Science Closes in on a Possible Biological Explanation for Sentience

Consciousness: the awareness or perception of something by a person; the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world;

Sentience: the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively; the ability to experience sensations, known in philosophy of mind as qualia; (this may not be true: “sentience appears at a certain stage in humans, as in other species, and brain damage can result in those abilities being lost so not all humans are sentient”)

Mind: the element or aspect of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought, including abstract thought about things not directly sensed by human senses such as sight, touch, smell or hearing


The February 2020 issue of Scientific American includes an article, In Search of The Brain’s Social Road Maps. The article summarizes research that is beginning to describe how the brain and mind might work in terms of monitoring and guiding our movements in space and time, social relations, memory and abstract thinking.

The concept of cognitive maps as a part of the workings of the mind arose in 1948 in experiments with rats that generated data interpreted as rats being able to think abstractly. The data was fully consistent with a brain that could think in terms of locations in space without having physically been to the locations. That was seen when rats knew how to navigate a maze they had never been through.

Later research discovered neurons in the brain that helped keep time, which facilitated mapping of space. The brain maps are little clumps of neurons (place cells) that fire together when sense inputs or abstract thinking lead to known locations. Three clumps of neurons (grid cells) constitute triangles corresponding to a known place. When a known person is encountered a 2-dimensional map for that person is activated with the perceived power of the person and their social closeness being the two axes. Place and grid cells are now hypothesized to play a role in creating social maps. If that is true, then the human mind creates maps for both places in space and the social position of other people relative to the observer.

The Jennifer Aniston Neuron

Our brains create concepts or images of other people they know. Specific neurons are involved. The authors write:

“The progression from the physical to the abstract carries over into the way the brain represents social relationships. Various bits of knowledge about another person are distilled into the concept of that individual. When we see a photograph of someone or hear or see that person’s name, the same hippocampal cells will fire, regardless of the sensory details of the stimulus (for example, the famous “Jennifer Aniston neuron” described by Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues). These hippocampal cells are responsible for representing concepts of specific individuals.

Other hippocampal cells track the physical locations of others and are called social place cells. In an experiment by David Omer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and their colleagues, bats observed other bats navigating a simple maze to reach a reward. The task of an observer bat was to simply watch and learn from a navigating bat, enabling it to subsequently navigate the same route to get the same reward. When the observer bat watched, hippocampal cells fired corresponding to the location of the other bat.

Hippocampal activity also tracks social hierarchies: the demands of a boss and a co-worker, for instance, may be valued differently and confer different social standings. Common metaphors illustrate the spatial dimensions of a hierarchy: a person may try to gain status to “climb the social ladder” or “look down” at someone below them. Other factors are also critical. Biological relatedness, common group goals, the remembered history of favors and slights—all determine social proximity or distance. Human relationships can be conceived of as geometric coordinates in social space that are defined by the dimensions of hierarchy and affiliation.”

Thus if bat and human brains work alike, they commingle map information about space and time with images of the social power vs. closeness map location of others. Experiments can follow human brains in space and time as they form various social relationships with characters in computer games. Evolving human relationships in these games can be plotted as trajectories through social space, giving data on angles and lengths of the social vectors our brains create.

The world is too complex, we need to model and map it to simplify it

What all this appears to boil down to is this: The world is too complicated to deal with directly. We cannot test all possibilities in life, so we need some way to think abstractly about them. That avoids the need to test many possibilities without ever directly experiencing them. To simplify and model reality, our brains use clusters of neurons to create and represent physical maps of space, time and other people. Using that information our brains can recall memories, think abstractly and come to new insights and beliefs about their physical and social situation without directly experiencing reality. Maybe this sort of exercise in reviewing and making maps is the basis of consciousness and/or sentience for humans, and possibly other animals.

The U.S. Commander-in-Chief...

The Twitterverse is lit up like a Christmas Tree.  With the POTUS impeachment trial underway, the nasty, name-calling insults are flying, and in part, being led by America’s Commander-in-Chief.  Here’s one interesting example:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Our case against lyin’, cheatin’, liddle’ Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrat Party, starts today at 10:00 A.M. on @FoxNews, @OANN or Fake News @CNN or Fake News MSDNC!

9:37 AM · Jan 25, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

I know that it is said that geniuses can be quite eccentric.  I can get that.  They say even Einstein had a problem tying his shoelaces. But to me, in my opinion, this tweet, these musings, are of someone not quite in control of his mental faculties, let alone some “stable genius.”  And these apparently are the thoughts of a man who, it is said, occupies the “most powerful political office on the planet.”

