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Making Your Mind Matter
Dr. Joe Dispenza
How Molecular Machines
Extract Order from Chaos
By Peter M. Hoffmann
Peter M. Hoffmann is a professor of physics and material science
Neither design,
purpose, randomness, nor a vital force can explain the emergence of
life from inanimate matter.
Design is too ridged and does not account for evolutionary
changes. The Greek
notion of purpose or teleology violates special relativity theory.
Randomness could not produce the complexities of life in a finite
amount of time, and a vital force has no explanatory value; it is
simple reification.
Peter M. Hoffmann says
that we cannot say what life “is” because life is a
process involving a
complement of chance and necessity.
All that we experience around us from galaxies to the rose is
not merely the result of the random, mindless, scurrying of matter,
but a complement between chance and necessity, the laws of physics.
Though we are not machines
as Descartes claimed, we are, in fact, made up of molecular
machines.
Evolution is a
bottom-up process emerging from the nanoscale of molecular machines.
Unlike the macro scale where inertia and gravity dominate,
and the quantum scale where strong nuclear forces prevail, forces
are balanced and energy conversion between electromagnetic forces
and thermal motion readily occur at the nanoscale of molecules where
surface-to-volume ratios are large.
On average a molecule
undergoes ten billion collisions every millisecond in what Hoffmann
calls the thermal storm,
and molecular machines take advantage of this chaos necessitated by
the laws of thermodynamics (Greek—therme
meaning heat, dynamics meaning power) by minimizing free energy
and moving toward their lowest energy state given by the formula F=
E – TS; (Free energy (F) is equal to the total energy (E) minus the
product of Temperature (T) and Entropy (S)).
This is an important formula in that every interaction in
nature, with the exception of quantum interactions, occurs as a
result of minimizing free energy (the product of temperature and
entropy).
Random entropic forces
are a means by which most molecules are assembled.
For example, exclusion zones exist around large molecules.
When these molecules combine they increase their order and
free energy locally, seemingly running counter to the second law of
thermodynamics, but the system as a whole must be taken into
account. By combining,
their exclusion zones also combine creating more space for smaller
molecules that are buffeted by the random thermal storm, thus
increasing the overall disorder and entropy within the solution.
Cells take advantage of these entropic forces to assemble a
variety of complex molecules including collagen, an extracellular
connective tissue as well as actin and microtubules forming the
matrix of our cells. These are examples in which individual
molecules ratchet-up to form more complex molecules as a result of
entropic forces. One can
argue about whether or not this process can be attributed to a
force. At the molecular
scale, causative factors are replaced by complementarities in which
the concepts of “before” and “after” are less obvious. Whether we
consider that entropic forces are acting on the molecules causing
them to coalesce or invoking the concept of a meaningful
complementarity, which is acausal, the end result is the same—an
overall increase in entropy preserving the all-important second law
of thermodynamics.
Lipid molecules, which have
no charge, are another example of how assembly can take place as a
result of the thermal storm.
Lipids are made of a head which is hydrophilic and a tail
that is hydrophobic.
These properties conspire to form structures that keep water and oil
separated. When an
optimal number of lipids occur in a solution a
micelles, a ringed
structure spontaneously forms with all the hydrophilic tails
submersed in oil in the center and all the heads immersed in water
on the outside forming a ring that separates the oil from the water.
A second kind of structure called a
vesicle is a structure
where one ring of tails line up with a second ring of tails to form
a double wall separating two volumes of water.
This structure forms the cell walls in animals.
Hydrophobic forces are
responsible for the thousands of three dimensional protein folding
configurations necessary to carry out virtually all the functions of
the cell. Chains
of amino acids are bombarded by the molecular storm until by chance
they fold into its lowest energy state as dictated by the laws of
thermodynamics, with hydrophobic side chains in the center and the
hydrophilic side chains on the outside. The various sequences of the
amino acid chains determine which folding pattern is most conducive
to that particular amino acid’s lowest energy state.
Hoffmann states that protein folding is possibly the best
example of how physical laws, randomness, and information work
together to form life’s complexity.
