NOTES FOR PRESENTATION AT WCOC I shall present some of the ideas below in an invited keynote talk at the World Congress On Organic Chemistry (WCOC 2024) taking place October 24-25, 2024, in Paris, France. My presentation, will be given remotely, on 25th October in the morning. This is the announcement of the presentation on the conference web site: https://www.scitechseries.com/organic-chemistry/program/scientific-program/2024/how-minds-with-brains-evolved-from-brainless-synapse-ancestors The Abstract for the talk, on the web site (slightly modified here): "I'll argue that biochemical processes in synapses are more important than currently favoured neural mechanisms for deep forms of spatial intelligence that led ancient humans to discover, and use, types of geometric and topological necessity and impossibility, including Pythagoras' theorem discovered and proved several times in different ways, centuries before Pythagoras was born. Deep spatial intelligence was also involved in constructing complex temples, pyramids and other structures that, among other things, required transporting large blocks of stone across land and water. Much earlier, related forms of spatial intelligence were used not by humans, but by processes of evolution, reproduction and development used to construct increasingly complex components of increasingly complex ancient forms of life e.g. hatching processes in eggs of vertebrates and spectacular processes of biochemical disassembly and reassembly in insect metamorphosis in cocoons, producing not only new physiologies but also complex new spatial competences, e.g. flying to plants to feed on nectar, and mating (in some cases while flying!) after metamorphosis. There are unobvious connections with physics, chemistry (especially biochemistry), biology, neuroscience, psychology, computation, various branches of philosophy and their histories." -------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES FOR THE TALK (UNFINISHED DRAFT) The following notes will be used as the basis of my presentation, though during the presentation I may add points not included below, and I shall also skip some of the details below, which have been included for the benefit of audience members wishing to learn more about this work and its background, after the presentation. There is much more detailed information about all this in an online document that is still under development, available here for the time being: https://poplogarchive.getpoplog.org/cogaff/misc/metamorphosis.html (It may be moved to a more appropriate location in the near future, but the old address above will then link to the new location.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THANKS TO ANTHONY (TONY) LEGGETT I am very grateful for critical comments and suggestions related to earlier versions of these ideas, received from Anthony Leggett, an old friend and colleague since our student days. He is a Nobel prize winner for work in theoretical physics: https://physics.illinois.edu/people/directory/profile/aleggett More information about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_James_Leggett On Amazon Kindle there is an old (2014), but very relevant, recorded conversation between Tony Leggett and Howard Burton in 'The ideas Roadshow', entitled 'The Problems of Physics Reconsidered. The discussion is available from Amazon here: https://read.amazon.co.uk/?asin=B08MLCVL2X The conjectured gaps in current physics are mentioned by Leggett near the end. They are different from the gaps I discuss below, though perhaps they will turn out to be related. He has not seen this document, although he has seen related documents written since late 2020 (some used for invited online presentations) before I started thinking about the problems of explaining insect metamorphosis discussed below, and the resulting challenges to current fundamental physical theories. He has also suggested on several different occasions in the past that there are gaps in current physical theories, but without mentioning insect metamorphosis, which provides specific deep challenges to current physical theories, as I'll try to explain below. As far as I can tell no other researchers have noticed, or written about, the challenges I shall describe. If someone has, I'll be grateful for references, preferably to documents available online. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE KEY IDEA Many people are familiar with currently well known facts about biological evolution and its production of humans and other intelligent animals. But they do not notice that we also need to understand how the basic physical mechanisms that make possible the processes of evolution, reproduction and development that produce humans are also able to support many complex capabilities in other species, including - insects able to collaborate in constructing and maintaining complex structures such as ant-hills, as illustrated in this short BBC video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZglirAfRvWg and - insects discussed in this web site https://www.orkin.com/pests/moths/what-is-a-cocoon which points out that, following feeding and growing for a while after hatching from their eggs, the insects are able to use processes of metamorphosis in a cocoon, chrysalis or pupa, to transform themselves to new life-forms with new capabilities, using very complex mechanisms which I suspect are not yet fully understood and which pose serious challenges for current theories about fundamental physics, as explained below. That is a simplified summary of the main point of this presentation! There is much information available online about metamorphosis in various species, including videos showing results of the transformations. But I have not found any attempt to explain *how those transformations are controlled*, and I have seen no suggestions that answering that question may require a revolutionary change in fundamental physics, as I am suggesting. There also many well-known facts about changes that occur in eggs of vertebrates between the time the eggs are produced by the mother and the time a fully formed individual with significant unlearnt behavoural competences emerges e.g. chicks able to peck for food and to follow their mothers, and avocet chicks that leave their mothers and walk towards water where they fish for food, without having to learn how. [There are online videos showing these and many other examples of behaviours of new hatchlings.