Questions:

1. Though there are many to choose from, what is your assessment of this particular tweet by Donald Trump?  If there are any psychologists in the house, we’d especially like to read your considered, qualified thoughts.  But all feel free to analyze.
    
2. Is Donald Trump a good role model for our country, for the rest of the world, not to mention his young son, Barron, still in his somewhat formative years?
    
3. Should a man of Donald Trump’s mental state have access to and complete control over the nuclear launch codes, which cannot be questioned by (apparently) anyone?
    
4. Is America in big trouble?  If so, is it “fixable?”  If yes, “how?”

Chapter Review: The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism

The Public Philosophy of Contemporary Liberalism is chapter 1 of Michael Sandel’s 1996 book, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Sandel, a philosopher and Professor of Government at Harvard, is an astute observer of the human condition and America’s social and political predicament. His book asks questions[1] about why so many Americans are unhappy with government and each other and why the two parties are unable to make sense of America’s situation. Those question sound relevant today in January of 2020. Sandel understood in 1996 a significant part of why some people rebelled and voted to reject the broken system they saw in 2016.

One key argument that Sandel makes is that politics and morality cannot be disentangled. That argument goes against the liberalism ideology that arose in the 1950s and still dominates American politics today. The belief that politics is inherently and mostly a moral endeavor is one I came to myself in the last 18 years or so. That was based on empirical evidence from modern cognitive and social science. By contrast, Sandel arrived at his understanding based on his observations and how he logically analyzed society’s situation. Two different lines of inquiry point to the same conclusion.

The discontent

Sandel argues that two fears lie at the heart of modern American discontent. The first is that we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives (self-government), e.g., demographic changes are unsettling to some people. The second is that the moral fabric of family, community and nation are unravelling. These fear generate anxiety: “It is an anxiety that the prevailing political agenda has failed to answer or even address.” Sandel’s anxiety argument is supported by some evidence from recent empirical research indicating that many people are concerned about loss of status and social changes. The core of the anxiety argument is that feelings of loss of control or self-government and moral unravelling are products of the rise of a variant of liberalism that has come to dominate American politics since the 1950s.

The new ideology

Sandel describes the variant of liberalism that arose in the 1950s in America. Its origins date back to John Locke (1632-1704), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). The central idea of the American variant is that “government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse.” This ideological belief recognizes that people disagree about how best to live. Government and laws should therefore be neutral about what vision is best. Instead, liberty arises when government provides rights that respect people as “free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends.” Sandel calls this form of public life a ‘procedural public’ because government emphasizes fair procedures over particular ends.

Importantly, because liberalism conceives of people as free and independent, they are unencumbered by any moral or civic burdens or ties that they do not choose to accept. Sandel argues that this lack of moral and civic burdens and ties leads to the sense of disempowerment and anxiety that America is experiencing now. In short, liberalism “cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot inspire the sense of community and civic engagement that liberty requires.” That is Sandel’s core complaint about modern American liberalism.

The old ideology

The modern liberalism variant replaced a republicanism ideology. That republicanism held that liberty depends on people sharing in self-government or self-rule. Unlike sharing in self-government under liberalism, under republicanism means citizens deliberate to define and shape the public interest and the people’s destiny. Unlike liberalism, republicanism asks of citizens that they acquire some knowledge of public affairs and have a sense of moral concern for the whole of society. Republican citizens are thus asked to acquire republican qualities of character and civic virtues. Republican government is tasked with cultivating qualities of character that self-government requires.

Thus, unlike the liberal citizen, the republican citizen is asked to take on moral and civic burdens that are inherent in self-rule.

Sandel points out that both liberal and republican[2] forms of governance have been present in America from the start but their influence has waxed and waned over various periods of time.

It’s about morals and social glue

Liberalism tends to shy away from engaging moral issues. That creates a sense of emptiness and anxiety because humans are moral creatures and politics is riddled with moral concerns. Liberalism doesn't provide a glue to hold people together and create a common sense of community. Liberalism doesn't promote a particular view and thus “liberal political theory insists on toleration, fair procedures and respect for individual rights.” People choose their own values, including anti-social and destructive values. That is moral relativism, which basically says, all morals and all ways of life are equal. Of course, the logic flaw there is that liberalism does support core moral values of freedom and fairness: “The relativist defense of liberalism is no defense at all.”