These interactions are helped along by protein enzymes which speed
up the process. The
substrate molecule is bombarded by billions of water molecule
collisions every millisecond until by pure chance the molecule is
pummeled into the correct shape to fit into the enzyme’s “pocket.”
When the two molecules combine they lower their energy state.
Enzymes
form complementarities similar to the DNA/protein complementarity.
Enzymes fueled by the ATP molecule, produce other molecules that, in
turn, regulate the enzyme’s activity by changing its shape and
function in a process known as
allostery. Self-regulation
in the form of enhancement or inhibition give molecules computing
power making them appear intelligent. An enzyme can produce enough
of an inhibitory molecule to completely shut down its own function.
Enzymes can also give
molecules directed motion by successively changing its shape and
making it “walk” along tracks of microtubules and actin filaments
inside the cytoplasm of the cell. The
thermal storm provides the impetus for the random movement and the
tracks provide directional irreversibility allowing for movement in
only one direction.
In his book “What is
Life,” Physicist Erwin Schrodinger speculated that the code of life
must be written in the molecular structure and that these molecules
must be connected by strong chemical bonds to withstand the
destructive bombardment of thermal motion.
He was correct that the code of life is written in the
molecular structure, but he did not know that life harnesses thermal
motion, and that the molecular bonds between the strands of DNA are
held together by many temporary hydrogen bonds lasting only
milliseconds. Hoffman states that “The ability of life to somehow
incorporate thermal randomness as an integral part of how is
works—as opposed to giving in to chaos—shows that life is a
bottom-up process.”
Genes are not the
architect of the bottom-up process as Evolutionary Biologist Richard
Dawkins has proposed.
Famous for his idea of the “selfish gene,” and proponent of the
gynocentric hypothesis, Dawkins champions the idea that biological
changes are the sole result of random changes in DNA.
The
central dogma associated
with this idea is that information flows in only one direction, from
DNA to RNA to proteins.
Hoffmann says while the central dogma holds true during replication,
transcription, and translation, proteins control which parts of DNA
are read in the first place.
According to Hoffmann, DNA is mistakenly called the
blueprint of life, but it is more like a cooking recipe. Hoffmann
says that DNA contains neither information nor meaning; it does not
replicate itself, tell us the morphology of an organism, or even
create functional proteins.
DNA is useless without the supporting chemistry of the cell
and the body as a whole.
For example, protein receptors in the cell are responsive to
neuropeptides released into the blood stream as a result of our
thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Information from receptor proteins
on the cell wall is passed on to effector proteins inside the cell
which in turn select the code for synthesis of new proteins needed
by the organism at that moment.
Information indeed flows both ways in a complementary
process involving the entire organism.
Hoffmann says that looking at molecular machines has made him
realize that evolution is the only way these machines could have
come to exist. The
tendency of molecular machines to use chaos rather than resist it
provides a strong case for evolution.
The universe, according to Hoffmann, is a storm of necessity
and chance. We are
intelligent, creative beings, a natural extension of the creativity
of the universe. While
we are not machines, we are composed of machines, and if there is
life elsewhere in the universe, according to Hoffmann, it makes
sense that they too will be a product of molecular machines.
David Paulides
Missing 411: A Sobering Coincidence is the fifth book in David
Paulides 411 series. His first four books deal with strange
disappearances of people in our national parks. These disappearances
are not the typical reasons why people go missing such as getting
disoriented and lost, animal attacks, hypothermia and so on. The
cases Paulides investigate fit a particular profile that is very
much out of the ordinary. Initially, Paulides didn’t want to get
involved in urban disappearances because of the difficulty in
weeding out the normal from the more bizarre due to the vastly
larger pool of individuals and the more numerous reasons for urban
people going missing such as being attacked by thugs, suicide,
mental illness, and so on. But he knew that eventually he would have
to consider urban disappearances as well. After reading between four
and five thousand missing person cases, a profile developed that was
all too familiar, coincidental, and sobering. Some of the key
aspects of these cases are cited below.
1) As in rural disappearances, urban incidences of missing
persons tend to be in geographical clusters. In both urban and rural
situations, the Great Lake region constitutes a disproportionately
large cluster.
