Given the mystery of consciousness, the possibility that all matter is sentient to some extent (panpsychism), is taken seriously by philosophers. Notwithstanding, I think it is most probable that consciousness is unique to brains, and evolved to aid in gene survival.

I don't know that sentient is the right word. I would say that DNA is information that cellular consciousness / epigenetics / RNA can read. Human DNA information is 875 mb of data, or the equivalent of 100 encyclopedia volumes. Cellular consciousness is able to select from this data, transcribe it and then discern the transcription, snip of the unwanted data, and create a protein. It is estimated that the human body contains between 80,000 and 400,000 proteins. So this is a very sophisticated system of self organization.

My definition of consciousness is an evolving process of self organisation, where intracellular consciousness and extracellular consciousness agree on an emotional gradient, that we experience as a pain pleasure spectrum. If you wish to read more you can do so here.

That cellular consciousness is sentient though is going too far, in my opinion. It is entirely focused on cellular self organization and can not have thoughts like brain centric extracellular consciousness. The information it integrates is vastly different to the information that we integrate, so it is a vastly different ball game, as I see it.

The common thread is that both systems integrate information, as dose the biosphere.

The capacity of a cell to be aware of surrounding cells in the organism is limited - most of our internal systems don’t require information directly from the brain to continue operations, only energy and other resources from interacting cells. As long as those surrounding cells also don’t require interaction with the brain directly, the system will continue until the cell no longer has access to what it needs. The cell’s internal purpose is not to sustain the life of an organism, but to interact, connect and collaborate with surrounding cells to the extent that it is able. Most would be unaware of any ‘social construct’ to maintain the human body, even as its structure and limitations suit this external purpose.

A ‘cancerous’ cell would then simply be interacting with a vague awareness of capacity beyond its current structure and limitations. The susceptibility of human cellular reproduction systems to this type of interaction may be minimal, but it isn’t zero.

There seems to be a misconception that the sentience of the whole amounts to ‘control’ of all aspects, but this isn’t the case. Just as we can structure society according to certain rules or ‘laws’ but cannot prevent members from ‘breaking’ them, so, too, cells ‘born’ into a ‘social construct’ of the human body are under no obligation to ‘know their place’.

FWIW, I think there are many people going about their lives carrying out functions for a societal construct with little to no awareness of the entire organism...

most of our internal systems don’t require information directly from the brain to continue operations, — Possibility

I wouldn’t agree. Most systems do required input from the brain to continue operations; the hypothalamus secretes several hormones that regulate the bodies different systems; hunger, core temperature, sweating, blood volume, uterine contractions etc. Also how do any autonomous aspects of our tissues work without the fundamental voluntary act of Finding food and water, chewing swallowing etc all of which are governed by the brain.

The only reason brain dead patients “survive” is because of myriad interventions to keep them breathing, fed, remove wastes, prevent skin ulcers and infection due to inability to self clean. Basically a hospital takes over all the executive functions that normally would be carried out by the brain. So no most of our internal systems do require nervous impulses and even critical indirect cause effect reactions with the external world caused by our brain.

I wouldn’t agree. Most systems do required input from the brain to continue operations; the hypothalamus secretes several hormones that regulate the bodies different systems; hunger, core temperature, sweating, blood volume, uterine contractions etc. Also how do any autonomous aspects of our tissues work without the fundamental voluntary act of Finding food and water, chewing swallowing etc all of which are governed by the brain.

The only reason brain dead patients “survive” is because of myriad interventions to keep them breathing, fed, remove wastes, prevent skin ulcers and infection due to inability to self clean. Basically a hospital takes over all the executive functions that normally would be carried out by the brain. So no most of our internal systems do require nervous impulses and even critical indirect cause effect reactions with the external world caused by our brain. — Benj96

To regulate them, yes. But systems don’t require input from the brain to start or stop functioning - they will continue to do so under suitable conditions at the rate the resources are supplied. So long as the hospital systems can manage the basic functions of the central nervous system and keep up the flow of resources and waste disposal, the patient remains ‘alive’ for the intents and purposes of its cells, which would be aware of little more than the resources and conditions required to act in their capacity.

The point I was trying to make was that our cells are not just mechanistic units, but their awareness is sufficiently limited that they can collaborate as if the system (their universe) is still operating more or less as normal, long after the brain ceases functioning.

