Bacteria, blogs, holographic consciousness and The Singularity

On Oct. 8, while attending Dave Winer’s session on New Tools at the ConvergeSouth blog conference, I just had to open my big, fat mouth.

The subject of tools – which I had imagined to be both bold and abstract – had turned into a tedious discussion of what buttons people wanted on their blogging software. I was bored. And so I tried to change the subject to what was on my mind. Namely: bacteria.

Download holographic_consciousness.doc

Because in case you haven’t heard, bacteria talk to each other. Constantly. They speak in chemicals, broadcasting molecular signals that click into receptor slots on other bacteria like tiny little Lego bricks, expressing dormant genes and initiating cascades of biochemical reactions. When there are only a few bacteria in the neighborhood, this communication has little effect, but as their numbers grow and the frequency of the signaling passes a threshold, something profound happens: They change states. The bacteria stop thinking as individuals and begin thinking as a group.

That’s just the beginning. Since the late 1990s, an Israeli physicist named Eshel Ben-Jacob has written a series of revolutionary papers from his studies of this bacterial communication: Among his findings: That the group state of these simple organisms represents a complex, aware entity with the ability to intentionally modify its own genetic code. Ben-Jacob even proposes a term for this amazing ability: cooperative evolution. (I wrote about his work here on Nov. 28, 2005.)

And the more I pondered the culturally transformative power of the blogosphere at ConvergeSouth, the more I began to see analogies to those self-aware bacterial colonies.

So when Dave Winer called on me, I didn’t talk about blogging platforms and intuitive toolbars. I wanted to know about the kinds of tools that might make the blogosphere self-aware, in real time. I wanted to talk about what it would mean to wire the totality of our species into direct, unfiltered communication. Could we, too, achieve a form of cooperative evolution?

There was one other stray thought floating in that mixture: the notion that human consciousness, memory and perception occurs not in a physical location within the brain, but as a 3D holographic projection, the net result of millions of neurological connections and streaming stimuli. 

And it occurred to me: What if? If the blogosphere represents the emerging, self-aware mind of our species, what if the resulting consciousness operated like our own – three-dimensional, projected from billions of nodes, unmediated, unfiltered. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 

For my mad minute of comment, this is what I talked about in the big classroom at North Carolina A&T: The mind of the species. Cooperative evolution. Tools that would let us see and understand, instantly, what other people were thinking and saying about whatever topics concerned us. The room looked at me politely, and then went back to talking about whether bloggers needed easier-to-use tools or greater control over the product. 

Later, out in the hallway, Ed Cone passed me as he hurried someplace else. “Holographic consciousness?” He asked. “Whoa.” And I knew he was right. I’d gone off on another one of my tangents, pulling people away from what they wanted to talk about.

So I might never have thought about any of this again, if it hadn’t been for Bora Zivkovic. It’s an interesting thought, he said. You should write about it. 

Which is one of the wonderful things about the emerging, real-time, holographic consciousness of the human species: Thanks to blogs, I don’t have to monopolize a conversation to talk about a thing that fires my imagination. So here goes:

Step One: Group-Think

One of the problems with microbiology, Ben-Jacob told me in a phone conversation three weeks after ConvergeSouth, is that the development of microscopes capable of perceiving individual bacterium changed the paradigm of study from group behaviors to the actions of individual cells. 

Such reductionism has long reflected the essence of our rational Western tradition. To understand the function of the larger system, understand the function of its smallest component parts. Want to understand the colony? Then study the unicellular creatures that comprise it. 

That’s been the paradigm since the 1950s, and it’s been responsible for all sorts of advances. Nothing wrong there, mind you. 

The problem, according to Ben-Jacob, was that the ability to study individual cells had caused scientists to assume that the natural state of those cells was individual. Yes, each bacterium contains the adaptive ability to exist on its own – but the goal of the individual cell seems to be little more than finding a colony to join. 

