I happened to read another stunning article in Aeon on the same day I re-read this tidbit from Lewis Thomas:
Item. I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell.
https://aeon.co/essays/biology-is-not-as-hierarchical-as-most-textbooks-paint-it
The issue brought forth in the article is, bluntly, that “a cell is not a factory,” and persuasively, that social hierarchies have been projected upon our understanding of the way cells work, hindering scientific advancement and new interpretations of cell biology.
That this needs to change is a story we’ve heard before – the structure of scientific revolutions – but well worth revisiting. Social justice, like the factory, is a problem of the human landscape, and so it may be just as limiting as the factory metaphor when it comes to describing cell biology.
The experience of a cell, from a cell’s point of view, will never reflect a human perspective warped by a material economy (founded upon competition and addiction). Biologists (like all scientists) are trained to look for measurable signals, but most messages cannot be measured because they are not matter; they are qualia. This is why, for all the decades of hi-tech brain studies, no one has ever discovered a single idea in the brain! It is for the same reason we fail to understand communication in cells.
Basically, the aspect of qualia which may get measured (color, sound, texture etc.) has nothing to do with the content of its message. This is because the content of its message is something that has evolved, within a qualiadelic relationship, in a long series of rituals between a sender and a receiver. No measurement of color or smell projected from a flower can reveal how a bee interprets it. All a scientist sees is a reaction to a message, and that is why the message is often described as a command or a code. But it is hardly in the power of a flower to make such a command of a bee – or a cell nucleus to make of an organelle.
A qualiadelic relationship is an evolving relationship. A flower, over generations, projects a brighter color or a stronger smell while the bee, also over generations, develops a keener sense to perceive it. Therein lies the meaning which no tool can detect (not anymore than a psychologist or a judge can detect the deepest sources of a person’s motives).
Every being, even the organelles within a cell, have evolved to mutually share qualiadelic messages. Just as an animal has evolved to respond to messages (landmarks that guide it down pathways to what it needs to survive in its landscape), so too do the parts of a cell recognize and respond to landmarks and pathways. These landmarks and pathways – manifestations of qualia – have attractive or aversive power, and all the organelles within the cytoplasm, including the cytoplasm itself, are influenced by it.
Think of a tree; it is a collection of landmarks and pathways some of which attract squirrels, others of which attract birds, still others all the insects and microbes on and within it. Curiously, different species do not compete – they are drawn to the trees by different messages, the content of which serves the bird, the squirrel, the insect, and the microbe for uniquely evolved reasons. The tree is a niche that all the beings who live there share – it is a balanced ecosystem. So too is an individual cell an ecosystem.
And, just as a tree is influenced within its larger ecosystem (a forest of soil and streams and creatures and weather, so is a cell, in its qualiadelic way, influenced by its organ, the organs around it, the body and its emotions. They are all projecting and receiving qualia, which has meaning for them, albeit sometimes vaguely, perhaps somewhat atavistically. (We merely see a tree as beautiful or practical in some way, but our interdependence still exists. The benefits of shared qualia that were once strikingly mutual are now attenuated because we have evolved apart.) Or, on the other hand maybe they are still evolving, just becoming part of the local consciousness, having only recently been noticed, still yet to be sensed clearly.
Qualiadelic relationships move from qualiadelic to symbiotic. They work and get repeated until the ritual process of learning – experiment and play – solidifies into routine. A symbiotic relationship is like a tradition: it may not be evolving anymore, but the qualia that it has selected for is still its lifeblood, and its rituals are still its heartbeat.
A cell is a miraculous tradition. But like any tradition, sometimes it is forced to change. When a pathogen invades and the usual landmarks and pathways begin to fail, the key to survival lies in noticing new qualia and ritualing with it to discover its benefits.
Extinguishing the pathogen – the human, competitive, materialistic response to an invasive species – is just one method of solving the problem. Alternatively, the way all other enduring beings on the planet survive is adaptation. New and heretofore unnoticed qualia is always ready to reveal itself to the needy. Ecosystems are just like god in this way, never stingy with its gifts.
The entire process of qualiadelic selection is cooperative, not competitive. Qualia is shared; it cannot be owned or hoarded. Rather, it possesses us just as the first mitochondria was possessed (perhaps literally, but certainly figuratively) by the protective environment of another cell).
Qualiadelic communication is a different form of communication – not focusing on matter but on qualia. Humans, and therefore scientists, tend to look beyond the qualia to the matter – and this helps explain why the factory analogy fails. We need to pay attention to the qualia, to focus on the qualiadelic, not the material, relationships of what it is we are studying.