Thank you so much John for taking time out to respond and sharing your theory with me. I know I have sort of “lurked” here, and mainly because it is amazing to just take things in that you all so easily express. So I look into what many of you share and grow quietly, I guess (or hope I am growing at least).

Lately I have marveled at how many things you have mentioned that (surprisingly) bring grounded evidence of unusual assumptions I am currently looking into. I see Margulis mentioned, and Bohr, and endosymbiosis, and Penrose, and an open-mindedness to the idea that consciousness is not a rare phenomenon that arises in some magical combination of biological pieces (yay!). I am so happy to see these, and the niche construction makes very good sense, especially the idea of a non-random genesis of an internal hodology that increases the odds of biological extension for the complex. That works even for socially constrained psychological hodologies (Kurt Lewin). What better to affect than what cannot get away? It is the origin of domestication, perhaps, in the structure and functional behavior of a cell. It is like a superstitious favor for an overarching fear of systemic collapse (Skinner’s work on Verbal Behavior helps here, I feel), and in time, the phenomenal struggle becomes mistaken for the physical struggle.

May I ask some beginning questions? How do you frame the idea of cellular protagonism? Do you think of a cell as having a lasting mental agency? I sat in on a cell biology class and what I came away with was really a mathematical lemma. What is the membrane? What is its endoplasm and why does it conceive itself in conflict and in need of adaptation? Which aspect of a prokaryotic or eukaryotic cell do you consider the centroid of its urgency to survive? I noticed you do share that mitochondria are likely parasitical yet partially commensal (almost a saltational evolution, which Margulis speaks of). And one can guess that if mitochondria signal perfuse cell death, they must not share a stake in the survival of the cell (or the diverse complex which we see organismically, since to issue or obey a superior order like that requires detachment from the organic complex). Instead, mitochondria seem to occupy a hierarchical or systemic maintenance role at the expense of their neighbors, and find extension in that (like many parasitical concerns, especially amensal symbionts and social roles such as villeins and tax collectors across history, and capos in Frankl’s search for meaning). 

In set theory, something that puzzles me is “the manifold” (and it is so much like a cellular membrane in a living system). When we see something as a closed set, we must determine what circumscribes it; but whatever circumscribes it must differ from what circumscription yields to our understanding. So, the Order (and its appreciable variability as some coefficient of its uniform invariability) we see as separate from the “conscious” (conatus-like?) energy of the system – we seem to ignore the living aspect of a manifold or a containing membrane for its own sake (this course was at Adelaide, online). Nature does not create (non-living) structure, apparently, and one can as easily see the membrane as the protagonist rather than the unconscious skin of that urgent agency... while an eerie and ardent localizability drive seems to mandate a separation of “anatomy” from “physiology”, or organ membrane from organ contents/function.

Cell biologists explain that the membrane is not here for the endoplasm, its Golgi apparatus, reticulum, or any other systemically viewed sub-object. The idea of a constant membrane or manifold or container or axis of change, then, detracts from the complete idea of the systemic urgency which variability is irreducible to any anatomy, and brings us an estranged dichotomy… made of part-wise perspectives and their enduring agent (meta-perspective) - to explain the belief in an irreducible invariance and inseparability while witnessing continuing variability and separability of expression. Darwin called it "an insensible series..." such that no two observations are quite identical, so we reduce them to a species-like or variety-like similitude to avoid the impinging discomfiture of continuing differences.

Thank you for your time and help John!
--Lonny

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