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.[1] [1] National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, Visuals Online. https://visualsonline.cancer.gov/details.cfm?imageid=2370 accessed 5 March 2023. |
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.
- 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.[1]
- Third, we recommend integrating the representational immune self with eco-immunology, while dropping the Jerne and Varela self/nonsense distinction.
- 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.
- 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.
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