"Cells With Minds" Theory Is As Bad As "Brains Make Minds" Theory

Everywhere there is a massive explanatory failure of the theory that brains make minds. For example:

• There is no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things. An individual synapse and a dendritic spine do not last for years, and consist of proteins that only last for weeks.  A 2019 paper documents a 16-day examination of synapses, finding "the dataset contained n = 320 stable synapses, n = 163 eliminated synapses and n = 134 formed synapses."  That's about a 33% disappearance rate over a course of 16 days. The same paper refers to another paper that "reported rates of [dendritic] spine eliminations in the order of 40% over an observation period of 4 days." 

• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.

• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.

• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers.

• Brain tissue has been studied at the most minute resolution, and it shows no sign of storing any encoded information (such as memory information) other than the genetic information that is in almost every cell of the body.

• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably required hundreds of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist).

• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).

• Contrary to the claim that brains store memories and produce our thinking, case histories show that humans can lose half or more of their brains (due to disease or hemispherectomy operations), and suffer little damage to memory or intelligence (as discussed here). 

A wise response to such failures is to suspect or assume that minds must be the product of something beyond the human body, or to suspect or assume that the mind must be the equivalent of something beyond the human body. That would be moving in the right direction. But a recent paper touted some theory that attempts to deal with the failure of "brains make minds" by marching in the wrong direction. The paper ("The CBC theory and its entailments: Why current models of the origin of consciousness fail") tries to sell a "CBC theory" that tries to explain minds by assuming something material that is less than a brain: mere cells. The CBC stands for cell-based consciousness. A brain is basically very many cells (neurons) and very many connections between those cells (axons and synapses).  You sure don't make the "brains don't explain minds" problem any better by trying to explain things using only cells. It's kind of like someone writing a long book entitled "My Grand Explanation for Life's Origin," and then responding to a critical review of that book by ripping out all of the pages but one, and then saying, "Now I have an explanation for life's origin." 

The paper misinforms us badly by claiming this: "

Prokaryotes, the simplest unicellular species, display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature including associative learning, stable memory formation, route navigation and decision-making." The paper provides no good evidence to back up this claim, which is not true under the normal definition of "cognitive." Cells do not display behaviors that demonstrate any such things (although using a stripped-down shrunken definition of "navigation" you might be able to claim that cells do some navigation). An individual cell can't learn anything, cannot form a memory, and cannot make a decision. 

As references to back up the claim above, all we get immediately are some self-citations by the authors. One of the self-citations is to this paper, which states:

"We posit that subjective awareness is a fundamental property of cellular life. It emerged as an inherent feature of, and contemporaneously with, the very first life-forms." 

This is the same kind of nonsense which is a pillar of panpsychism, in which mind is spoken of as if it is only the measliest shadow of itself, something that is then called a mere property. Similar nonsense would be going on if you described human beings as mere "noise makers,"  and then offered a "theory of noise occurrence" to try to explain the origin of humans. 

You could probably find some study you could cite to try to support a claim of cell learning, but the study you found would probably show little. Imagine a scientist who has 1000 cells in a beaker, and tries to test learning by the cells. First he gives the cells  some task, and records how well they do. Then he tries the same task again, and records how well the cells do. There will be a 50% chance that on the second try the cells will do better, and that's merely chance at play.  If a scientist files away in his file drawer unsuccessful tests, and writes up for publication a successful test, he might do 100 experiments trying to show cell learning, and a few might get results that would be only expected in one test in 20.  That would be enough to claim "statistical significance," which would be probably be enough to get the paper published.  There is no well-replicated evidence that an individual cell can learn something. 

A recent article cited the paper "Associative Conditioning Is a Robust Systemic Behavior in Unicellular Organisms: An Interspecies Comparison" as evidence that cells can learn. I don't think the paper is robust evidence of any such thing. We have some scientists claiming that after some cells were prodded to move in a particular direction by an electrical stimulus, that they will be more likely to move in that direction without the stimulus.  But the paper is not a pre-registered study, and it failed to follow any blinding protocol. A blinding protocol is an essential for a study like this to be taken seriously. The effect reported is one that could very easily have occurred by chance. By chance a group of cells may have some kind of herding effect, and may tend to move in any of four directions with a probability of about 25%.  The authors seem to have made the dubious assumption that each cell in a rather dense group of cells would move randomly in any direction, an assumption that ignores various factors that might tend to create a herding effect by which a rather dense group of cells will tend to move in the same direction. 

Cells do often act in a purposeful manner, as if guided by some higher agency interested in achieving grand end results such as the construction of a human body. But that does not entitle us to claim that cells themselves have minds. The authors are just spouting unjustified and implausible speculations when they make these claims: 

"All cells are sentient, exhibit self-referential awareness, and are fully capable of decision-making and problem-solving....each cell is a conscious 'self', combining three essential elements necessary for cogently explaining multicellularity. In order to collaborate in their trillions, each self-referential cell must 'know that it knows', 'knows that others know', and be aware that other cells 'know in self-similar patterns'. These aspects of consciousness are essential to the collaboration, cooperation, and co-dependencies that cells demonstrate for multicellular decision-making and united contingent problem-solving."

