Do Nebulae Think?

In 1974 Thomas Nagel earned himself a permanent position in the Intellectual Pantheon of the Western World. His signature essay, What’s it like to be a Bat, Hot Link catalyzed the Search for Intelligent Life on Earth (SILE):

 “There is something that it is like to be a bat…what it is like for a bat to be a bat…because  we know what it is like to be us.” (Do we?)

At least since 1500 CE, folks in the North Atlantic Community have imagined themselves as ‘little less than angels’. Prior to Darwin, any suggestion that we were more Gorilla than Gabriel would have been considered preposterous.

And prior to Nagel, extending monikers like ‘conscious, intelligent, sentient’ to non-human life forms was a non-starter. Besides, we were occupied with more serious questions: Should we extend these monikers to women, to children, to members of other races, other ethnic groups, other nationalities, other age cohorts, other ideologies, other social castes or classes? Heady stuff!

I’m pleased to report that we’ve made uncharacteristically significant progress in these areas over the half-century since Nagel. There is something approaching a consensus that certain non-human life forms are intelligent and conscious.

Primates and Sea Mammals make almost everyone’s list. Corvids (ravens, parrots, crows), Cephalopoda (octopus), and Pachyderms (elephants) show up frequently as well. They know what they know, and they know that they know it, and they project similar self-awareness onto others in their community.

There is even serious conversation now about the mental status and intellectual life of unicellular organisms. The average adult human body consists of about 30 trillion of the little critters – we call them ‘cells’ - organized into semi-independent organs, all working together to promote the survival (and fecundity) of the host….i.e. you!

Now as far as our fellow human beings are concerned, we’ve still got aways to go, but the best of you are working on it and have made some headway!

Phenotypically, life on Earth could not be more varied - from figs to ferns, bats to bacteria, cabbages to kings. But structurally, behaviorally, even morphologically, all life on Earth is remarkably similar. Birds fly, so do bats, so do bugs, and so do we (thanks to our technology). Different structures support similar functions. On the other hand, fish have gills and we have ears: same structure, different function.

Evolution, the wellspring of biodiversity, is also convergent: several organisms from different limbs on the tree of life may evolve similar traits/structures via radically different pathways. The features in question confer survival (reproductive) advantage across phyla and a variety of unrelated structures can serve as ground zero for their development.

Plus every member of every species now living on Earth is descended from a single DNA molecule synthesized about 4 billion years ago. How’s that for bio-similarity? For convergence? So on the one hand, no two cells are identical (mutation, epigenesis) but on the other hand, all cells are clones of a single aboriginal cell. Can we find similarly homologous structures in the inanimate world as well?

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No self-respecting middle school geek has failed to notice similarities in the structure of atoms, fundamental units of physics, and that of cells, fundamental units of biology: ‘nucleus & electrons’ meet ‘nucleus & mitochondria’.

Our cognitive lenses seem to work better as a microscope than as a telescope. We can detect congruent patterns in regions of the cosmos twenty orders of magnitude smaller than us, and we are not shy about attributing common functions to such congruent structures. We are less apt to recognize congruence on larger scales, and we are much less willing to posit homologous function on that scale.

That said, the same structure we noticed in atoms and cells appears in solar systems, galaxies, and galactic sheets. At the highest level of generality, the network of galaxies in the universe forms a pattern eerily similar to the network of neurons in the human brain.

A recent photo taken by the JWST of Nebula PMR 1 (top of this article), stretching more than 5 light years across and located some 5,000 light-years from Earth, reveals a structure similar to that revealed by an MRI of an unremarkable human brain.

Note especially (1) the inner concentration of structural elements protected by an outer membrane, and (2) a division of those elements into two hemispheres, separated by a longitudinal fissure. Co-incidence? Sure. An example of the self-similar organization of the cosmos? That too!

According to the popular holographic model of cosmology, the universe is self-similar across all scales, so we will not be surprised if it turns out that the Cosmos is self-similar to the Quantum.

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Consciousness is deeply associated with patterns. First, it seems to be an emergent trait in entities with certain structural similarities. Second, consciousness consists of patterns it discovers in the external world. Finally, consciousness appears to impose its own patterns on random sensory input.

Patterns are often self-similar across scales and across various material substrates. To bastardize Stephen Hawking, et al., “it’s patterns all the way down”. Perhaps a more useful phrasing (imitating Gregory Bateson) would be, “it’s patterns discovering other patterns.” That suggests that the phenomenon of patternedness, the propensity of entities to form patterns (logoi), may itself be substructural. (John 1: 1 – 3)

According to Arthur S Reber, there is a growing sense of unease among biologists re shortcomings in the Neo-Darwinian framework. For example, epigenetic effects are not only real but critical for the evolution of cells.

Further, it is increasingly clear that the central assumption of Neo-Darwinism, that mutations occur randomly and that natural selection operates to conserve the most adaptive variations, is simply wrong (Miller et al, 2023). It is virtually certain that cells control gene expression by the decisions and choices they make.

Likely, all cells are sentient and self-aware and capable of decision-making and problem-solving at some level. These cellular faculties rely on information integrated across the entire cell (Baluška et al, 2022).

Consciousness seems unrelated to the volume of information. Instead it is a function of, and a driving force for, information integration and that interconnectedness becomes the measure of consciousness. If nebulae do think, if they are conscious, we may assume that they integrate information, not just across nanometers but across light years.

So are the pattern of celestial objects in Nebula PMR 1 and the pattern of neurons in our skulls sufficiently similar to allow both to support consciousness; if so, what do such nebulae think about…and what do they think about it?