LifeOS: exploring the system that executes DNA

June 24, 2014

Psychic Cells Communicate across Physical Barrier

Cells communicate through wireless connections! This is what i’m talking about. Psychic communication is fundamental to biology!!!
mae-Wan Ho Comment left 23rd June 2014 18:06:35
“Hi Jens, Thank you for reminding me. It was Fritz Popp and his colleagues who have done the experiment you mentioned. I have done other related work with Fritz who discovered biophotons. But Alexander Gurwitsch was really the first to show communication between cells by UV light. I have no doubt that molecules, cells, and organisms could use the entire em spectrum” Regards, maewan

June 11, 2014

The Bogus Debate: Religion vs Science

The podcast

Howdy Folks, Welcome to Systems, Symbiosis and the Forest Goddess. My name’s jim cranford.
In episode 2 we closed with the concept of the microbial mat acting as the brain and central nervous system for the forest.
If you are waiting for science or religion to verify this, it just won’t happen.
It doesn’t matter if you were raised in a religious or scientific background, everything you have been taught has been spun to get you to behave in a certain way. You have been lied to.
For example, we have been brainwashed into believing that we are separate from Nature. We have been convinced that we must fight against Nature in order to survive, and therefore it is right and proper to rip apart our environment for profit. We have been conned into believing that human beings are special, either the descendants of the gods or the pinnacle of evolutionary progress. These fundamental beliefs translate into a screwed set of values and priorities. The result of applying these values is the mess we find ourselves in today.
Both science and religion want you to believe their philosophy… they want you to think they have all the answers between them that they offer the only options.
Are science and religion really at opposite ends of the spectrum, encompassing all between them? Well, we all know the history, we just need to put it in perspective. In the olden days all we had was religion for a philosophy. All the institutions of learning were owned and operated by the church. Then along came science. It didn’t grow out of the ground or appear fully formed out of the blue, it branched out of those religious institutions. Consequently, science inherited some of the same negative patterns that  defined religion, like dominion over Nature and the enslavement of the working class. That also has meant that religion financed and controlled all scientific research through it’s ownership of all institutions of higher learning. Not much has changed today, religious orders still own and operate the major universities.
The battle between religion and science is staged.
Does MIT have a chapel? Does CalTech? Does Notre Dame have a science department? Does Harvard give out Doctor of Divinity degrees?  In reality religion owns science lock, stock and barrel.
Religion and science keep up this mock battle for our beliefs to keep us from noticing that it is Nature that really runs the whole show. They want to keep us gobbling up the environment and lining their pockets.
After a while you may begin to notice that these lies all work together to extract certain behavior from us. These aren’t lies of misunderstanding, on the contrary, taken as a set of protocols, the lies fed us over the centuries show a coherence only possible with a deep understanding of “human nature”. Civilization demonstrates a degree of organization, coordination, consistency and yes, understanding not likely to be carried off by human beings at least not the ones that i know.

Awakening is not a one time deal, it’s a lifestyle.
It’s like the levels in a video game, or the corporate ladder, or boiling water. When you step up a level, the rules change. One of my favorite examples is the professional sports leagues. It doesn’t matter what sport, if it has a pro league you can be sure it fits this pattern.
We’ll start at the bottom. Kids learn to play the game, they learn the basics of the sport. As the levels get higher, the learning becomes more complex, but still is directly related to the performance in the game. Kid grows up, turns pro. Lots of things change at this level. There are contracts and money added to the mix.
Now the kid knows the game backwards and forwards and moves up to being a coach. At this level the rules change, new responsibilities and challenges. From coach he moves up to GM, a whole new ball game. Everything learned in the past is important, but the new rules change everything.
Somewhere near this pinnacle of success our sports hero will find out that all the sport, with all it’s rules and competition is really a front for a system with an entirely different rule set. This invisible set of rules trumps all the others. This rule set has been in place from the very beginning of the sport. This rule set was the reason the sport was organized in the first place. Of course this shadow benefactor from all sports is gambling.
Civilization has a similar shadow rule set that trumps all others. It is the reason for the existence of civilization itself.
We are like those children first learning how to play the game. We are so wrapped up in playing that we have no idea what our efforts lead to down the road.
I used to think that it was just pride that held science back, that scientists just didn’t want to admit that the shamans and witchdoctors were right all along. Then i was sure it was just greed, the hunger for wealth and power, that made human beings act so crazy. There is no doubt that pride and greed have, and continue to play their parts. However, the deeper i explored this Natural communications system, not just as an observer, but as a participant, learning from the experience, the more i began to sense that there is something much deeper going on here. Our civilized madness is not an end in itself. Our seeming separation from Nature is an illusion. Our cities are no less Natural artifacts than birdnests or termite mounds. There is a grand plan going on and we are a part of it. The plan comes from high above our paygrade and security clearence.  We are a strategy, signed off on by Mother Nature herself. We are in sort of a need to know phase. The plan expects most people to continue to be decieved. Complete awakening would just be way too painful for most folks to handle.
I think it was Gloria Steinman who said, “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” I think it is worse then that. What will really piss you off is when you find out that the truth is, there is no freedom. Like it or not, we serve a higher order, through our web of symbiotic relationships.