Life in a colony is far different than the solitary existence of a ronin bacteria. Alone, they wander in search of two things: suitable conditions and other bacteria of their own kind. In their silent chemical speech, these ronin are constantly shouting into the abyss: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” From an evolutionary biologist’s viewpoint, that fact alone suggests that bacteria grasp that group-living provides a competitive advantage. 

A ronin bacterium exhibits all the behaviors a neo-Darwinist might predict. Its actions seem geared toward maximization of its genetic future. It’s looking out for No. 1, competing for advantages and resources, blindly and savagely fighting to populate the world with the maximum number of copies of itself. 

Colonies, we assumed, were just group aggregations of such cells. But we assumed wrong. 

Instead, close studies of free-floating bacterial colonies, slimes, bio-films and complex microbial communities demonstrate an amazing degree of sophistication. Colonies are composed of cells that arrange themselves into what can only be thought of as architecture. These are not blobs, but intentional structures, designed to maximize flow and nutrient distribution. Individual cells of the same species – in some cases, little more than Xeroxed clones of their neighbors – begin to specialize their functions. The chemical communication I mentioned before – referred to by the uninspiring term “quorum sensing” – seems to be the method by which all this coordination is achieved. 

But here’s the thing that tells you coordination is just the beginning: Scientists have now proven that individual cells in a colony will “autolyse” upon receipt of the proper set of chemical instructions. 

Let’s put that into English. Autolyse is science jargon for what the rest of us call suicide. In other words, if it serves the interest of the colony to build a protective layer of dead cells at a particular spot, then the colony delivers the message to the cells living in that location and lets them do the rest. The colony doesn’t kill them: The individual cells kill themselves. 

This is tricky news if you believe that individuality is the essence of bacterial life. For while an individual bacterium looks out for No. 1, it will – without protest – sacrifice itself for the good of the colony upon receipt of the right code. Where’s the evolutionary sense in that? I’ve thought about it, and I can make a reasonable argument for it, but in the end it’s just an exercise in going around your ass to get to your elbow. I think the more elegant explanation is the obvious one: When bacteria get together, they stop becoming lots of little things and become one big thing. 

Which, if you think about it for just a moment, explains exactly how we got here. 

Like a biofilm, we are composed of billions of individual cells. Exactly why we perceive ourselves to be one thing and pond scum to be an aggregate of many things is an interesting subject, but here’s an easy answer: a distinct outer surface helps. 

So here we are, Mr. and Ms. Eukaryote. We have an epidermis to help us define the “me/not-me” basis of our identity. We have all sorts of specialized cells. We reproduce sexually, rather than by dividing. And if the unit stops functioning, then all the cells within it die. 

Our prokaryotic ancestors are not nearly so sophisticated, yet in their colonies we can see analogs for all the functions that evolution has invented for our use. They communicate by chemicals. So do we, although we also have a central nervous system that transmits electromagnetic signals that are generated by chemical activity. They specialize. So do we. They adapt to changing environmental conditions. We do the same. 

And when a virus penetrates one of our cells and hijacks its reproductive equipment to crank out copies of itself, our immune system confronts this threat by sending the same message that bacteria send to each other when their colony needs a protective layer: Kill Yourself. 

It doesn’t challenge our thinking to say that a specialized cell on the lining of our intestines will kill itself for the good of the organism. But to say that a bacterium will do this for the good of the colony is another thing entirely. For such a sacrifice to fit our thinking, we must imagine that the colony is itself an organism, rather than just a collection of them. We must also imagine that each individual cells is, in some way, aware of this distinction. 

So one could say that our evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life was a set of trade offs. We gave up our ability to survive and reproduce as individual cells in return for the benefits of permanent specialization and the genetic power of sexual reproduction. 

But the question of consciousness lingers uncomfortably. As sentient beings with complex brains, we have long imagined that consciousness is our exclusive preserve – sometimes arguing the case with absurd arrogance. Descartes contended that “lesser” animals couldn’t even feel pain, on account of their lacking the God-given, ergo cognito sum brilliance of homo sapiens.   

But maybe we can take a lesson from Forrest Gump. If “Stupid is as stupid does,” then can the same be said for consciousness? If a bacterial colony acts in a way that benefits the best interest of the group, may we say that these actions are based on its consciousness of its group identity? 

