Addy Pross
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Addy Pross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yes, this is very interesting because the problem, biology has given, of course, physicists hard burn for a century. I mean, Schrodinger and Wigner and Bohr, They basically said life doesn't make sense according to the known physical principles. And I think it was Schrodinger that hinted that there may be laws of physics that need to be discovered yet to be able to explain all of this.
But it turns, you know, now I'm going to say something cruel, that between physics and biology, there's this other little subject called chemistry that can help bridge between the two. And I think the kinetic dimension is suddenly allowing that physical biological connection to come together.
Yeah, this is a wonderful question. And I think... What we can see through this approach is the beginning of cognition because we're saying inherently the DKS system is cognitive. If cognitive means an awareness of the environment, it is aware. There's a definition of cognition that is a system that is able to store, access, and and act on information.
But that's exactly what a D-care system does. The energy and material that are coming in are, if you like, information input, and it acquires that information and responds to that information. So we can see essentially the beginning of cognition in in the way that a DK system behaves. By definition, it is cognitive.
And then we come to the tricky bit that one couldn't have predicted that this internal sense, this since the inner sense that we have comes about as a result of self-awareness. Because in order to be able to deal better with the outside, you've got to look after your inside. You've got to be aware of what's happening inside of you. Your internal state is relevant to your ability to
respond and react to the external environment. So there's a growing tendency of self-awareness that comes about naturally, if you like, through this evolutionary process. By knowing ourselves, look what we humans have done. We know ourselves to the extent that we understand all of the physiological processes, the metabolic processes that are going on within our bodies. Amazing.
But apparently, one can argue that the cell, the bacterial cell, already is aware of its own state and response to changes in the environment through... interacting with the environment and its state may change. And of course, phenomena like, you know, changing, locating, moving toward chemo taxes, moving towards food.
It's an awareness of its environment and its internal state says, I'm hungry, go get some food.
Yeah. Look, actually, this way of thinking has helped me reach the conclusion that sometimes there's a tendency for philosophers to say that everything we see around us may be illusory. It may not exist. But I actually say now that that can't be right because –
If we, everything, nature has given us all of these tools to persist and we, our understanding of the environment is important for our persistence. So it is there for a purpose. Consciousness, our mental activity apparently takes up something like 20% of our energy, a huge amount. amount of energy is put into our cognitive state, nature wouldn't do that if there wasn't some return for that.
And so our... The fact that what we see is what is really there has to be true because otherwise the cost, if we get confused about it, then we won't persist. People who lose track with reality can't survive. So I'm comfortable with that idea. In fact, it's very interesting. In our eyes, the vision, the image on our retina is an inverse image.
But nature knows that the image is the other way, so we correct for that. In other words, nature wants us to see things as they are. And I think – and that is an interesting thought, which has a bearing on whether the whole world is an illusion. And as Descartes said, the only thing I'm sure of is that I exist. Well, maybe we can take that given the –
The understanding of the interaction between self and the environment, maybe we could go a step further and be convinced that there is a universe out there after all and we're not making all of this up.
I think in that sense that... that consciousness and cognition started off from the very beginning of the evolutionary process. And it's remarkable, I have to make a comment on this, because Darwin, in his... Endless wisdom already foresaw that. He said in his treatise that the process of evolution takes place along both physical and mental dimensions. He was extraordinary.
He understood that the mental dimension couldn't just pop up in the middle willy-nilly, out of a physical situation on its own, that's not how evolution works. Evolution improves on something that had to be there. So Darwin already foresaw the mental dimension as being there from the beginning of the evolutionary process. So going back to that point, so bacteria are...
cognitive and i'm wary of the term conscious but obviously on the spectrum from naught to 10 if we're a 9.5 the bacteria are 0.3 yeah but they have something there in order for them to deal with the problems that they encounter and that they have to solve
Exactly. Exactly. In that sense, what was it called? The central dogma with which we started information flows from the genome, DNA, RNA, protein. We have to modify that. It's a more dynamic type of The cell is holistically, a wonderful term from Stuart Kaufman, the cell is holistically self-replicating. In other words, no element in it on its own is self-replicating.
If you take a DNA molecule and put it on the table, and even if you throw nucleotides at it, it doesn't make copies of itself. It doesn't work. We're in a cycle that closes A makes B, B makes C, D, E, F makes A. And once the cycle is closed, you have a self-replicating system. And the cell is, if you like, holistically self-replicating where everything plays a part.
And the genome is one part, a very important part, but it is just a part of the holistic cycle.
Great talking to you, Sean.
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