Viral consciousness

A thought that occurred to me a month ago while xarking influenza: The epidemiologists I read and interviewed seemed to endow viruses with something approaching a group intelligence. When the local infectious disease consultant told me that "this (H5N1) virus is up to something,"  he said it in the way that a computer security consultant might describe a group of clever hackers probing his company's security system.

A couple weeks ago I called him back to chat, and I during the conversation I broached the subject. Was I just projecting my own thoughts onto the material, or do people in his line of work secretly think that viruses represent a form of intelligence?

He was quiet for a moment, then answered my question with his own. "They sure do act that way, don't they?"

For instance, here's a fun fact about viruses that the average college-educated layman probably doesn't know: A virus with a learned resistance to an immune system defense will communicate that resistance to other viruses, even viruses of other types.

Consider the implications of that statement. The evolutionary paradigm you learned in high school, the idea that germs learn resistance solely via natural selection over generations of reproduction and random mutation, just got chucked in the landfill. Instead, we now must integrate the idea that these tiny germs, 1,000 times smaller than a bacterium, are sharing information with unrelated viruses and changing their own genetic structures based on what they've learned.

So when you look at the  10-year  history of H5N1 , you begin to see why public health officials  treat this disease like some phantom  malevolence, probing and testing, looking for weakness, trying new antigen combinations.

It's as if H5N1 understands that it's on the brink of a breakthrough, and it's simply a matter of time before it cracks the password for high communicability and makes the leap to global pandemic.

While the idea of a virus displaying signs of consciousness may seem silly on its face, it makes sense in light of alternative theories. For instance, thanks to our materialistic bias, we assume that the energetic fields that surround organisms are generated by the organisms. The alternate view suggests that it's the field that generates the biological entity (or, more accurately, that the field and the physical entity are inseparable).

At the cellular level, we know that our cells respond instantly to certain types of stimuli. Back before we could measure such things accurately, we assumed that "instantly" meant "at the speed that a nerve message could be transmitted."

Only it turns out that in this case, instantly means instantly -- faster than the signal itself. It's as if the field that surrounds the organism becomes aware of the proper response and communicates it, simultaneously, to all its cells.  The message isn't like wind moving across a wheat field: it's as if the wheat field suddenly starts doing a syncronized swimming routine.

If that's true, then we've just  taken consciousness out of the physical brain and moved it  into the field.

And if a field can be conscious, then in theory a virus could have some kind of group consciousness that encompasses the experience of all its individual, physical generators. Consciousness -- awareness of self as separate from Other -- is the fundamental component of what we consider to be intelligence.

There's no hard evidence for this idea in science, so it isn't science. But at one level, it hardly matters. If it helps public health officials predict what a virus is going to do next, the consciousness model has utility. These days, I'll take utility anyplace I can find it.

Comments

[DeweyS]

Ahhh, more excellent Dewey-bait.

I'll chime in with two points:

1) "Evolution" is a process by which alternative strategies are attempted and the best one selected. This does not require death of the carrier. See wikipedia: meme. In fact, you could make an argument that evolution which does *not* require carrier death is "better" (meaning more resource efficient).

I've even written computer programs that use an evolutionary strategy and arguably "learn". Learning requires that the current state of the "something" (organism, program, virus, ...) somehow depends on past experience. I believe that consciousness usually is defined in terms of awareness, which is not necessary for learning.

2) As for the "energy field" not being science because there's no hard evidence...review some history of science for things which were "impossible" due to lack of evidence or presences of contrary evidence.

Science, ultimately, is a process, not a body of knowledge. The process is ultimately very simple: theorize, experiment, repeat.

So, here's what I see right now: we have reason to believe that viruses can learn (e.g. maintain history). If this is outside of our current understanding of viruses then I believe the conclusion of "there's something going on" is scientifically defensible :)

[Janet]

The fact that viruses can learn make them somewhat superior to some other life forms I know ...