Action


(D.1) Those actions prompted by a change in the environment without consciousness of the change in the environment we shall call induced action.

(D.2) The melting of solid ice into liquid water and the production of gaseous steam by heating liquid water is an example of induced action. In this case the induced action occurs in the absence of brain and mind or consciousness and the induced actions are controlled entirely by the laws of nature. Those actions so induced we shall call inanimate induced actions with neither a living biological entity nor mind playing a role in them.

(D.3) Unconscious movement of the hand away from a hot stove surface is also an induced action. This we shall call biologically induced action. In this case a living biological entity plays an active role in the actions.

(D.4) The Venus fly trap plant also produces biologically induced action by closing its leaves around an insect crawling on them. However, it does not do so instantaneously in time present but only after experiencing a pair stimuli over a time interval as it develops an awareness which it subsequently uses to result in a biologically induced action. But does the ability to distinguish between a single stimulus of, say, a falling twig striking it which does not cause the leaf trap to close and a pair of stimuli required to close the trap mean that the Venus fly trap have a physical brain, a mind and perhaps even the sensation of consciousness? Were it a human we would say it did. And, in fact, it does have a botanical sensory system which plays a role in inducing the action by the biological entity. This is comparable to the stomach brain in humans which produces awareness in the gastrointestinal tract but no consciousness in the cerebral brain in our head. No, the Venus fly trap results in a biologically induced action just as the human gastrointestinal does when stimulated to swallow the food in your, push it thought the stomach and intestines, and finally excrete it as waste out the back end. You have no conscious control over any of that until you learn to consciously control the biologically induced action of your anal sphincter muscle over the neural sensory network connecting muscle and cerebral brain in your head. So it is that children eventually become "potty trained" through experience and learning. Thereafter, the stomach brain biologically induces the actions of intestinal pressure which result in sensory data being sent from the sphincter to the cerebral brain which produce the sensation of "urge" which in turn sends sensory data being sent back to the sphincter for the biologically induced action of relaxing the sphincter. But the cerebral sensory data does not always rule over the stomach sensory data. Indeed, when you suffer from diarrhea stomach sensory data sometimes rules over cerebral sensory data. It is a battle of opposing sensory data, one resulting in a consciousness sensation and one not.

Similarly, leaves on trees experience biologically induced action by turning into the sunlight and limbs on tress growing into spatial areas affording them the most available light even thought no physical part of the plant can be identified as a brain

In the animal kingdom of living things, the amoeba first identifies food in its environment through chemoreceptors on its cell membrane and then uses its peudopods to move toward the food in an biologically induced action even thought no physical part of the single cell amoeba can be identified as a brain.

The examples of both the Venus fly trap and the amoeba suggest that biologically induced action of a living thing is closely linked to the chemistry of the living thing as a result of physical contact with the outside world.

Summation

(D) All actions of living things are biologically induced as the result of sensory information obtained either directly from the outside world or obtained indirectly by way of a neural system. The actions of the living entities are prompted either directly with sensory information from the outside world or indirectly from sensory information from the outside world that has been processed by the brain and broadcast as sensory information to prompt specific actions by the material body. All the actions and sensory information prompting them are chemical processes adhering to the laws of nature and over which over which both brain and mind has no control.


Action