List,

John send this to me on Friday, but meant to send to list. My post is in blue, his reply in black.

From: JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 4:12 PM
To: Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Qualia

Dear Gregg and TOK folk,

You make an important point that different entities have different ways of being in the world. It is important we don’t loose sight of that or make too many assumptions based on our own narrow frame of reference.

[Thanks]

Let me just make two points. First, there is the epistemological point, which is that it is epistemologically difficult or impossible to determine directly if another entity has internal subjective experiences. This is the famous “zombie” problem.

[My sense of consciousness is in the context of homeostasis as sentience. In that vein it is possible to measure if another entity has internal experiences]

Then there is the ontological/ontic problem of our best guess about what sentience is and where it emerges. Everything I am looking at connects human sentience with the brain. That is, if a person is brain dead, they are not sentient or conscious.

[Sentience in the periphery feeds into the CNS, the specialized organ of holistic sentience. Jesse Roth showed years ago that neurons produce insulin, for expample, so the inverse is also true]

So, one question is, do you agree that human consciousness requires the brain?

[Yes. However the brain is the major resource but it is contingent on input from other tissues and organs which are also sentient in the context of homeostasis. You're being anthropocentric in your definition of consciousness]

Second, we can agree that many biological entities engage in functional processes that exhibit “adaptive intelligence” in that they work to achieve systematic outcomes. For example, my liver does all sort so of things.Is it possible that my liver is conscious? It seems to “know what it is doing” at the biological level. If you think my liver is conscious, then isn’t potentially everything? And how on earth would you know. If it is not, then why would a paramecium be?

[There's evidence that liver cells are synchronized, so there's communication between them. And yes, everything is conscious because I am defining it as a property of homeostasis, which arose as the 'equal and opposite reaction to the Big Bang'. Without homeostasis there would be no matter, only chaotic energy......Again, if consciousness is equivalent to the sentience of homeostasis everything is conscious.

Hope that helps....Best, .john

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 3:54 PM JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Yes

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 3:46 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Yes and I keep having to remind myself that you use the word differently than I do. Do you think that is how the other cell physiologists are defining it?

From: JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 3:32 PM
To: Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Qualia

OK....one more thing. I consider consciousness to be the aggregate of physiology. If that is the case, then it would only stand to reason that different organisms, with different physiologic makeups would have different kinds of consciousness.....j

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 2:54 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I did not mean it like that, John. I was more being playful. I will reply on the list.

G

From: JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 2:26 PM
To: Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Qualia

Seems a bit self-serving to me for you to pull the plug on my perspective, but it's your listserve dude. BTW Baluska, Brian Ford and I are all cell physiologists talking about unicellular consciousness at this meeting, so I'm not the only one who thinks that's valid. With the best of intentions. john

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 1:40 PM JOHN TORDAY <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

June 15, 16....

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 1:27 PM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Back channel.

Just FYI, I am going to pass on responding to this analogy on the list, although I can see the point that your way of thinking is about a foreign as a paramecium 😊😊…

When is your conference on consciousness?

G

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 1:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Qualia

Gregg, this discussion kinda reminds of my ER Doc friend who would tell me that if I were in the ER I'd always be looking for 'zebras' instead of the obvious, i.e. by the time I got around to the diagnosis the patient would have died. In other words even among us people there are differences in sentience/consciousness that are 'adaptive' for each of us- I have made a living out of 'zebras'. So why not think that a paramecium has the sentience of a paramecium, which works for it? j

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:48 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Fascinating article, John. I remain unconvinced that single cells have subjective experience, but I think things are getting clearer.

One of my problems with this might be considered the “deep sleep” problem. When I am in a deep sleep my sentience disappears (it flickers on and off when I dream). Of course, all while I am sleeping enormous functional processes are occurring. I would say, though, that there is nothing that it is like to be me in a deep sleep. Indeed, in a deep sleep or a vegetative coma, we are all the same, right? Thus, when someone claims that there is something that there is like to be a paramecium, I say why? Why wouldn’t it be just functional awareness and response, but no subjective experience of being. And are you really saying that I have billions of sentient beings inside of my stomach? (i.e., all the bacteria in my gut)

Reading it and thinking about these issues, along with a few other discussions, oriented me to map out a bit clearer the relationship between self/consciousness across the dimensions of existence on the ToK and it is attached.

Best,

Gregg

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 8:53 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Qualia

Hi Gregg and TOK, thank you for your kind words and thoughts. The intent of invoking Relativity Theory is to be all-inclusive, but it may be a 'bridge too far'.....gotta have goals.

I think that 'pain' is subjective, and may/not mean 'ouch'.....in a plant it may just be an aversive reaction to something that it finds undesirable. Given that we are mobile whereas plants are not I wouldn't think that 'ouch' would be response, but the net result would be the same-ish. I have attached a recent paper by Frantisek Baluska, a German botonist and Arthur Reber, a clinical psychologist that may/not be of interest. Frantisek is the Keynote Speaker at that Consciousness meeting I am also speaking at fyi.....John

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 7:54 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi TOK,

Cool thoughts, John. On this topic, here are some interesting articles about what plants might “feel” that my brother shared with me:

https://www.peta.org/about-peta/faq/what-about-plants/

https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/botany/plants-feel-pain.htm

For me, I completely agree that this stuff demonstrates plants exhibit aversion and withdrawal behaviors that are the roots of what we call “pain”. I would like to call them “proto-pain-behaviors”. However, I am a skeptic regarding “plant sentience,” although they clearly exhibit functional avoidance and aversion responses. When my son Jon badly broke his arm, the docs put him under and they tried to set it. Andee and I watched as his body writhed and he moaned and he pulled away. Was he “in pain” or did he “feel pain” as it happened? One of my “flashbulb” memories was when, twenty minutes later, he woke up and cried out “I am alive!”. I don’t think he felt pain during that time, at least in any we mean the term (although you might argue yes and he does not remember). Yet he exhibited behavior that was far more indicative of pain than the evidence cited for plant pain. The body (ours and plants) has lots of “functional awareness and response” mechanisms in it…but it is always tricky to sort out what observers see as patterns of behavior and what is (or is not) going on at the first person level of experience.

Best,

Gregg

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 6:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Qualia

Dear Brent and TOK, in putting together a brief talk on Consciousness, I had to reduce my cell biologic approach to the problem due to time constraints. So I decided to start with E=mc2 as the mathematical expression of the Singularity of the Cosmos (I assume we're all good on Einstein). Based on that 'logic', development of the embryo as cell-cell signaling is the conversion of 'mass' (growth factors) into 'energy' (the downstream interaction of the growth factor with its receptor (think 'lock and key'), triggering an intracellular cascade of high energy phosphates that ultimately affect growth and differentiation of the embryo, culminating in homeostatic physiology at birth. The aggregate of those cell-cell interactions is Consciousness, bearing in mind that the origin of the brain is the skin as a graphic. That would explain Qualia as the way in which experiences trigger consciousness, i.e. why seeing 'red' free associates with the physiology of the individual, bearing in mind that those homeostatic signaling cascades reference not only the physiology of the current individual, but their past experiences as a species as evolution too, so the Qualia go way back in the history of the organism. I hope that was helpful.

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