Does this mean cells cannot be sentient or if so that their sentience is completely removed from the individual humans sentience? — Benj96

Experiments have demonstrated the ability of some monocellular animals to learn, forget, and relearn something or some behavior (relearn in far less time than it took then to learn the first time around).

E.g. this research.

This would imply that cells can learn, or store behavioral information. In this perspective, neurons are just cells that are specialized in information management; they do that muchbbetter than other cells, because they are specialized, but they don't have a monopoly on it. Other cells in our body can perhaps learn some stuff too.

Ah okay I understand what you’re saying better now. Interesting. Despite the fact that they - as a whole - generate the body and brain necessary for typical human conscious experience it seems that they themselves are pretty much unaware of it. Living in their own world oblivious to the entire body and it’s full range of capacities.

The confounding question for me really is what is it about the organisation of all of our cells that solidified our sense of awareness. Where to we place the transitions the boundary or so to señal isolate that part of ourselves which identifies and reflects on said self? Assuming the common belief that the brain is involved, how many Neurons constitutes an aware brain that satisfies the conditions we identify as Human

this is kind of like how in organ donation recipients ... new behaviours and cravings/tendencies developed in the patient in line with those that the deceased donor had while alive. Perhaps your right and maybe the heart can have a healthy desire for specific nutrients or lifestyle that other hearts don’t have

In organ transplant, the issue is that often the immune system of the recipient does not recognise the new organ as belonging to the individual. It sense that it is foreign, and treats it as a threat.

this has to do with major histocompatibility complex and it’s not everyone that an immune system will reject the organs of; of course it’s incredibly rare to have the same immune profile siblings are generally the closest but it is immune cells that do not recognise the foreign tissue. What is to be said for the foreign tissue cells themselves?

What is to be said for the foreign tissue cells themselves? — Benj96

From their perspective, if they have any thing that can be described as such, they are in a dangerous situation: deprived of any immune system of their own, and surrounded by a foreign agent on all side. Surrounded with no weapon to fight.

Transplant patient are often given much drugs to tame their immune system, sometimes for years. This gives their cells from two different individials some time to 'get accustomed to one another' I guess.

The confounding question for me really is what is it about the organisation of all of our cells that solidified our sense of awareness. Where to we place the transitions the boundary or so to señal isolate that part of ourselves which identifies and reflects on said self? Assuming the common belief that the brain is involved, how many Neurons constitutes an aware brain that satisfies the conditions we identify as Human — Benj96

I think your first question about the organisation of our cells starts to approach the issue, but the second and third are limiting your scope. You can’t quantify/solidify/consolidate awareness, any more than you can solidify energy or photons. You CAN quantify evidence and calculate predictions, but a relational structure doesn’t really have ‘boundaries’. The transitions would be fuzzy - probabilistically located at best.

Not sure if you’ve read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s neuroscience/psychology research and theory of constructed emotion, but in my view it demonstrates a relational structure between the brain’s conceptual system (mind) and an interoceptive network that involves the brain and central nervous system, with energy/information transfer between them as a distribution of affect: attention/valence and effort/arousal.

FWIW, my own (speculative and unquantifiable) theory applies a dimensional structure of relations to address the common issues of consciousness, abiogenesis, quantum physics, etc.

What is to be said for the foreign tissue cells themselves? — Benj96

This is called graft vs host disease, from memory. The graft mounts an attack on the host / organ recipient.

Great question! Firstly, to tell you the truth, I/we don't know [if cells are conscious/sentient] and the reason this is the case is a big clue in this mystery. The single most important reason why we're in dark on this topic is that consciousness/sentience isn't something that can be observed directly. It isn't something like a rock that one can pick up with one's hands and display it to another with the words, "here, this is consciousness". If so, the first thing we must acknowledge is that it is far from certain that anything (that includes other people) other than oneself is conscious/sentience. I think this is known as solipsism, I'm not sure.

If one finds the idea of solipsism ridiculous then, perforce, one must conclude that cells are conscious/sentient. After all every aspect of cell behavior has a matching counterpart in complex organisms that are treated as sentient/conscious. Using humans as the paradigm case of sentience, we have the following: humans eat, cells eat; humans avoid harm, cells avoid harm; humans respire, cells respire, humans excrete, cells excrete, humans reproduce, cells reproduce, and so on. If you take this as an argument from analogy the "and so on" would look something like this: humans are sentient, hence, cells are sentient.