Note all the uses of words in quotation marks. For example, we don't get a claim that cells have a self, but a claim that they have a "self," and we don't get a claim that a cell knows that it knows, but that it "knows that it knows."  Always suspect you are being fooled and word-tricked when you read statements like this using words in quotation marks. Similarly, be very suspicious if someone says, "I have a nice 'computer' I'd like to sell you" rather than "I have a nice computer I'd like to sell you."

What is going on in the paper is largely some equivocation sleight-of-hand. The very slippery word "consciousness" (which can mean a hundred different things) is being used in different ways: on one hand to mean some hypothesized tiny little shadow of a thing that isn't anything like a human mind, and on the other hand to refer to the vast mental reality of a human mind.  So the authors try to make a jump from some claimed "consciousness with a microscopic small c" (claimed to exist in a cell) to consciousness with a giant capital C (human minds), not telling us how the use of the word "consciousness" is vastly changing from one part of the paper to another. Similarly, all kinds of verbal tricks are being employed in which the words "intelligent," "self," "know," "conscious," "sentient" and "cognition" are being used in strange ways outside of their normal definitions. This all smells like a type of equivocation and language misuse similar to what goes on when Darwinists refer to "natural selection" that is not actually selection (not being a choice made by conscious agent), and when they talk about evolution with a microscopic "e," some mere tiny variation in a gene pool, and try to use that as a justification for claims of evolution with a giant sky-high capital E, such as claims of macroevolution or common descent a trillion times harder to prove  than such a tiny gene variation. Similar equivocation trickery is used by theorists of panpsychism, as I discuss in my post here. 

The idea of a conscious cell might at first glance seem to be a promising one to someone who considers the vast unsolved problem of morphogenesis, the problem of how there occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body.  The progression cannot be explained by the idea of cells reading a body blueprint stored in DNA, because no such blueprint exists in DNA, contrary to the many lies that have been told on this topic. Now, a person might think that you could make progress on this problem by assuming that each cell is conscious, and that a cell has a goal of moving things towards greater order.  

But deeper reflection should lead you to conclude that this idea leads nowhere in helping to explain the origin of human bodies. An individual cell could never understand the grand purpose served by the construction of the human body: the end result of having large, mobile, tool-manipulating, seeing and food-gathering (or food-catching or food-growing) organisms such as adult humans that can survive well on the surface of planets like our planet. The construction of a human body and the purpose of such a result are ideas that would be 1000 miles over the heads of some little barely conscious cell floating about in the body.  Such a cell could never have any idea such as "Aha, let me try to reach exactly the right place in one of the chambers of the heart, where I might serve some purpose in helping this large mobile organism pump its blood so that it will be able to live for years on the surface of its planet."  So we wouldn't actually help to explain the origin of human bodies by imagining conscious cells. 

If human bodies were merely a heap-like blob of cells, then we might be able to help explain how we got such bodies by some idea that cells are conscious, and like to stick together, like lonely people seeking crowds on a Saturday night. But human bodies are no such blobs. Human bodies are fantastically organized systems consisting of a suitable arrangement of organs, muscles and bones that allow humans to live, reproduce and walk around on the surface of a planet while breathing, pumping blood, and finding, eating and digesting plants and animals. No cell would ever understand what was needed for a human body to fill such role, nor would such a cell understand how it could position itself in the right way to serve such a role.  

Part of the reason why "cells with the slightest shadow of a mind" cannot explain the origin of a human body is the vast amount of component interdependence in the human body, very often requiring that things mutually dependent on each other be constructed simultaneously rather than sequentially. 

It is true that cells combine in magnificent ways, just as if some mysterious higher agency was driving them towards purposeful goals. From such a reality you have no warrant for suspecting that individual cells are conscious, and that the vast amount of organization that occurs when a body forms is a result of a billion tiny little decisions made by conscious cells.  Similarly, if you see some miracle of organization at a beach in which a swirling whirlwind of sand forms itself into a giant beautiful well-arranged sandcastle, you have a reason for suspecting that some mysterious unseen causal agency is at work; but you have no warrant for suspecting that such an effect occurs because individual grains of sand are conscious. 

The idea of conscious cells is also worthless in explaining the human mind. You would not get anything like the experience of what it is like to be a human mind by adding up tiny little experiences of what it is like to be a cell. This type of problem is one of the main reasons for rejecting panpsychism.  Panpsychists claim that individual atoms or subatomic particles are conscious. But trillions of little experiences of being an electron or an atom would never add up to being the experience of being a human with a single self. In a book dealing with the philosophy of mind, J. P. Moreland discusses an objection to panpsychism just like that I just stated, which he describes like this:

"Combination Problem—Sub-minds, such as those of atoms, cannot be conceived to combine or sum into complex, unified minds such as humans have. Hence, panpsychism is not an adequate account of mind."

