Do Cells know they're part of something bigger?

Crashfrog writes>>"Well i know I've made the case before that conciousness is a linguistic phenomenon, and I've not heard anything to disuade me"...Crashfrog is this from a previous thread I would be interested in reading more of this. I am beginning to think that conciousness is an emergent property of energy. As for whether or not cells "know" if they are part of something bigger we are back to "linguistics" again people must define what they mean by "know" And what is meant by conciousness. If "know" means the cells have tiny little brains that can think and acertain they are part of a larger organism then the answer is no. But if "know" means there is some metaphysical force generating some sort of cellular telepathy allowing the individual cell to "know" it is part of something bigger ; then again I believe the answer is no. I guess I do not believe cells "know".

I covered it briefly and most recently here. I agree with you.

I'd like to point to and recommend the book;
"The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness" by Antonio Damasio.I read it a while ago, but my recollections are that his basic thrust was there are levels of structure (chiefly) in the brain which when damaged cause specific behavioural and reported conciousness alterations.I remember that he mentioned a linguistic base for consciousness, but didn't believe it had much support, I don't remember why.He describes three differentiable types of observed neural activity and offers an interpretation of each:
1) The proto-self which is largely status registers of the current state of the organism. A useful construct to maintain homeostasis but not conscious. The control structures of the body and brain maintain and update this construct via neural and humoral means.
2) Core consciousness which is a supervisor and observer of the overall state of the proto-self. It is created moment by moment by the proto-self state and is conscious, but not continuously.
3) Autobiographical consciousness wherein the self recognizes itself and forms interrelationships between self and environment. Lots easer to protect and maintain self if one recognizes there is a self to protect.Personally, I believe there are observable structures of greater or lesser complexity than ourselves and that they may be considered alive, but I fail to see evidence that they exhibit a conscious self.
My operating definition of alive was stolen from my applied thermodynamics professor:
"Any system which focuses a stream of energy on itself to maintain or diminish its local entropy."

You say toe-may-toe, I say toe-maw-toe..
I have a friend that believes rocks are "concious". I wish i could tell him maybe the rocks in his head. He contends that the conciousness they have is not perceptible to us therefore we do not think of them as concious. When you get right down to the nitty-gritty of what constitutes matter and reality I believe if memory serves that the current theory is atoms and subatomic particles behave in ways that are not 100% predictable. At the sub atomic level there is a sea of "quatum foam" and a reality exist where a pair of electrons can exhibit behavior that may seem "concious" an may bloody well be ... you spin right I will spin left. And if manipulated in a semiconductor to change spin regardless of how far apart they are the other electron instantaneouly changes its spin the opposing direction. So whats my point? Anything is possible in this wacky world. If my friend want to say rocks are concious on some level maybe he is right. But I wouldnt want to try and hold a conversation with one people may stare. Remember pet rocks??? LOL>

Maybe the whole universe is a sentient being!The universe is not conscious/ sentient but in some extra-dimensional way, beyond all human comprehension, it is. The way in which the universe ‘thinks’ is completely alien to anything our puny brains could imagination. This force that is the universe could not possibly know or understand itself, even though the universes mind (If you could call it that) is everything within itself. At complete random our particular universe was born with the laws and universal systems that would allow intelligent life forms to arise. (However, how are we to know if there aren’t other universes with different laws that have created even more intelligent beings?!) Space-time acting like the very fabric of the forces thought itself allowing chronological events to take place so intelligence could arise and solve the great puzzle in an ordered and logical way. And, as the universe sees through our eyes, allow it to comprehend itself.
We as humans are the highest manifestation of this power because, unlike every other life form on the earth, we CAN understand and seek to fulfil all the questions the universe has within itself. The more answers we know, the more evolved we become. So, as we are all indirectly the whole universe, we can answer these questions for the force, the very force that moves our sinews, and drives us to think.
This force does not care for us like the fictional spiritual gods, it is not even directly aware that we even exist! It cares no more than you would care if a single cell amongst the billions in you fingernail died. An entire galaxy is but one cell in the fabric of this universal force. We as humans are not the only sentient beings capable of asking and answering the questions of the universe; there are thousands upon countless thousands of millions like us. We are all the atoms that make up the fabric of the universe.
The universe can be likened to a small child, totally unaware of what makes it breathe and live, but it is constantly learning, like a human child, about its surroundings and the way the ‘world works’. We are the universes mind, individually and as a whole, we are the cells that make the universe LIVE.
And this is but a millisecond in the evolution of the universe’ life.So, like the universal force, we must look within ourselves to truly know the answers to this place we call home.

What your talking about is the Gia theory, that the whole world is just one single organism and we are all the cells and tissues that make the Earth work.

With cloning technology making leaps and bounds, we probably are not that far away from taking a somatic cell (ie, stem cell) and manipulating it into creating a new individual. I think that we would all agree that a full grown clone would have consciousness since naturally occurring clones (identical twins) seem to have separate self-identities.So I don't think I am going out on a limb in saying that almost any cell in our body could possibly, through technological cloning advancements, multiply and grow to house conciousness. However, I don't see individual cells as having consciousness.My hypothesis is that since no single cell contains consciousness, and multicellularity seems to be a requirment, our consciousness is most likely due to communication between cells with neural cells being the most probable cell line. One piece of evidence for this, IMHO, is the connection between language and self-identity development. Crashfrog has mentioned this in other posts. One example is a child that was shunned by her parents and lived around dogs during her early childhood. She now thinks of herself as a dog and is unable to communicate with other humans. Whether or not she thinks of herself as an individual I am not sure, but her ability to communicate with other humans as an individual is definitely hampered and/or nonexistant. Another child was living in the same conditions but was found at an earlier age. He is able to speak, but his communication skills are far below other kids his age. He may never be able to communicate at an adult level, or be able to fully comprehend abstract associations within language.Could learning language be the key to consciousness? Human language has an inherent property of separating out I/ME, US/WE, and YOU/THEM. Could this separation of self from the group initiate our own sentience and self-identity through changes in neural cell net development? Could language initiate a thought loop, or cell signaling loop between neural cells, that results in consciousness? Don't know, but I think it could play a role.