We tend to look at symbiotic relationships like communication channels in that we are amazed to find them in the first place. Look how unusual it is to find this kind of behavior in a deaf and dumb universe, we say. Imagine, such diverse species cooperating and communicating. How did the learn to do that? However this kind of behavior not unusual at all. In reality communication and symbiotic relationships are the glue that holds Natural Systems together. Most species depend on dozens of direct symbiotic relationships and many, many more indirect relationships for survival.
Back to the forest system. The forest provides a steady flow of nutrients to the mobile species through a multitude of feeding stations. Fruit and nector are certainly nutritious, but they also carry a bunch of information in hormones, allomones, pheromones, flavors and other enticements. Within the output of each feeding station are messeges that encourage the guest to return often, as well as information on the duties expected by the plant. This is where we get into trouble with our plant relationships. We expect a onesided realtionship. The opium poppy is an extreme example of a plant encouraging it’s user to return often. The folks who live in the mountains where opium is grown have little trouble with their relationship, because they can perform the second half of the deal they have made with the plant. Their duty is to grow and harvest the opium poppy. The big city addict gets the first part of the deal, but has no way to fullfil the rest of the bargain and suffers serious internal conflict as the result.
In a way then, the primates in the forest are addicted to the food they eat. Their behavior centers around the feeding stations and their bodily functions. What do you suppose these primates dream about at night? Visions of sugar plums? Another way to look at it is that primates serve, or maybe they are slaves to the forest.
This is how it was for our ancestors in the Garden of Eden. Our ancestors were fully immersed in the forest system, taking in and processing energy and information from our symbiotic partners and depositing our output on the forest floor. Along with our feces, hair, sweat and skin, dead bodies were absorbed into soil and recycled back into the system.
 I don’t usually recommend books, but i suggest you check out Tony Wright’s book “Left in the Dark”.
It is a really good description of how our hormone rich forest diet stimulated growth of our brain and our savannah diet led to a shrinking and malfunctioning brain.
 So here we were, our ancestors anyway, hanging out in the forest, digging the ripe fruits and tender leaves of paradise, growing bigger brains, and what happens? The bottom falls out. Forests are shrinking, food’s getting scarce and some adjustments need to be made.
This story is not so much about human beings as it is the forest, so we’re going to widen our view. Besides, the forest system was aware of the situation long before any humans would have noticed. This pattern was in place in the mature forest, long before it began to shrink. In a mature forest, energy is already in short supply. The huge biomass generated by a mature forest uses up most of the availabe nutrients. So there is a forest wide strategy already under way to find ways to import energy. It was, and is, really a simple plan. She just programs mobile species to go out, find food and bring it home.
One of the first steps was to send the birds out to gather energy and bring it back. Some birds would eat seeds and grains and just bring home the bird shit, while others would bring home food for their young, nesting in the forest. In those days there were a lot of birds, which amounted to a sizable daily import of energy for the local forest system.
This is a very simple behavior pattern we can see throughout Nature; go out, find food, bring it home. From ants cutting their leaves, eagles catching fish, to Papa bringing home the bacon, this behavior pattern drives a good portion world systems.
From the forest point of view, primates were perfect for this kind of mission. They couldn’t cover as much ground as birds, but they could carry bigger loads. We have certainly taken to the procedure of, go out, find food, bring it home to eat. It is my contention that it was the forest goddess that first sent our ancestors out onto the savannah.
For a clue as to how that might have happened we can look to the leaf cutter ants. They have prospered using part of process by going out, finding food and bringing it home, for the fungus , of course. It shouldn’t be any stretch to figure out how this symbiotic realtionship developed. The fungus was once attatched to the root of a tree in the forest furnishing it’s moisture, nutrition and antibodies; that’s what it’s current relatives do. What probably happened is that it’s host trees died, leaving the fungus without a symbiotic partner. There were ants nearby and a new partnersip was forged. In this new symbiotic relationship, the fungus no longer counted on a specific tree, but with the help of the ants, could forage a variety of plants. Like i said, this relationship has been highly successful for millions of years.
Our ancestors entered into a very similar relationship with a fungus. That’s going to be the sunject of the next episode. This is really the key episode coming up, so i hope you’ll be around for it.
In closing, i’d like to ead you a little bit from a book titled, “Molds and Man: An Introduction to the Fungi” by Christensen, Universtiy of Minn. Press, 1963. Give you something to think about until next time
“When the young queen from one of these nests goes out to found a new colony, she has her infrabuccal pouch filled with the fungus on which the colony has lived for millions of years. After being fertilized, she seeks out a likely spot, grubs out a small chamber, and casts her wad of fungus out on the floor. As soon as the mold begins to grow from this pellet, she lays an egg or two, crushes these, and mixes them with the growing fungus. She also mixes her excrement with the compost. This is not done just casually and by chance, but deliberately and by intent.”
You don’t suppose that that queen ant was sacrificing her first born, to show her faith? Where have i heared that before?
That’s all for today. thanks for tuning in.