And should we create multiple categories for consciousness? For instance, while I’m conscious of myself writing this essay, and – ergo cognito sum – define myself as my consciousness, the truth of the matter is that my body is simultaneously doing all sorts of intelligent things, and most of them are occurring far beyond my awareness, consent or control. 

In other words, the consciousness that I think of as me appears to reside within a body that is governed in large part by a consciousness that is not me. Is it possible that there are at least two kinds of consciousness that are required for eukaryotic life? 

Whatever the answer to that question, Western human beings are generally secure in the knowledge that at least their thoughts are their own. We are a civilization of proud individuals, of bold, world-changing free agents. 

Except… well, maybe we’re not. 

Is it possible that we’re not so different than from our bacterial ancestors? That, like a ronin e. coli in search of a new gut to populate, our natural state is not the lonely individual but the social group? 

Human beings are social animals. We call true individuals hermits, and we don’t generally like or trust them. Much of our intelligence is devoted to the subtle tasks of living, communicating and functioning within groups. People who cannot perform these tasks with ease are called autistic, or mentally disabled – even though their other cognitive functions may be perfectly healthy. 

Left alone, we tend to wither and die. Our brains don’t develop. You want to see the human analogy of a free-living bacteria, go look at a feral child. It isn’t a pretty picture. 

So let’s just say that bacteria have changed the way I look at myself, not to mention the popular American mythology of the Noble Individual. 

And if you take this new view and project it one step further, into the principles proposed by Ben-Jacob, then the blogosphere serves another function: It’s the beginning of a meta-medium that may well serve our own version of cooperative evolution.

Step Two: Self-awareness

What is the difference between the intelligence that drives my fingers across this keyboard and the intelligence that regulates the digestion of a bowl of cole slaw? To understand the question, we would do well to set aside value-judgments about the answers. 

My self-aware consciousness, the one that thinks big thoughts and controls my voluntary muscles, is an observer-defined consciousness. It resides physically above my jaw, and – as scientists have measured, projects just slightly forward of my eyes. 

The processes of perception may occur somewhere within my brain, but the observer of all this – the governor of my self-aware self – doesn’t reside inside my skull at all. Consciousness, as we perceive it, is an external projection. This observer-consciousness is geared for dealing with the external environment, on a scale of interaction that can be measured in centimeters, meters and kilometers. 

The processes that guard against viral infections, digest my food, regulate the diverse microbial ecology of my healthy gut and pass information around my body at the cellular level does not have a central observer. At least not one that I’m aware of. Whatever it is, it’s a consciousness that appears to be geared to interactions with the environment that occur at the nano scale. 

These two intelligences appear to be related, if not exactly integrated. I’m barely aware of the functioning of the other consciousness that exists in my body, but I’m sometimes quite aware of observing it. 

Because we believe the observer-consciousness is what makes us special, we assign relative values to what we consider the higher and lower functions. Thinking about the nature of life? Higher function, reserved for homo sapiens. Regulating the symbiotic e.coli in my intestines? A lower function. Any old beast could do that. 

And because we’re not conscious of any connection between the two (I can’t concentrate real hard and observe the secretion of enzymes at the cellular level), we have assumed that there is no connection between them. Again, value bias slips in. Deciding to vote for George W. Bush is deemed an act of intelligence. The physiological changes that occur in response to a sudden threat and serve to keep us alive are “just instinct.” 

Instinct, one might say, is our generic term for any intelligence we deem inferior to our own. 

Yet could it be that different scales of perception simply require different forms of consciousness? That a bacteria colony requires a different level of awareness than an individual bacterium? Could we concentrate on interacting with our external environment if we were conscious of every biochemical adjustment going on in our bodies at the cellular level? Seems to me that such a level of awareness would make it awfully difficult to concentrate on something as complex as, say, hitting a running jumper from 17-feet at the buzzer. 

Of course, an intelligent reader may be wondering at this moment, why spend so much time talking about a concept that seems, on its face, to be little more than a pointless philosophical argument? 

