Sic et Non self deconstructs

[_Gadianton]

Dr. W,

I read the article and certainly interesting. Noted the distinction between conscious / unconscious vs. sleep / wake. It seems like something like this has to be right.

One part that doesn't resonate with me:

the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions

I can agree that the claustrum or something like it may need to orchestrate the whole thing to make it useful. What I disagree with is calling it a "seamless package".

I cannot fathom how any experience by virtue of meeting the criteria of being an experience can be anything but "seamless".

As an example, I suffered from pretty heavy sleep paralysis back in the day, where the very categories of sensations are all mixed up, but it was still "seamless". If I were like that more often than not, it wouldn't seem abnormal. At worst we could say that being in such states don't offer a competitive advantage and so would unlikely ever be the norm, but I tend to think of experience as seamless by nature, even if the conductor is out to lunch.

[_Arc]

I read the article and certainly interesting. Noted the distinction between conscious / unconscious vs. sleep / wake. It seems like something like this has to be right.

One part that doesn't resonate with me:

the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions

I can agree that the claustrum or something like it may need to orchestrate the whole thing to make it useful. What I disagree with is calling it a "seamless package".

I cannot fathom how any experience by virtue of meeting the criteria of being an experience can be anything but "seamless".

Gadianton, when reading articles in magazines such as Science News about original research, you need to keep in mind that the science writer for the magazine is not the original researcher. The writer might not have a very deep understanding of the subject they are writing about. When writing for the general public, they often decide to use words and phrases that they think are more familiar to their non-scientist audience. Rather than using "seamless", the writer might have better used a term like "fully integrated".

I experienced what to me were terrifying sleep paralysis episodes in my 20's and 30's. It scared the hell out of me. I would finally become fully awake in a cold sweat with a pounding heart. I eventually learned to get myself out of the situation with less trauma by reminding myself that I had been there before and the best way out was to withdraw from the experience, calm down, and wait for the full re-connection of the various regions of the brain that would eventually come to rescue me. I can't recall having a sleep paralysis experience after about age 40. Maybe we grow out of it.

[_Physics Guy]

Brains can’t be separated from their environments, either, though. At least not while preserving consciousness.

According to the paper, the conscious part of the brain can be separated not just from the outside world, but from other parts of the brain not participating in consciousness. By separated, they don't mean physically separated, they mean what constitutes the system that is conscious, and what constitutes the environment. "Dark" parts of the brain are considered environment in their theory even though they are physically connected to the conscious parts.

Sure, but as I said, distinguishing part of a complicated thing as "the system" while treating the rest as "environment", and thereby producing a decently accurate description of the system's behavior, is common throughout physics. You can totally do it with a thunderstorm. So does that make a thunderstorm conscious?

After all, these guys don't just seem to be saying that whatever it is in human brains that is doing consciousness is effectively separate from the rest of the body and brain. They seem to be asserting that anything that separates in this way from anything else counts as consciousness because according to their definition consciousness is nothing but this kind of separation. So are they saying that thunderstorms are conscious? I really can't tell—and I'm not sure they can tell, either.

[_Physics Guy]

If we can take something alive apart by pieces, and reduce it and figure out how it works, and then put it back together but it does not come back alive, would that not indicate a vast and exciting mystery to us?! How you can possibly say its boring when in fact, you are ALIVE to say its boring is astounding to me.

Where did I say it was boring? The microscopic mechanisms of life are amazing and fascinating. We are full of microscopic contraptions.

My point is that if you aren't keeping sharp focus on the fact that it's all just electrical charges pushing and pulling each other around then you're missing the really amazing part. "Self-organization" is a summary of what those electrical forces sometimes do, under certain conditions. It's not something additional that is going on besides electrical charges and forces.

[_DrW]

If we can take something alive apart by pieces, and reduce it and figure out how it works, and then put it back together but it does not come back alive, would that not indicate a vast and exciting mystery to us?! How you can possibly say its boring when in fact, you are ALIVE to say its boring is astounding to me.

In Germany, I worked for a company that designed and built the best mass spectrometers on the planet at the time. A few of these systems were so good, and strategically important*, that the company was forbidden, under the export provisions of the Status of Forces Agreement, from selling them to Eastern Bloc countries or to Red China.

Eventually, the Chinese made it known that they would be willing to pay a handsome premium (read bounty) to obtain one of the restricted machines. Within a year, a work -around was figured out so the Germans could export to China via a sham sale to South Africa with offload, new paperwork and re-export. The deal was done, and our chief engineer took vacation to travel to China, off the books, to install the system and train the Chinese to use it.

Less than a year later, the company chief engineer received a communication from China regarding the machine. Turns out they had carefully taken apart this very expensive machine in an attempt to copy it (as the Russians had done with the US B-29s that made "emergency landings" there near the end of WWII). Despite their best efforts, the Chinese had screwed up. Not only were they unable to copy this machine (no surprise there), they were not even able to reassemble the original to working order. This in spite of it being reassembled, to the best of their ability, according to the manual and with no leftover parts.

This turned out to be a real problem for everyone concerned once the word leaked out, including the company and no doubt one or two German government ministers at the time. Company engineering staff at my level didn't hear much of anything more about the whole fiasco.

So, what was the problem here?

The problem was not that the mass spectrometer had lost some mysterious vital essence that made it run when it was disassembled. The problem was that the Chinese engineers and scientists - the best they had at that time - did not know enough about the technology involved to be able to do what the Germans had done. And as we all know, Germans are good when it comes to high tech, but they are not God.

