The philosophical and spiritual views of Barbara McClintock | Hacker News Reader

The philosophical and spiritual views of Barbara McClintock

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If plants are conscious, then it stands to reason to assume every life form is conscious -> a bacterium is conscious -> any cell in our body is conscious. I tried to google "single cell consciousness" and found a few articles that briefly touch on the idea. But then it doesn't take a leap of imagination to conjecture that my own consciousness is in fact the consciousness of a single "special" cell. It might be located in the brain, but not necessarily.

I've never fully understood his thinking, but I think that's basically Daniel Dennett's argument in From Bacteria to Bach and Back [1]. He makes it while somehow simultaneously denying panpsychism and the reality of consciousness itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bacteria_to_Bach_and_Back

If you find this fascinating then [1] Panpsychis may be a fun hole for you to go down.

Basically consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

I know, panpsychism is a logical next step, but we are very far away from being able to study the consciousness of the atom. A bacterium could be a simpler target of practical research. There's a lot of "intelligence" in the living organisms, which potentially can be utilized and eventually lead to a real AGI.

Today, the science practices double-think: on the one hand it claims that the entire universe is one big wave function that evolves as one and can't be split into parts, but on the other hand it would call you a heretic if you use this wave function reasoning to claim a connection to a plant or, worse, to a rock.

I think that scientifically speaking this is a step too far. It makes sense for a cell to have developed awareness, it doesn’t make sense for a rock to be consciousness fundamentally speaking; or at least doesn’t seem falsifiable ever.

It seems awfully fragile. What happens if that cell dies? Do you turn into a p-zombie? :)

Scientists have been studying brain damage for a long time, and it seems pretty clear that minds are more distributed than that. Oliver Sacks wrote a lot about this sort of thing.

I don't know what happens if that cell dies. The person may die. Or another neuron may take over (e.g. after coma). But under the new management, the person won't be the same as before. This is not something unheard-of. There are precedents. There are some neurons that control muscles. If the neuron dies, the brain loses control over this muscle. There's no regeneration, and no other neuron takes over.

Yea cells probably do know they are a thing but is that really consciousness or should we call it “awareness.” Your own consciousness is likely a combination of this or even what you experience as sentience is the swapping of attention between these different cells that point to trees of thought.

This is at least what I’ve come to believe after meditation.

Suppose my consciousness is localized in a single neuron. This neuron is connected to thousands of other neurons, each of which is connected to... etc, so the "me"-cell indirectly receives inputs from the entire body. The swapping of attention, as well as any other effect you can think of, could conceivably be implemented by a "me"-cell alone, just based on the interplay of inputs.

I'm a fan of the thousand brain theory of consciousness. Something like our consciousness is the experience of a democratic voting process involving all the cells in our body.

Why are you a fan? It seems to be unsubstantiated speculation.

You can be excited about an idea or cause independent of its substantiation. I'd argue that fandom is actually really healthy and needed--sometimes our intuition about a concept, coupled with our excitement (even fanaticism!) is the energy necessary to do what it takes to prove or disprove what is at first wild speculation.

All theories on consciousness are unproven, but some feel right to the individual.

>McClintock was unfazed by academia’s rejection. She simply stopped publishing and waited for science to catch up.

Scientists nowadays are judged mostly by how many papers they publish per year, this would be career suicide nowadays. Or unis will push you into pure-teaching positions to justify your expense, so you don't have time for research any more...

Conciousness and language in animals is a form of abstracted motor action planning*. If it turns out some plants are sentient (or even sapient) their "consciousness" will likely be different enough to deserve a new word.

* see the book Rodolfo R Llinás wrote, "I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self". Llinás was the discoverer of the mechanism by which myelinated axons conduct action potentials among a dozen other fundemental neural processes or neuroscience techniques. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodolfo_Llin%C3%A1s

Language is sure, but consciousness itself is a big [citation needed]. I also don’t think it needs a new word. If trees are aware of themselves and their surrounding then they are consciousness even if they aren’t sentient.

for a deeper dive into this sort of idea i recommend reading "mind in life" by evan thompson

Try missing to water your plants for a week or two and then spend some quiet time around them, as an experiment.

With the intuition I have built up over decades of caring for plants, I can "feel" them crying out for water. But that feeling is more a combination of observation and learned outcomes. A dry plant shows, through its color and appearance, that it is thirsty. The same goes for many plant ailments.

As a side note, I live in a rainforest. Just after a rain when the clouds break, the forest is the "happiest". I am sure part of that feeling is happiness I myself feel at the beauty of glittering raindrops on plants and crepuscular rays in the mist. But, the forest feels happy too. The birds are singing and the animals emerge to play in the sun. Truly an amazing feeling.

> I found that the more I worked with [the chromosomes] the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends.

Sounds remarkably similar to controversial Canadian pyschologist Jordan Peterson talking to Richard Dawkins about how a mushroom trip allowed him to experience DNA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbGoUwmqIEQ&t=2473s

I have said it for many years: At some point there will be people who will only eat synthetic food, because they don’t want to harm plants/fungus etc. - working title is “Syntheanians”

The machinery used to create that food will be just as conscious as the plants we're eating today.

So... rather than eating food made from plants they'd eat food made in a plant?

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