As I stated in my
previous post, the first major content theme in The Atlas of
Social Complexity is Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness. Chapter
6 addresses Autopoiesis. Chapter
7 turns to the role of bacteria in human consciousness. Chapter 8 (Immune System
Cognition), which is our focus here, explores how the immune system, just like
bacteria and cells, is cognitive – and the implications this has for our wider
brain-based consciousness.
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM SELF
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Figure 1: Macrophages
attacking cancer cell (the large, spiky mass). Upon fusing with the cancer
cell, the macrophages (smaller white cells) inject toxins that kill the tumour
cell. Immunotherapy
for the treatment of cancer
is an active area of medical research. By Raowf Guirguis and Susan Arnold.
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As everyone who has taken
a biology class learns, the founding principal of immunology is the concept of
‘identity’ and the capacity of immune systems to distinguish between self and
non-self. While the immune system functions at a different level of
consciousness than our brain-based self, it is nonetheless continually engaged
in a complex set of cognitive processes that are in constant communication with
our body’s various cognitive systems and agents, including the
microbiota-gut-brain axis. (For further reading, see
Klenerman, Paul. The
Immune System: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017)
In this chapter, after a
brief introduction to the immune system, we explore the leading-edge view of
immunity that not only resonates with the research elsewhere in Theme 2 but is
also fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the immune system’s complex
relationship with its environment and how this relationship can be harnessed to
treat disease and infection more effectively. This approach is called ecoimmunology.
That is not to say the
field of ecoimmunology is without controversy or internal debate, because it
is. In response, we end Chapter 8 recommending what readers take away from the
debates within immunology around issues of cognition, identity, memory and the
self; and what research direction we think most useful for the theoretical
weave we seek to construct.
Here is a short summary
of our recommendations:
- First, we strongly recommend embracing eco-immunology.
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Second,
to address the ‘immune self and cognition’ debate, we recommend not taking a
side. Instead, we advocate for combining approaches. It is of significant irony
that the mainstream representational approach – being current scientific
convention – embraces a complex systems view of the immune self; while complex
systems scholars such as Maturana, Varela, Jerne and Tauber disagree with it.
-
A useful example of combining approaches is the two-tier
schema developed by António Coutinho, the Portuguese immunologist, and
Francisco Varela, in combination with their colleagues at the Paris school they
helped to create.
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Third, we recommend integrating the
representational immune self with eco-immunology, while dropping the Jerne and
Varela self/nonsense distinction.
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Fourth, we recommend embracing Tauber’s
argument that the immune system self, like most complex systems, lacks a
centralised command centre and therefore a centralised identity.
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Fifth, the immune system is not without
hierarchy.
-
Finally, we recommend the representational view that immune
systems do, in varying degrees, represent things, see things, learn things,
hold memory, and remember things. We see no compelling evidence to think
otherwise. If the mind is in every cell of the body, then it only makes sense
it resides in the immune system as well.
KEY WORDS: Immune system
cognition, eco-immune system, ecoimmunology, representational immune self,
cellular cognition, bacterial cognition.
Coutinho, A. Biological research. 2003: 36(1), 17-26.