2) Bodies are often found a long distance from where the search
started. Paulides says:
"In [name deleted] case, there were no roads into the lake; you would
have had to walk. The idea that anyone carried his body to the lake
and placed it in the water seems extreme. [He] was a big man, and
it’s very hard to carry a dead body (300)."
3) Trained search canines are unable to pick up the scent of the
victim. In the case of a missing La Crosse, Wisconsin man, an
article in the La Cross Tribune states:
4) Victims are often found in areas previously searched dozens of
times.
"The spot where [name deleted] had been found, as well as the area
surrounding where he had been found, had been thoroughly searched by
humans and dogs during the time he was missing without positive
results (309)"
5) Victims who survive their ordeal most often have a lack of memory
of the incident and experience missing time.
6) Almost all of the cases involve the victim being found in water,
yet most of the deaths cannot be attributed to drowning. Paulides
states:
"One of the most unusual parts of this incident dealt with [name
deleted] rate of decomposition. The coroner had stated that the
decomposition was slight to moderate. This is nearly an impossible
fact if the body had been in the water for seventy-seven days (279)."
7) Victims are often found with missing articles of clothing and
shoes in ways that cannot be explained by natural causes.
8) Victims seem to disappear without anyone noticing even when
accompanied by friends and associates. Even more inexplicable, in
several urban cases when establishments had continuous video
coverage of the area, the person’s image was not seen leaving.
"The pair was standing outside of John’s Bar discussing taking the
city’s Safe Ride bus system back to campus. His friend stated that
he got on the bus, thinking that [name deleted] was right behind
him. When he sat down [he] was gone. This was the last time anyone
saw him (285)."
"Video surveillance shows [name deleted] and his friends arriving at
Bootleggers night club in Woodlyn the night of January 19. No one
ever saw him leave. In reality, not only did nobody see him leave,
he wasn’t [seen] on any surveillance system leaving (309)."
9) Often the cause of death cannot be determined. Because
authorities do not want to cause public concern, coroners will often
list the easiest, most common, and least suspicious cause of death
to wash their hands of the incident. Paulides says of a case in
Lacrosse, Wisconsin:
"The official autopsy does not mention any rigor mortis (rigidity) in
the body at the time of autopsy. [Rigor mortis becomes identifiable
within two to four hours of death and leaves the body twenty-four to
thirty-six hours after death.] However, at the time the body was
recovered from the water, photos do show he was in rigor. This means
that [name deleted] could not have been dead for the forty-three
days he was missing—impossible. The two authors [Gannon and
Gilbertson] state that the rigor meant that [he] could only have
been dead for seventy-two hours. If you do the math and buy into
their discussion, which I [Paulides] do, [he] disappeared on April
11, was held against his will, and then was dumped in the water the
last three days to make it appear he had been in the water the
entire time. This is definitely a scenario that local officials
would not want their constituents to understand. It could definitely
be a main reason why certain facts about his body were left out of
the autopsy report (274)
"The result of the autopsy was that [name deleted] drowned with the
manner of death as “undetermined”…It was a unanimous opinion from
the physicians [who reviewed the toxicology report] that [he] was
not in the water for twenty days…This means that [he] was held
somewhere for fifteen to eighteen days before being placed in the
water (299)."
Though the profile of national park disappearances and urban
disappearances has many similarities, there are a few differences.
In the cases of missing people in urban environments, most often the
individuals in Paulides profiles are college age men who had
consumed alcohol. These individuals were usually athletes and
scholars, often described as brilliant. As Paulides commented,
almost all were stellar individuals with great futures ahead of
them. They were most often close with their families and often had
religious ties. Never did Paulides come across homeless people,
drunkards, or social misfits that disappeared in the manner of the
profiled cases.
The deaths of these urban individuals is rarely classified as a
crime despite the fact that families were certain a crime had been
committed in about one hundred and fifty cases Paulides
investigated. The reason for this is that there is always what
Paulides refers to as plausible deniability. In the parks, the
reason for a death is usually listed as disorientation and
hypothermia; in the case of the urban disappearances, almost all of
the missing young men had been drinking, both situations reach the
minimum level of plausible deniability, satisfying the coroner, the
police, and assuring the public.
