[continued from previous message]   
      
   > electricity that, Levin suspects, makes basic cognition possible.   
   >   
   > We’ve known about bioelectricity for centuries, as you might recall from   
   > high school biology: send a jolt through a frog and its leg will twitch,   
   > right? But Levin is demonstrating that it plays a much bigger role than   
   > anyone realized. He suspects that organisms store all kinds of   
   > information not just in their cells, but in the patterns of electrical   
   > currents passing between the cells. The specific pattern would convey   
   > information to other cells.   
   >   
   > And what about plants? After all, we know that plant cells use   
   > electrical signaling, too. And over the past decade, scientific   
   > experiments have shown that they do a whole lot more than seeking out   
   > certain outcomes like sunlight and avoiding others. They remember and   
   > learn from experience, a fact the ecologist Monica Gagliano established   
   > with the help of Mimosa pudica, a plant known for defensively folding in   
   > its leaves in response to physical stimuli. Gagliano dropped these   
   > plants from a height onto a foam base and, as expected, the leaves   
   > curled up at the shock. But after being dropped several times, the   
   > plants learned that the drops were pretty harmless, so they kept their   
   > leaves open during future drops even a month later.   
   >   
   > Plants have many other tricks up their leaves: they keep track of how   
   > long it’s been since bees last visited, they send out biochemical   
   > distress signals to other plants, and they appear to lose consciousness   
   > when sedated with anesthesia.   
   >   
   > Levin thinks networks of electrical signals may be making such things   
   > possible: storing memories, learning, solving problems creatively in   
   > short, cognition.   
   >   
   > "We know that things that don’t have brains have cognitive capacities,"   
   > Levin said. "Frankly, I don’t understand how it took this long for this   
   > view to really come back." Given what evolution tells us about the   
   > gradual development of mind, "there’s no getting away from the fact that   
   > cognition exists widely and long before brains and nerves appear."   
   >   
   > In case you’re wondering why Levin prefers to speak about cognition, not   
   > consciousness: The former is about functional abilities we can observe   
   > from our third-person perspective. The latter is about what it feels   
   > like to be a creature from that creature’s own perspective so it’s hard,   
   > if not impossible, to get at experimentally. Nevertheless, Levin told   
   > me, "If I had to put dollars down right now, I do think that   
   > consciousness is very ubiquitous and primary, and I think it does go   
   > along with cognition."   
   >   
   > "All life is sense-making"   
   > Of course, not everyone is ready to bet on panpsychism. For scientists   
   > and philosophers who believe consciousness resides in more than just   
   > humans and animals but are not convinced it resides in atoms, there’s a   
   > kind of in-between position: biopsychism. That’s the view that all   
   > living organisms and only living organisms are conscious.   
   >   
   > Some scientists are busily amassing evidence that could support that   
   > view. Aware that anything with "psychism" in its name will probably be   
   > branded as woo-woo, they use terms like "minimal intelligence" or "basal   
   > cognition." Their goal is to investigate signs of cognition at the base   
   > of the tree of life in organisms that have very simple nervous systems   
   > or lack them altogether because they appeared early in the story of   
   > evolution.   
   >   
   > Some of these researchers note that attributing consciousness to, say,   
   > plants gels nicely with a theory of consciousness that’s becoming   
   > increasingly popular in the scientific community: integrated information   
   > theory, which says that consciousness is basically equivalent to   
   > integrated information. "Integration" happens when different elements in   
   > a system communicate with each other, whether that’s neurons   
   > communicating in a brain, or something else. The more integrated   
   > information there is in a system, the greater the degree of   
   > consciousness it’s got. If the cells in a plant are sharing and   
   > integrating information through bioelectricity, maybe it’s not that big   
   > of a leap to think the plant has some minimal degree of consciousness.   
   >   
   > Evan Thompson, a professor of philosophy at the University of British   
   > Columbia, argued in his 2007 book Mind in Life that only humans and   
   > animals with nervous systems make the cut. But he later changed his   
   > mind. After all, he reasoned, any living thing has to make sense of its   
   > environment, pursue its goals, and solve problems in order to survive.   
   > Whether you’re a tiger or a fern, a slime mold or a bacterium, you need   
   > to find a way to get food, reproduce, and adapt when faced with hostile   
   > conditions. By its very nature, living seems to be a process of   
   > cognition.   
   >   
   > "All life is sense-making," Thompson told me. "The reason I think we can   
   > assume that it’s basic to all life is that it’s actually much harder to   
   > make sense of the idea that a system that produces itself metabolically   
   > can have directed, oriented behavior without some kind of motivation or   
   > drive that involves affect."   
   >   
   > In other words, what does it even mean to say that a living being is   
   > pursuing goals but doesn’t want anything?   
   >   
   > The downside for biopsychism, though, is that it’s still stuck with the   
   > "hard problem" of consciousness, since it reinforces the idea that   
   > there’s a sharp break between conscious and nonconscious or between   
   > living and nonliving stuff. And so, philosophers like Strawson and   
   > scientists like Levin think we need to go further, all the way to   
   > panpsychism.   
   >   
   > I asked Levin what he thinks is going on inside a plant when it bends   
   > toward the light: Is it just acting mechanically, or does it want the   
   > light? "All these dichotomies are false dichotomies," he replied. "What   
   > most people say is, ‘Oh, that’s just a mechanical system following the   
   > laws of physics.’ Well, what do you think you are?"   
   >   
   > Okay, but how could an atom be conscious?   
   > Debates about theories of consciousness are kind of like a party game.   
   > The central question is: How low can you go? Are you willing to ascribe   
   > consciousness to animals? Plants? Cells? Atoms? Subatomic particles?   
   >   
   > Even if you believe that all living things have some degree of   
   > consciousness, you might have trouble with the idea that an atom or an   
   > electron is conscious. It’s hard to understand what that could possibly   
   > look like.   
   >   
   > Panpsychist thinkers are quick to explain that they’re not suggesting   
   > these particles have complex forms of consciousness, like decision-   
   > making or meta-cognition ("I want X, and I know that I want X"). They’re   
   > envisioning something way more basic. Remember that to have   
   > consciousness is just to have a perspective on the world, a feeling of   
   > what it’s like to be you.   
   >   
   > "For an electron, there’s no meta-cognition, no decision-making,"   
   > Leidenhag said. "But when it encounters another electron with another   
   > negative charge, it repels." For any particle, she suggests, "there’s   
   > something that it’s like for it to be attracted or repelled." This   
   > attraction or repulsion is a minimal sense of wanting or not wanting.   
   >   
   > "Cognition that’s really, really simple looks like physics to us," Levin   
   > told me. For example, we typically assume a key feature of cognition is   
      
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   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
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