Is consciousness to be found in quantum processes in microtubules?

Don't get mad, get practical. You could just splinter the two interests into their own distinct topics.

Create a new thread about consciousness in general (not devoted to microtubule context).

Likewise, introduce a topic expressing news about and infatuation with microtubules in the general sense (not narrowly preoccupied with consciousness).

You could provide links to those in the last post of this one, and vice-versa. (But avoid conflating the two subjects again, at least in any extended or non-contingent manner.)
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That's true but it still seems that Write4you going bye-bye is the better option IMO.

 

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You'll be back. Unfortunately.

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Birds of a feather flock together.

 

It took less than a month for you to return! You can't stay away.

 

Thanks for the constructive advice. But I don't want to fall into the "scientific specialization" trap, where a scientific subject becomes so fragmented that any connection to a greater pattern becomes obscured.

The subject is properly described by the OP. There is no conflation of 2 separate subjects. I believe that "conscious awareness" is a unique property of "living organisms" and living organisms are another extension and "expression of universal dynamics".

As such, microtubule properties should be conducive to very fundamental natural mechanics, such as regular patterns emerging from a chaotic environment at the most fundamental level of biochemistry and these various abilities should be demonstrable. Hence the links to ALL data processing functions that employ microtubules and 2 related filaments.

Admittedly this is an ambitious enterprise for a well-read amateur, interested in the very fundamental guiding principle that allows for the emergence of consciousness as a "self-aware living pattern", stochastically being assembled by and from naturally occurring resources and dynamics as in the human biome.

I began my quest with Robert Hazen's excellent lecture on "Chance, Neccessity, Origins of Life"

IOW, the earth's mineral resources are not tuned for life, they provide the raw chemistry for the emergence of life that is tuned to Earth's resources..... difference. This logically (mathematically) guided process itself is a quasi-intelligent function of universal dynamics.
This is where it begins, in the abstract!

start viewing at 12:00 to avoid a legthy introduction.


Being that I cannot provide physical algorithms and chemical mechanics from formal education, I teach myself by researching and quoting established science. I presume that most peer reviewed papers are authored by people who do know the maths of describing the physics.

All previous posts are chapters describing the microtubule and are designed to paint a historical evolutionary picture of the incredible functional versatility of this simple self-organizing, dipolar, variable biochemical potentiometer (and related filaments) on display since the very beginning of biochemical life itself.

"Conscious Thought" is a product of universal dynamics and therefore subject to and dependent on universal potentials as they exist on localized pockets of planets with sufficient Electromagnetic and Biochemical resources.

My interest was piqued by the proposition of ORCH OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction), authored by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, proposing that a form of quasi-intelligent (orchestration) is required necessity for the evolution and eventual production of evolved molecular and atomic scale biological dynamical patterns, including the emergence of awareness and response to external pressures and an evolutionary emergence of environmental awareness and ultimately the ability for decision making in response to environmental pressures including ability for communication by and between cellular network structure of the organism.

Since self-awareness is a potential property of complex living organisms, its emergence can only begin at very fundamental molecular scales and organizational networks.

Now that technology has advanced to where we can observe study microtubule physical dynamics visually as well as by EM and chemical relational interactions.

I believe that there is overwhelming evidence that there is a sole candidate that can demonstrate its ability to meet all the requirements of necessary information processing abilities for self-aware consciousness.

It simply has to be the dynamical substrate from which consciousness emerges. There is nothing else that can even begin to compete.

What I post are not "hard questions", what I post are "hard facts" on which a model, such as ORCH OR or IIT (Integrated Information Theory) can be built.

I cannot imagine why this should be ridiculed as pseudo-science when all my supportive data is purely scientific....

Nobody has come up with a physical model that is sufficiently complex to generate the conscious fields inside the brain except the neural network (microtubules).

I am merely bringing to general attention that Roger Penrose, a well--qualified scientist has expressed his intense curiosity about microtubules functional abilities, based on the demonstrated fact that they afford the cell's ability to receive and send data of many types at the intra-cellular and inter-cellular level and that cells themselves exhibit "memory" and "problem solving" properties.

This is where it begins, the rest is a matter of evolved complexity and acquired "knowledge".

So until someone comes up with a better model for a "brain" than the cytoplasm and cytoskeleton in ALL cells of living organisms, I'll keep reminding people of the "microtubule, the little engine that could" .

 

A hint

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880148/

 

continued..

