From Cell to Society: The Body-Mind Problem, Levels of Reality and what we are in the middle of it
By: Rafael Augusto
Tags: Cognitive Science, Intuition, Consciousness, Unconscious, Science

Homo Sapiens, in an attempt to imitate the brain, created the computer — made up of dispositions, which make it act in the X way in the case of the Y stimulus (which is the perceptible basis of the mind). Well, let’s start in the cell.

The cell is the smallest living organism, the largest organism being a set of cells that share the same genetic code. Over millions of years of a very slow evolution in relation to our individual life, one of the things that characterizes it is an always increasingly complex interaction between individual cells, each programmed with dispositions, to give an output to a given input, and each one of them willing — being that will the expression of that output.

Computers do not reproduce, but they re-produce themselves (they are produced from an always updated starting point) because man does not reproduce only biologically, but mentally, starting each being from a collective memory and being innovations made from previous innovations — allowing the language a non-biological evolution. But there is a difference: nature does not think, and it is this non-thought that characterizes evolution — what Dawkins called “the blind watchmaker”: each organism being a random possibility of adaptation to a certain environment, or reproducing itself for survival, spreading its genetic code and dying, or not working out as a possibility and dying. Over millions of years, a rule forms sets of cells that act in increasingly complex sets, organized into several systems that perform several functions: digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, etc. And the structure of the body reflects the structure of the cell: the cells of the nervous system have a function identical to that of the nucleus of the cell: to manage and control, perceiving the environment in some way. The brain does it through the senses, in a head with ears, eyes, nose, mouth and a center that interprets and organizes signals (the brain and its various systems).

From this increasingly complex interaction between cells with will, first emerges a mind that has mental representations of how to act — mental images that express propensities, results of abstract rules marked by emotions and feelings, by feeling.

Thus, our emotions and feelings are the most advanced versions of homeostasis — life management — present in any cell and result of the interaction between them: the common will of many cells in constant interaction. Hence emerges a mind (mental images), which we share with many other animals, a Self (that we share with some) and a consciousness. Now let us see: what are these joint voices of which any mental phenomenon is an expression? Is the Self me, the one writing, and you, the one reading? Consciousness is the you, who knows that it is reading there, and the I, who knows that it is here writing. The mind, all the images and thoughts. And not just visual images, but any pain, feeling or sensation. And this being all variations of feeling, we can say that the cell feels, and the simple interaction between millions of cells, or the product of interaction that forms very complex units, composed by very specialized and developed systems, feels (mentally), is (having a perspective, a Self), and knows that it feels and that it is.

But what has to be noticed, in a matter of perspective, is that no cell knows of my existence as a Self, or a mind, or a consciousness, as I do not know of the existence of the will of the singular cell. Of course I can deduce it after thousands of years of thought and investigation, but the mental experience of the organism ignores that which it results from, like any perspective: it is and eventually it knows that it is, acting in a certain way, still guided, and forever, by the mechanisms of life management that bring us closer to what evolution has learned that was good and away from what evolution has learned was bad, whether through good or bad smells, good or bad opinions, good or bad songs, through boredom, fear, love or loathing.

What is kept from the dispositions of our brains is not the object, but dispositional guides that relate object, environment and self. It was not in my brain the person I love, it was in my brain the willingness to love someone under certain circumstances. That is, several factors — an incalculable conjunctive and disjunctive set of outer, inner, multidimensional factors — contribute to everything that goes on in my brain, and therefore in my mind, at a given moment.

Pay attention to your body’s capacities for a second: you think, sit, move, recycle food, take energy away from it, take oxygen out of the surrounding air, spread it through the blood pumped through the heart; it has bones that hold a structure, muscles that move it and skin that protects it. It has organs! All that you are is a cluster of organs so complex that it became self-conscious, but only partially. An agglomerate of organs that is an activity between cells.

And what is society if not a level above, if not an agglomeration of organs that is an activity among humans? In your body, cells die and reproduce. Today you are not the same cells you were ten years ago — taking away the neurons and retinal cells, which are always the same. And that did not change your identity. Also Portugal is “the same country” of two hundred years ago, with no living person being the same. And this is the intelligence of Nature, that of ignorance, of unconsciousness, of parts: an organism is the result of the interaction between cells, without the organism knowing its cells or the cells the organism that they compose. Humanity is a complex whole resulting from the interaction between humans, without knowing them and without them knowing it.

So shall we ask ourselves: are there more intelligent beings than us? And, to answer, just imagine a neuron or another cell asking itself the same: is there something smarter than the individual cell, whether nervous or not? If so, It’s me. And what am I? A society of cells, a self emerging from an extremely well-organized society of cells, which live and die in generations, in the world that is my body. Then, of course there’s something smarter than us if we seek beyond ourselves but not outside ourselves: as a simple interaction between nervous cells brings out a whole acting together, each individuality exercising its intended purpose, so is humanity: a complex system, composed of several subsystems, not thought or planned by anyone but emerging of the contact between humans. We are humanity’s neurons — individualities that, without necessarily touching each other, trade information and produce a whole that none of them decided or planned. Understanding the connection between every level of reality is understanding the biological, physical and chemical bases of our complexity and subjectivity; it’s understanding a society of cells and, consequently, our own society, our own interaction — an interaction between brains, minds, consciousnesses, guided by a cellular will to expand. It’s understanding that we are not just brains, but neurons of a bigger brain.