do cells feel?
DeleteTo Arthur Reber... I'm not sure to understand the problem of the Emergentist's Dilemma. What is the problem that "at some moment in evolutionary history a capacity for subjective representation blinked into ontogenetic reality whereas one cosmic moment before no species possessed it”? It is the same thing for life itself. At some point there was no life and the moment after we got something we call "life" today, following some criterions scientifically established. Could you refer me where I could read about these difficulties the emergentist approach implies?
DeleteTo Stevan Harnad… I’m not sure I can say that cells do feel, and in which sense they “feel” if they do. However, if they can “feel” in the sense that they are not only able to perceive a stimulus and respond appropriately to it but are also able of something more, like having a lived experience of perceiving and responding to this same stimulus, I’m not sure either than we need an additional reason of “why” do they feel. I mean, the same reasons of why a cell is able to perceive and respond to a stimulus could be used to justify why a cell could feel, if this “feeling” is a necessary condition to perceive and respond to a stimulus for any animal being. Furthermore, I don’t see why there should necessary be a “why” to this question if we consider that this “feeling” could also just be an accidental by-product of the evolutionary mechanisms that led animal being to perceive and respond to a stimulus. The only reason I see we could need a “why” to this question is if that “feeling” is not a necessary condition for an animal to perceive and respond to a stimulus, what which I cannot know.
Je pense que les comportements décrits des cellules, des comportements adaptatifs, sont l’équivalent des comportements décrits de la plante. Ils ne sont pas une preuve que les cellules ont le ressenti, mais plutôt des mécanismes de bases qui sont un héritage de l’évolution.
ReplyDeleteAussi, le conférencier suppose que des bactéries ont le ressenti, mais que les plantes ne l’ont pas. Les plantes s’en seraient passées pendant leur évolution parce que c’était métaboliquement demandant (hypothèse). Son point suppose que le ressenti à une fonction causale (qu’il sert à quelque chose). Or, pour le moment, ce n’est pas très clair pourquoi on a le ressenti. Il se pourrait même que le ressenti ne serve à rien. De plus, le conférencier mentionne que le ressenti est essentiel à la survie. Or, mon cerveau me garde en vie pendant mon sommeil. Si j’étais dans un coma à la suite d’un trauma crânien, des fonctions végétatives contrôlées par le cerveau me garderaient aussi en vie sans que je n’en sois conscient. Le ressenti ne semble donc pas essentiel à la survie. D’ailleurs, les plantes sont vivantes et n’ont pas besoin du ressenti (selon son hypothèse).
L’hypothèse semble dure à intégrer.
James: It translated your comment into English -- my French just wasn't good enough for me to feel confident I understood you. Assuming the "machine translation" is a good one, let me try to deal with your comment. First, I'm agnostic on plants but am willing to consider that the points Baluska made.
DeleteSecond, sentience certainly has adaptive value. Being sensitive to the valences of objects a cell encounters is critical to its survival.
Third, the many cells in the human brain that modulate consciousness are still functioning during sleep and, as new research is revealing, even in coma. However, there is a larger issue here: How does a multicellular organism come to have a singular subjective experience rather than a mosaic of many subjective senses from each of its individual cells? I gave what I think is a reasonable conjecture about how this happened (in evolution) -- it is linked with individual cells becoming specialists, some do the sensing, others control metabolism, others locomotion, and some sentience.
Do objects have valences? Or do the effects of objects on cells have valences? With feelings, we usually think of them as being positive, negative or neutral (pleasure, pain, neither). Greg Dudek's learn quite well with just positive and negative feedback from the consequences of what they do. No need to feel anything... Why do cells need to?
