More than half your body is not human?

I think this is possibly going to turn out to be a big deal re: consciousness studies

More than half your body is not human

Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: "You're more microbe than you are human."

Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one.

"That's been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you're about 43% human if you're counting up all the cells," he says.

But genetically we're even more outgunned.

The human genome - the full set of genetic instructions for a human being - is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.

But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.

Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues: "We don't have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own.

"What makes us human is, in my opinion, the combination of our own DNA, plus the DNA of our gut microbes."

So wild.  Sort of meshes with the massive turnover of cellular mass in the human body on various cycles.

Tying into the Diet for Help with Depression thread - seems like there is an interplay with brain, body and microbes we play host to .

My guess it just further diminishes the hope of mind-upload enthusiasts

Tying into the Diet for Help with Depression thread - seems like there is an interplay with brain, body and microbes we play host to .

My guess it just further diminishes the hope of mind-upload enthusiasts

Evolution is messy, ay?

My guess it just further diminishes the hope of mind-upload enthusiasts

Where does it leave survival of mind?

Where does it leave survival of mind?

There's this too. 

Control of Brain Development, Function, and Behavior by the Microbiome https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4442490/

Where does it leave survival of mind?

Well I guess since our mind/self appears to remain pretty constant, given the turnover of raw material in our body, it looks to me like an argument against mind=body(brain).

Another tick for Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, and gestalt panpsychism, perhaps?

Where does it leave survival of mind?

With more funding from people who thought they'd secure a piece of Eternity for themselves on a server somewhere.

Another tick for Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, and gestalt panpsychism, perhaps?

Yeah, I'm thinking Eric Weiss' combination of Whitehead & Sri Aurobindo.

Why I don't see this really impacting arguments for survival. The subtle body has to direct the Occasions regardless of whether they are of the "body" as defined at the biological/material level.


From Embodiment – An Explanatory Framework for the Exploration of Reincarnation and Personality Survival

Let us say that consciousness is intrinsic to matter. In these terms we can, as we will see subsequently, form an interesting and useful explanation of how it is that a body ‘has’ a personality. But if that personality is intrinsically involved with the physical body, then there will be no basis on which we can understand the survival of that personality when its body disintegrates. In order to make full sense of the phenomena associated with personality survival, we will also have to invoke the doctrine of subtle matter and subtle worlds..
That doctrine, which is sometimes known under the name “hylozoism”, and which Michael Murphy has introduced into the proceedings of these conferences under the name of “hylic pluralism,” is an ancient doctrine – one which was accepted by all pre-modern cultures. Indeed, in the context of this doctrine, which conceptualizes the personality in terms of a number of different “vehicles of consciousness,” personality survival becomes quite natural and easy to understand.

But the doctrine of subtle worlds, without a basis in panexperientialism, is not sufficient for our needs for two reasons.

• First, even though the doctrine of the subtle worlds might allow us to conceptualize the existence of “subtle vehicles,” it does not give us any reason to think that these “subtle vehicles” are any more conscious than the “gross vehicle” made of physical matter. If the mind/body problem is not somehow solved, then the notion of subtle bodies still does not give us an intelligible way of understanding the continuity of consciousness which is such an important part of personality survival.
  
• Secondly, no one has, in my opinion, been able to generate an entirely satisfactory account of the relationship between the subtle worlds, on the one hand, and the physical world studied by the hard sciences, on the other.[3]
  

In this paper, I will show how the doctrine of panexperientialism can be seamlessly combined with the doctrine of the subtle worlds to provide an entirely satisfying framework of explanation for the phenomena at hand – i.e. for personality survival and for reincarnation.