From: "Richard" (rcarlson@olympus.net)
Date: July 21, 2005 11:43:25 AM EDT
To: rjon@vzavenue.net
Subject: Re: Question about challenging the materialist view of the evolution of consciousness
Reply-To: postaum2005@sriaurobindocenter-la.com

(Discussion List Post-AUM 2005): Replying to this email will send it to all members of the Post-AUM list.

To
follow up on the great bacteria consciousness controversy, although I
would have to agree that they do not make conscious choices in quite
the same manner as us humanoid types there is apparently something
going on with these little devils, IMO it resembles a sort of
fantastically advanced consciousness at work at the barest levels of
the physical mind propelling the evolution forward. Here is the
specific quote out of indeed one of my favorite science books Howard
Bloom's Global Brain.

Two scientist one University of Tel Aviv
physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob and the other the University of Chicago's
James Shapiro, performed some interesting experiments with bacterial
colonies in the 1980s. Their findings led them to believe that there is
some type of learning mechanism at work in bacterial colonies. In fact
they suggest that there is evidence of some type of collective mind
working within bacterial colonies.

The following experiment is part of the proof which they have discovered for this:

“Experimenters
have taken a community of the intestine-dwelling bacteria Escherichia
coli away from the cusine it normally eats and offered it salicin ?" a
pain reliever squeezed from the bark of willow trees which, to the
Ecoli bacterium is inedible as pitch. An individual bacterium can crank
nourishment out of this unpalatable medication only if it goes through
a step by step sequence of two genetic breakthroughs one of which
entails taking a giant step backwards. The odds of pulling this off
through random mutations are less than 1 in
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or to put it in English more than 10
billion trillion to one. Yet e coli consistently manage it. How? The
answer according to Ben-Jacob of the University of Tel Aviv lies in
networking. A “creative net’ of bacteria, unlike a man-made machine,
can invent a new set of instructions which to beat an unfamiliar
challenge. Some colony members feel out the new environment, “learning”
all they can. Others “puzzle” over the genome like race-car designers
tinkering with an engine whose power they are determined to increase.
Yet others collect incoming “ideas” passed along by their sisters and
work together to alter the existing genetic parts or to turn them into
something new. The “super mind” according to Ben-Jacobs even sucks
lessons from other colonies and designs and constructs a new more
advanced genome. Thus performing a genetic leap…….(Bloom 1996)

rc

----- Original Message -----

From: Jan Maslow
To: rcarlson@olympus.net
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 3:28 PM
Subject: Re: Question about challenging the materialist view of the evolution of consciousness

(Discussion List Post-AUM 2005): Replying to this email will send it to all members of the Post-AUM list.

Hi Ron:

Thanks for this very interesting stuff. I'd like to comment on three points, in the light of recent scientific developments:

1. When did consciousness begin?

There
are still a few behaviorist holdouts who refuse to talk about
consciousness at all. Aside from this, there are some fairly hardline
materialists who grudgingly admit "consciousness" (as no more than a
brain state, of course) but deny it to infants and all animals. It gets
interesting when you get to animals. Many mainstream scientists are
still reluctant to grant consciousness to all but the 'higher animals"
(primates and some mammals) but since the world's leading specialist in
animal consciousness, Donald Griffin, released a new edition of his
book on animal mind (in the 1990s, I think) animal consciousness is
becoming more widely accepted.

So how far down does it go?
Neuropsychologist Merlin Donald, in his book "Mind So Rare", suggests
that members of what he calls the "consciousness club" include
primates, all mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and insects (he
cites the Australian jumping spider, for example, which is able to
maintain a primitive mental map of its environment which it uses quite
cleverly to stalk its prey). Canadian psychologist Harry Hunt, is
willing to consider ameoba as having some kind of incredibly simple
sentience.

That's as far down as I could find among scientists.
Panexperientialist philosopher David Ray Griffin, following Whitehead,
extends consciousness to all matter. Pretty far outside mainstream
science, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, and physicist Amit Goswami also
accept consciousness in matter. Somewhere in between the far-out and
the mainstream, the increasingly acceptable parapsychologists like Dean
Radin and Charles Tart also accept consciousness in matter, using
explanations remarkably similar to Sri Aurobindo: psychokinesis (mind
over matter), which has been proven in extremely rigorous scientific
studies and well replicated, would not be possible if there was not a
consciousness in matter which responds to the mind of the individual
attempting to affect that matter.