DeleteI appreciated the idea of understanding consciousness as a continuum across living beings rather than something that emerged suddenly among only a few species. Even if Mr. Reber was still somewhat skeptical of the claims made by Mr. Baluska in his previous talk when considering plants could be sentient-conscious organisms in their own "plant-specific" ways, he still held on a similar philosophy of "organism-specific" consciousness that can be defined by how the said organism reacts & interacts with its environment and the other members of its "life form". He demonstrated for example that some cells who are part of a colony can sometimes sacrifice themselves to ensure other cells will survive and that this behavior could be interpreted as altruistic and somewhat conscious (in the sense that acting altruistically demands the ability to know/be aware of its own role among a group of similar organisms). I also appreciated when Mr. Reber stated that the questions "how did consciousness/sentience evolve" and "how did life emerge" are linked for I also share this point of view. Looking forward to read his soon to be published book and see how his understanding of minds, sentience & consciousness differs from a traditionally more behaviorist perspective (à la Dennett).
ReplyDeleteThanks Mathilde. First, yes, I think Baluska made some very good points. We spent several hours talking about these issues and realize we agree on most matters. He's slowly convincing me about sentience in plants .... slowly! We likely will collaborate on this and related issues in the next few months. As for Dennett ... Dan and I friends and have been for decades. I do hope he writes a blistering review of the book when it comes out.
Delete; - )
Mathilde, you said you were vegan. I assume that is because the animals you don't eat feel, and you don't want to hurt them. If all living things feel (and you eat anything at all), are you not being a "speciesist"? (I am a vegan too; I don't believe plants feel: is that just cognitive dissonance?)
DeleteThank you Arthur for replying! And thank you Stevan for asking me these questions. I’ll try to formulate a short answer for now as I will be addressing these topics directly in my essay for the summer school. If we want to avoid falling into derailing semantic debates on the meanings of the “speciest” & “vegan” labels, we have to look at the empirical evidence that brought these labels to be created in the first place. On the biological basis that humans and non-human animals (& other non-animal organisms) can only survive by feeding off other living beings (meaning that the necessary nutrients for our survival are only found in live organisms) it would be an ontological fallacy to claim that the “speciest” label refers to any human behaviour involving the use of other living beings for survival. In such context, it could only mean that being a human is inherently “speciest”, all because of innate chemical and biological dispositions that made us evolutionary dependent on other living organisms to survive. If that’s indeed the case, then any other organism who uses other organisms to survive is “speciest” and the concept loses its purpose. Same goes for the “vegan” label. Following that logic, supposing every living organism can feel pain or is sentient/conscious, the only true vegans are the non-existent ones, for anyone could potentially be causing pain at any moment.
DeleteTo grasp the ethical depth of both the “speciest” & “vegan” labels, we have to understand the distinctions between what counts as survival behaviour and what counts as free willed, learned or cultured behaviour. The frontières are not always clear and both biology and philosophy have spent centuries trying to figure out how this apparent nature-nurture duality articulates itself through human evolution. What both sides seem to agree on tho, is that humans have evolved the physiological & cognitive abilities (through specialized motions & languages) to transform their relationships between themselves, their environments and all other life forms, beyond their survival instincts and into self-created behaviours. Now I think we could fairly claim that this diversity & flexibility in human decision making leads humans to ask themselves the utilitarian questions: for what purpose is this decision or this action being made? Who or what does it serve and for what reasons? As we could see throughout the summer school, some would argue that humans instinctively act selfishly or following anthropocentric interests in every situation where they have to make a decision that can affect them and other living beings. I would argue that anthropocentrism is not an innate behaviour but rather a learned belief that can be unlearned through ethical reasoning and, as we also saw during this summer school, through science.
That being said, to answer your questions more specifically, me being a vegan is less about strictly wanting to avoid causing pain to animals and all about acknowledging that the social environment I live in makes it so that using any animals (or insects - ex: bees, or some plants as well, ex: palm oil) is useless to my survival and well being. Using plant-based food and objects on the other hand is still necessary for my survival and unless I wanted to end my life, I’m still dependent on this type of nutrient and resource to exist. Does this make me a speciest or any less of a vegan? That’s still up for debate I guess, or maybe it’s just semantics ;) Please, let me know what you think!
