English Version

“Reptile soul:
reptilian mental contents
and their phylogenetic descent,”
 was asked for serving as Introduction for the new, soon-to-be-published edition of a quite focused Spanish treatise, J. C. Troiano’s Reptile Biomedicine,
and commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the research work
that exposed the above facts.

¡Alma e’ reptil!

Los contenidos mentales de los reptiles

y su procedencia filética

Introducción a una próxima edición de Biomedicina de reptiles, por Juan Carlos Troiano y colaboradores
por

Mario Crocco

Electroneurobiología 2004; 12 (1), pp. 1-72; URL

 http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/index2.htm
 

Copyright © 2004  by the author.
This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's full citation and original URL (above).

- Laboratorio de Investigaciones Electroneurobiológicas -

Long abstract: The evolutionary origin of the nervous systems is reviewed, with special focus on the physical means put at play at each stage. Numerous observations, often scarcely discussed outside of the neurobiological and psychophysiological concerns, consistently point out that mass variations in the action carriers of a force field, obtained by coupling with intensity variations of another, overlapping force field, found a neurobiophysical application. In it also intervened relativistic dilations of the instant or minimal interval-like course of causal transformation, despite such dilations’ being unexpected in the Pythagoric-Parmenidean mindsets where, in order to deny genuine reality to elapsing time, the physical instant is supposed infinitesimal – i.e., not integrable into actual time courses – and therefore unfit to undergo relativistic dilations. Brains combine the two physical phenomena in connecting minds with their environment and varying their sensations’ force of imposition. This application, not specifically discussed in this review (see rather Electroneurobiología 11 # 2 pp. 14-65, 2003: M. Szirko, “Effects of relativistic motions in the brain and their physiological bearing”) aimed instead at its antecedent stages, was achieved through the electric field’s neurophysiological patterning which, before and after the incorporation of those phenomena into biological functions, some living organisms employed for getting into resourceful relationship with outer events. Whence depicting the long evolutionary roots of this special use clarifies such incorporation.

One of the most notable dynamical phenomena in nature is the evolution of living systems. To obtain nourishment, defense and sex recombination, biological organisms enact their distinctive menus of relationships with the external world by performing what is called their “functions of relation.” Distinguishing any particular external thing or sector to be acted or reacted upon (object) from the rest of the environment, while allowing for its relevant relations with this environment (mapping), is termed a “reference to object.” It was once thought that, for the functions of relation to make reference to objects and map them, a nervous system was requisite.

Nervous systems, for that reason, got conceived as having started with cellular specialization; that is, with the evolutionary selection of surface cells specialized in detecting and cooperatively communicating the presence of relevant objects to other bodily cells specialized in fittingly dealing with them. Though functional, this criterion guarded the primacy of anatomical distinctions: the nervous systems were assumed to have started with the functional diversity that made neurosensory cells different from other cells – specially from motor cells.

The remaining of the nervous evolution was thought to have consisted in the natural selection, differentiation and combination of the paths or circuits (hodologies, also called neural nets) composed of those specialized cells of the first class (neurosensory cells). The acount tells that, early on, some of these communicating outer cells went down into the tissue (subepithelization) for covering. Then, for mustering into synergy more numerous and farther motor cells (muscles), they also became elongated into fibers (fibrillarization). Then the fibers became drawn together into suitable anatomical corners, forming local networks called nerve plexuses (plexusification). Concentration continued: as it enables shortening in strategic sites the fibers’ length and, so, faster coordinating the nerve communications that must be forwarded in some mutually referred-to sequence for bringing diverse muscles into common action, the natural selection of more complex instinctive behavior selected the genetic formation of nervous ganglia (ganglionarization). Their development came upon a treasure of new resources derived from variations in their inner connectivity. As ganglia so became more complex, they formed an inner fiber mesh called neuropil (neuropilarization), which got organized into the brain cortex (corticalization) and – up since the appearing of reptilomorphs - into neocortex (neocorticalization) so as to sustain the natural selection of physical processes which minds can react to with subjective intonations.

Otherwise stated, it was thought that the natural selection of paths for nerve activity supplied the physical processes to which minds can react by intonating themselves subjectively. But the story is incorrect.

Already in the acellulars from which all animals derive, far before any cell differentiation, the functions of relation made reference to objects. These acellulars distinguished from the rest of a mapped environment the particular thing or sector to be acted or reacted upon. The electric field patterns (correlograms) that they utilized as means for attaining reference to objects got lost in many animal lineages, which rather formed nervous ganglia to serve as their uppermost level of organic regulation. Those means, instead, were preserved during the process of path concentration that formed brains.

As a result, the brain organs that nowadays carry out the chordate’s uppermost level of organic regulation include neural ganglia that subserve a specific, connectivity-based function, which is not the uppermost regulatory function of the organism: the neural ganglia embedded in each chordate brain do hodologically enact unmindful behavior through refined sensomotor archs that lack any memory of particular objects. As another result of the same course of events brains include, too, the said electric field means. They perform another specific function. These electric means furnish the therein circumstanced mind as well with exchanges to which intonatively react as, too, with a way for ecphoria, i.e. for causally chaining some extramental processes to mental operations. Further, these very electric field means, by way of making relativistic effects to assume specific values at the locations of the mind-extramentality causal exchanges, enact variations in time resolution that modulate the mind’s intonative reactions, while the mind’s retentiveness supplies a memory of particular objects in terms of their operative characterization. Therewith individual intellectual developments become allowed in the biosphere - whereupon the regular eclosions of never regular minds get placed into the causal organization of behaving organisms, as their uppermost regulatory level. Thereby, not through the hodologies or circuitry of the neural ganglia embedded in the brain, these organisms become able to surmount the Turing machine limits and, so, colonize such biological niches where transforming accidents into opportunities is requisite for survival. Reptile organization, by its affording neocorticalization, provided the newest major step in this evolutionary journey.

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