Forensic experts found in many cases that though the person had been
missing for weeks or months, their bodies, which had been found in
the water, did not show signs of deterioration that would account
for the length of time they were missing. As Paulides wondered,
“Where were these people during all of that time they were missing?”
Often, bodies were found with clothing or shoes missing, and if the
clothing was found, it was often in places far from the place the
victim was found. In some cases victims were inexplicably found
bobbing with head and shoulders above the water or floating face up,
neither situation is normal. (Women usually float face up, men face
down.) Sometimes they were found upriver from the only logical place
they could have “fallen in”. In a few cases the bodies were
bloodless, yet there were no needle marks or wounds of any sort.
"It appeared as though the body had been exsanguinated (drained of
its blood) by someone who was proficient enough to not only remove
the blood, but to also remove the vitreous fluid from with both
eyeballs…The removal of all fluids had to have been done without
making any noticeable marks that a forensic pathologist would have
clearly observed and noted as suspicious in an autopsy report (275)."
Often, victims who survived were found semiconscious, groggy, or
unconscious with a high level of GHB in their system, a drug that
allows you to know what is happening, but can leave you unable to
react, making you easy to control and abduct.
In reference to the high occurrence of cases in La Crosse,
Wisconsin, Paulides states: “Thugs in downtown La Crosse do not have
the expertise to hold a person for thirty-eight days, keep him
alive, remove various fluids from his body, and still keep him alive
long enough to drop him in the water and have him drown, bloodless
and without ligature marks.”
Wisely, Paulides will not offer an opinion as to who or what is
causing these disappearances, because, at this point in time, he
doesn’t want to rule out anything. He does say that whatever is
happening, it is completely outside of our understanding of reality.
No logical explanation can be given as to how these healthy young
men end up deceased in the water.
Stanislas Dehaene
Dehaene says that consciousness has a broad range of meaning that
includes the concept of Vigilance; the state of awareness
when we are awake, attention; the ability to focus on one
particular event
or piece of information; and conscious access, our ability to
process and communicate acquired information to others.
Conscious access is the most important of these for scientific
study because our ability to report our conscious experience allows scientists to
correlate these experiences with objective measurements of brain
activity. This is achieved using the latest in scientific equipment
and techniques including: functional resonance imaging (fMRI)
invented by the Japanese researcher Seiji Ogawa and his colleagues
in 1990, electro encephalography, electro magnetoencephalography,
and electrodes placed in the brain during surgery.
Formerly, behaviorists contended that subjective experience could
not be trusted in scientific studies and was outside of the boundary
of scientific study. This idea according to Dehaene is completely
wrong.
Though science cannot objectify conscious experience, it is possible
to detect the signatures of conscious experience. For example, when
subjects report becoming aware of an object through the senses of
sight, sound, or tactile experience, a consistent objective measure
of these experiences can be recorded using these instruments by
correlating the subjective experience with the frequency and
amplitude of brain waves over a certain period of time. Dehaene
says, “Thanks to brain imaging, the mystery of consciousness has
finally been cracked open.” (117)
(fMRI) is one of these machines that have contributed to the
understanding of consciousness. These machines are tuned to pick up
small distortions in the magnetic field created by measuring
variations in oxygen levels in the hemoglobin. Hemoglobin without
oxygen acts as a small magnet, while hemoglobin with oxygen does
not. When neural circuits become active they increase their need for
oxygen and local arteries expand to increase blood flow and oxygen.
By quantifying the amount of oxygen used by the neurons these
machines are able to distinguish which stimuli activate the brain
only on an unconscious level, and which stimuli ignite the global
electrical storm of conscious awareness. The distinction between
conscious and unconscious processing in the brain is at the
forefront of brain research.