So in regard to bacteria: it
is not entirely unacceptable among mainstream scientists to speak of
consciousness in bacteria. However, Lynn Margulis, the world's leading
expert on bacteria - speaks often of an extraordinary intelligence
working in bacteria. This is certainly not a conscious intelligence,
right? So what is the source of this intelligence? There doesn't seem
to be an answer in the current scientific framework - even within
quantum physics or parapsychology...... See #3 below.....

2. How
do quantum processes get passed on from one generation to the next?
Perhaps McFadden and Hameroff refer to this in their writings; I'd be
curious to know and will certainly look at the sites you suggested.
There's been discussion on the Journal of Consciousness Studies from
time to tim over the years of their theories, but I've never seen this
point discussed. When Jan and I sent our passage on evolution to an
evolutionary biologist, he asserted that Goswami misunderstands both
physics and biology!

It turns out - as far as we can understand
at this point - that we neglected to emphasize strongly enough the role
of a 'field" of consciousness in carrying the potential mutations that
exist as quantum superpositions across generations. I think it's
correct to say that without this field of consciousness, there is no
way within conventional quantum physics to explain why the quantum
possibilities aren't collapsed once a creature gives birth. Goswami

makes use of Sheldrake's morphogenetic field hypothesis to suggest that
a species-wide field of consciousness (Sri Aurobindo's "group-soul"?)
holds potential mutations over hundreds or even thousand of generations
until the time is ripe (the appropriate karmic moment?) when the new
species "needs" to emerge.

3. Links to Integral Yoga.

You
mention that bacteria "are not conscious" and do not make "choices". We
really struggled with this when we started writing about evolution from
the yogic viewpoint - how to distinguish the simple consciousness of a
primtiive creatures such as bacteria from the evident intelligence at
work in bacteria.

There's actually an enormous amount of
completely mainstream scientific literature describing the working of
an astonishing intelligence in bacteria (Harold Bloom, in one of Rich's
favorite books, "Global Brain" has collected quite a bit of this; Lynn
Margulis, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry have also written about this).
So what is happening here? If we accept Harry Hunt's notion that
consciousness extends at least as far as ameoba, it's not too hard to
imagine that sentience of some kind exists in bacteria. But it's
certainly not the conscious mind that is at work here.

Sri
Aurobindo gives a clue in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad: He
speaks of the mind's 4 major functions of sensing, perceiving,
comprehending and willing. Taking just the mainstream scientific
community's general consensus on consciousness in animals, we find
sensing at work in animals from bacteria up through insects. Perception
- the capacity to bind sensory data into a discrete object - emerges
with amphibians and reptiles. While there is comprehension and will of
some kind implicitly at work throughout evolution, it doesn't seem to
emerge into "consciousness" until the more complex reptiles and in
mammals and birds. You don't see the capacity for selective attention
(conscious volition) until mammals; some birds have it and all primates
do. Many of these same higher animals also have other volitional
capacities like complex problem solving and decision making.

But
here's the most interesting part - if it's true that sensing,
perceiving, comprehending and willing - from the yogic perspective -
are at work not only in the most primitive animals but in plants and
matter too, what is responsible for these functions? Sri Aurobindo
speaks of a vaster subliminal functioning - clearly, the inner
consciousness which has not yet evolved to the surface. Among the
examples he uses are an insect's anatomical precision in attacking its
prey, and an illiterate servant girl overhearing her master speaking
Hebrew and later under hypnosis being able to reproduce without error
the Hebrew words. The vaster subliminal intelligence then, is at work
in bacteria, which would also explain how the bacteria seem to function
as a kind of global web - the universal subliminal consciousness is at
work guiding the surface consciosness and behavior of the bacteria. So
there actually is an extraordinary intelligence at work -- it just
isn't available to the surface consciousness of the creature. And of
course, there is the still greater supramental consciousness at work,
guiding the whole process.

We found, in writing the chapter on
the emergence of mind in animals, this distinction of the evolved
consciousness in contrast to the yet hidden greater subliminal
consciousness at work resolved many issues which remain obscure in
works by various scientists on the evolution of the mind.

