Collective intelligence and how viruses communicate with the body

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Today's publication of excerpts from the monograph by biophysicist Boris Georgievich Rezhabek on the noosphere may require some explanation.

Look, someone in the commentary even described the theory of the noosphere as “the bourgeois theory of" tyaf-tyaf ". Is this reaction fair, is there at least some real evidence that translates this theory into the rank of physical reality?

In our opinion, there is, and the argument in favor of the noosphere is serious. This is the existence of an information field “spilled” around us. It is poured, as water is poured - a symbol of information.

And where there is matter and information, there is certainly a measure: a set of rules, laws (physics, chemistry - nature in general), coding systems, etc.

It remains to find out whether such a system, where the presence of matter, information and measure has been proven, has intelligence. We will not go into the definition of the latter, but simply ask ourselves the question: does nature - does it have intelligence or not? If it does not, then the soulless material world around us should have already turned into complete chaos, according to the principles of thermodynamics.

But in practice, we observe the opposite process: not degradation, but development! At a minimum, the creation and preservation of conditions for human development, after all, it is enough extremely smallderegulation of near-Earth and near-solar parameters and processes, so that on Earth, for example, the temperature or the level of radiation changes so that a person as a biological species ceases to exist.

In general, we rarely think about this fact - the existence and stable maintenance of that incredibly narrow range of physical parameterswhere we can live! Just imagine that the temperature on our planet will rise by insignificant for spacesome 50 °! Or it will go down … For comparison: the surface temperature of the Sun is 5 778 K, the temperature of the core is 15.000.000 °! What is plus or minus 50 degrees for space in comparison with millions? !! Indeed, there is something to think about …

It turns out that someone is engaged in adjusting the parameters of space that are acceptable for our pitiful liberal life today. Those. there is a will external to humanity. And the mind, i.e. there is an external intelligence.

Consequently, this is no longer just nature, but Nature with a capital letter, to as the bearer of a part of the enveloping intellect.

But where is the evidence for the existence of the information field mentioned above? - a thoughtful reader might ask. It is: intuition.

Each of us faces the facts of manifestation of intuition, to a greater or lesser extent. And it's not just about intuitive insights or insights, like the history of the creation of the Periodic Table of the Elements. Here we can also assume that Mendeleev saw her in a dream as a result of his previous searches and reflections - so the brain suggested a solution in a dream.

This assumption certainly has a right to exist. But here's how to explain the intuition of a mother, who suddenly felt that trouble had happened to her child, who was somewhere far away? Such facts are undeniably numerous, which means that the existence of an information field external to us is a fact of the physical world. Dot.

By the way, the Eastern doctrine of karma transmitted from generation to generation and influencing them is just one of the manifestations of the existence of such a field - a field of information about everything that a person has ever done: in thoughts, intentions, actions. Hence the Russian proverb: do not wish harm to your neighbor! For evil will somehow return to you.

With that in mind, below is a post about viruses that reveals a completely unexpected side of them: sociality … Yes, yes, it is before our very eyes that a new direction in science is emerging: sociovirology … Fantasy? Yes, if we reject the noosphere as a fact of our being. If we follow the facts, logic and common sense, if we strive to expand the horizons of knowledge, then the birth of sociovirology is a completely logical reflection of the principle of esoterics: what is above, so below.

Taking into account the existence of the noosphere as an actor of control with an intellect, including earthly and social processes, it can be quite logical to assume: the current pseudo-pandemic, and especially the results of the efforts of the rulers, which they can achieve in the slave-owning planetary society that is being created before our eyes with the destruction a significant part of the population - isn't this a reaction of the Noosphere to the immoral existence of modern mankind?

Again, we will not immediately discard such a hypothesis. It was not for nothing that Klyuchevsky argued that the regularity of historical phenomena is inversely proportional to their spirituality..

Do viruses possess collective intelligence? They communicate and have a clear goal, what are they trying to achieve?

The virus cannot be killed. He does not live, so he can only be broken, destroyed. The virus is not a being, but rather a substance.

The pandemic of the new coronavirus has been going on for two months. Everyone already considers himself an expert in this topic. Did you know that a virus cannot be killed? He does not live, so he can only be broken, destroyed. The virus is not a being, but rather a substance. But at the same time, viruses are able to communicate, cooperate and disguise themselves. These and other amazing scientific facts were collected by our friends from the Reminder project.

The social life of viruses

Scientists discovered this just three years ago. As often happens, by accident. The aim of the study was to test whether hay bacteria can alert each other to an attack by bacteriophages, a special class of viruses that selectively attack bacteria. After adding the bacteriophages to the hay bacilli tubes, the researchers recorded the signals in an unknown molecular language. But the "negotiations" on it were not at all bacteria, but viruses.