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTELLIGENT REPRODUCTIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS The word "intelligent" is normally applied to whole individuals or to things done by complete individuals. However we also need to acknowledge that things done by *parts* of organisms, such as assembling a new complex structure, can also be regarded as intelligent, in part because humans would require intelligence in order to initiate and control such processes, if they were able to. There are many such forms of "sub-organism intelligence" that, as far as I can tell, have not yet been explained. Most of the challenges seem not to have been noticed by most researchers on forms and mechanisms of intelligence. In various publications and presentations Tony Leggett, mentioned above, has given other reasons for suspecting that revolutionary changes are required in current fundamental physics, but I don't think he has thought or written about requirements for control of processes of insect metamorphosis that include both disassembly of complex previously developed structures and also re-use of the physical matter to assemble some completely new structures, providing completely new behavioural capabilities. (I await his reactions to some of the new ideas presented below, which I have recently sent to him.) Animals have digestive systems that disassemble molecules in food and use the components for various purposes, including forming new physiological structures and repairing or extending older structures, or even assembling new individual members of the species, in the case of female animals, including humans and other mammals. I have not tried to find out whether those reproductive processes have features that challenge current fundamental theories in physics, though I will not be surprised if there are many examples, including the mechanisms that enable some female mammals (e.g. horses and deer) to produce offspring that shortly after birth already have complex cognitive capabilities, including abilities to walk to their mothers, to suckle, and to run with the herd shortly after birth, if chased by carnivorous predators, without requiring any training. A great deal is known about such animals, and a huge amount of information about various "precocial" species (species born with competences they don't have to learn) but I suspect the *detailed* reproductive processes that produce the unlearnt competences are not understood, partly because not all the questions raised in this document have been asked, which I find surprising! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MECHANISMS OF METAMORPHOSIS Most species of animals don't disassemble complex structures previously assembled within themselves and then use the materials to produce new very different structures with new very different capabilities, e.g. creating wings used for flying, which requires not only assembly of the new body parts but also creation of mechanisms for controlling their use, e.g. controlling new flying, feeding and mating behaviours, as happens in many insect species. I don't know whether there is any evidence that the control mechanisms were created at an earlier stage of development, long before the old physiological structures were disassembled and new ones created during metamorphosis, or whether new developmental processes occur shortly before metamorphosis, to create the new control mechanisms required for metamorphosis. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHY FOCUS ON INSECT METAMORPHOSIS? The processes in insect metamorphosis are particularly important because unlike many of the other biological processes mentioned, metamorphosis seems to involve remote control of *disassembly* of *previously assembled* complex physiological structures in the insects and *re-use of the particles* to assemble new very different structures including wings and a proboscis, used with entirely new abilities, mentioned above, along with new brain mechanisms for controlling the new structures, e.g. when flying, feeding or mating. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROGER PENROSE Another relevant nobel-prize winning physicist is Roger Penrose, one of the intellectual giants of the 20th Century, In 1989 he published his remarkable book "The Emperor's New Mind, Concerning Computers Minds And The Laws Of Physics" (Oxford University Press). After I published a partly critical review entitled "The Emperor's Real Mind", invited by the editors of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Penrose and I had several (amicable) discussions, including a public debate, but never reached agreement. His later book "Shadows Of The Mind" (Vintage Press 1994) is also relevant. He is a very prolific writer, and has frequently talked and written about the need for new ideas in fundamental physics, partly related to abilities of humans to make mathematical discoveries that go beyond what can be explained by known reasoning mechanisms, but as far as I know he has never written about or thought about the mechanisms involved in insect metamorphosis. I have searched for relevant comments by him without success. I have written to ask him about this but it seems that he is no longer responding to email. Penrose has proposed that the universe goes through cycles of development, collapse and re-birth (though my crude summary does not do justice to his ideas), but as far as I can tell he offers no adequate explanation of how the mechanisms of intelligence can arise after re-birth of the universe. His neuroscientist collaborator Stuart Hameroff has proposed that mechanisms in microtubules in brains play a crucial role but has not explained how microtubules made possible ancient discoveries such as Pythagoras' theorem, which was discovered and proved in several different ways, in different countries centuries before Pythagoras was born! Penrose has noticed some of the explanatory gaps and apparently hoped to provide adequate explanations at some future time, providing only vague descriptions of how such explanations might work. As far as I can tell, he has not thought about the relevance of biochemical processes in synapses, nor about the evolutionary importance of synapses that I am proposing. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although much research has been done on the evolutionary histories of a huge variety of forms of life on this planet, investigating changes in their physiological structures, habitats and behaviours, I think there is an even richer, much longer, history, nowhere completely summarised, which is the history of all the many types of biological mechanisms, substances, and processes that have existed on this planet since the earliest life or proto-life forms were produced, and the roles those (sub-organism) mechanisms and their products have had in the species in which they occurred, in some cases with impacts on other species, such as predators and prey of the species directly affected. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- OTHER RELEVANT RESEARCHERS A few researchers, including especially Lynn Margulis, in work referenced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis, have thought and written about some of this history, though I suspect much is still waiting to be discovered. I have learnt a great deal from her publications and once attended a workshop on her ideas in Oxford, some of which is recorded in this video https://www.voicesfromoxford.org/homage-to-darwin-part-2-symbiogenesis-film-and-discussion The theory I present here, was also partly inspired in a different way by ideas of Karl Popper, who distinguished what he called World1, World2 and World3, but spelling out the connections with Popper's ideas would add unhelpful complexity to this document. Popper scholars may wish to work out the connections and influences. I am not claiming to have produced a *complete* list of evolution-extending products of evolution. In this presentation I merely wish to point at some important examples, with extremely ancient biochemical origins, that appear to have gone unnoticed by current research communities. My examples can be regarded as extensions of the work of the other thinkers mentioned above. I also suggest that human forms of spatial (geometrical and topological) intelligence are among the products of biochemical mechanisms in synapses related to mechanisms mentioned above that enabled evolution of insect metamorphosis, among other things. As far as I can tell this is a novel proposal, though I am still trying to work out details. Part of the conjecture is that single celled organisms that were ancestors of synapses were the earliest ancestors of animals on this planet! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- EVOLUTIONARY BOOT-STRAPPING I am trying to develop a new systematic collection of labels covering products of evolution that extend the powers of biological evolution by making use of increasingly complex and powerful physical/chemical processes of reproduction and physiological and behavioural development. The *possibility* of such mechanisms always existed, but the *realisation* of different, increasingly complex, possible mechanisms required many new physical mechanisms to be assembled by earlier products of biological evolution, all depending ultimately on features of the physical universe that have always existed, though increasingly complex and varied derivatives could be produced by processes occurring at different times in different parts of the universe, repeatedly using general features of the universe in combination with previously produced local derived mechanisms in many different evolutionary and developmental trajectories. Those processes must depend on basic features of the physical universe that have always existed which may not yet been identified by human scientists. They may or may not turn out to be consistent with currently accepted "fundamental" physical theories. Consistent developments merely extend the old theories, whereas inconsistent developments will require some aspects of current physical theories to be modified or rejected and replaced. The history of all the *details* of life on this planet could not possibly be summarised completely in a single document or conference presentation, but I am trying to present a useful partial history including key features of *the early universe* that supported all the later developments of forms of life, and also possible developments that have not been realised on this planet, but may have been elsewhere in the universe. Some of them may also occur in the distant future on our planet, e.g. new forms of metamorphosis of organisms. Some of the possible forms may never occur anywhere in the universe. CLUES FROM INSECT METAMORPHOSIS Existing known varieties of insect metamorphosis, among other biological facts, illustrate what I think are deep new ideas about what seem to be previously unnoticed features of the physical universe, because important questions about the mechanisms involved (including mechanisms providing complex disassembly and assembly actions at a distance) have not been asked. If the questions and ideas are not new, I'll be grateful for references! I expect most members of the audience will find the the key new ideas presented here very unfamiliar and difficult to take in during the time available for a conference presentation. There is an online web site that provides a lot more detail and a large variety of links to online sources of information including documents and video presentations. https://poplogarchive.getpoplog.org/cogaff/misc/metamorphosis.html I hope it will be moved to a website with a shorter name. The above will then provide a link to it and the new website name will be provided near the top of that document. It is a huge document. Most people will not have time to read through