Would this be the beginning of a trend? I have an intuition that reversing the causal relationship between high-level (psychology, mind, behaviors) and low-level (physiology, disease manifestations) matters can significantly advance medicine.
'Higher level' stuff like behavior is the result of our cells communicating, there's no magic 'soul' that act on our biological systems. It generally goes from low->high but there is some feedback that occurs at 'high' and induces changes at 'low'
The reality is a combination and thinking it just goes one way is flawed reasoning. Nothing is unidirectional and nothing is binary
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0057...
Like when doctors see someone's blood ammonia levels go up and they're suddenly less aware of everything going on, less responsive, less able to talk about their thoughts and less coherent. Or patients with hypoglycemia losing their short term memory and eye sight and ability to make coherent sentences. And how we can do EEGs and directly see declines in electrical activity when this happens.
How could you possibly think that the consciousness is independent of matter at that point? It seems utterly ridiculous.
The other, straightforward interpretation is that there may be a third factor that caused both the high ammonia marker and lack of coherence, and naturally that could be patient’s own consciousness and/or its interactions with other consciousnesses (e.g., alcohol abuse).
ignores how systems work together to produce emergent behaviors
Also, I don’t think that it is unreasonable to imagine “consciousness” happening as an emerging feature of sufficient complexity. Remember, we have 3 billion neurons with orders of magnitudes more connections between them.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I am failing to see the same in case of the “consciousness-from-matter” theory.
Note that the article actually suggests the evidence to the contrary. You make a choice to change your lifestyle, boom microbiome.
An organism can detect something, be aware of it, by sensing it. This involves some stimulation and then neuronal transmission, the processing that happens determines if the stimulus reaches conscious awareness as not all stimuli does.
I’m not saying it as a fact, as it is neither refutable no verifiable—but neither is the conventional view.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it at least seems like a step in the right direction where the hypothesis is based on already verified behavior of neurons and their networks
So, but can you disprove that gut bacteria can't impact brain processes? They can deliver signals to the brain, so what is exatly the obstacle that it makes it impossible task?
(Without circular definitions or those involving consciousness, of course.)
If we cannot agree that objective observations can be made and shared from the perspective of a human, then it's obvious that you will just write off everything after that point and this conversation is meaningless. This agreement is generally implicit when discussing the results of research.
The very quick stupid idea was that bacteria from guts was invading brains, but there might be other explanations to that - bacterias are also living outside gut and if some of them somehow are finding a way into the brains, that does not mean that they came directly from guts. Might be - might be not and brains might have other canals that allows bacteria to enter and once they are in brains, they might be able to get control over things and condition brains in favouring specific gut bacteria, by requesting - craving specific food. So, I don't see that this research has nullified those ideas about bacterias affecting brains and helping their species of bacterias without knowing about them. But what this article is proposing is not illogical - not getting into demands of zombified controlled brains hold hostage of bacterias, or actually - developing healthy dietary habbits, by favouring diversity of gut bacterias in first place.