Hi Mathilde thanks for your thought provoking insights,
DeleteRegarding your first comment, I do not see why we should interpret the fact that bacterium can commit sacrifice for their co-specifics as a marker of their capacity to feel – or any behavioral capacity for that matter.
A caterpillar does not need sentience to go on about its business, eating the leaves in my vegetable garden. Nor do my cucumber plants when they expand beyond the confine of my garden and use their vines to pull other plants down on the ground. However, I have no doubt that the first one feels whilst the second can’t, and that it is clear they both use complex cognitive capacities «to do the right thing with the right kinds of things».
Regarding your second comment, there are true vegans: the organisms that use photosynthesis. Yes, some plants can use other organisms for their own well being, but most of them have been doing just fine with the sun’s light and some minerals. Also, we can ''unlearn'' anthropocentrism until wet hit the barrier of our biological imperatives, which are very much innate.
About your relation to veganism, if every living thing feels – thus suffering is not in the equation when we choose what to eat – how do you define which animal products or plants are useless to you? I’m also curious about your juxtaposition of «plant-based food and objects»: it seems like a gateway into panpsychism.
ReplyDeleteTo M. Reber : It was very, very interesting!
I tried to present quickly what you proposed (the type and tokens) to other speakers and get their input on it. I did badly! I don’t think they understood any of it – I’m sorry!
Do you think some species could benefit from that framework by expanding radically what is meant by sentience? Or would it just push the worthiness of welfare on to another concept, like consciousness, intelligence, etc.?
Thanks Elisabeth .. I'm pleased you liked my ideas. But I'm not sure what you point is. Yes, species could (and did) expand sentience -- we've got a lot more going on than a nematode does and that worm has a lot more than a bacterium. Mental life underwent evolution through natural selection just like every other form and function.
DeleteAu début de sa conférence, Arthur Reber nous a dit qu’il croyait que la conscience ne pouvait advenir que dans des organismes vivants, et donc pas dans un robot, par exemple. Ce propos m’a rappelé un article d’Étienne Harnad (Harnad 2000), “Minds, Machines and Turing : The Indistinguishability of Indistinguishables”. Les sciences cognitives cherchent à expliquer le mécanisme causal qui sous-tend la cognition, soit la capacité que nous avons de faire tout ce que nous sommes capables de faire. Pour y arriver, nous devons faire de la rétro-ingénierie, étant donné que le mécanisme en question ne doit pas être “fait” : il est déjà là, et nous devons trouver son fonctionnement. Le Test de Turing (TT), le test d’instiguingabilité, peut nous dicter si le mécanisme “rétro-inginierié”, étant donné le problème des autres esprits, a ou non un esprit. Étienne, dans son article, introduit la hiérarchie des TT pour savoir à quel niveau le test est vraiment décisif.
ReplyDeleteLe t1 est le niveau des jouets qui font une minime partie de ce que nous faisons, le T2 est le niveau de l’indistinguabilité des capacités verbales (par correspondance courriel). Une machine passant ce test ne démontrerait pas qu'elle possède un esprit, nous dit l'auteur, étant donné le contre-argument puissant à un système purement symbolique : l’argument de la chambre chinoise de John Searle. Enfin, le T3 est le niveau robotique, des capacités d’actions (le niveau où la machine n’est plus simplement un jongleur de symboles, mais une machine capable d’interagir avec et dans le monde comme nous le faisons) ; T4 est le niveau où l’on ne distingue même plus l’intérieur du robot, c’est-à-dire où l’on ne distingue plus ses “microfonctions internes” ; et T5 est le niveau où tout est identique à l’être humain, jusqu’au dernier électron.