As far as taking a living cell apart, and then putting it back together again so it is alive; scientists have already done that to some extent. Scientists have removed the original genome from a cell and replaced it with a man made genome, after which the cell line continued to live and divide taking on new characteristics dictated by the artificial DNA.

For an relatively recent review of progress toward artificial living cells see:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222523/
You might be surprised. From the review:

--- [R]ecent progress in the formulation of artificial cells ranging from simple protocells and synthetic cells to cell-mimic particles, suggests that the construction of living life is now not an unrealistic goal.

_______________________________________________

* Mass spectrometers that were stable enough to make highly accurate long term isotope ratio measurements were restricted because of their potential use in nuclear fuel enrichment. The one the Chinese wanted was (at the time) an ultra-high resolution machine that could provide accurate elemental compositions of organic compounds at molecular weights well over 500 daltons.

[_Philo Sofee]

If we can take something alive apart by pieces, and reduce it and figure out how it works, and then put it back together but it does not come back alive, would that not indicate a vast and exciting mystery to us?! How you can possibly say its boring when in fact, you are ALIVE to say its boring is astounding to me.

Where did I say it was boring? The microscopic mechanisms of life are amazing and fascinating. We are full of microscopic contraptions.

My point is that if you aren't keeping sharp focus on the fact that it's all just electrical charges pushing and pulling each other around then you're missing the really amazing part. "Self-organization" is a summary of what those electrical forces sometimes do, under certain conditions. It's not something additional that is going on besides electrical charges and forces.

Oh o.k. I am just pent up because of my wife's chemotherapy, so I was misreading you. I probably shouldn't post much til I pull myself together....

[_DrW]

Oh o.k. I am just pent up because of my wife's chemotherapy, so I was misreading you. I probably shouldn't post much til I pull myself together....

Philo,
Sorry to hear that your wife is undergoing chemo. A spouse suffering from cancer can make things very stressful, especially if there are just the two of you living in the home. My wife has gone through the experience twice. The best thing I could do to help was to listen when she felt like talking about things, understand the situation through study and questions to the physicians, and stay optimistic - no matter what.

Not knowing your wife's situation, I would just comment that medical care for most cancers has improved dramatically over the last two decades. This is definitely a situation in life where science is on your side. My wife is just now ten years cancer free and hopefully your wife's case will have a similar outcome.

Best wishes,
DrW

[Guest]

A physicist (Sean Carroll) and a biologist (Mike Russell) were sitting together on a flight to Denver. The physicist asked the biologist, “What is the purpose of life?”

“Ah, that’s easy”, replied the biologist, “the purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.”

Our physicist (Physics Guy) claims that, in the end, life serves to increase entropy. The biologist Mike Russell wholeheartedly agrees.

From an energy point of view, the net exothermic hydrogenation of carbon dioxide (CO2) to methane (CH4) can’t happen spontaneously at ambient temperatures. At these temperatures, several catalysts are needed to complete a series of reactions, and water must be available. Here is an abbreviated energy and entropy accounting of the process, each step catalyzed by an enzyme:

- The first two reactions in the process (carbon dioxide to formaldehyde via an intermediate) require the input of about 40 units of energy (entropy decreases).

- The next reaction in the process (formaldehyde to methanol) releases about 50 units of energy to the environment (entropy increases).

- The final reaction in the process (methanol to methane) releases more than 60 units of energy to the environment (entropy increases even more).

This final step (CO2 ---> CH4) in the anaerobic decomposition chain of reactions that occur in garden compost piles, for example, requires catalysts that are available in a variety of anaerobic bacteria. These enzymes are synthesized according to the genetic code in the bacteria by a series of well controlled chemical reactions involving RNA and DNA and simple amino acids to make the proteins. Energy is taken up from the environment to organize and run these reactions, thus the organism represents negative entropy (also as described upthread).

However, the overall effect on the environment from the set of reactions converting CO2 to CH4 is to increase entropy by a net of some 90 units of energy as low quality heat.

Production of methane from biomass is ubiquitous in the environment - in rotting leaves, in the stomachs and guts of cattle as they digest the hay they consume and in municipal waste landfills, to name just a few examples.

Methane as natural gas is a valuable, clean burning, fuel. Methane is also more than 25 times as effective as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and a real hazard to the environment when released into the atmosphere.

Hope this story, adapted from one related by Sean Carroll, helps to clarify and quantify the discussion on life and entropy upthread between Physics Guy and me.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/free-energy-and-the-meaning-of-life

Best thing about this story? It provides a quick and valid comeback to the eternal question as to the purpose of life.

[_Philo Sofee]

Yes that does that, but there is a vastly more simple explanation and reason for life. Life has no meaning, it's not about the meaning. It is about experience.

And Ilya Prigogine has shown that chaos leads to self-organization, so its not all about entropy, because organization also occurs along with entropy. It's a two way street, not a one way downhill only. The engine of chaos leads to self organization which gives something for entropy to do...

[_Physics Guy]

Entropy isn’t the bad guy. I think it’s unfortunate that popular discussions of entropy all define it as “disorder”. In a sense it is disorder, but not necessarily in the sense that people think of as disorder. One could also say that entropy is freedom.

Entropy increases whatever happens. It increases in decay and it increases in growth. It increases in death and it increases in birth.