June 4, 2014

Intelligence in the Forest

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — insomniac @ 8:02 am

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You can listen to the podcast or read it below… yer choice.

Yes, it’s yer old independent philosopher, jim cranford.
Welcome to the show.. so glad you could make it.
In episode one we finished up talking about communication and how it is fundamental to living things on all levels.
That exposes another circle jerk mainstream science runs on us. Humans are the only creatures that are intelligent, they say. We got that from tool use and such, which gave us bigger brains etc. We used our big brains to learn to language and all that.
It takes intelligence to communicate, and since only humans have it, the exchange of information between single cells, microorganisms, plants and other animals must be instinct or some kind of automatic response not requiring a big brain. However, when the information thus exchanged is used to make choices, intelligence is surely involved.

We like to separate instinct and intelligence, but both are the result of learning. The choices we make are based on experience; ours in the current life cycle and others in the past. It’s all information that we use to make choices everyday.
If you look at the display our nervous system provides us, it is nothing short of ingenious. It has taken a massive intelligence to engineer human consciousness. It was/is no accident. It took intelligence to get us here, so we can act act like we have no brains at all.

What is a system? A system is any group of interrelated parts or components that cooperate and share processes. Like a common goal. Systems thinking is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. Systems thinking focuses on cyclical and holistic causes rather than linear cause and effect. In other words, what you do is follow the flow of energy, matter and information through the various components and parts and see how they’re related.

One of the first rules of system science is that there is no such thing as a closed system, as they are all interconnected and share energy, material and information. So actually we don’t study systems at all, we can only study subsystems. Mainstream science hasn’t caught on to this yet, but continues to study subsystems in the laboratory, far removed from their Natural environment. Science has acted as if they could set up a closed system, unaffected by the outside world, and be confident in the reliability of their results. Sure enough, it has been discovered that not only do outside forces like celestial rhythms and cosmic rays affect all interactions, but those with that were left out because the subsystem was moved into the lab, were influencing their results as well.
Besides that, it has lately been determined that the expectations of the researchers were also skewing the results.
Another great thing about systems thinking is that it applies to all sorts of systems, biological, cosmic, educational, financial, social, bureaucratic, and since there are only subsystems, you can see how each of these seemingly separate areas is interconnected and interdependent.

We will get into that in depth later on…
Meanwhile, let’s talk about Feedback loops–

You know the classic example, a furnace and thermostat. The thermostat turns the furnace on and off to maintain a steady temperature. Natural systems are like that except every cell acts like a thermostat. Besides reporting it’s temperature, it also reports energy usage and other status information.  The system uses that information to regulate all activity.

For example, here’s what the basic forest loop looks like. It begins with water and nutrients being provided to the roots of a tree by the microbial mat. This mat is the combined growth of fungi and bacteria that services just about all plants with roots. Besides the nutrients the mat also supplies antibodies to the plants. It is this microbial mat that is the star of the show. Nothing grows without it.

The tree pumps the solution up to the leaves where photosynthesis occurs. That’s the simple description, but this transport system is a phenomenal accomplishment in itself. Billions of tiny passageways route this life’s blood through a maze of branching tunnels which provide just the right amount of everything to every cell. The last cells in line use light energy to make sugars. Then these sugars are transported through this wondrous on-time supply system to building sites, some of them way back down in the tips of roots.

 Some of the sugars are used to entice and feed pollinators, while still more sugars are used to build fruit and seed. The seed is for reproduction, and the fruit entices and feeds the seed distributors.

All of this activity produces a steady stream of leaves, flowers, bark, feces and dead bodies that fall to the forest floor. This litter is a constant flow of matter and energy as well as information about the state of the forest. This flow is disassembled and analyzed by the microbial mat. Each bit of litter carries the information of its path through the system, dropping off molecules here, picking some up there. The microbial mat furnishes the input, then analyzes the output of each loop and adjusts accordingly.