Don Salmon
Greenville, South Carolina
virtreal@jps.net

----- Original Message -----
From: Ron
To: jmaslow@jps.net
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 5:10 PM
Subject: Quantum Evolution

The
idea that quantum phenomena may have been crucial to the evolution of
both life and consciousness on Earth is gaining increasing interest. (A
Google search today for articles containing both the words "quantum"
and "evolution" returned over three million hits.)

Two of the
most frequently cited references are the work of Professor Stuart
Hameroff, a research anesthesiologist and Director of the Center for
Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson and the book
*Quantum Evolution* by Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Molecular
Genetics at the University of Surrey in England.

1) In my
previous posts I've referenced Hameroff and Oxford's Sir Roger
Penrose's work on possible quantum effects in human neural processes in
the brain and their hypothesis that these quantum actions are a crucial
component of moments of conscious experience. Their most controversial
claim, based on advanced mathematical work by Penrose, is that these
quantum processes access "Platonic qualia" that are fundamental
properties of reality, located everywhere and everywhen at the
omnipresent Planck scale of spacetime. - <
http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/ >

Hameroff has extended
these ideas to include possible quantum effects in the evolution of
consciousness on Earth; e.g., in his paper "Did Consciousness Cause the
Cambrian Evolutionary Explosion?"

Hameroff's conclusion is:
-
"The place of consciousness in evolution is unknown, but the actual
course of evolution itself may offer a clue. Fossil records indicate
that animal species as we know them today, including conscious humans,
all arose from a burst of evolutionary activity some 540 million years
ago (the "Cambrian explosion"). " - "Occurrence of consciousness was
likely to have accelerated the course of evolution." - "Small worms,
urchins and comparable creatures reached critical biological complexity
for emergence of primitive consciousness at the early Cambrian period
540 million years ago."
- "Cooperative dynamics of microtubules, cilia, centrioles and axonemes were the critical biological factors for consciousness."
-
"Cytoskeletal complexity available in early Cambrian animals closely
matches criteria for the Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR model of
consciousness." - "Orch-OR caused the Cambrian explosion."

For
those interested in these ideas, I suggest reading Hameroff's paper. -
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/cambrian.html

2)
McFadden's "Quantum Evolution" is a widely read book published in the
United States in 2002. He proposes that quantum effects can act on the
positions of protons in the structure of DNA. Through a quantum
computing process via the 'multiverse,' optimized adaptive mutations
may occur.
- For more on the fascinating concept of the multiverse,
see:
http://www.qubit.org/people/david/index.php?path=Parallel%20Universes

A
few McFadden quotes to give the feeling of his ideas: - "Cells may
enter quantum states when they are unable to divide and replicate ?"
perhaps they can’t utilise a particular substrate in their environment.
They may collapse out of those quantum states when their DNA
superposition includes a mutation that allows them to grow and
replicate once more. In this way the environment interacts with, and
performs a quantum measurement on the cell, to precipitate advantageous
mutations. From our viewpoint, inhabiting only one universe, the cell
appears to ‘choose’ certain mutations." - "The problem with adaptive
mutations is that no one can figure a way that information can travel
backwards from the environment to DNA, to mutate certain genes. Myself
and a physicist colleague, Jim Al-Khalili, recently proposed a novel
solution: that DNA may exist in quantum states that are able to sample
multiple mutational states simultaneously." - "... According to
Newtonian mechanics, future events are entirely determined by what
happened before. We may believe we make decisions but classical
deterministic science tells us that we are fooling ourselves. Our
destiny and every action we make are determined by a series of previous
events whose ultimate source is the Big Bang." - "Quantum mechanics
allows an escape from this gloomy outlook because quantum systems are
not entirely deterministic. Although bacteria are certainly not
conscious and do not know that they are making a decision, I believe
those same quantum dynamics though involving electromagnetic fields
rather than DNA are responsible for what we call our ‘free will’."
-
I recommend reading the following link for McFadden's summary of his
book, with illustrations and references to technical papers, including
supporting quantum field theory equations by Al-Khalili.
- http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/quantumevolution.htm

3)
Obviously, some of these ideas relate to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother's
ideas re the evolution of consciousness and the psychic personality. To
keep this post from getting absurdly long, I'll talk about some of my
conjectures re all this in a later posting.

Namaste,

~ ron