Can we retitle this as there is nothing new here besides long musings
> Which brings us to the most striking idea — that some types of electrical oscillations could mediate an experience of self.
> In 2021, Hanson found that similar electrical activity — spontaneous low-frequency oscillations — is evident across many different organisms, from E. coli to humans. She concluded that across a diverse range of creatures, the oscillations may have a shared function: constructing a single organismal whole from many parts.
That's fascinating stuff which deserves the title (and the long context). 2021 is pretty damn new as far as theories of mind go.
> this is very literally about the first steps in how brains evolved
Well, no; they even highlighted this section:
> “Intelligence, according to some, is a biological function that evolved not with humans or brains but way back in some form to the earliest organisms, a fundamental biological function like respiration.”
It would definitely connect to how brains evolved, but the article and the main idea are a lot broader than that.
> It's akin to theories of abiogenesis like the one involving clay crystals "reproducing"
Well no; unless the clay crystals are producing interesting electrical oscillations.
> it's steep to say this is about minds, which only works if we accept the various parts of the article that urge us to stop being so egotistical and anthropocentric as to expect that a mind should be capable of doing something clever.
It's not clever to live for 2,000 years? And, are only clever people worthy of the label of having a mind? ... Because I know an awful lot of people with no interest in doing anything particularly clever.
And yes, your comment is anthropocentric... Definitively so. Whether something has a "mind" depends on the definition used, and if you define that as "what humans call clever", then yeah you're being anthropocentric.
(I meant very loosely akin, because it's another example of some complex phenomenon emerging from matter.)
It seems to me that a key characteristic of consciousness is it's informational character. It is representational of a cognitive state, it's interpretive, introspective. It seems to me that for any system to be conscious it must at a minimum be generating and interpreting representational structures. I'm sure that's nowhere even close to being a sufficient criterion, but I don't see how it can't be a necessary one.
I think that's key to subjectivity, because different systems can have radically different ways to represent and interpret even the same phenomenon they have representations of. The details of the representational structure, and it's network of associations with other representational structures in the system, are intrinsically tied to details of the system processing and interpreting the representation.
Hanson, Alison. "Spontaneous electrical low-frequency oscillations: a possible role in Hydra and all living systems." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376.1820 (2021): 20190763.
Discussion of some of it here with M. Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZPhqwrSC24
If it’s not:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676...
If everything is pulsing with electricity and they are syncing to something global …
From the paper:
Examples of biological systems that have been modeled using PCOs include cardiac pacemakers [2], crickets that chirp in unison [3], and rhythmic flashing of fireflies [4]
I'd say you probably don't know enough to say that with such certainty, and should probably avoid jumping to conclusions lest you be Dunning-Krugered.
I would then encourage you to ask ChatGPT something like: "How are SELFOS (Spontaneous electrical low-frequency oscillations) different to PCOs (pulse-coupled oscillators)".
Tl;dr - SELFOs and PCOs aren't the same.
I'll absolutely take that.