Like i said, there just isn’t any way to achieve this level of efficiency without making intelligent choices. It takes constant monitoring, evaluation and planning to maintain this level of successful operation. The kind of logistical efficiency doesn’t just take communication, it takes superior communication. Ask UPS.

Okay, what happens if the forest dries up and blows away? Apparently something like this is what our ancestors had to deal with.

Whether the forest dries up or a new forest is beginning to form, the forest process is stripped down to the bare bones.  We still have some basic plants, the real survivors, and our most basic microbes. The roots of each grass plant has a bit of the microbial mat attached.

When researchers looked closely at root fungus interface, they found that there was no clear dividing line between them. The cells in between pure root and pure fungus were composites, containing elements of both root and fungus. Something to think about.
At the very beginning of the forest progression we have the same fundamental process that takes place in a mature rainforest. Although the path is much shorter, moisture and energy follow the same feedback loops, from the microbial mat, through the plants and back to the mat. So, the essence of the forest is not the trees at all, but plants in general and the microbes that inhabit the soil. It is these microbes that benefit the most from the existence of the forest. It would appear that the microbes have built forests to protect and nourish their colonies.

This is where science and religion agree… not about the microbes, they’ll never go for that, but they agree that our ancestors started out in a lush forest and migrated out onto the savannah. Here we find other creatures who moved out of the forest as well. One of the most interesting critters to make the move is the leaf cutter ant. I mentioned them in the first episode. These ants are important for a couple of reasons. First they show us a subsystem that is very similar in structure to an animal without the skin. Second they show us how species adapt to changing climate.

There are three distinct species involved in these ant colonies. There are the ants, the fungus they cultivate for food and a bacterium that regulates growth of the fungus.

As the ants are the only species visible to us, they seem to be number one. The second species in this three way symbiotic relationship is the fungus. Its exact species grows as a mushroom on the forest floor, but this strain has been propagated by simple cell division for millions of years. Each nest is a clone of the original mycelium, with no fruiting body or spores.

The third partner is a bacterium that is common in the forest as well as in the guts of human beings. In the human body as well as in the ant nest, this bacterium regulates the growth of fungi. So we have a representative of each major microbial group and a very efficient mobile species teamed up in a very tight relationship.

Within this three way symbiotic relationship, the ants are the only ones who have changed at all. The bacterium and the fungus are running the same DNA as their close relations, but the DNA of the ants is very different from any of their relatives. The fungus and bacterium are doing roughly the same job they perform in other symbiotic relationships.  

One change in the ant’s anatomy was a gland on their underside that secrets food for the bacterium. In the fungus farms, the ants are constantly crawling over the fungal mat, carrying leaves. Thus the bacterium is brushed onto the mat, keeping the fungi from overgrowing.

Within the leaf cutter ant system the fungus provides nutrition for the ants and acts as an immune system for the colony. When the ants bring leaf parts into the colony they usually carry any number of foreign bacteria and fungi that should be able to set up shop in the cozy subterranean environment. However the resident fungus isolates the intruders and surrounds them with a fungal growth that keeps them from growing. The ants then move this chunk of immobilized intruder out of the digestion chamber. This symbiotic strategy has resulted in a pure strain of fungus that has lasted for millions of years.

The colony also acts as sort of immune system for the whole forest. The reason leaf cutter ants have been studied at all is because they pose a real threat to agriculture in tropical forests. They can defoliate an orchard in a matter of hours. In normal activity the ants prune leaves off of a variety of established species, spreading out their needs with no detrimental effect on the forest, but if a new species attempts to get a foothold, like an orchard, the ants go to work and defoliate the intruders in no time.

In the case of the fungus tended by the leaf cutters, they have shortened the normal feedback loop. Instead of having to wait for information to fall back down to the forest floor, to be digested by the microbial mat, the ants can be sent directly to a trouble spot, collect information on the threat and eliminate it, if necessary.

The immune system is at the very core of a sense of self. The body/mind system identifies itself as a functional unit, both on our conscious and basic cellular levels.

Within the colony the fungus understands the difference between that which is “colony” and that which is not. At the forest level, the colony understands the difference between forest and non-forest species.

Making these kinds of choices demonstrates understanding, the very definition of intelligence.

These ants have been able to adapt to the loss of forest cover by burrowing into the ground. The design of their nests manages to maintain optimum temperature, humidity and air quality for the growth of the fungus and friends, regardless of the above ground climate. You think the nearly brainless ants figured this out? Remember, if you or i were to learn how to build such a ventilation system we would have to go to school for years.

It is much more likely that the fungus is the source of this wisdom. The fungus grows a mycelium that follows the same growth patterns as, looks like, and is proven to function like, a nervous system. Functionally the fungus performs the duties of an immune system, a digestive system and a brain for the colony, just as the microbial mat does for the forest.

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