At least sometimes, probably usually, it is impossible to separate decisions about morals from political choices. Policy based on moral decisions can be unconscious decisions, but they are decisions nonetheless. Even a political choice that claims to be purely neutral about underlying moral issues cannot always (ever?) be neutral. In the case of abortion, a liberal can defend abortion arguing the woman’s right to choose and a right to privacy. That may seem morally neutral but it isn’t. It implicitly rejects the moral argument that the moral status of a fertilized human egg, a human fetus and a baby are all equivalent and thus abortion is murder.

Sandel makes the same case regarding the slavery debates between Abe Lincoln and Steven Douglas. Douglas argued the liberal point that since people disagreed over the morality of slavery, the central government should not decide the slavery issue. To do so would violate the constitution and risk civil war. Therefore, ignore the moral question and let the states should decide. Lincoln took the republican position and rejected that. He argued the question was inherently and unavoidably moral. Pretending to be neutral makes no difference: “Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about?” Even in the face of civil war, Lincoln understood that it made no political or moral sense to aspire to political neutrality.

In essence, what Sandel argues is that our current political ideology isn’t up to the task of socially gluing a complex, diverse country like the US together. If he is at least mostly right, then is republicanism an ideology that can do better? Sandel believes it could be.

In this 2-minute video, Sandel briefly touches on republicanism. He argues that wealth inequality erodes republican ideals, which require some sort of shared experience to help build a shared sense of community, social cohesion and the common good.





Footnotes:
1. Sandel’s book deals with complicated political theory and moral philosophy. It was hard for me to to read and understand. His style of prose in this book is dense, technical, academic. That is unfortunate. This insightful book deserves a wider audience that a simplifying rewrite might generate.


So familiar is this vision of freedom that it seems a permanent feature of the American political and constitutional tradition. But Americans have not always understood freedom in this way. As a reigning public philosophy, the version of liberalism that informs our present debates is a recent arrival, a development of the last forty or fifty years. Its distinctive character can best be seen by contrast with a rival philosophy that it gradually displaced. This rival public philosophy is a version of republican political theory. Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-government.

2. Sandel acknowledges that republicanism has lead to bad things in the past that he calls “episodes of darkness.” He wrote in 1996, a time when government was still somewhat functional. American conservatives still mostly believed in facts and logic, although that moral standard was eroding. It would be interesting to know what Sandel thinks of our current situation and whether current conservatism is a toxic variant of liberalism, republicanism or something mostly different.

Could invisible aliens exist among us?

The Earth might be crawling with undiscovered alien creatures whose biochemistry is very different from life as we know it. An astrobiologist explains:

They probably won’t look anything like this. Image via Martina Badini/ Shutterstock/ The Conversation.

By Samantha Rolfe, University of Hertfordshire

Life is pretty easy to recognize. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym MRSGREN to describe it. It stands for movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition.

But Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial College London, recently said that alien lifeforms that are impossible to spot may be living among us. How could that be possible?

While life may be easy to recognize, it’s actually notoriously difficult to define and has had scientists and philosophers in debate for centuries – if not millennia. For example, a 3D printer can reproduce itself, but we wouldn’t call it alive. On the other hand, a mule is famously sterile, but we would never say it doesn’t live.

As nobody can agree, there are more than 100 definitions of what life is. An alternative (but imperfect) approach is describing life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which works for many cases we want to describe.

The lack of definition is a huge problem when it comes to searching for life in space. Not being able to define life other than we’ll know it when we see it means we are truly limiting ourselves to geocentric, possibly even anthropocentric, ideas of what life looks like. When we think about aliens, we often picture a humanoid creature. But the intelligent life we are searching for doesn’t have to be humanoid.

Life, but not as we know it

Sharman says she believes aliens exist and

… there’s no two ways about it.

 Furthermore, she wonders:

Will they be like you and me, made up of carbon and nitrogen? Maybe not. It’s possible they’re here right now and we simply can’t see them.

Such life would exist in a shadow biosphere. By that, I don’t mean a ghost realm, but undiscovered creatures probably with a different biochemistry. This means we can’t study or even notice them because they are outside of our comprehension. Assuming it exists, such a shadow biosphere would probably be microscopic.

So why haven’t we found it? We have limited ways of studying the microscopic world as only a small percentage of microbes can be cultured in a lab. This may mean that there could indeed be many lifeforms we haven’t yet spotted. We do now have the ability to sequence the DNA of unculturable strains of microbes, but this can only detect life as we know it – that contain DNA.

If we find such a biosphere, however, it is unclear whether we should call it alien. That depends on whether we mean of extraterrestrial origin or simply unfamiliar.

