The Primacy of Cellular Consciousness

Abstract

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;, the dimensional relationship between the physical phenomena the brain directly interprets and an organism&s;s experience as subjective qualia. The dilemma resolves when basal self-referential cognition/consciousness/sentience is embraced as an irreducible cellular attribute. Basal cellular consciousness encompasses all aspects of consciousness, despite its idiosyncratic expression at other multicellular organismal levels. The purpose of cellular consciousness is the self-referential maintenance of life-sustaining cellular homeorhesis. These states of preferential flux are co-incident with cellular-organismal-environmental complementarity as continuous assimilation of the environment, achieved through the measuring assessment of ambiguous environmental cues. This assessment requires a flexible senomic cellular boundary linked to retrievable and deployable memory. As all these activities are conducted within the cellular interior, all information for any cell is a product of its individual self-referential measurement which is an explicitly experiential dynamic.