Consciousness and sentience are not exclusive to animals with nervous systems but are grounded in the fundamental biology of all cells. The cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) model proposes that the excitable plasma membrane, which defines a cell's internal and external domains, is the foundation for biological awareness. This article examines the biomolecular structures and processes that enable and sustain this cellular consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, arguing that unicellular organisms like protists and algae, as well as the cells of multicellular fungi, plants, and animals, all possess a primitive form of sentience rooted in general cell biology.
The paper proposes that biological order originates from an exaptation of information measurement from the abiotic realm. It posits a universal holographic relational information space-time matrix that unifies abiotic and biotic information systems, where information is a fundamental property of matter-energy interactions. The authors introduce compartmentalizing this matrix into partitions defined by Markov blankets, allowing application to both abiotic and biotic systems. Abiotic systems derive information from quantum entanglement asymmetries, which serve as precursors to the nested information fields characterizing life. Biotic measurement and biological partitioning are thus exaptations of preexisting abiotic information processes, with the key difference between abiotic and biotic states lying in the attributes of observers.
Consciousness likely depends on biological processes within individual cells that have no equivalent in computer-based artificial intelligence. The argument challenges the prevailing view that AI consciousness is primarily a matter of functional information density and integration, and that no technical barriers prevent its achievement. When cognition is understood as a cellular attribute, the premises underlying the possibility of AI consciousness are directly contradicted. The innate characteristics of biological information and how cells manage that information have no parallels in machine-based AI systems. Any claim of computer-based AI consciousness represents a fundamental misunderstanding of these crucial differences.