It turned out that after penetrating bacteria, viruses forced them to synthesize and send special peptides to neighboring cells. These short protein molecules signaled to the rest of the viruses about the next successful capture. When the number of signal peptides (and therefore captured cells) reached a critical level, all viruses, as if on command, stopped actively dividing and lurked.

If it were not for this deceptive maneuver, the bacteria could organize a collective rebuff or completely die, depriving the viruses of the opportunity to parasitize on them further. The viruses have clearly decided to put their victims to sleep and give them time to recover. The peptide that helped them do this was called "arbitrium" ("decision").

Further research has shown that viruses are also capable of making more complex decisions. They can sacrifice themselves during an attack on a cell's immune defenses to ensure the success of the second or third wave of the offensive. They are able to move in a coordinated manner from cell to cell in transport vesicles (vesicles), exchange gene material, help each other mask from immunity, cooperate with other strains in order to take advantage of their evolutionary advantages.

Chances are that even these amazing examples are just the tip of the iceberg, says Lan'in Zeng, a biophysicist at the University of Texas. A new science - sociovirology - should study the latent social life of viruses. We are not talking about the fact that viruses are conscious, says one of its creators, microbiologist Sam Diaz-Muñoz. But social connections, language of communication, collective decisions, coordination of actions, mutual assistance and planning are the hallmarks of intelligent life.

Are viruses intelligent?

Can something that is not even a living organism have a mind or consciousness? There is a mathematical model that allows this possibility. This is the theory of integrated information, developed by the Italian neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. He considers consciousness as the ratio of the quantity and quality of information, which is determined by a special unit of measurement - φ (phi). The idea is that between the completely unconscious matter (0 φ) and the conscious human brain (maximum φ) there is an ascending series of transition states.

Any object capable of receiving, processing and generating information has a minimum level of φ. Including those certainly inanimate, such as a thermometer or an LED. Since they know how to convert temperature and light into data, it means that "information content" is the same fundamental property for them as mass and charge are for an elementary particle. In this sense, the virus is clearly superior to many inanimate objects, since it itself is a carrier of (genetic) information.

Consciousness is a higher level of information processing. Tononi calls this integration. Integrated information is something that is qualitatively superior to the simple sum of collected data: not a set of individual characteristics of an object such as yellow, round shape and warmth, but an image of a burning lamp made up of them.

It is generally accepted that only biological organisms are capable of such integration. To test whether inanimate objects can adapt and gain experience, Tononi, together with a team of neuroscientists, developed a computer model resembling an arcade game for a retro console.

The subjects were 300 "animats" - 12-bit units with basic artificial intelligence, simulation of the senses and the motor apparatus. Each was given randomly generated instructions for body parts and everyone was launched into a virtual maze. Time after time, researchers selected and copied animats that exhibited the best coordination.

The next generation inherited the same code from the "parents". Its size did not change, but random digital "mutations" were introduced into it, which could strengthen, weaken, or supplement the connections between the "brain" and "limbs." As a result of such natural selection, after 60 thousand generations, the efficiency of passage of the labyrinth among animats has increased from 6 to 95%.

Animats have one advantage over viruses: they can move independently. Viruses have to move from carrier to carrier in the passenger seats in saliva and other physiological secretions. But they have more chances to increase the level of φ. If only because viral generations are replaced faster. Once in a living cell, the virus makes it churn out up to 10 thousand of its genetic copies per hour. True, there is one more condition: to integrate information to the level of consciousness, a complex system is needed.

How complex is a virus? Let's take a look at the example of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 - the culprit of the current pandemic. In shape, it looks like a horned sea mine. Outside - a spherical lipid shell. These are fats and fat-like substances that must protect it from mechanical, physical and chemical damage; it is they that are destroyed by soap or sanitizer.

On the envelope is the crown that gave it its name, that is, the spine-like processes of S-proteins, with the help of which the virus enters the cell. Under the envelope is an RNA molecule: a short chain with 29,903 nucleotides. (For comparison: there are more than three billion of them in our DNA.) Quite a simple construction. But a virus doesn't need to be complex. The main thing is to become a key component of a complex system.

Science blogger Philip Bouchard compares viruses to Somali pirates hijacking a huge tanker on a tiny boat. But in essence, a virus is closer to a lightweight computer program compressed by an archiver. The virus does not need the entire control algorithm of the captured cell. A short code is enough to make the entire operating system of the cell work for it. For this task, its code is ideally optimized in the process of evolution.

It can be assumed that the virus "revives" inside the cell only as much as the resources of the system allow. In a simple system, he is able to share and control metabolic processes. In a complex one (like our body), it can use additional options, for example, to achieve a level of information processing that, according to Tononi's model, borders on intelligent life.

