https://matpitka.blogspot.com/2020/04/decapitated-wasp-grasping-its-head-and.html

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Decapitated wasp grasping its head and flying away


Runcel Arcaya gave a link to very interesting popular article telling about the rather surreal behavior of decapitated wasps. The wasp just grabs its head and flies away! Also decapitated hen can fly and I remember the story that some decapitated animals start to move towards nearby water.

The standard explanation for the ability of insect to move would be that insect brain is far from being so important than brains in higher animals. Ganglions in their spine take care of motor control. This looks reasonable.

One can of course wonder how the insect can fly if it does not see - eyes are in the head which it lost. Flying could be of course completely random.

These findings force to challenge the belief that brain is the seat of consciousness. Actually one must challenge also the belief that biological body is the seat of consciousness.


  1. The notion of magnetic body (MB) is more or less forced by the fact that brain codes information to EEG and sends it to space: the waste of metabolic energy in this manner makes no sense if there is no receiver. Also the sensory data is fraction of second old: this finds explanation since it takes some time to communicate it from brain to MB. This allows to estimate the size of MB and it has layers of size scale of Earth and even bigger.

  2. The macroscopic coherence of biological body is not possible without macroscopic coherence at control level and standard quantum mechanics does not provide it: Planck constant is simply too small. Hence dark matter at MB.
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  3. Even further, the idea that consciousness is a property of physical system must be challenged at fundamental level. Conscious experience is in quantum jump replacing the quantum state with a new one, between the old and new world, in a moment of creation. This picture solves the logical paradoxes of physicalistic and idealistic paradigms.

TGD based view about quantum jump provides another view about the situation.
  1. "Big" (ordinary) state function reductions in zero energy ontology change the arrow of time. This is essential for the new view about self-organization apparently breaking second law. Time evolution obeying second law in non-standard time direction looks in standard time direction like self-organization generating order and coherence and dissipation of energy looks in standard time direction like extracting energy from environment - feed of metabolic energy.

  2. This explains Libet's experiments apparently showing that experience of free will is caused by neural activity. The macroscopic quantum jump would correspond to this experience and the time evolutions starting from the final state would lead to geometric past and cause brain activity.

  3. Motor actions would be realizations of free will induced by "big" (ordinary) quantum jumps at MB carrying dark matter as heff=n×h0 phases and inducing coherent actions at the level of ordinary matter.Also effective change of arrow of time would be induced at the level of ordinary bio-matter.

  4. In the case of decapitated insect motor actions would involve similar macrossopic quantum jumps. The effects of motor activity propagating backwards time would start from the level of body but would not reach the brain but this would not be a problem!

  5. In TGD framework one can wonder whether eyes still see and the information about visual percepts still goes to the magnetic body (MB) of the insect, which controls the biological body? It would be enough to keep the head and just this the wasp does!

See the article Getting philosophical: some comments about the problems of physics, neuroscience, and biology.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.

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