all of it, but I have tried to summarise the key ideas near the top, with links to further details in other parts of the document. Searching for keywords in the document may be useful for some readers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE RELEVANCE OF FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS It is obvious that what life forms, forms of evolution, forms of reproduction, forms of development, etc., are *possible* depends on a variety of features of fundamental physics. However, identifying those features and working out how they explain the more complex processes can be a challenging task, as illustrated by the discussion of insect metamorphosis, below. I suspect current fundamental physical theories will have to be modified. I am not an expert on fundamental physics, so I welcome comments from theoretical physicists. I have already had a great deal of help in the past from Anthony Leggett, mentioned above, with whom I have interacted at various times since we met as students in Oxford around 1960, though he has not yet had time to look at some of the newest ideas about insect metamorphosis and the earliest single-celled forms of life, presented in this document. I also don't yet know whether he will agree that the physical transformations that occur during metamorphosis of insects, challenge current theories of fundamental physics, which he has also challenged in other ways. (I have informed him about the latest ideas and await a response.) I believe that long ago (around 1781) the philosopher Immanuel Kant had some ideas closely related to the ideas presented here, though he thought humans might never achieve a full understanding of the mechanisms explaining ancient human abilities to discover necessary truths and impossibilities concerning geometric and topological structures and processes, which he suggested might "lie forever concealed in the depths of the human soul". N.B. I am not claiming that the universe had an intelligent designer, partly because any such claim would also raise intractable questions about how the intelligent designer came into existence. Instead I am trying to suggest ways in which unintelligent physical-chemical mechanisms and processes eventually produced known forms of intelligence, making use of previously unacknowledged facts about fundamental physical mechanisms that are used in human reasoning mechanisms based on biochemical processes in synapses. [Another fact that I think has largely gone unnoticed is that human sign languages may have preceded human spoken languages, which only became possible after evolution of changes in mechanisms involved in chewing and swallowing food and in breathing. Before human mouths were used for speech there may have been no need for them to provide a passage for air going into or coming out of lungs if nostrils (nose holes) provided such a route. However, it is possible that the transition to allow breathing through the mouth occurred in common ancestors of humans and other animals that use mouths both for feeding and for vocal communication, e.g. barking or growling in ancestors of wolves and dogs.] One of the implications of the ideas here is that diagrams that depict biological evolution as a forward-branching tree-structured process are seriously misleading, partly because sexual reproduction combines two evolutionary histories (of male and femaile parents), implying that evolution has both backward and forward branching trajectories. I also argue that attempts to explain intelligence in terms of statistics-based neural networks that discover probabilities are seriously misguided, as implied by the ideas of Kant in 1781, long before neural network theories had been proposed! Another implication is that we should not use the notion of "intelligence" as applicable only to *whole* organisms, or machines, or collections of such entities (as in "swarm intelligence"). Instead there are forms of intelligence involved in processes of construction of *parts* of organisms, including processes that add new forms of complexity to developing organisms, such as -- Processes that occur during hatching in eggs of many species -- Processes of metamorphosis in insects that occur in a cocoon, decomposing parts of the insect and using some of the constituent physical particles to form a new, very different insect, for example providing wings and a proboscis and abilities to move to food by flying to new sources of food, e.g. nectar in flowering plants, instead of feeding on solid matter while crawling, e.g. chewing and digesting leaves before metamorphosis occurs. In some cases metamorphosis even produces new insects that can mate while flying, e.g. some dragonflies. -- Other processes in more complex organisms during development from a fertilised egg, which I shall not have time to discuss in this talk, one example being production of new-born horses and deer that shortly after birth, without having time to learn new behaviours, can walk to their mothers to feed and can also run with the herd if chased by predators. There are many online web sites describing unlearnt competences of new-born horses and deer. They *describe* but do not *explain* how the unlearnt competences are produced. As far as I can tell nobody has provided (or even attempted to provide?) adequate explanations of how such complex unlearnt capabilities are produced, e.g. providing descriptions of biochemical mechanisms involved in the production of new individuals in wombs, which ensure that when the foals are born they do not need to learn how to walk to their mothers to suck milk, or how to run with the herd if necessary. I suspect that if or when such mechanisms are discovered they will involve the sorts of extensions of current physical theories that I suggest are needed to explain processes of metamorphosis in insects. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE RELEVANCE OF PLANT INTELLIGENCE Although plants are not normally thought of as having intelligence, there has been research on so-called "Plant intelligence" as reported by Paco Calvo, in What Is It Like to Be a Plant? in Journal of Consciousness Studies 24, 2017. That is one example among many such discussions about intelligence in plants in the last few decades. Perhaps some of the mechanisms will also turn out to challenge current physical theories. More generally, I claim that although many theories have been proposed that attempt to explain how various forms of intelligence can evolve and can be reproduced and extended, they all make explicit or implicit assumptions about the use of mechanisms whose existence is not explained, and very few even attempt to explain how the mechanisms they describe could have been produced in a physical universe that does not already contain such mechanisms. A CONJECTURE ABOUT EVOLUTION OF SPEECH Another evolutionary conjecture: before the evolution of mechanisms of speech, earlier forms of communication by ancient ancestors of humans may have used physical movements of hands and other body parts to communicate. Such communication would have used vision and depended on available light and unobstructed lines of sight. Evolution of *spoken* languages avoided those constraints but required evolution of major physiological changes to mechanisms of breathing and swallowing food, to allow mouths to produce sounds transmitted through the atmosphere for communication at times when vision could not be used (e.g. because participants are out of sight, or at night, or in dark caves). Use of vocal sounds to communicate required evolutionary changes to both sound production and mechanisms for sound reception. I suspect the actual evolutionary history of mechanisms of communication in humans (and some other animals??) was more complex than the above conjectures. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE WORK OF MIKE LEVIN Neuroscientist Mike Levin, with whom I have had a couple of online debates has written and thought about related topics. For more information about him see: https://as.tufts.edu/biology/levin-lab and https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/soro.2022.0142 I have not seen any evidence that he has thought or written about the mechanisms underlying processes of reasoning about impossibility, possibility or necessity in spatial structures and processes, such as the theorem usually attributed to Pythagoras, although it was independently discovered and proved in several different ways by ancient mathematicians in several different countries long before Pythagoras was born! I also don't know whether he has thought or written about mechanisms involved in discovery and proof of topological theorems such as theorems about cutting along the midline of a Mobius strip with one, two or more twists in the strip. The simplest case is demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS2rLRYlFR8 Readers may try to think about the effects of cutting a mobius strip with two or more twists. It is not easy to think about, though there are several online demonstrations of the effects, and some mathematicians have thought deeply about the processes. However I don't think any current neuroscientist can explain which brain mechanisms make this possible. My conjecture is that biochemical mechanisms in synapses are involved. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- OTHER RELEVANT RESEARCHERS There is also partly related work by Stuart Kauffman, though I don't think he has noticed or thought about the ideas presented here. His 2023 interview with Bryan Greene is partly relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITJ3AF3TK5M I suspect there are many other researchers who have thought about and presented ideas about possible mechanisms in books, journal papers, online presentations, etc. though I have so far found none who ask the questions about control that I have been asking or who propose that the answers will involve biochemical mechanisms in synapses whose powers cannot be explained by current physical theories. The work of Seth Grant and colleagues (in Edinburgh University) on mechanisms in synapses is very relevant though they have not, as far as I know, asked the questions I have been asking, or provided answers, or conjectured that the answers will challenge current fundamental physical theories. For a useful overview of work by Grant and colleagues see https://sidb.org.uk/seth-grant/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have just discovered, but not yet read in detail the work of Xavier Belles https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10735215/ Investigating the origin of insect metamorphosis It claims that experiments exploring the role of juvenile hormone during the life cycle of firebrat insects provide clues about the evolution of metamorphosis. A quick scan shows no mention of challenges to fundamental physical theories. I don't know whether he asks, or attempts to answer, my questions about how the detailed physical/chemical processes of metamorphosis are controlled, as opposed to merely reporting that they occur. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ARE HUMANS CAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESSES OF INSECT METAMORPHOSIS? It could turn out that some of the mechanisms involved in biological processes of reproduction, hatching, development, gene-expression, metamorphosis, and, more generally, processes involved in interactions with various aspects of the environment, including environments provided for some body-parts of organisms by other body-parts, cannot be adequately described using forms of representation that are capable of being understood by humans, unless humans find new ways of extending their forms of representation and reasoning, that have not yet been discovered or created. It may even turn out that there are aspects of such biological mechanisms and processes that simply cannot be understood by humans, no matter what new forms of representation and reasoning they develop. I suspect Alan Turing had related thoughts when he was writing his paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, published in 1952, shortly before he died. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------