Brain imaging experiments show that while information reaches parts
of the brain it doesn’t always reach our conscious awareness if the
information is presented too rapidly or if conflicting information
is presented simultaneously. Dehaene states:
“When we attempt to attend to two things at once, the impression
that our consciousness is immediate and ‘online’ with both stimuli
is just an illusion. In truth, the subjective mind does not perceive
them simultaneously. One of them gets accessed and enters awareness,
but the second must wait.” (33)
The reality we perceive is a homogenized version of objective
reality. For example, our conscious mind corrects for the raw visual
data that enters our retinas. We do not notice the blind spot at the
center of our retinas where the nerve fibers are located that send
information to the brain, or the blood vessels at the back our
retinas. Dehaene says:
“What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for
retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for eye and
head movement, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous
experience of similar visual scenes. All these operations unfold
unconsciously.”(60) “This situation is not limited only to sight. As
surprising as it seems, we do not hear the sound waves that reach
our ears; nor do we see the photons entering our eyes. What we gain
access to is not a raw sensation but an expert reconstruction of the
outside world.” (62)
Recent experiments have shown that we perceive meaning even when we
are not consciously aware. The amygdala, a part of the brain that
quickly responds to high emotional events, registers signals when
presented with danger even when a person is not aware of these
events. This is a very fortunate for our survival as a species for a
couple of reasons: First, conscious awareness is much slower at
processing information than unconscious processing, and second, we
can only be conscious of one thing at a time. If our attention is
directed toward some task a dangerous situation might be completely
ignored. Dehaene says:
“The determination of which objects are relevant and should be
amplified is better left to automatic processes that operate sub
Rosa, in a massively parallel manner…Unexpected stimuli, such as a
scream or the call of our own name, must remain able to break
through our current thoughts—and therefore the filter called
“selective attention” must continually operate outside of awareness,
in order to decide which incoming inputs call for our mental
resources.” (75)
Experiments have proven the importance of the role of the
unconscious in solving problems. Attentive preparation and study of
a problem followed by inattention and relaxation are key to
unraveling difficult problems. Experiments show that during sleep
the hippocampus of the brain remains active as it consolidates
information and provides new insight. Many anecdotal stories from
prominent scientists and mathematicians have acknowledged the
importance of inattention in solving problems.
[REVIEWER’S ASIDE: Julian Janes, author of The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind says: “The
picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems and using
conscious induction and deductions is as mythical and the
unicorn…The literature is full of insights which have simply come
from nowhere” To the mathematician Gauss, ‘Like a sudden flash of
lightning, the riddle happed to be solved.’ To Poincare’, the
brilliant mathematician, ‘without anything in my former thought
seeming to have paved the way for it, the solution just came to me.’
To Einstein on his idea of general relativity, ‘Suddenly the
happiest thought of my life came to me.’
A well-known physicist in Britain once declared. “We often talk
about the three B’s,” the bus, the bath, and the bed. That is where
the great discoveries are made in science!” (34, Kreiter, Quantum
Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.)]
According to Dehaene, psychology has amply demonstrated not only
that subliminal perception exists but that a whole array of mental
processes can be launched without consciousness.
The unconscious mind certainly controls much more of our behavior
than we intuit because we can only be conscious of what we are aware
of. Our aware consciousness is like a flashlight in a large dark
room. From the perspective of the flashlight it appears that
everything is illuminated because wherever it turns the room is lit.
But from a more distant perspective, it becomes evident that only a
small part of the room is lit at any one moment. We are only aware
of a very tiny fraction of our environment. Some neuro scientists
suggest that only about five percent of our actions and decisions
are made consciously. As I type, I am not aware of the position of
the keys on the keyboard. In fact, if there were no visible letters,
I would be hard pressed to identify where each of the letters were
on the keyboard. But somehow my fingers directed by my unconscious
mind know. Being aware and attentive to each key would drastically
slow the typing process.
In spite of the abilities of our unconscious mind, our aware
conscious is critical for our survival. Dehaene believes that
consciousness is a useful evolved biological function. He states:
In fact, consciousness supports a number of specific operations that
cannot unfold unconsciously. Subliminal information is evanescent,
but conscious information is stable—we can hang on to it for as long
as we wish. (89)
Consciousness is an evolved function because it is beneficial to the
survival of an organism. The outside world is flooding our brains
with incoming data, and it is up to our conscious mind to sift
through all of this information and come up with a solution based on
probability. Scientists call this aspect of consciousness Bayesian
inference, adapted from the field of mathematics in which
statistical outcomes are traced back in time to their source.
Typically, probability theory begins with specific events and
predicts the outcome from known quantities. However, in the reverse
inference Bayesian method, the results are analyzed and the events
leading to those results are given a probability of occurrence.