Brainless organisms already have the means to "solve problems"

 

....as prophesied in post 2705..................


I had hoped that prophecy would annoy him so much that he would try hard, with all his Dutch stubbbornness, to prove me wrong. But no such luck.

 

Perhaps that'll teach you not to start slumming in the world of pseudo-science. What exactly is your complaint and on what premise does your complaint about content of the quoted science from peer reviewed papers rest?

What is your problem that you would insult the scientific sources I quote as my library of information?

Why are you trying so hard, with all your British stubborness, to prove me wrong when it is abundantly clear that you are way behind times and may want to do a little work to familiarize yourself with microtubules rather than analyzing my mental competency?

Which btw, my brain contains as many microtubules and synapses as your brain and I am disappointed that you don't present yourself well and you are certainly not an example of a kindred spirit, unless of course, you claim a higher level spirit. A spirit I have no access to.

btw, post #2705 no longer exists on my screen....

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Years ago I wrote a "guide to woo" - that would seem to have some applicability here, especially the last one in the list.


Top Signs you are Reading Woo

Cranks often enjoy posting on science forums. Once they feel the thrill of making up some pseudoscientific woo, telling it to a friend and having the friend think they are clever - they come on line, find a science forum and post away, hoping for kudos and compliments on their imagination and intelligence. We see them here all the time.

But how can you tell a true crank from someone who is just confused, or someone who has a reasonable idea that is just not developed? How can you tell plain old errors from woo? Below is a guide to help with that decision. It lists several characteristics of cranks. If you see one of these characteristics, be wary. If you see several, well - either ignore the fellow or have some fun with him.

============================

1) The Einstein gambit. This gambit is perhaps the most popular attempt that cranks use to justify their woo. "Sure, they're laughing at me, but they laughed at Einstein too, you know!" By equating his situation to that of Einstein, the crank hopes to make it seem that his intelligence is akin to Einstein's - thus granting more validity to his woo.

2) The sheeple claim. Once a crank uses the word "sheeple" for the first time - to distinguish his own brilliance from the dull conformity of all the other "sheep" on a given forum - you know he's all woo. Use of this word is nearly inevitable for some types of cranks, especially 9/11 truthers and UFO believers.

3) The mathematical obfuscation. Often, cranks attempt to "prove their point" by throwing a bunch of math on the forum. This can be done several ways. Most commonly it's just unrelated math - constants with improbably large numbers of significant digits is a good clue here. More clever cranks will often use unrelated but accurate math to support their woo. For example, someone claiming zero point energy might post a few derivations of Maxwell's Equations to attempt to prove his point, then claim "if I'm wrong, show me where the math error is!" Support for tools like LaTex increases the odds he will try this, by making it easier to post equations.

4) Webster Rescue. Often when a crank is losing an argument he will resort to redefining words to try to ameliorate a previous error. For example: "The results you have presented show greater than 100% efficiency, which is thermodynamically impossible." "Well, really, what's the definition of efficiency? Can't it mean that . . . " He will then search out various online dictionaries until he finds a definition that is at least not entirely clear, at which point he will claim that that's the definition that is in common use.

5) The retcon. In comic books and science fiction, the "retroactive continuity" trick is often used to clear up previous continuity problems.. It is in effect saying "what REALLY happened is . . . ." Perhaps the most famous retcon is in episode V of Star Wars, where Obi-Wan tells Luke "well, yes, I told you your father was dead, but in fact turns out he's Darth Vader due to this complex explanation." On-line, people often use this angle to claim "Yes, I may have said this, but what I really meant was . . ." For example, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist might claim that no steel building has ever collapsed due to fire. When examples are presented, he might change his story to "what I REALLY meant was that no TALL steel building has ever collapsed; that was obvious from my post."

. .

7) Occam's Glue. In general, Occam's Razor describes the general rule that the simplest explanation that explains something is usually the correct one. Cranks use a version of that I call Occam's Glue - if something CAN be the explanation, it must be the explanation, even if simpler explanations suffice. UFO believers use this one a lot. "Yes, it could have been aircraft lights, or a meteor, or a planet, or low clouds - but how can all those explanations always be true? Some MUST be space aliens."

8) Woo prejudice. Oddly, most cranks will reject other people's woo quite strongly even when it is closely related. "There's no possible way those objects could be space aliens. They were clearly angels." This, while common, unfortunately does not help distinguish a crank from anyone else, since most people reject woo once it's clear that that's what it is.

