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Mutation as an "intentional" strategy
Sequencing of those hundreds of Arabidopsis thaliana plants revealed more than 1 million mutations. Within those mutations a nonrandom pattern was revealed, counter to what was expected.
"At first glance, what we found seemed to contradict established theory that initial mutations are entirely random and that only natural selection determines which mutations are observed in organisms," said Detlef Weigel, scientific director at Max Planck Institute and senior author on the study.
Instead of randomness they found patches of the genome with low mutation rates. In those patches, they were surprised to discover an over-representation of essential genes, such as those involved in cell growth and gene expression.
"These are the really important regions of the genome," Monroe said. "The areas that are the most biologically important are the ones being protected from mutation."
The areas are also sensitive to the harmful effects of new mutations. "DNA damage repair seems therefore to be particularly effective in these regions," Weigel added.
Panpsychism: The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility — Quartz
Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences. This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.
Study: Psilocybin Mushrooms Can Help Cancer Anxiety - The Atlantic
In the Johns Hopkins study, half of the 51 participants were given a low dose of psilocybin as control, followed by a high dose five weeks later. (For the other half, the order of the doses was reversed.) The results were remarkable: Six months later, 78 percent of the participants were less depressed than they started, as rated by a clinician, and 83 percent were less anxious. Furthermore, 65 percent had almost fully recovered from depression, and 57 percent from their anxiety, after six months. By comparison, in past studies antidepressants have only helped about 40 percent of cancer patients, performing about as well as a placebo.
Pooled consciousness? No...
‘Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence’. This is how William James illustrated the combination problem of panpsychism [110]. Or take John Searle: ‘Consciousness cannot spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam; there has to be a point where my consciousness ends and yours begins’ [117]. Indeed, if consciousness is everywhere, why should it not animate the United States of America? IIT deals squarely with this problem by stating that only maxima of integrated information exist. Consider two people talking: within each brain, there will be a major complex—a set of neurons that form a maximally irreducible cause–effect structure with definite borders and a high value of Φmax. Now let the two speak together. They will now form a system that is also irreducible (Φ > zero) due to their interactions. However, it is not maximally irreducible, since its value of integrated information will be much less than that of each of the two major complexes it contains. According to IIT, there should indeed be two separate experiences, but no superordinate conscious entity that is the union of the two. In other words, there is nothing-it-is-like-to-be two people, let alone the 300 plus million citizens making up the USA.13
Consciousness: here, there and everywhere? | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
A corollary of IIT that violates common intuitions is that even circuits as simple as a ‘photodiode’ made up of a sensor and a memory element can have a modicum of experience [80] (see also figure 5a, right panel). It is nearly impossible to imagine what it would ‘feel like’ to be such a circuit, for which the only phenomenal distinction would be between ‘this rather than not this’ (unlike a photodiode, when we are conscious of ‘light’ or of ‘dark,’ our experience is what it is because it includes scores of negative concepts, such as no colours, no shapes, no thoughts and so on, that are all available to us). But consider that normal matter at −272.15°C, one degree above absolute zero, still contains some heat. However, in practice its temperature is as cold as it gets. Similarly, there may well be a practical threshold for Φmax below which people do not report feeling much of anything, but this does not mean that consciousness has reached its absolute minimum, zero. Indeed, when we fall into a deep, dreamless sleep and don't report any experience upon being awoken, some small complex of neurons within our sleeping brain will likely have a Φmax value greater than zero, yet that may not amount to much compared to that of our rich, everyday experience.