Dehaene says, “The hypothesis that the brain acts as a Bayesian
statistician is one of the hottest and most debated areas in
contemporary neuroscience…Our brain must perform a kind of reverse
inference because all our sensations are ambiguous.” (94)
The unconscious mind takes in raw data and assigns a probability or
likelihood that the incoming information conforms to the norms of
our experience. The higher the probability the longer they are
accessible to our conscious mind. This in essence is the process of
induction in which the unconscious mind samples various
probabilities and then comes up with the most likely consensus
reality (97).
[REVIEWER’S ASIDE: The analogy to this process can be seen in
quantum theory. In nature most information exists in a meaningful
superposition of states of all possibilities until an observation or
measurement occurs. The measurement can be in the form of human
interaction or simply an interaction with another particle or an
electromagnetic field. At that moment, in a process known as
decoherence, the meaningful superposition collapses into one
definitive bit of information and entropy. Like matter and energy,
information is physical and must abide by the laws of
thermodynamics. Therefore, Information is conserved and it never
decreases unless the system is in isolation as are biological
organisms. Our brain, the most complex system we know, is just such
an isolated system. It has evolved as a reverse decoherence organ in
which bits of information are reestablished into a meaningful
complementarity. The reversal process begins when unconscious
neurons gather raw information, usually in wave form, and assign a
certain probability to this information based on meaning. This
process forms what I refer to as an information/meaning
complementarity, similar to nature’s superposition of states. The
higher the probability assigned to the complementarity the more
meaningful and the longer its duration in memory. In the second step
of the process the conscious mind samples from the more probable of
these possibilities by focusing attention. This action collapses the
complementarity into a single reality. Information therefore has
been compressed into a sort of superposition of states by the
unconscious and then re-collapsed into a definitive particle by the
aware conscious. The chain-of-events doesn’t stop there. Once the
information is released from the superpositon new neural pathways
are created or reinforced in the brain. These pathways allow for a
process Dehaene refers to as the global storm of communication
between trillions of other neurons representing our memories of past
experiences. I contend that the mere association between trillions
of neurons produces an
emergent property we call conscious
experience.]
As we have come to know, nothing has independent existence, and
everything exists relative to something else. The brain's unconscious
ability to synthesize information into a coherent whole and the
conscious minds ability to select from these possibilities creates
our subjective experience. Dehaene says:
“The very act of conscious attending to an object collapses the
probability distribution of it various interpretations and lets us
perceive only one of them. Consciousness acts as a discrete
measurement device that grants us a single glimpse of the vast
underlying sea of unconscious computations.”(98)
Unconscious processes are very short in duration. It takes
consciousness to recall past events. A conscious experience requires
that a low level unconscious signal in the brain gets amplified into
an electrical storm over wide regions of the brain, most often
incorporating the prefrontal and parietal lobes. If we are
confronted with a surprising situation or piece of information, for
example, the entire brain lights up with electrical activity. This
slow and massive wave event appears starting at 270 milliseconds
after the stimulus and peaks at around 450 milliseconds. (124).
Activation of brain waves below conscious awareness last only about
one half of a second, but stimuli that become conscious can last
indefinitely. When we hold an image in mind, our brain literally
keeps it alive in the firing of neurons in the visual cortex, at a
subthreshold level, ready to be reenacted by a pulse of stimulation.
Interestingly, during a global ignition of the brain, the entire
brain is not excited. Though the effect is widespread in the brain
only precise sets of neurons get activated. It has been discovered
that individual neurons can be selective to a picture, name, or
concept. A single neuron might be relegated to the face of a single
individual for example. Experiments involving electrical stimulation
in lab animals and humans have demonstrated a link between
electrical firings of specific neurons and perception. For example
stimulating parts of the parietal lobe may cause an out-of-body
experience, a de’ja’vu experience or even an orgasm. This is not the
one-to-one correspondence professed by epiphenomenalists however
because meaning is a necessary component of the global discharge.
For example, the same neuron might fire when we see a picture of a
person, hear that person’s voice, or even hear a description of that
person. This indicates that the brain's function isn’t like a circuit
board with a one-to-one correspondence between bits of information;
rather, meaning must be involved in a complement with information.
