Does It Make Sense to Trace Consciousness to Single-Celled Organisms?
Paulo J. Negro
BENTHAM SCIENCE PUBLISHERS eBooks February 8, 2019 DOI: 10.2174/9781681087665119010005 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that consciousness may emerge from the informational nature of life, with the subject-world dialectic of single-celled organisms as the first exchange enabling the transition from biological mechanisms to information. Proposes a variable "Q" representing adaptive inference processes that incorporate environmental state and causal architecture, which at some point became human consciousness, and contends that qualia, though subjective and illusory, can still provide tailored adaptive information about reality from the organism's perspective. |
Abstract
Popular theories of consciousness convey the notion that traces of consciousness exist even below the level of single-celled organisms. Alternatively, consciousness may emerge from the informational nature of life. Fundamental processes that, when scaled up, might give origin to the “mind” must transit from biological mechanisms to information. Portraying the subject-world dialectic of singlecelled organisms as the first exchange that makes this transition possible does not constitute a hypothesis, but a description. Qualia refer to subjective phenomena, and not to something objectively present or to the human brain processes from which such phenomena arise. Nonetheless, qualia can still provide tailored adaptive information about reality from the perspective of the organism. One can reconcile this notion with the illusory nature of qualia by recognizing a variable “Q”. This variable represents an abstraction of the processes that transform evolutionarily relevant information into the subject experience. Q represents adaptive inference processes that incorporate the state and the causal architecture of the environment. These inference processes at some point became human consciousness.