A few pages later he says this about this Combination Problem: "I take this to be the Achilles heel of panpsychism." He discusses some attempts to evade the problem, none of which are credible. The same Combination Problem that rules out panpsychism as an explanation for human minds also rules out individually conscious cells as an explanation for human minds. 

If there were trillions of bodily cells (none having the slightest knowledge of history, politics, science, art or human culture, and none having the slightest ability to produce speech, thoughts, novel ideas, abstract generalizations, literature, art, philosophy, culture and science), and they had some kind of shadow consciousness, no combination of such cells would ever add up to make the minds of humans who do understand facts and subtle truths of history, politics, science, art and human culture, and do have the ability to produce speech, thoughts, novel ideas, abstract generalizations, literature, art, philosophy, culture and science.  And if trillions of tiny cells each had a tiny bit of awareness of their cell surrounding,  that total body of knowledge would be a body of biology internals knowledge not matching the knowledge of humans, 99% of whom have no appreciable knowledge of biology internals, but instead have an entirely different body of knowledge: knowledge of topics such as friends, family, school subjects, history, politics, local geography, sports and celebrities. 

Contrary to the claims quoted above, cells do not have selves; cells do not know; cells do not know that they know; and cells do not know that other cells know. There are not 37 trillion selves in my body, but a single self. The unified self of a human mind could never arise from some combination of 37 trillion cell selves. 

The paper I have criticized does at least give a good quote that I have added to my long list of revealing quotes by scientists in which they make confessions that undermine confidence in the achievement legends so commonly stated by scientists. The quote is this:

"There is a growing sense of unease among biologists that there are serious shortcomings in the Neo-Darwinian framework, in particular that several of its central assumptions are wrong and that, as a result, it lacks explanatory power. The problems are many and likely fatal. For one, epigenetic effects are not only real, they are critical for the evolution of cells. Epigenesis had been largely excluded from the Darwinian paradigm due to Lamarckian theory having been deemed in error. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that the central assumption of Neo-Darwinism, that mutations occur randomly and that natural selection operates to fix the most adaptive variations, is simply wrong (Miller et al, 2023)." 

The authors imagine a replacement for the Neo-Darwinian framework:  

"We anticipate a shift from a gene-centric Neo-Darwinism and SMC to a cognition-centric CBC framework (Miller et al, 2023). The result will be an evolutionary biology based on systematic, natural learning carried out by intelligent and sentient cells—not on random genetic errors."

But that would just be replacing one mythology with a different mythology, because claims of intelligent cells are as mythical as the "DNA is a body specification" myth that is a pillar of Neo-Darwinism.  And you could never credibly explain how you got the fantastically organized structures of large multicellular organisms such as mammals by imagining that it happened by cells learning something, which would be an idea almost as silly as claiming that skyscrapers get constructed because parts such as steel beams, pipes and windows learn things.

Postscript: An earlier post of mine ("Why Imagining 'Cognition All the Way Down' Does Nothing to Explain Morphogenesis') refutes a previous paper arguing along the lines of the "The CBC theory and its entailments" paper. Here is a quotation from that post:

 "Consider a male newborn baby. He has the following features:

(1) arms that are very useful outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(2) legs that are useful for walking around outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(3) eyes that are useful for seeing things outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (where everything is so dark that nothing can be seen even if you have eyes);

(4) ears that are useful for seeing things outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(5) a penis and testicles that will one day be useful for reproducing outside of a womb, but are useless inside a womb;

(6) a mouth that is useful for eating and speaking outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (where a developing baby gets all nutrients through an umbilical cord); 

(7) a nose and lungs that are useful for smelling and breathing outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (babies take their first breath after being born).

If we imagine conscious cells inside the womb, we have no explanation as to why such conscious agents would ever band together to make a human body that is optimized for living not within a womb but in the utterly different environment outside of the womb. Such cells would know nothing about existence outside of the womb and would know nothing about the requirements of organisms outside of the womb.  We cannot imagine any leap of creativity or imagination in such cells that would cause such cells to assemble into a human body optimized not for living inside the womb, but for a totally different environment outside of the womb. Similarly, if there were people living on some extraterrestrial planet perpetually covered in very thick clouds, and such people had no knowledge of outer space or any bodies outside of their world, such beings would never build some kind of rocket like the Apollo 11 system, one capable of reaching outer space, traveling through outer space, and also capable of landing a spacecraft on the surface of a body very much smaller than their own planetary body.  

If cells in the human body were conscious, this would not at all explain how cells end up in the right place for there to arise a gigantically organized human body.  Such a cell would also lack any idea of what was the right place for it to go to, for the cell would not understand such grand ideas as human anatomy, and also would not understand what proper role it should play in such a grand scheme.  A conscious cell would also lack any senses, meaning it could never use visual information to navigate to the right place.  The cell would be like a blind, dumb and speechless man stumbling around in New York City, one that didn't know where its house or apartment building was."