(Updated: 5 August 2008, 11:25, GMT+01:00.)
(A master of this document can be found on my Algorythmy blog.)
(The emphases made in the quotes below are by me. /Albatross)
One thing. One link I'd like to introduce, to direct attention to, leads to the thinkings of Professor Jonathan CW Edwards on Single Cells, particularly on the Neurons of the brain. Edwards general thoughts on this idea are here:
the
"Single Neuron Theory of Consciousness" (1),
and a formal paper by Edwards on this, first published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, is here:
"Is Consciousness only a property of the Single Cell?” (2).
I should, ought to, must, some day, attempt an essay on this idea, if only for to see how much of it I myself am able to express coherently, yet the idea of a single cell bearing awareness, in the terms stated by Prof. Edwards is indeed intriguing. Here's a quote from the beginning of the article of the first link above:
"Perhaps the most baffling unanswered question in science is how the physical working of the brain gives rise to conscious awareness. There are several reasons for this question being difficult, but the most important may be that we are looking for the wrong sort of answer. Almost everyone assumes that we are trying to explain one copy of awareness in each person's brain, one observer, one subject; one consciousness. However, as William James pointed out in 1890, having one copy of awareness in a brain makes very little sense, whether in terms of logic, physics or neurology. It would make much more sense if there were lots of copies and lots of subjects, even if it seems odd. There is also a basic biological reason for there being many subjects in a brain; a brain is not a single life unit but a colony of cellular life units which are not joined together by any mysterious 'life force'.
The hypothesis of Single Cell Consciousness (also known as the Single Neuron Theory of Consciousness) arose from the simple strategy of trying to find an explanation for awareness that fits with what we know about the physics of the brain. There appears to be only one option that works; that each brain cell is aware separately. Although this may seem to conflict with our experience it almost certainly does not."
Another li'l idea that tangents the study of consciousness I found in linguistics. This idea (which I'll get to in a moment, below) seems, to me, to have a relevance as regards the Single Cell Stuff of Professor Edwards. In short. Is there a relationship of the phonon and the phoneme? Are the lilts, movements and reactions of single cells, by whatever stimulus caused, translated into cascades of phonic waves that in patterns of spreading multiple drafts of interaction through neural networks, accented by reverberating recursions of further stimuli patterned on the single cells response to the first input, are these minute movements, the flexings of the cell a conscious song? Is is all just plain Rock 'n Roll? Is Life – a Singin', Swingin' Momentum? In the Single Cell Theory the membrane of a cell is viewed as the carrier of an elastic wave, capable of accessing 'rich' information, as Edwards would have it, it has SAMEDI, simultaneous (cotemporal) access to many elements (of information) in defined inter-relationships, i.e. it has access to a pattern. These patterns, as they propagate, might, give rise to further multiple drafts of actuation, to be received as patterns and cognized by the single cell in the networks of neural nets reciprocally surrounding differentiated single cell nodes? (The above be but a bit of hariolation from my side, but have a look at the nitty gritty below.)
Heres another quote from Professor Edwards formal article where this elastic wave of the neuron is seen as bearing the characteristics of a 'phonon', a quanta of sound, as in a bell-ring. From the section, "Which indivisible perturbations might carry our consciousness?" (3):
"The hypothesis seems to make two requirements of a wave that might endow the neuronal membrane as a whole with sentience linked to behaviour. Firstly, a wave with access to information about the state at all synapses would need its wavefront (or domain of non-trivial amplitude) to occupy the whole neuronal dendritic tree. This would seem to require a reverberating wave with time to make several passes – like the resonation of the bell. In Vitiello's (2001) terms it would be a long range correlation. Secondly, to be describable as a quantised field it probably needs to be energy conserving, at least to a first approximation. It is not clear that a purely electrical wave with these features exists. The basic Hodgkin-Huxley wave is a simple damped, dissipative biphasic packet. Fröhlich (1968) suggested an electromechanically coupled wave in which electrical and elastic potential were exchanged. He suggested that this wave might be a Bose-Einstein condensate, but this seems unlikely and is as far as I can see unnecessary. There is no doubt, however, that electromechanical coupling can occur in neuronal membranes. As shown by Iwasa et al. (1980), an action potential is associated with a mechanical wave. Petrov (1999) has shown that as polar planar liquid crystals, cell membranes generate biologically relevant voltages when flexed and vice versa. This is a form of piezoelectricity, called flexoelectricity, involving coupling of phonons to an electrical field. At least in isolated sheets of membrane modes of electromechanical perturbation can be established. Of note, there is increasing interest in electromechanical coupling as fundamental to the way cells sense their environment and respond through opening and closing ion channels (Zhang et al., 2001; Kumanovics et al., 2002). It has been suggested that this might be particularly relevant to sites of membrane curvature such as neuronal dendritic spines (Zhang et al., 2001)."
