David Bailey
Member
Well they surely do in the sense that they may catalyse one reaction, thus removing reactants that might otherwise combine with something else more slowly. Lab organic chemistry famously generates tarry bi-products - heavily polymerised materials that would be very hard indeed to excrete.I would say consciousness makes use of life, and I think that difference in outlook explains a lot. I don't reject the possibility that cells are conscious, it just seems to me to be an unnecessary hypothesis. I give it creedence because of some of the things NDErs say not because of the biological, biochemical facts.
Are you implying biological reactions yield 100% yields? Enzymes are catalysts and they increase the rates of reactions by lowering the activation energy, they don't change the stoichiometry of the reactions.
You seem to adopt a curious position which is part anti-materialist, and part pro-materialist! There is nothing wrong with that as such - just odd.Cells produce and excrete waste (crud). There are many reactions going on in the cell but the cell has a highly organized internal structure and compartmentalization. It isn't just a vat of chemicals it is like a factory with assembly lines.
I still don't understand the role you think consciousness plays in the cell. Does the cell think "my amino acid levels are out of balance, I have to make more alanine"? Consciousness doesn't help an animal adjust its cholesterol levels, how does consciousness help a cell manage biochemical reactions?
For example, if we have a non-material essence that separates at (near) death, that presumably does control a lot of our actions while we are alive. I assume that consciousness does manifest itself in many animals, and it is extremely hard to pin down a level where it stops. However, that control must mean that our individual cells - neurons and maybe others end up doing things they wouldn't do otherwise - so the capacity for non-material control of cells does exist in us and higher animals.
The problem (to me) is that known biochemistry just keeps on getting ever more complex, and it seems to me that complexity without some overall control seems less and less likely to be stable. Rupert Sheldrake looks at the complexity of embryo development. The point is, that yes there may be gradients of various chemicals that drive the differentiation of the cells, but such a process would become very unstable because of its complexity. Here he discusses a very revealing experiment in which the lens in a newt's eye is removed in the embryo, and it re-grows by a quite different mechanism:
http://members.tripod.com/~Glove_r/Sheldrake.html
The point is it seems unreasonable to assume that this mechanism got designed in just in case this particular situation arose! It seems more reasonable to assume that some form of intelligence can push an embryo back to viability because it knows what the end product is supposed to look like.
Did you see what I meant by the Rube Goldberg comparison?
David