Harnad introduit le “Grand Tournament of T-Levels” pour tester nos intuitions et savoir quel niveau est décisif. Dans ce tournoi, il y a neuf candidats tous impossibles à distinguer au niveau T3. Trois de ces candidats échouent le T4 et trois autres échouent le T5. Nous avons donc trois T3, trois T4 et trois T5. Les neuf peuvent interagir, discuter, jouer, rire, pleurer avec nous sans qu’on soit capable de les distinguer des êtres humains, et ce pour une vie entière. Tous les neuf candidats ont des cris de douleur lorsqu’on les blesse, sauf que trois d’entre eux ne saignent pas (T3), et trois autres n’ont pas le bon type de sang (T4). Imaginons maintenant que nous connaissons depuis plus de trente ans les neuf candidats, nous avons grandi avec eux, nous avons joué avec eux, nous avons été à la même école, etc. On nous demande alors, à la lumière de cette surprenante révélation, auquel(s) on serait à l’aise d’enlever les droits civils, et pourquoi. Et ici on fait face à l’intuition de Turing : « the overwhelming answer is that none should be deprived of their civil rights; none can be safely assumed to be ‘Zombies’ » (Harnad 2000, p.440-1). Nous sommes portés intuitivement à dire qu’ils possèdent tous un esprit.
Ainsi, Arthur S. Reber, s’il apprenait que son ami d’enfance est un robot T3, serait-il à l’aise de lui donner un coup de pied en nous disant qu’il n’a pas d’esprit? Dirait-il après tout ce temps d’amitié que le robot ne “ressent” rien, qu’il n’est pas conscient? Étant donné le problème des autres esprits, et étant donné que le robot est indistinguable de nous (qu’il est capable de faire tout ce que nous faisons), il serait difficile de dire qu’il ne ressent pas.
Arthur Reber croit pouvoir se débarrasser du problème difficile avec sa théorie CBC. Rappelons que le problème facile est celui de savoir comment et pourquoi nous avons la capacité de faire tout ce que nous sommes capables de faire. Il s’agit du problème que les sciences cognitives tentent de résoudre en trouvant le mécanisme causal qui sous-tend ces capacités. Ensuite, le problème difficile est celui de savoir comment et pourquoi des organismes qui “cognisent”, tels que nous et les animaux, ont le ressenti. Les états mentaux sont caractérisés par ce ressenti, et le problème est de savoir comment et pourquoi ce phénomène survient. Est-ce qu’on peut vraiment dire qu’on peut laisser tomber ce problème? Est-ce que l’on peut réellement dire qu’il est “réglé” (resolve)? Qu’en penserait David Chalmers? A-t-on vraiment réglé la question de savoir comment et pourquoi il y a le ressenti?
ReplyDeleteIl faut dire que je suis très débutante dans le domaine, étant quelque peu hors de mon champs d'étude lorsqu'il en est de questions scientifiques. J'ai trouvé les idées que M. Reber amenaient originales et elles m'ont fait réfléchir. J'ai particulièrement été impressionnée par le comportement des bactéries et ce qu'il a qualifié comme étant de l'altruisme. En effet, certaines bactéries vont se mettre à risque afin de permettre à d'autres de survivre. C'est quand même un bon point qu'il amène.
ReplyDeleteI understand that the CBC’s radical proposal is: Consciousness comes with life, single-celled species are conscient- Even if living as a non-independent part of another body/being? Even if there is many interesting scientific facts offering a basis for the theory, I personnally think that finally, at the end of the "chain", in an holistic view, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Independently of pure philosophy, for the ethical or legal practical purpose, organisms that should be considered as sentient are the living beings taken as a whole, and not each one of the cells or bacterias composing them.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the talk. The first basic assumptions of the CBC model is that sentience accompanies life. But according to of Block (1991), sentience is seen as the most basic feature of consciousness (phenomenal consciousness), i.e. the ability to hear, see, feel pain, etc. Doesn’t this basic assumption lead to a circular argument in trying to resolve the hard problem?
ReplyDelete