How Vast Is Consciousness?
Recent neuroscience recognizes two basic forms of consciousness. It all starts with the divisions we make: "Two broad types of consciousness must be distinguished" based on the neurobiological domain (LeDoux, 2023, 219). Creature consciousness is attributed to all organisms with a nervous system. The other form of consciousness, associated with more complex nervous systems, is mental state consciousness. It is "the ability to experience the world and one's relationship to it" (LeDoux, 219).
Recently, another category of consciousness has been added: existential consciousness. (Reber, Baluska and Miller, 2024). Here, consciousness is rooted in cellular intelligence as an expression of a living, self-organizing order.
This view of the cellular basis of cognition offers a promising new perspective on the vastness of consciousness in life. Is it necessary to stop seeing the possibility of consciousness as a form of sentience based on the presence of a nervous system?
How Deep Is Consciousness?
Life on Earth is estimated to be 4 billion years old. During its first 2 billion years as a single cell, natural intelligence invented all the essential ingredients of our present multicellular life. All the essential metabolic processes on which life depends arose then. All the primordial, innovative processes that still occur in our bodies today, even photosynthesis and respiration, go back to the ancient archaea and bacteria.
The ancient prokaryotic organisms on our oxygen-poor planet invented the bioelectrical aspects of our cellular life, based on electrostatic phenomena and ionic electrical charge transfers within and between different macromolecules (Derr et al., 2020). The differentiation of cells into neurons was a very slow process. All the basic ingredients necessary for existential, creature, and mental state consciousness were created during billions of years of cellular development.
Life’s natural intelligence created sentience, feeling, and consciousness. Life was not interested in the names we give them. A minimal form of consciousness as sentience was probably part of life from the very beginning. So consciousness is a vast phenomenon with deep roots and is still growing. We have not yet reached the end point in the development of the possible expressions of consciousness.
Why Is It Important to Expand Consciousness Deep into Life?
Science has long neglected the importance of human experience. Have we created a blind spot for consciousness? (Frank, Gleiser and Thompson, 2024)
This is despite the fact that lived experience is an inescapable part of our search for scientific truth. Science, including psychology, has clung to the idea that we can know an objective world from outside our position in it, without subjectivity.
An alternative perspective is emerging: one in which life and consciousness are intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology (Reber et al, 2024). This is true for the single cell organism as well as for the billion cell organism that we are. We are intimately connected to this natural intelligence. The consciousness we experience as humans today is the expression of a natural intelligence that began 4 billion years ago. We are deeply rooted in life.
In contrast to panpsychism, which claims that consciousness is everywhere, this view, based on a deep continuity between living and knowing, offers a valuable perspective from which to view the deep planetary crises created by humanity.
There is no God's-eye view of reality that can help us solve the problems created by Homo sapiens.
Before AI Colonizes Us, Human Intelligence Must Evolve
For millennia we have been challenged by beliefs based on divine and disembodied forms of consciousness. We are currently being challenged by artificially designed systems that mimic emotion and consciousness. The natural intelligence of humans is radically different from the man-made intelligence of machines, which is not conscious.
Life always appears as a kind of cellular body. Life revolves around feeling, consciousness, emotions, and intelligence. The building blocks of feelings and consciousness are cells. The continuity of life and natural intelligence is now in the hands of Homo sapiens.
Perhaps a better understanding of the deep roots of our own capacity for consciousness and its subtle presence in many forms of plants and animals can help us cultivate a deeper form of understanding of the ethical implications of our own choices.
Our current capacity for consciousness is by no means at its end. The many forms of consciousness have always been about life. Our consciousness is about the present state of our lives. We are also now choosing its future expression and possibilities.
Our consciousness is never a separate phenomenon; it is always fully connected to a living world within us and a living world around us. From the humble beginnings of life a very long time ago to the way we live now, life is built around creating and maintaining metabolic homeostasis: it's about the flow of water in our veins, the nutrients in our cells, and energy as ATP. This is true for the single cell organism as well as for the billion cell organism that we are. We are intimately connected to our living source.
It is the deep integration between visceral bodily functions and somatic interactions with the external world that drives our life story. Our neurons are built around this living order: "...it is the very reason the nervous system exists" (LeDoux, 2023, 109). From our complex mental state consciousness, it is hard to imagine the sentience of a single-celled organism.
Yet our Homo sapiens roots are embodied in the deep continuity between life and the feeling of it.
Becoming Fully Human
Abraham Maslow authored the inspiring book Toward a Psychology of Being, but he died too young to complete his work. His unfinished work was incorporated into the posthumous The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, and his work is still in progress (Kaufman, 2020, De Vleeschauwer, 2021). The study of consciousness is also unfinished, and we are still in the infancy of a psychology of consciousness.
Maslow’s research question "What might be the normal psychological or inner life of persons who are fully human?" is still highly relevant (Maslow, 1971, XVII). Consciousness has always been about life, and that life is vaster and deeper than we ever thought.
Every drop of seawater, every spoonful of soil is filled with billions of sentient microorganisms. Our planet Earth is a natural intelligent system, we are part of it, but life doesn’t need human intelligence to survive. We are just one of its possible expressions of consciousness.
Becoming fully aware of who we really are is our best option for becoming the “wise human" we can call ourselves as Homo sapiens. Perhaps this is the furthest reach of our human nature?
References
Derr, J.B., Tamayo, J., Clarck, J. A., Morales, M., Mayther, M.F., Espinoza, E. M., et al. (2020). Multifaceted aspects of charge transfer. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics 22, 21583-21629. https://doi.org/10. 10.1030/c0cp01556c
De Vleeschauwer, P. (2021). Entering Our Highest Possibility. How to Be Human in the 21st Century. London, Austin McAuley.
LeDoux, J. (2023). The Four Realms of Existence. A New Theory of Being Human. Cambridge Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kaufman, S. B. (2020). Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. New York, TarcherPerigee.
Maslow, A. (1971). The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York, Penguin Compass.
Frank, A., Gleiser, M., Thompson, E. (2024.) The Blind Spot. Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. London, MIT Press
Reber, S. A., Baluska, F., Miller, W. B. (2024). The Sentient Cell. The Cellular Foundations of Consciousness. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
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