9) Magical thinking. If part of someone's proof for their woo is the list of wondrous boons that this technology will grant mankind, the odds are high that he or she is engaging in magical thinking - the belief that a fervent desire for something will make it valid. Cold fusion believers, for example, often will list all the beneficial changes in society that cold fusion will bring about - and therefore declare that it is a real power source.

10) The Googleblast. Some cranks, facing skepticism, will make a somewhat late attempt to justify woo by searching the Internet for support. They cannot, of course, do any serious research, since that would tend to disprove their woo. However since anything is available on the Internet, they can always find something to at least marginally support them. Their cycle goes like this: Read (forum) Search (google) Pick (something that says something close to what they are claiming) Post (link to related information.) This read-search-pick-post cycle can go on for dozens of posts. They feel that by posting enough marginally related links they have found independent proof of their claim. This is very similar to the Gish Gallop.

11) Cyberturfing. This is related to the point above. In politics the term "astroturfing" is used to describe the false "grass-roots" support that politicians can fabricate. By funding political media efforts and making it look like the support is coming from many independent voters, they can claim much wider support than they otherwise could. Likewise, cyberturfing attempts to generate so many emails, websites, links, studies and articles that the crank can point to the mass of material and say "see? EVERYONE agrees!" They will often use tactics like submitting papers to vanity journals so they can claim their woo is "peer reviewed." 9/11 truthers are especially good at this.

12) The Patriotism Ploy. Often a crank will attempt to confabulate his woo with some other laudable ideal like patriotism, family values, freedom, prosperity etc. Thus, rather than arguing the validity of his woo, he can argue the desirability of prosperity - which is a much easier argument to make. For example, a climate change denier might say "you can't believe in climate change! If you do it will bankrupt the US and make Al Gore rich. Do you really want that?"

13) Quote-mining. Often cranks will search out quotes from well-respected people to support their position (the classic "appeal to authority") - and often will not be able to find the support they want. However, a carefully extracted quote might make it appear that they have such authoritative support. The most popular is a quote from Charles Darwin, ofen used by creationists: "To suppose that the eye . . .could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." The next lines then go on to explain how it is NOT absurd, but since cranks often gather most of their information via the above-mentioned read-search-pick-post method, they will generally miss that.

14) Prove Me Wrong. Cranks who propose an unusual theory (say, that UFO's are space aliens) will often not listen to alternative explanations that better explain the data. Instead they will propose their woo and ask "can you prove that that's NOT what's happening? Can you prove that that sighting was just a weather balloon?" This lets them sit back and wait for someone to provide an impossible level of proof for the more-reasonable explanation.

15) As seen on TV! Links to Youtube videos are one of the hallmarks of cranks. Whether this is due to cranks getting most of their information from videos, or whether it is due to the fondness of conspiracy theorists for Youtube, masses of Youtube links are one of the most common signs of the crank.

16) The argument from incredulity (i.e. "if I can't understand it, it is incorrect - and thus the explanation that I DO understand must be the correct one") is very common among cranks. Since they invariably have a very high impression of their own intelligence, any theory/explanation/process they do not understand must be incorrect.

And last but not least:

17) The Grand Trampling Exit. Often cranks, once they have realized that they are not going to get kudos and attaboys for their unconventional thinking, will make a "final post" that is usually along the lines of "you're all a bunch of idiots! I'm going to leave this once and for all, and deny you all the pleasure of my company. Instead I am going to post on a board where intelligent people have open minds!"

Reading the Grand Trampling Exit, readers of the forum might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief as the signal to noise ratio improves. However this relief is often short-lived. Cranks love attention, and thus more often than not they come back sometime later, often with a statement along the lines of "well, I just had to say one more . . ." or "I realized you wanted me to leave, so I'm going to stick around to get back at you!"
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Yes, I recall seeing the Grand Trampling Exit before, though I'm not sure whether it was here or on another forum. But that's what we've had here, complete with predicted return.

 

An hour and a half is too long for me to watch (at least for now), so I glanced through the transcript instead. The early going seems to be about plants.

But the general idea abstracted from whatever specific examples are exhibited is probably something similar to Daniel Dennett's "competence without comprehension". Which isn't really a new discrimination concerning "what's going on", either. Incrementally arising self-organization of one stripe or another has probably been pointed to for quite a while, including mechanisms and behaviors serving some function falling out of "mind"-less evolutionary development.

