03: THE MIND
Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2025 11:35 am
In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Antonio Damasio writes:
The archaella do not move because of the impact of the photons. Nor do they move because of a brute-force chain reaction, like dominos simply banging into each other. The archaella move because a series of chemical reactions carriers the information that light with certain characteristics is in a certain direction.
That is a mind processing information, even if only at an incredibly basic level. The information of the light causes the response of movement. Information is causing something to happen. Something that came into existence (archaea) through the processing of information (molecular machines using the information in DNA to make proteins) has a mind that processes information.
Among the other creatures/minds Ogas and Gaddam discuss is the roundworm. Roundworm has a new thinking element, to help out its sensors and doers. It has thinkers. It has two thinkers: one activates the doers that move the roundworm forward, and the other activates the doers that move the roundworm backward. These thinkers are also connected to each other, and inhibit each other. If food is sensed ahead, the forward thinker starts its doers, and inhibits the backward thinker. If poison is sensed ahead, the backward thinker starts its doers, and inhibits the forward thinker. The stronger the signal a thinker receives, the stronger it inhibits the other thinker.
In the roundworm, we have a creature that came into existence through the processing of information that is now processing information about two different things in the environmental, is judging how good or bad those things are, comparing their merits against each other, and acting on the decision it comes to. That's a good deal of information processing, in just a roundworm.
If all of this, and more, right on up to us, is nothing more than the physical properties and processes we know from our senses and sciences, there is no reason for any process or creature to be subjectively experiencing what is happening, or its own existence. Nothing described suggests such a thing. There is no reason to think conscious beings constructed of different materials than us would examine us, and understand that we are conscious. No neuron, or neurotransmitter, or sense, or storage system, or any other thing or process known to our sciences suggests it.
The more a living thing, that is, a thing built from an information system, processes information with its mind, the more information processing it subjectively experiences.
How many steps are between the sensor and doer in an information processing system? How many information processing systems does an entity have? How does the nature of the information in an information processing system change between the sensor and the doer? How do the information processing systems within an entity interact?
The consciousness within each particle of its mind experiences what is happening to it. And, as the different parts of the body function as one unit - the body - all of the thinking elements function as one mind, and all of the consciousness functions as one consciousness.
In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write:Life sailed forth without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of minds or consciousness. And yet living organisms sensed others like them and sensed their environments. By sensing I mean the detection of a “presence”—of another whole organism, of a molecule located on the surface of another organism or of a molecule secreted by another organism. Sensing is not perceiving, and it is not constructing a “pattern” based on something else to create a “representation” of that something else and produce an “image” in mind. On the other hand, sensing is the most elementary variety of cognition.
It seems Ogas and Gaddam think sensing, alone, isn't thinking. Thinking also requires doing. So a mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements: a sensor and a doer. The simplest hypothetical mind would have one sensor and one doer. Apparently, we are not aware of such a thing on the planet. The simplest mind we are aware of is the archaea, which has two sensors and two doers. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about this, and detail isn't important for my point. The general idea is that a protein called rhodopsin changes shape when the light changes. This starts a chain of events that leads to the archaea's archaella (flagella) moving, which moves the archaea. A little more detail is found starting at 3:00 of this video.A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind.
The archaella do not move because of the impact of the photons. Nor do they move because of a brute-force chain reaction, like dominos simply banging into each other. The archaella move because a series of chemical reactions carriers the information that light with certain characteristics is in a certain direction.
That is a mind processing information, even if only at an incredibly basic level. The information of the light causes the response of movement. Information is causing something to happen. Something that came into existence (archaea) through the processing of information (molecular machines using the information in DNA to make proteins) has a mind that processes information.
Among the other creatures/minds Ogas and Gaddam discuss is the roundworm. Roundworm has a new thinking element, to help out its sensors and doers. It has thinkers. It has two thinkers: one activates the doers that move the roundworm forward, and the other activates the doers that move the roundworm backward. These thinkers are also connected to each other, and inhibit each other. If food is sensed ahead, the forward thinker starts its doers, and inhibits the backward thinker. If poison is sensed ahead, the backward thinker starts its doers, and inhibits the forward thinker. The stronger the signal a thinker receives, the stronger it inhibits the other thinker.
In the roundworm, we have a creature that came into existence through the processing of information that is now processing information about two different things in the environmental, is judging how good or bad those things are, comparing their merits against each other, and acting on the decision it comes to. That's a good deal of information processing, in just a roundworm.
If all of this, and more, right on up to us, is nothing more than the physical properties and processes we know from our senses and sciences, there is no reason for any process or creature to be subjectively experiencing what is happening, or its own existence. Nothing described suggests such a thing. There is no reason to think conscious beings constructed of different materials than us would examine us, and understand that we are conscious. No neuron, or neurotransmitter, or sense, or storage system, or any other thing or process known to our sciences suggests it.
The more a living thing, that is, a thing built from an information system, processes information with its mind, the more information processing it subjectively experiences.
How many steps are between the sensor and doer in an information processing system? How many information processing systems does an entity have? How does the nature of the information in an information processing system change between the sensor and the doer? How do the information processing systems within an entity interact?
The consciousness within each particle of its mind experiences what is happening to it. And, as the different parts of the body function as one unit - the body - all of the thinking elements function as one mind, and all of the consciousness functions as one consciousness.