And the answer is, because without it, what comes next is going to seem an awful lot like magic.

Step three: Mutation and evolution

Western rationalism had defined animate and inanimate into separate categories long before Charles Darwin came along. You’ve got your life over here, and everything else is just dumb matter. Period. 

What Darwin did was propose a way in which relatively dumb lifeforms could become increasingly complex and – to our way of thinking – increasingly animate. His ideas suggested a materialistic worldview in which everything – from the Holocaust to the Brooklyn Bridge to a Mozart symphony – is nothing more than the inevitable result of chain-reactions that occurred in dumb matter, left to play out according to their own irreducible rules over millions of years.

Consciousness, because it cannot be quantified or described in satisfyingly objective terms, doesn’t fit into this picture at all. And scientists, trying to find ways to study these subjects without resorting to non-scientific ideas like vitalism, weren’t particularly interested in working self-awareness into their research plans. 

If Natural Selection is the engine of Darwinian evolution, then random mutation is its fuel. By feeding enough genetic imperfection into the system, we are told, Nature ensures the randomly generated diversity that makes biological systems so amazingly complex, robust and stable. 

Ben-Jacob suggests something else. Yes, random mutation occurs, he says, but self-regulated genetic changes may be far more important.    

Science shuns such thinking. By what mechanism would a lifeform perceive a need, devise a solution, access its own source code, engineer a response and then physically alter the sequence of its own genetic structure? More to the point, how could anything design something more complex than itself? How could an individual bacteria design a genetic patch to boost its chances of success? 

Ben-Jacob’s answer is that the individual bacteria cannot, but the bacteria colony can. 

Such colonies form what he calls a genomic web, which functions much like a brain. Each cell or connection is simple, but the totality of all the cells and all the connections is exceedingly complex. 

Of course, none of this works without another concept, and here it is: Remember how you learned in school that DNA is the blueprint for building a biological being? Well, it is – but it is also much more. Ben-Jacob contends that the DNA molecule also functions as an information processor. Each alone is simple. But string them together, put them in communication, and now you’ve created a network of processors that is orders of magnitude more complex than any individual genome. 

So it is not the individual that designs the smart mutation, but the colony. The individual implements the change at the molecular level, swapping out genes and building something that has never existed before. 

If you apply this to human beings, then it is through our social networks, through our civilization, that we solve problems and create new answers. But it is up to the individual to implement the changes. 

Now, can those changes be implemented down to the cellular level? Is it possible that processes for which we have no conscious awareness are constantly delivering these messages down to the genetic sequence within our DNA? The dumb-matter materialism to which science has consigned itself would say no. Such things are not possible. 

But then again, such thinking doesn’t even acknowledge consciousness. Because if a thing can’t be measured and controlled, it can’t be considered. That’s science, and I don’t want to change it. I’m just proposing that it needs new tools.

Step four: Quantum reality

The greatest leap in the history of our species will occur when human beings grasp the physics of consciousness. But since this event has yet to happen, we are left to search for clues and patterns. 

Quantum physics offers some of the best glimpses of reality, and here’s how you recognize them: When something seems too weird to be right, that’s reality. That’s what reality looks like when it isn’t mediated by the limited perspective of our human observer-consciousness. 

Consequently, when someone says that physicists have witnessed one particle occupying two separate locations simultaneously, that isn’t bullshit. It isn’t a mistake. It isn’t a glitch that we will someday correct. It’s the cosmos, as it exists without us observing it. 

Because when I said back in Step 2 that observe- consciousness was a projection, that’s exactly what I meant. We project a means of perceiving on the world around us, in “real time,” in three dimensions. We project order on the world, and in doing so we reshape it into ways we can process at biochemical speeds. 

Since we had no other way to perceive the world until we invented high-energy particle smashers, we had no way of spotting the effect of our own perception. These particle experiments give us a chance to see the reality that occurs without the aid of an observer “collapsing the wave function.” And it seems a paradox. 