What do viruses want?

But why do viruses need this at all: sacrifice themselves, help each other, improve the communication process? What is their purpose if they are not living beings?

Oddly enough, the answer has a lot to do with us. By and large, a virus is a gene. The primary task of any gene is to copy itself as much as possible in order to spread in space and time. But in this sense, the virus is not much different from our genes, which are also concerned primarily with the preservation and replication of the information recorded in them. In fact, the similarities are even greater. We are a bit of a virus ourselves. By about 8%. There are so many viral genes in our genome. Where did they come from there?

There are viruses for which the introduction of a host cell into the DNA is a necessary part of the "life cycle". These are retroviruses, which include, for example, HIV. The genetic information in a retrovirus is encoded in an RNA molecule. Inside the cell, the virus starts the process of making a DNA copy of this molecule, and then inserts it into our genome, turning it into a conveyor for assembling its RNAs based on this template.

But it so happens that the cell suppresses the synthesis of viral RNA. And the virus, embedded in its DNA, loses the ability to divide. In this case, the viral genome can become a genetic ballast, passed on to new cells. The age of the oldest retroviruses, whose "fossil remains" are preserved in our genome, is from 10 to 50 million years.

Over the years of evolution, we have accumulated about 98 thousand retroviral elements that once infected our ancestors. Now they make up 30-50 families, which are subdivided into almost 200 groups and subgroups. According to the calculations of geneticists, the last retrovirus that managed to become part of our DNA infected the human population about 150 thousand years ago. Then our ancestors survived a pandemic.

What are relic viruses doing now? Some do not show themselves in any way. Or so it seems to us. Others work: protect the human embryo from infection; stimulate the synthesis of antibodies in response to the appearance of foreign molecules in the body. But in general, the mission of viruses is much more significant.

How viruses communicate with us

With the emergence of new scientific data on the influence of the microbiome on our health, we began to realize that bacteria are not only harmful, but also useful, and in many cases are vital. The next step, writes Joshua Lederberg in The History of Infections, should be to break the habit of demonizing viruses. They really often bring us sickness and death, but the purpose of their existence is not the destruction of life, but evolution.

As in the example with bacteriophages, the death of all cells of the host organism usually means defeat for the virus. Hyperaggressive strains that kill or immobilize their hosts too quickly lose their ability to spread freely and become dead-end branches of evolution.

Instead, more “friendly” strains get a chance to multiply their genes. “As viruses evolve in a new environment, they usually stop causing severe complications. This is good for both the host and the virus itself,”says New York epidemiologist Jonathan Epstein.

The new coronavirus is so aggressive because it only recently crossed the interspecies barrier. According to immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki of Yale University, "When viruses first enter the human body, they don't understand what's going on."They are like first generation animats in a virtual maze.

But we are no better. When confronted with an unknown virus, our immune system can also spiral out of control and respond to the threat with a "cytokine storm" - an unnecessarily powerful inflammation that destroys the body's own tissues. (It is this overreaction of immunity that causes many deaths during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.) To live in love and harmony with the four human coronaviruses that cause us harmless "colds" (OC43, HKU1, NL63 and HCoV-229E), we had to adapt to them, and to them - to us.

We exert an evolutionary influence on each other not just as environmental factors. Our cells are directly involved in the assembly and modification of viral RNAs. And viruses are in direct contact with the genes of their carriers, introducing their genetic code into their cells. The virus is one of the ways our genes communicate with the world. Sometimes this dialogue gives unexpected results.

The emergence of the placenta - the structure that connects the fetus to the mother's body - has become a key moment in the evolution of mammals. It is difficult to imagine that the synticin protein required for its formation is encoded by a gene that is nothing more than a "domesticated" retrovirus. In ancient times, synticin was used by a virus to destroy the cells of living organisms.

The story of our life with viruses is drawn by an endless war or an arms race, writes anthropologist Charlotte Bivet. This epic is built according to one scheme: the origin of the infection, its spread through the global network of contacts and, as a result, its containment or eradication. All his plots are associated with death, suffering and fear. But there is another story.

For example, the story of how we got the neural gene Arc. It is necessary for synaptic plasticity - the ability of nerve cells to form and consolidate new nerve connections. A mouse in which this gene is disabled is not capable of learning and the formation of long-term memory: having found cheese in the maze, it will forget the way to it the very next day.

To study the origin of this gene, scientists have isolated the proteins it produces. It turned out that their molecules spontaneously assemble into structures that resemble HIV viral capsids: protein envelopes that protect the RNA of the virus. Then they are released from the neuron in the transport membrane vesicles, merge with another neuron and release their contents. Memories are transmitted like a viral infection.