[Fis] Emotional Sentience & Information

[Pedro C. Marijuán]

Dear Aaron,

Many thanks for your scholarly contribution (excuse the delay, but at 
fis we are not always very punctual in our responses).

The origins of nervous systems attracted my attention for a long time. 
So, your paragraph below strongly resonates to me:
> Inspired by those ideas (and others, including Kant's comments on 
> limitations of David Hume's theories) my own work, begun over half a 
> century ago, has recently taken a new turn leading to a conjecture 
> that the earliest ancestors of animals with brains were single-celled 
> organisms that were ancestors of current synapses, which began to 
> engage in various forms of collaboration, producing increasingly 
> complex organisms in which nervous systems evolved to enable 
> communication and coordination between subsystems, initially linking 
> synapse ancestors, then later providing connections to increasingly 
> remote and increasingly complex body parts, e.g. digestive systems, 
> circulatory systems, breathingn systems, movable limbs or wings, etc.
If I am not wrong, sex is an almost universal characteristic of 
eukaryotes, from the very beginning, including unicellular ones.
Then, for the sexual intercourse a mutual link has to be created where 
species identity, sex type, cycle phase, metabolic status, and other 
trophic determinants closer to the future immune system have to be examined.

This is the ancestral eukaryotic synapse, which will evolve from sex 
background towards mainly the immunological function first, and later 
towards the bioelectricity function in multicellulars (with several 
steps covering motility, sensibility, organ coordination, etc., as you 
mention).

> I now think that those ancient biochemical mechanisms in synapses can 
> provide answers to questions about ancient forms of human intelligence 
> leading to discoveries in geometry and topology, such as Pythagoras' 
> theorem, centuries before Pythagoras was born, using mechanisms that 
> are related to forms of intelligence in other species e.g. 
> nest-building birds, apes, elephants, aquatic mammals, etc. Octopuses 
> are an amazing special case that I don't pretend to understand!

The immune-neural link keeps a close functional interrelation, as Kate 
comments, related to behavioral options and their outcomes; but also in 
a crucial aspect of identity surveillance for the sake of the whole 
organism. This involves playing fascinating formal games, a la Godelian, 
as Sheri Markose has discussed in this list. And also Lou Kauffman. See 
Godelian Self-referential Genomes 
<http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/2022-October/003184.html>: Sheri 
Markose. October 25, 2022, in 
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://fis.sciforum.net/fis-discussion-sessions/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TZV0WHGiHDAU6VynaKc_L1w8YD8Nrq4kdo3TOC0mSQ5jMezo1smigYZ5isrmzZozEu7G4TT5SIkjcS8UKX24i3xnYFUs$   (By the way, The fis 
list has a pretty long history, as you can see there, of more than 25 
years of discussion sessions. It would be great if you could chair one 
of the coming sessions).  I remember that in one of my past messages I 
mentioned to Sheri (or to someone else?) that emotions become the 
guardians of our behavioral integrity, projecting in an extended 
temporal framework the instant now, so that it accommodates to the whole 
fitness maintenance. So i think emotions, and their progressive 
complexification, may respond to formal games too (far beyond 
conventional game theory)...

It could be great if we can throw more explanatory light to social 
emotions, that so many troubles have created in the past and continue to 
create. I think this dovetails with Aaron views:

> I don't think current popular concepts of 'emotion' are rich enough to 
> support these theories.

> I have recently been working on an online document about all this 
> (still work in progress) including references to a huge, varied, and 
> still growing collection of evidence, along with my own new 
> speculations about synapses (still under development) available here: 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/metamorphosis.html__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!STfKJ-tvmFDeSUubIX6C43WsVpLlshOlBrc-ytpa_EUAIW_NYRotcvQvUrVaXd_OtJZ7PNnrJgSZaseQizhhFzg$ 
> It is about much more than metamorphosis, discussing the amazing forms 
> of control that transform a previously crawling insect into a flying 
> animal with entirely new behaviours (e.g. flying to plants and feeding 
> on nectar) inside a cocoon or chrysalis, where the transformations 
> require forms of remote control that I don't think can be explained 
> using any currentlyh available theories, and which may require changes 
> in fundamental physical theories (which I have been discussing with a 
> colleague, an old friend from our student days, awarded a Nobel-prize 
> in theoretical physics). I hope that mades some sense, despite my 87 
> year old downhill-sliding dementia-damaged brain.

Yes, it is great stuff. Some fis colleagues are also working in 
"artificial genomes" and biomorphologies. We could also discuss whether 
the new AI might contribute to adumbrate those "remote control" 
transformations unexplainable currently, as you say. If you can have the 
patience to endure our many tangents and digressions, we can have an 
exciting discussion time!

All the best,

--Pedro




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