In fact, everything that quantum physics teaches us seems a paradox. Solid matter is composed of nothing. Linear time should run in all directions. Precise states are replaced by clouds of uncertainty. 

It’s as if nothing makes sense at all… until you start thinking of everything in terms of information. A quark, an electron, time itself. The space between here and there. Just information. And in a cosmos composed of information, consciousness is what matters. If information is the HTML of the universe, then consciousness is the browser. 

And more. Perhaps consciousness is life, the self-organizing counterbalance to entropy that I wrote about in the short stories “Eula Makes Up Her Mind” (“Empire of Dreams and Miracles,” Phobos Books, 2001) and “Abundance” (Xark! 2004). 

And if you can accept that, then it’s no big jump to grasp that we can alter our genetic structure in the same way that it is possible to alter our thinking. Which is not to say that the possibilities are limitless, but that the possibilities are far more fluid than we have imagined.

Step five: The holographic mind and The Singularity

Which brings me back to the lecture hall at ConvergeSouth. 

For if our species has a genomic web, a group mind, then it is on the verge of become self-aware. 

Like bacteria sending out signals, we have always shouted to the abyss: “I am here! I am here!” When we get few or no responses, we just keep on slogging in isolation. But as we receive more replies, we begin sending out more signals. The feedback loop intensifies. The printing press gives way to the World Wide Web. Personal web pages give way to blogs. Computers are replaced by personal communications devices. We are always on, always wired, but there is still a time lag. We still require a mass media to mediate between ourselves and the world. 

Meanwhile, quietly, in ways few people have noticed, our world is changing. Intelligent agents created by techniques from Discovery Informatics prowl our data streams. Every year our ability to search and index our communications grows faster, more powerful. 

Soon we will reach the moment when new tools will provide us with a picture of the blogosphere in real time. And as that picture comes into tighter focus, we will find ourselves in communication with ourselves. The social intelligence skills that we have evolved over millions of years will have been augmented into a new level of consciousness. And if bacterial intelligence offers any clues, it suggests this: Every time you cross a feedback threshold, you change states. 

And if you can accept the idea that evolution is no longer limited to biology and genetics, then it’s easy to see that we’re perched on the edge of a fundamental change in what it means to be human. 

In his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near,” futurist Ray Kurzweil proposes Six Epochs of Evolution. They’re worth noting here: 

Epoch 1: Physics and chemistry. Information is stored in atomic structures.

Epoch 2: Biology. Information is stored in DNA.

Epoch 3: Brains. Information is stored in neural patterns.

Epoch 4: Technology. Information is stored in hardware and software designs.

Epoch 5: The Merger of Technology and Human Intelligence. The methods of biology (including human intelligence) are integrated into the (exponentially expanding) human technology base.

Epoch 6: The Universe Wakes Up. Patterns of matter and energy in the universe become saturated with intelligent processes and knowledge. 

If we would accept the blogosphere on its own terms, then we must zoom out and see it from a distance. And when we do this, it looks like the group mind of humanity. Each of us, a cell, a processor. Every hyperlink and relationship a neural connection. Its intelligence isn’t uniform. It isn’t housed in one place. Its self-awareness is projected, not locational. It is transhuman and non-biological, more a process than an outcome, yet its influence could affect us down to the sequence of our own DNA. 

I’m not entirely comfortable with the thought, and of course it sounds like science fiction. The same can be said of Kurzweil’s concept of The Singularity, where human and non-human intelligence meld, creating a civilization that is entirely “human” but not necessarily biological. 

The key to his thinking, as I understand it, is that exponential increases in our intelligence may compensate for the destabilizing effects of enormous increases in the rates of technological development. How could human society possibly cope with a world in which decades of technological advancement occur in mere days? Kurzweil seems to hope that the resultant increases in our ability to process information will keep his hyper-intelligent civilization from coming unglued.

 I propose a different idea: That if The Singularity is to serve civilization rather than shake it to pieces, it will be the result of an evolutionary, normative blogosphere that will aggregate, shape, inform and mediate the changes that affect our species.