Silicon-based life

A popular suggestion for an alternative biochemistry is one based on silicon rather than carbon. It makes sense, even from a geocentric point of view. Around 90% of the Earth is made up of silicon, iron, magnesium and oxygen, which means there’s lots to go around for building potential life.

Silicon is similar to carbon; it has four electrons available for creating bonds with other atoms. But silicon is heavier, with 14 protons (protons make up the atomic nucleus with neutrons) compared to the six in the carbon nucleus. While carbon can create strong double and triple bonds to form long chains useful for many functions, such as building cell walls, it is much harder for silicon. It struggles to create strong bonds, so long-chain molecules are much less stable.

What’s more, common silicon compounds, such as silicon dioxide (or silica), are generally solid at terrestrial temperatures and insoluble in water. Compare this to highly soluble carbon dioxide, for example, and we see that carbon is more flexible and provides many more molecular possibilities.

Life on Earth is fundamentally different from the bulk composition of the Earth. Another argument against a silicon-based shadow biosphere is that too much silicon is locked up in rocks. In fact, the chemical composition of life on Earth has an approximate correlation with the chemical composition of the sun, with 98% of atoms in biology consisting of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. So if there were viable silicon lifeforms here, they may have evolved elsewhere.

That said, there are arguments in favor of silicon-based life on Earth. Nature is adaptable. A few years ago, scientists at Caltech managed to breed a bacterial protein that created bonds with silicon – essentially bringing silicon to life. So even though silicon is inflexible compared with carbon, it could perhaps find ways to assemble into living organisms, potentially including carbon.

And when it comes to other places in space, such as Saturn’s moon Titan or planets orbiting other stars, we certainly can’t rule out the possibility of silicon-based life.

To find it, we have to somehow think outside of the terrestrial biology box and figure out ways of recognizing lifeforms that are fundamentally different from the carbon-based form. There are plenty of experiments testing out these alternative biochemistries, such as the one from Caltech.

Regardless of the belief held by many that life exists elsewhere in the universe, we have no evidence for that. So it is important to consider all life as precious, no matter its size, quantity or location. The Earth supports the only known life in the universe. So no matter what form life elsewhere in the solar system or universe may take, we have to make sure we protect it from harmful contamination – whether it is terrestrial life or alien lifeforms.

So could aliens be among us? I don’t believe that we have been visited by a life form with the technology to travel across the vast distances of space. But we do have evidence for life-forming, carbon-based molecules having arrived on Earth on meteorites, so the evidence certainly doesn’t rule out the same possibility for more unfamiliar life forms.

Samantha Rolfe, Lecturer in Astrobiology and Principal Technical Officer at Bayfordbury Observatory, University of Hertfordshire

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bottom line: An astrobiologist suggests that Earth may be crawling with undiscovered creatures with a different biochemistry from life as we know it.
https://flipboard.com/article/could-invisible-aliens-exist-among-us/a-5ZLBdHdNSC-3eCrGdd_eoQ%3Aa%3A987847798-8bd4bb01e9%2Fearthsky.org

Aliens definitely exist and they could be living among us on Earth, says Britain's first astronaut:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/06/uk/helen-sharman-aliens-exist-scli-scn-gbr-intl/index.html

Bloomberg attacks Trump in his safe space

Fox & Friends aired a commercial by the former New York mayor hitting Trump, then interviewed Bloomberg's campaign manager.

Mike Bloomberg is attacking President Donald Trump in his safe space.

On Thursday morning, the Democrat premiered his newest ad attacking the president on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite program that frequently lavishes praise on him. Adding insult, the show also interviewed Bloomberg’s top presidential campaign adviser, Kevin Sheekey.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/23/bloomberg-attacks-trump-102723

Trump Disrespects Our Troops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izkONjZM9zI

Fox & Friends Airs Brutal Bloomberg Ad Highlighting Trump’s ‘Erratic and Out of Control’ Attacks on the Military

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-friends-airs-brutal-bloomberg-ad-highlighting-trumps-erratic-and-out-of-control-attacks-on-the-military/

The Plot to Overthrow FDR

A 6-minute NPR broadcast from 2012 is highly relevant to America's polarized politics today. The language people used was apocalyptic about the end of America and the Constitution. There was a real plot to overthrow FDR as president and replace him with a dictator.

The broadcast includes this introduction:

“It was a dangerous time in America: The economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system. The newly elected president pursued an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. ‘This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty,’ one senator wrote to a colleague. ‘The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom.’” -- Republican Sen. Henry D. Hatfield (R-WV) criticizing FDR’s policies, 1933