Cells represent the basic units of life, not only as structural building blocks, but also as cognitive agents endowed with subjective cellular feelings, sentience (consciousness), and cognitive infocomputatioal competence. Living cells act as 'Kantian Wholes': All of its parts exist for and by means of the whole system, allowing cells to use sentient agency for solving existential problems and...
The presumption that experiential consciousness requires a nervous system and brain has been central to the debate on the possibility of developing a conscious form of artificial intelligence (AI). The likelihood of future AI consciousness or devising tools to assess its presence has focused on how AI might mimic brain-centered activities. Currently, dual general assumptions prevail: AI...
Abstract This chapter presents an overview of the evidence to support the Cellular Basis of Consciousness theory. It reviews the large, indeed enormous, literature for sentience, awareness, subjectivity, cognitive functions, feelings, motivational states, learning, memory formation, decision-making, and communication in a large number of single-cell species. As noted in Chapter 1, these...
Abstract This chapter presents the biological foundations for the authors’ position that life and sentience are coterminous, that all (and only) living organisms have a palpable internal, felt, experiential life, that they have valenced sensory inputs, and make appropriate determinations about the impact of the events that occur around and within them—that they are conscious beings. This...
Cellular measurement is a crucial faculty in living systems, and exaptations are acknowledged as a significant source of evolutionary innovation. However, the possibility that the origin of biological order is predicated on an exaptation of the measurement of information from the abiotic realm has not been previously explored. To support this hypothesis, the existence of a universal holographic...
Modern science ratifies that conscious self-awareness is present in all cells as a scale-free phenomenon for the reception and measured assessment of integrated information. One remaining contention is whether cellular self-referential cognition represents both conscious self-awareness and experientiality. This capacity to knowingly &s;experience&s; represents the supposed &s;hard problem&s;,...
Cells emerged at the very beginning of life on Earth and, in fact, are coterminous with life. They are enclosed within an excitable plasma membrane, which defines the outside and inside domains via their specific biophysical properties. Unicellular organisms, such as diverse protists and algae, still live a cellular life. However, fungi, plants, and animals evolved a multicellular existence....