Anyway, that’s what I came up with, Bora.

And finally, in answer to the original question, What kind of tools do you want? here goes: It would be great if somebody would make a blog engine that lets me put captions on photos.

Thanks.
 
Daniel Conover
Charleston, SC

Comments

[coturnix]

What kind of tool do I want? I want a tool that can send this post to every blogger in the world. Instantly. And requires a response. In two weeks. Non-response punishable by public flogging.

I am so glad you have written this. I will definitely (but let me sleep on this first, then re-read it tomorrow, OK?) respond to this on my blog and urge people to come here, read this, comment and think about this.

Thank you.

[Pam]

Like you at the conference, reading yesterday’s post made me think of all sorts of things – some of them microbiological, most of them not. Regarding microbiology, I started thinking about whether or not in reality that we EVER work with a single organism. We don’t. We sometimes think we do – we streak plates and obtain “isolates” (which are really colonies) and we grow them up and examine their biochemistry or genetics. But what we are really examining is a group of very, very similar organisms – I mean, we can’t even come to any kind of agreement with respect to what defines a “species” within the Eubacteria, much less work with “one”. This (of course) made me think of some of the more versatile microorganisms, Pseudomonas and Burkholderia, famed “versaphiles” – in Pseudmonas aeruginosa, for example, they are finding genomic islands that contribute all sorts of competitive and adaptive traits. But regardless of the islands present in any “one” isolate (or colony) – they are all considered strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. As much as I think that microorganisms are definitely social (and intelligent) beings, I also am regularly humbled by what the study of a single microbial colony has shown us. Those genomes…I mean, we just looked at four actinomycetes isolated from a uranium-contaminated site using a collaborator’s functional gene microarray and found only 15 of 25,098 genes examined being similar between the four organisms. Microbial diversity – genetic diversity - is just mind-boggling.

Which just brings me, oddly enough, to the whole Maureen Dowd thing, because I received an email this morning from a colleague who used “quorum” in her message. I read through your earlier discussions, and the Chris Nolan take on the whole thing and again must say, back to diversity, that the comments I’ve heard from everyone has been about as diverse as your everyday microbial biofilm. I can’t help but quote a woman in my research group (yes, I hire women, and try to mentor them as well as the men) in her response to Nolan’s take:

“So, the younger generation of women feels betrayed and misunderstood by old-school feminists? I think the reverse is also true. Maybe they're not working with the same old retrograde men that we are, and therefore don't feel the pressure, and I guess that would be progress. I'm sorry about the perception that successful women have pulled the ladder up behind them, but it wouldn't surprise me...success is still defined in terms of ladder-pulling patriarchy, and most women have had to play by the rules to make it. I just hope we'll get a quorum someday so that progressive ideas can get a hearing! Interesting take on Monica as a feminist owning her sexuality, and being called names by old-school feminists. I didn't know feminism was about sex, I thought it was about self-determination, equality! What's equal about a page blowing an executive? I am really out of touch, I guess.”

For me, Dowd hit on a few things that I recognized, as well as a lot of my female colleagues and friends – a lot of folks (male and female) emailed me the link to her article. I’ve been called draining more times than I’m comfortable with, and a lot of what she said resonated with me (and I’m a woman who has definitely not led Dowd’s “protected” life!). I do worry about the mentoring issue – and have been disappointed in the past by choices that my female students have taken (and some of the males as well), and I have wondered if they look at my life and thought “Do I want THAT?” But I hate that the whole discussion of feminism comes down to Maureen Dowd’s (or even my own) ability to get a date. It’s not all about sex either. For folks that might be interested in broader issues that “old-school” feminism tries (tried?) to address, spend a week with me at work. Or, better yet, first read SCIENCE (19 August 2005, Vol. 309. no. 5738, pp. 1190 – 1191) and then come spend some time with me. The women who wrote the article don’t complain about their dating lives, and don’t mention Monica Lewinsky even once.