Dehaene says:
“Putting together all the evidence inescapably leads us to a
reductionist conclusion. All our conscious experiences, from the
sound of an orchestra to the smell of burnt toast, result from a
similar source: the activity of massive cerebral circuits that have
reproducible neuronal signatures. During conscious perception,
groups of neurons begin to fire in a coordinated manner, first in
local specialized regions, then in the vast expanse of our cortex.
Ultimately, they invade much of the prefrontal and parietal lobes,
while remaining tightly synchronized with earlier sensory regions.
It is at this point, where a coherent brain web suddenly ignites,
that conscious awareness seems to be established.” (159)
The brain is not an input-output device like a computer that merely
transfers date from the senses to our muscles as Ivan Pavlov
believed. In fact, less than 5 percent of brain activity is
stimulus-provoked. Even in the absence of any input, neurons
spontaneously fire, triggered by random evens at their synapse. Just
as molecules take advantage of the random thermal energy storm
(See
“Life’s Ratchet review”)
to go from the simple to the complex, so
the nerve cells take advantage of voltage fluctuations caused by
random releases of neurotransmitters due to thermal noise that
buffets the molecules at the neuron’s synapses. By spontaneously
generating fluctuating patterns of activity, even in the absence of
external stimulation, the global workspace allows us to freely
generate new plans, try them out, and change them at will if they
fail to fulfill our expectations. This is a Darwinian style process
of variation followed by selection that occurs within our global
workspace system.
Dehaene says:
“It is humbling to think that the “stream of consciousness,” the
words and images that constantly pop up in our mind and make up the
texture of our mental life, finds its ultimate origin in random
spikes sculpted by the trillions of synapses laid down during our
lifelong maturation and education. (190)”
The lesson learned is that we are not separate from nature. The same
deterministic processes taking place in nature are the same
processes taking place in our brain. The difference is that the
brain is a very complex and specialized evolved system that is able
to compress information quickly and efficiently giving us the
illusion that we are somehow separate from the rest of the universe.
The brain is not completely deterministic, but rather, an organ that
fights entropy by compressing information into meaning and then
decompressing meaning into information in a cyclical process. To
understand consciousness it is necessary to understand the basic
laws of physics, evolution. and life. Consciousness, like life, is
an emergent property of the processes of randomness, information,
and meaning.
Thomas E. Woodward, James P. Gills
The mapping of all 3.1 billion letters of our genome was a
monumental achievement of the Human Genome Project launched in 1990
and completed in 2003, but it fell well short of expectations for
the anticipated spin-offs of new drugs and treatments for curing
disease that drug companies had counted on. The primary reason for
this disappointment is that the project marked the end of the
deterministic model of biology and revealed the sobering news that
genes alone are not the prime controllers of our health.
When the project began, it was assumed that there was a one-to-one
correspondence between our genes and the proteins they create, and
since there are about 130,000 different proteins, it was believed
there would be a corresponding number of genes. But only around 23
thousand genes were identified, comparable to the number found in a
flat worm. It is humbling to acknowledge that a species of wheat has
nearly sixteen billion letters of DNA code per cell; salamanders and
newt species have from 10 billion to 120 billion letters, about four
times more than humans. (36) Obviously, the quantity of genes is not
the determining factor in the complexity of a species. Recent
research is showing that our epigenome, (meaning “above the gene”)
is the “intelligence” that controls genes and is the most
significant reason for human complexity.
The epigenome is not simply one program, but rather a variety of
dynamic programs controlling the genome, that can change over time,
respond to nutrition and life habits, and can be passed on to
successive generations. Hail Jean-Baptiste Lamarck! One such piece
of software is the “splicing code” found within sequences of
unspecified DNA, once considered to be “junk.” Discovered in 2007,
this single sequenced instruction can spice together a wide variety
of different genes numbering in the thousands.