I'd hazard that retention of patterns / structural configurations (whether local affairs or broader scale) are probably a vital factor for guiding or triggering the debut of a new attribute added to the existing hierarchy, which crudely corresponds to dependence on generic memory or its precursors.

IOW, though not full-blown sapience by any means, the unsophisticated building blocks of intelligence (like proto-memory) are probably abundant. Anything that can maintain a shape or relational arrangement over time that could potentially cause a predictable effect ("guided" consequence) or even the rare feat replicating itself eventually, is to a usually never remotely realized intelligence what a red brick lost in the wild is to an early 20th-century multi-story building. A "could be" piece of a complex framework that never makes it to that particular, potential system of dynamic creativity (brain or whatever).
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I just posted about the sickest woo anyone could possibly imagine in another thread, and it has been days now since anyone has replied. Reading this, I cannot help but wonder what I am doing wrong. It seems like if everyone absolutely agreed with it, you guys have been cranking out science on here for way too long. Who shot JR?

 

Thanks for that constructive critique.
I absolutely agree that plants can at best be considered proto-conscious, but then they are just plants without any neural network altogether. But Monica Gagliano also draws a kind of novel comparison between the ability of plants to "learn" how to respond and even making choices of how to respond or if to respond at all. She calls it "problem solving" in its most rudimentary form.

@ 30:00 Ms. Gagliano presents her research and the surprising results that convinced her that plants do possess a rudimentary experiential existence contained in "habituation", but can behave in more sophisticated ways than that in a variable environment .
I think that you will find it interesting if not revelatory.

Given that rudimentary awareness manifests at plant level, it can be easily imagined that a few billion years of evolutionary processes might well cause an emergent specialization of varying responses to varying external conditions if there is a single or a set of common properties that allow for "memory" and ability to respond to variable information as produced by variable environmental conditions.

If the "eye" can evolve from a "light-sensitive chemical patch" in animals, what evolutionary "abilities" might plants have acquired over an even longer time?

There is a common denominator in all living organisms, microtubules. And microtubules have demonstrated their incredible ability to process a host of informational data about all of the environments they are exposed to, whether they are functional in flora as well as fauna.

As to your analogy of the relationship between a lost red brick and a multi-story building, microtubules are never separate from a network. All simple or complex cellular networks on earth are composed of networked microtubules. Cells themselves are internally regulated by microtubules and complex cellular organisms are regulated by complex microtubule networks, with the brain as the crowning product of evolutionary adaptation.

A network of 1000 billion microtubules networked by 1000 trillion synapses simply represents one of the most complex organic data processing machines in the universe.
To me this is axiomatic.

 

Establishing the origins of evolving "problem solving" in plants.

Plant Root Hair

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Plants take in water from the soil, through their root hairs:

• At the very tip is a root cap. This is a layer of cells which protects the root as it grows through the soil.
• The rest of the root is covered by a layer of cells called the epidermis.
• The root hairs are a little way up from the root tip. Each root hair is a long epidermal cell. Root hairs do not live for very long. As the root grows, they are replaced by new ones.

Functions of root hair cells

• Increase the external surface area of the root for absorption of water and mineral ions (the hair increases the surface area of the cell to make it more efficient in absorbing materials).

• Provide anchorage for the plant.

https://biology-igcse.weebly.com/root-hairs-and-water-uptake-by-plants.html

and how does this work?

Microtubules guide root hair tip growth

Abstract

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16101908/

continued.....

 

.......continued

Microtubules regulate tip growth and orientation in root hairs of Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

more..... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10230063/#

Do forests acquire "quorum sensing"?

Note that a recurring theme in the description of microtubules functions is the role they play in controlling (decision making) growth and evolving efficiency in energy gathering abilities of all cellular organisms, already starting with plants and with greater complexity in motile organisms and animals.

AFAIK, there is nothing in nature that even remotely comes close to microtubules in number and function of processing data for homeostatic health and response to environmental influences.

 

This is a remarkably informative video.


Do forests practice "quorum sensing"?

 

I believe this experimental discovery was announced 30 years ago on the cellular level. They didn’t understand how their microbes acted as though they had brains when no brain tissue was involved. This sparked the idea to begin this research on plants. Unexpectedly, the same thing was found in plants. They discovered that plants are sensitive to different frequencies. The leading theory was that it was some type of ESP. The secret is using a lot of hair spray…

 

Microtubules are not microbes
I believe you are barking up the wrong tree here....