Brain complexity: whole brain vision mechanisms (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 08, 2015, 13:41 (3086 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I don't think anyone would claim that the brain is objectively reliable, since different people so often see the same thing differently.-DAVID: Eye witness memory is often at odds because the events are sudden, startling and even confusing.-I used “see” in a much wider sense. Our brains (using senses and intellect) are highly selective, and how we select is influenced by many different factors. We may read the same book, look at the same landscape, consider the same evidence, but we may never agree on what we have perceived!
 
dhw: I would take Goris's statement one step further and suggest that we will probably never understand how thought can emerge from materials. If you agree, perhaps you will stop asking me how cells might be able to ‘think'!-DAVID: Networks of plastic neurons make human thought. I'll always question your fondest wish that ordinary somatic cells can ponder their future.-As above, your subjective mind selects and in this case distorts. “Ponder their future” conjures up a human-type intelligence which I'm sure even Margulis, McClintock, Shapiro & Co would find way over the top. The concept involves absorbing information from the environment, processing it, and figuring out how it might be exploited. The environment would be present, and the processing, communication and cooperation between cell communities would be geared to the present, as they would be in your own hypothesis. The latter entails a computer programme, passed down from protocell to Freddy Fish a couple of thousand million years later, which suddenly switches itself on and transforms a fin to a leg, together with all the other necessary fish-out-of-water adjustments.
 
Why are you now specifying “ordinary somatic cells”? Are you saying that maybe germ cells do have an intelligence of their own? Once a cell community is formed, I am suggesting that, just as with an ant colony, there is some kind of mind directing operations. That does not mean that every cell/ant in the community is a ponderer of the future. Most will perform the tasks they are instructed to perform. In your “wiggles” post you wrote: “As with everything I've presented, these molecules seem to know what they are doing. I think they are controlled by onboard instructions. I fully expect more research will show that.” We are in agreement, except that in my hypothesis the “onboard instructions” were not issued 3.8 billion years ago in a computer programme or by a constantly dabbling God (what research will be able to show that, eh?) but by the equivalent of an autonomous “brain” within the cell community itself. (See also under “multicellularity”.)