Which brings me to an online article I read this morning - Scott Shane’s article in today’s NYT: “Universities Say New Rules Could Hurt U.S. Research”. I’ve already had to give the powers that be a list of foreign nationals in my lab, and a list of equipment – and they plan on cross-listing equipment with sensitive technologies and countries that we don’t allow exportation of that equipment/technology. It’s creepy, and I hate it all. No wonder WP is a possible weapon of choice now – talk about creepy. What are we becoming?

[coturnix]

Before I get to writing my own, just a couple of book recommends...

John Bonner has spent 50 years studying slime mold. Those are single cells for most of the time. Then, when conditions are right, the cells start calling each other and aggregating. Together they form a mushroom-like structure with a head and a stalk. The cells in the head reproduce. The cells in the stalk do not - as good as suicide.

Bonner, being a brilliant person, wrote a number of books on various topics, some technical, some much more easy to read. I think you would love his "Evolution of Complexity" where he extends his insights from slime mold to human communities (that was before Internet, though). You may also enjoy his "Life Cycles" as well as a book he wrote at retirement (titled something like "50 yeasr in biology"). Just search his name and read the reviews.

Stuart Kauffman's "At home in the Universe" is excellent at explaining how many little simple elements, when interacting together, build a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts. His last chapter applies to economics, in an interesting way (I used to hate that chapter and vehemently disagree, but I have come around).

Finally, to learn about selection at the level of the group, the place to go is "Unto Others" by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson. The first half explains how group selectin works and gives examples from lab and fieled. The second half applies the model to the question of the evolution of human altruism. Wilson followed this up with another book, "Darwin's Cathedrals", applying group-selection thinking to the problem of evolution and adaptive function of religion. You'd love it, I think...

[Anna Haynes]

> ... public flogging ...

oh no, not another one...

Since there are no unrelated topics -

Another life form your blogoslime mold reminds me of is corporations - you take all these well meaning neurons and support cells, and, via morphogens known as "paycheck", "profit" and "externalities", organize them into a creature with sociopathic characteristics.
(other creatures like "communist state" may be more hideous, but still...)

I'm not convinced though, I still see blogosphere as ecosystem not as life form - seems to me, a life form presupposes the existence of other life forms, to compete with - otherwise what causes the selection pressure for within-'self' cooperation?

(I don't believe in Gaia either)
(disclaimer: may have missed relevant points in your post, fingers and toes are freezing which isn't conducive to concentration)

> ... group-selection thinking to the problem of evolution and adaptive function of religion ...

which fits in rather well with Fred Clark's recent post on so-called-Christians' attempts to narrow the focus of who they're required to care for; excerpt:
"'whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
For those who claim to be followers of Jesus, this passage ...doesn't provide a great deal of wiggle room. So, naturally, it tends to provoke a great deal of wiggling.
Many American evangelicals lunge for a technical, lawyerly reading ..."

Also, a different (and I hope transitory) metaview of life from Lisa Williams - "Is life a game that you can win, or is it like Space Invaders, where they just keep coming at you until you die?"

[Anna Haynes]

re religion part above - the connection was to be that the tendency they're displaying is to want to limit the "love your neighbor" neighbors to "people like us", "of our tribe", "of our religion" - which of course aids the spread thereof, especially if it gives you license to neglect/exterminate the heathens.

[Anna Haynes]

The hive mind at work -
on Morph (Nov 22), here's Guy with new Cell Phone as neuron ("As the individuals of our species plug into the neuro-network of instant communication and their random firings evolve into relevant communication, what will our species then become?")

[coturnix]

Trackback

[Sol Cohen]

The parts of your blog that I am referring to are in quotations.

“That’s just the beginning. Since the late 1990s, an Israeli physicist named Eshel Ben-Jacob has written a series of revolutionary papers from his studies of this bacterial communication: Among his findings: That the group state of these simple organisms represents a complex, aware entity with the ability to intentionally modify its own genetic code. Ben-Jacob even proposes a term for this amazing ability: cooperative evolution.”

YES! I also add that the colonies can form themselves into imagery that indicates that they are trying to communicate with us!! I have many photographs that may indicate that this is true.