A typical human gene is composed of between one thousand and five
thousand pairs of DNA letters or bases. These bases are attached to
a five-carbon sugar molecule and a phosphate molecule making up a
single nucleotide forming the back bone of the DNA strand. These DNA
strands are very efficiently compacted in each cell because they are
wound around millions of “spools” made of eight proteins called
histones that fold into irregular three dimensional “Z” shapes. (60)
The histone spools are tagged at various locations with an acetyl
molecule that is put in place by protein machines (histone acetylase
enzyme). The acetyl tags make it easier for the DNA to be pulled off
the spool and read. On the other hand, removal of the acetyl tags by
protein machines (histone deacetylase enzyme) make the DNA pack more
closely to the spools and therefore more difficult to read.
When it comes time to read the DNA strand, molecular protein
machines unwind a section of the code exposing the rungs which
reveal tens of millions of C bases that are additionally tagged with
a small methyl molecule consisting of one carbon atom and three
hydrogen atoms. The entire molecule is called a methylated cytosine
and there are about two hundred million methyl tags in a single
nucleus. These methyl tags tend to silence the gene. Amazingly, when
the strand of DNA is being duplicated the methyl tags are reattached
to the new strand by molecular protein machines. Woodward says:
“Consider the dozens of delicate operations on the histone spools to
carry out the addition or removal of acetyl tags, phosphate tags,
and methyl tags on the various histone tails. A set of complex,
exquisitely engineered machines are busy adding, deleting, or
transferring those tags. Thus, discovering the epigenome is like
landing on an entirely new continent filled with endless examples of
irreducible complexity.”(115)
Too many or too few of these tags are suspected of causing diseases
such as cancer. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that
exposure to BPA in plastics can cause the removal of methyl tags
which could lead to obesity and cancer.
One of the most sought after answers in biology over the past
century has been the question of how a fertilized egg and embryo
which contains all the information that will be transferred to
succeeding cells through replication can differentiate and form into
all of the specialized organs and tissues in the human body. This
can be explained only if there are multiple programs operating
outside of the genome controlling the large number of specialized
cell types in mammals. Humans, for example, who have about 210
different cell types, have a similar number of epigenome programs
tailored for each cell type.
In some ways the answer to the question of how cells are able to
differentiate has simply been kicked down the road. Having 210
different programs for different cells still does not tell us how
the programs get established in the first place. As Woodward says,
“How do two hundred epigenetic programs unfurl from a single
fertilized egg?” One researcher suggests that DNA reprograms the
epigenome, and in turn, the epigenome orchestrates DNA. This
explanation is one of many such chicken-and-egg scenarios that occur
in biological organisms. The protein, DNA, RNA system is another
example. DNA is dependent upon the protein machines to replicate and
to create proteins, and these same proteins are themselves created
by DNA. One must wonder which came first since each is impotent
without reference to the other.
The process of blood-clotting offers another example of an
irreducible system. Hundreds of components of the system operating
in a step-by-step process must all work together at just the right
time for clotting to occur, yet one wonders how this step-by-step
process could have evolved when none of the components working alone
serve any biological advantage.
My solution to the chicken-and-egg problem is to invoke an idea in
physics called the principle of complementarity in which no linear
unfolding of events takes place; rather, an emergent complementary
system arises in which the parts of the system have no independent
existence; but manifests only as a complement of the existence of
something else; whereupon, each entity depends upon, yet is
exclusive of the other. Niels Bohr was the first physicist to use
the idea of complementarities to explain the wave/particle duality.
The concept of complementarity requires meaning to be an objective
part of reality.
Sadly, as often happens, when science runs up against a dead end, a
homunculus is born. In this case, the conundrum of the
chicken-and-egg perplexity, seemed to give the authors license to
invoke an all-knowing, all-encompassing, transcendent being they
refer to as “God”, who, ironically, is assigned a gender, and
thereafter referred to as “he!” The tendency of some scholars to
regress into reductio ad infinitum serves no purpose and leaves
nothing for science to build upon.
One of the main lessons of The Mysterious Epigenome is that nature
is like an onion. As science peels away successive layers of
reality, new layers are always revealed beneath the last. The Human
Genome Project was thought by many scientists to be the “ground”
layer of reality, but an astounding world exists below, or shall we
say “above,” the level of the genome that will occupy scientific
research for generations. Mapping the 3.1 billion letters of the
genome will pale in comparison to the mapping of the 210 epigenetic
programs of all 210 specialized cells.