[Fis] "the mother of information"--MINI-BRAINS

Tue Jan 29 22:13:36 CET 2019

Dear Pedro,
I have not previously contributed to this thread, but thought that you 
and your terrific readership might be interested in this article.

Miller Jr, W.B., Torday, J.S. and Baluška, F., 2018. Biological 
evolution as defense of'self'. /Progress in biophysics and molecular 
biology/.

Based within the conclusions defended in that article, there should be 
no surprise about the experimental findings you mention below. Every 
cell has self-referential consciousness, within its basal limits, and 
assesses and deploys information as communication to problem-solve. 
Hence, the researchers are not close to a pre-emergence of 
consciousness, since it exists as the definition of life and they are 
experimenting with living cells. In my opinion, the researchers nicely 
substantiate the arguments within the above paper.  The pre-emergence 
you mention below would then be prior to its instantiation in the living 
cell, which would be somewhere along the trajectory of the molecular 
attachment to information space-time that changes physical data to 
biological information.

Best regards,
Bill

On 1/29/2019 11:28 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
> Dear FIS Colleagues,
>
> An interesting twist on what could be the minimal requirements for 
> consciousness has recently arisen (Nature News, 15 Nov. 2018). 
> Lab-grown mini-brains, or better, brain organoids obtained from stem 
> cells and coaxed to form cortical tissue, show amazing properties of 
> structure, connectivity, and synchronicity of their neural discharges. 
> Up to the point that ethical questions have been raised. The neural 
> types, the genes expressed, and the "EEG records" are surprisingly 
> similar to those seen in real human brains of preterm babies. The 
> organoids themselves have been in culture for 10 months. How close 
> could they be to a primary form or say to a pre-emergence of 
> consciousness? Although grown for medical purposes, if these 
> organoids, or more complex ones, are hooked to organoid forms of 
> sensory organs (eye, hear) what would happen? Would these sensory 
> organoids open real windows to these mini-brains towards the external 
> world? Could they be sort of an instantiation of Putnam's  "brain in a 
> bat"? Too many questions one can formulate...
>
> Best--Pedro
>
>
> El 22/01/2019 a las 13:25, GUEVARA ERRA RAMON MARIANO escribió:
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> I have some comments on the question by Krassimir. In our paper we 
>> talked about consciousness but I think the results can also be 
>> interpreted in a wider sense.
>>
>> Indeed, with open or closed eyes, a person is not more or less 
>> conscious than with closed eyes, also seems to me. There is simply 
>> more sensory input with eyes opened, and presumably more information 
>> processing.
>>
>> So, going back to our paper, we measured the information content in 
>> the brain network, and see that in some states there is more 
>> information content than in others. Now, if you are unconscious, in a 
>> medical sense, say you fainted or you are in coma, the information 
>> content is very low. But also if you switch off part of the sensory 
>> input. In both cases what you measure is information processing.
>> In other words, our measure is good at revealing the amount of 
>> information processing in large scale brain networks. Incidentally, 
>> it serves to contrast conscious and unconscious states as 
>> consciousness is related to information processing. But not only, it 
>> also serves to contrast states with different sensory input, as in 
>> the eyes opened/ eyes closed case, even when both seem to be 
>> conscious states.
>> It would be interesting to see results from an experiment where 
>> subjects have sensory deprivation.
>>
>> Regarding consciousness, I don't know of a method to quantify it 
>> behaviorally. Actually, even the definition is elusive. Without a 
>> behavioral quantification, all we can do is to rely on an empirical, 
>> medical use of the concept and say "this state is more conscious than 
>> that state".
>>
>> I agree with Karl , this question is very important, weather 
>> something is alive or not, and is perhaps related to the question of 
>> begin conscious or not.  They may be examples of "major evolutionary 
>> transitions" (Maynard Smith and Szathmary). In this sense I have a 
>> comment. There seems to be a believe in certain communities that 
>> intelligence and /or consciousness would appear as a result of the 
>> accumulation of processing units, with networks of sufficient 
>> complexity. So, an artificial intelligence could appear if we have a 
>> very complex and large set of artificial neurons (it could even be a 
>> simulation, it doesn't have to be physical). I disagree with this 
>> optimism on historical grounds. There was a similar  wave of optimism 
>> after the Miller - Urey experiment on the origin of life, long time 
>> ago, and look where we are now. As long as I know, a self-replicating 
>> artificial cell cannot be created from inorganic molecules.  I think 
>> this is the case because, of the large amount of possibilities that 
>> gives molecular combinations, chemical reactions, etc, only a few can 
>> be qualified as "alive". And the more the system is complex, the more 
>> there are combinations. Is the selection of the correct combinations 
>> that is difficult. One could say the same about the brain, where in 
>> this case the units are neurons. There is a nice argument in one of 
>> Penrose's books about this. The cerebellum and the cerebral cortex 
>> have the same order of magnitude neurons. However, we don't tend to 
>> believe that the cerebellum is the material basis of consciousness.
>>
>> Best,
>> Ramon
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
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