“There was one other stray thought floating in that mixture: the notion that human consciousness, memory and perception occurs not in a physical location within the brain, but as a 3D holographic projection, the net result of millions of neurological connections and streaming stimuli”.

AGAIN YES! We do not know how but the cells can communicate with other cells all over the world and that including us humans. They speak to us very softly and we tend to think that it is “our idea’ where it is the cells that are trying to guide. This is the basis for the synchronicities (coincidences) that we all experience.

For my mad minute of comment, this is what I talked about in the big classroom at North Carolina A&T: The mind of the species. Cooperative evolution. “Tools that would let us see and understand, instantly, what other people were thinking and saying”.

Join the exclusive club of those of us who believe that you are on the right track as the tools are built in to us all. The cells try to help us but we do not know how to listen....usually....but then there are those who listen. Perhaps most of us only hear a part of the message from the cells what have their own way of gathering information.

Cleave Derrick a polograph expert wrote the book “Primary Perception” in 2004 about biocommunications that occures with plants, living foods, and human cells. He attached a volt meter to a plant and the polograpgh machne showed reactions when a threating thought occurred. The polograph would also registered reactions when a person who had bonded with the plant had an emotonal event. The plant would have the same reactions when the bonded person was hyundreds of miles from the plant. The plants reaction showed on the polograph machine and it was at the same time as when the emotional event happened. It would seem that the cells in plants are doing that you referred to when you wrote: “ let us see and understand, instantly, what other people were thinking and saying about”

“ In their silent chemical speech, these ronin are constantly shouting into the abyss: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” From an evolutionary biologist’s viewpoint, that fact alone suggests that bacteria grasp that group-living provides a competitive advantage.”

HELLO! HELLO! from cells in a cheese sandwich.... The sale of a cheese sandwich on eBay made the headlines when it was sold for over twenty thousand dollars. I accidentally discovered that one can see the cells in a photograph using a combination of Photoshop filters. The image in the cheese sandwich was formed by cells. Was it an image of the Virgin Mary? I do not know, but if a large group of humans were praying and a colony of cells could read their minds....they just might have formed a female face in the protein to communicate. Her hair style was modern, but what do cells know about fashion?

“Colonies are composed of cells that arrange themselves into what can only be thought of as architecture. These are not blobs, but intentional structures, designed to maximize flow and nutrient distribution.”

YES AGAIN! But distribution may not be the motivation. The architecture you refer to I believe is the ability of the cells to form images and symbols as a way to communicate. I have been taking photographs of cell colonies for over twenty years, The imagery that they are capable of forming seems to be impossible. The cells are communicating but do they can not create works of art, they require pattern recognition. One example is when a colony of cells formed an image that looked furry, has a rounded head two eyes, and a small tail it was similar to a cat. When it was sprayed with water an open mouth with a tongue was formed and it looked as if it was licking its nose.

I have a photograph of my cat licking his nose and it was a chance happening. My old digital camera required 10 seconds to recycle and another second after pressing the button to take the photo. The flicking of his tongue takes a fraction of a second.

You write of what the colonies of cells and humans cells have in common. After a few years of technology we have learned how to communicate with an international internet. The Eukaryote cells have had over two billion years of evolution and some believe that they have developed their own universal means of communicating. As you know all plant and animal life was formed from one proeukaryote cell. It seems possible that we all have developed the same need of communicating with each other.

There is much more that I could add, but I will stop now and wait to see if there is any interest in this my first blog.

Sol
My business email [email protected]

[Sol Cohen]

This is a very well written commentary and hypothisis of cell intellegence.....but for the most scientific information about cell intelligence try reading this information: http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/g-buehler/cellint0.htm
CELL INTELLIGENCE by:
Guenter Albrecht-Buehler, Ph.D.
Fellow, European Academy of Sciences, Brussels
Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Berlin
Robert Laughlin Rea Professor of Cell Biology
Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago

[Jean McGreggor]

So we are ALL interconnected with every other living thing ! The Pagans are right.If we could only find a way to listen and understand. What wonderful things we could learn.