Neurons; public domain, digital enhancment by Pinkers
Then I happened onto a site dedicated to the study of phonestemes, the minutest coherent quanta of words, the sounds of the letters as such. This site is the work of linguist Margaret Magnus (who has written a Dictionary of English Sound). Here's the Link to "Margo's Magical Letter Page" (4). And here's a link to Ms. Magnus dissertation "What's in a Word? Studies in Phonosemantics" (5); from here it is possible to download the whole dissertation as a pdf. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:
"Individual phonemes and phonetic features are meaning-bearing. They each have a unique semantics which can be identified by first measuring the semantic disproportions within phonologically defined classes of words and then the converse -- measuring the phonological disproportions within semantic classes. One finds in this way that every word which contains a given phoneme bears an element of meaning which is absent in words not containing this phoneme. One finds further than the effect of the phoneme-meaning varies with the position that the phoneme bears within the syllable. In addition, one finds that all phonemes which have a common phonetic feature also have a common element of meaning."
On Ms. Magnus main site there is an interesting allusion, she connects the sound elements of words to Archetypal characteristics:
"About 300 hours into this research, you start losing your mind. You start imagining you discern archetypes in all those consonants and vowels. (Ho, ho!) For your confoundment and entertainment, I now proffer some data on the serpent in /s/ and the Grail in /g/.
In truth, I believe data of this type to be incredibly important. What it says essentially is that the consonants and vowels do in fact have a meaning. The most fundamental aspect of that meaning is pure sound without any interpretation or symbolism. That pure sound is meaningful (and how!). But one step above that most fundamental and pure sound-meaning is the archetypal meaning. Since the consonants and vowels form the foundation of the word - not only of its sound, but also of its meaning, then we literally talk in terms of archetypes. Every word is a sound - a shruti note - on which are superimposed a collection of gods whose interaction forms the basis of the word. It is really like that. It is poetic, but it is also cold, sober fact. What is added on top of that - the semantic class and the referent is secondary to sound and archetype.
And so, friends, I bid you observe how the mighty serpent abides in English S and informs every word that contains it."
The link
"Archetypes" (6) in the left frame on Ms. Magnus' main site will bring you directly to this discussion. (Clickin' in from the main page keeps the sites' frame structure intact.)
I think this is all quite fascinating (and would allow for mucho harilatory) and as I have Prof. Edwards 'phononic' waves, of the elastic type, actuated in my thinking apparatus, I find the two ideas somehow merging, but I'm not really able, yet, to explain the correlations I feel arise from these two ideas, the ‘Phononic' thingy’ and the 'Phonemeistic' one. When I read Prof. Edwards latest article,
"Are our Spaces Made of Words?" (7) in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol.15, No.1, January 2008 (subscribers only), I felt a strenghtening of this felt correlation, even though Edwards does not refer to the work of Ms. Magnus. Yet the title itself, full of spaces, words, somehow suggest a connectivity of sorts. Well, I'll cut off here - there's still 'The Entropic Theory of Life' to consider and possibly weave in into all this, but I've lost the link so I'll have to search arundo a bit.
Albatross
**********
References:
1. Single Cell Consciousness: Jonathan C.W. Edwards, 2005.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm
2. Is Consciousness Only a Property of Individual Cells?: Jonathan C.W. Edwards, 2005. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/aw.htm
3. Is Consciousness Only a Property of Individual Cells?: Jonathan C.W. Edwards, 2005. See the section: "Which indivisible perturbations might carry our consciousness?".
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/aw.htm
4. Margos' Magical Letter Page: Margaret Magnus, 2001.
http://www.trismegistos.com/MagicalLetterPage/
5. What's in a Word? Studies in Phonosemantics: Margos' Magical Letter Page: Margaret Magnus, 2001.
http://www.trismegistos.com/Dissertation/
6. Archetypes in the Consonants: Margaret Magnus, 2001. http://www.trismegistos.com/MagicalLetterPage/Archetypes/index.html
7. Are our Spaces Made of Words?: Jonathan C.W. Edwards, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol.15, No.1, January 2008.
http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.html
