different scale. (see attachment). The cell is likely to survive
longer if the organism in which it lives is stable, which means that
it controls well.
···
What follows is a long dissertation analyzing a conceptual approach
to this issue, using an approach different from that in the
attachment, but related to it.
The role of the cell in the organism's ability to control means
nothing to the cell’s actual operation. It’s an evolutionary thing.
When Powers initially considered reorganization as a random
re-weighting and reconnection process, he realized that to be
effective within an entire individual would take times comparable to
the age of the Universe, not of the age of the individual. It was
only when he discovered the “e-coli” process that he was able to
take the random aspect of reorganization seriously.
Similar arguments apply here in spades, but the solution might be
different. The first organisms presumably controlled very few
variables, and used chemical rather than neural signalling. The
archetypal “e-coli” for PCT controls just one, and its model
oversimplified biological bacterium perceived only which end-to-end
direction of its body points up a gradient of some scalar field such
as concentration of a nutrient in the liquid in which it swims. Its
descendants might perceive and control a second variable, such as,
say, the side-to-side or up-down variation of the same
concentration, which would allow the mutated bacterium to choose the
optimum direction in which to turn rather than making a tumble in a
random direction.
From there, multiple systems might be developed using a variety of
sensors and output mechanisms, but so long as the reporting was al
done chemically, each different signal type would need to use a
different chemical. The situation would be analogous to the early
stages of TV, when each transmitting station had to use a frequency
band that differed from its neighbours, but could use the same band
as stations a long way away. Initially there were 13 bands (channel
1 was soon discarded), and as the demand for variety increased, UHF
bands numbered up to (I believe) 85 were added. But the electronic
properties of the atmosphere varied by the day and by the hour, and
sometimes in Toronto a station from Houston or (on one occasion) San
Diego might override the signal from Buffalo, and sometimes the
signal from Buffalo would be so weak as to fail to produce a
recognizable picture in the “snow”.
In the much-mutated complex single-celled descendants of the
hypothetical original super-simple “e-coli”, on occasion chemical A
from the upper north-west corner of the cell might leak into the
southern sector, where that chemical was used for an entirely
different purpose (a side-effect disturbance to the southern control
systems). Or it might get depleted and fail to provide the signal
variation required to enable effective control of its variable.
In the case of TV, this kind of problem was resolved (among other
problems such as energy wastage) by not using a broadcast medium,
but instead providing point-to-point services such as cable or
directed narrow beams. In the biological case, these might initially
have been membrane-encased tubes that kept the chemical spatially
separated. Such tubes would have varying concentrations of the
signalling chemicals along their lengths, as the signals progressed,
and they would have to converge on hubs where the signal values
represented by those concentrations were produced or used.
Varying chemical concentrations often are accompanied by electrical
potential variations, as also happens when one material moves with
respect to another. Since electrical effects can be transmitted from
point to point much faster than can material concentrations, it does
not take much imagination to see the value of using the tubes as
electrical rather than material transmission conduits, without
changing the interchange of chemicals, using the electrical signals
to stimulate the emission of the old-style chemicals from a reserve
supply held at the far end of the tube, and for the receiving hub to
limit its sensitivity to those chemicals to small areas around the
tube-ends. I have just described a synapse.
At this point, we are talking about a "cell" that contains
internally a lot of spatially distinct structures, all of the same
general character, all contributing in one way or another to the
maintenance of the "cell"s control of various internal properties
that depend on its local environment. These internal structures,
which we might now call “archeo-neurons”, swim in a chemical
environment that has some spatial variation of chemical
concentrations – a “hormonal soup”. What we have been calling a
“cell” now might be considered to be a multi-cellular organisms, or
approaching being one.
In this proto-organism, what's in it for any one of the
archeo-neurons? Only that proto-organisms in which they promote good
control are more likely to survive to produce descendants than are
those that detract from the overall ability of those that don’t.
There’s nothing in it for any particular archeo-neuron, from this
point of view, but the later existence of connection structures in
which they participate cooperatively depends largely on whether they
do or do not participate in effective control structures.
In the attachment, I talk about social systems, and about
specialization of roles in sufficiently large communities of
organisms. In the above, I concentrated on one kind of
specialization, but for the development of the archeo-neurons there
must be other specializations, such as structures that produce each
particular kind of chemical used in signalling. They are analogous
to the farmers, cart-wheel-makers, storekeepers, metal-smiths, and
so on, who prove different services that allow the other kinds of
social structures to survive.
Whichever kind of structure we choose to examine carefully, the
others are there to sustain it. A specialized “farmer” would not
exist if everyone grew their own food, for example. It is because
there is a farrier to shoe the farmer’s horse that he can plow as
big an area as he does, and because he has a customer for his food
that he needs the farrier. Specializations exist and survive because
of their position in networks of use and be used. The same is true
of the kinds of cell in an organism. There may be nothing in it for
any one cell, other than that it survives longer in a stable
organism whether it knows it or not. But there sure is a lot “in it”
for that organism’s kind, and its likelihood of existing , and
existing in the same or similar kind of network, down through the
generations.
Martin