Put simply the same difficulty we face in deciding whether cells are conscious or not - that we're unable to directly observe sentience/consciousness - is present, alive and kicking, in making the inference that other people are sentient/conscious. :chin:

At the other extreme is the notion of a superorganism - a conglomerate of individuals behaving as if it were a single entity as it were like bee and ant colonies. Is the human family colony exhibiting such behavior as to justify the label of a superorganism and, more to the point, is the human superorganism sentient/conscious? Back to square one, and again. We can only observe the behavior of the human superorganism that takes the form of families, communities, nations, organizations, etc. and, clearly, observations suggest that the human superorganism, in its various incarnations, is sentient/conscious.

The crux of the issue of whether anything is sentient is that, to be frank, no level or detail of data/information short of directly experiencing consciousness in an other will ever be conclusive and that's impossible (as of now, I must admit).

Are there like 8 or 9 types of pancychism?

Or maybe it emerged from either fluke or design.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other

The researcher from above link found that "trees communicate their needs and send each other nutrients via a network of latticed fungi buried in the soil — in other words, she found, they “talk” to each other. "

You could argue that tress are sentient, or at least a community of them could be.

I'd say it all depends on whether these cells communicate with each other. But I would argue that under a strict definition of a cell, it is not sentient, but it could form a part of a sentient whole, but that's a different question.

Thanks for starting this thread.

The crux of the issue of whether anything is sentient is that, to be frank, no level or detail of data/information short of directly experiencing consciousness in an other will ever be conclusive and that's impossible (as of now, I must admit). — TheMadFool

I agree with pretty much everything you said. Philosophy aside, we routinely apply the idea that appearing human indicates experiencing yourself as human. If some ethical or metaphysical stance connects form to substance in this way, we can inquire how using appearances allows us to discern consciousness, what kind of metric separates being sentient from being insentient (number of cells in the brain, organization of those cells). If the metric implicitly exists, we can inquire for some hypothetical justification or explanative devices behind its implicit construction, and hence delve in its micro- and macro- extrapolations. If is it done purely by association with the statistically normative human form, it becomes a rather crude metric for something so decisive and a disguise for hypocritically disinterested viewpoint to me. Social/political/legal conventions are out of convenience or necessity, but while they may never be made precise in practice, we can at least dissect them philosophically.

My personal view - panpsychism and pantheism might be one and the same. I only speculate, of course. But it would be very convenient if they were simultaneously true. It would satisfy our need for objectivity, because forms would exist independently, and even if they are not complex enough to be self-aware or self-perceiving like we are, they will be inherently alive and serve as their own self-attestation. Spirituality would be satisfied, because experiences would be endemic in nature and would either not be concerned with transcendence, or might provide reincarnation by substance transfer of some kind, without violating empiricism (but by extending the known empiricism). It would satisfy theism, since form would elaborate life with scale and produce sentience of greater complexity. The emergent sentience need not have the same faculties (reasoning, ethical concerns, etc), but it will have its own merits. I don't know. It is merely some comfortable idea.

My personal view - panpsychism and pantheism might be one and the same. — simeonz

I think I am pantheist and also a believe in panpsychism. In fact I didn’t even know the word pantheism existed as a definition for what I have come to ascertain from philosophical/ spiritual/ metaphysical investigations into Being
I agree that they are one in the same. That it’s just down to perspective or choice of words as to how one describes it.

so do you think sentience is sort of like an emergent phenomenon of collectives of non sentient neurons? Sort of like how oxygen and hydrogen atoms when brought together in huge amounts produce an emergent phenomenon of fluid water.

Is a magnet sentient? It responds to one of an opposing polarity. Baking soda responds to vinegar. It reacts to certain things. Radioactive isotopes are in constant dynamic fluctuation. Like cells we can't ask it "how it's doing". Is the idea of a brain, the only object found to hold consciousness, the only thing in existence capable of consciousness, even a form we can't detect/understand?

yes Ben, I think so. That's how I think it came to be.

But you could argue too that we are part of a divine plan. We as individual people are also a small part of a much larger distributed group of all sentient beings in the universe. Kind of like the neurons of the universe itself. So that we exist so that the universe is conscious of itself. The beauty of a forest would have no meaning without people to perceive it.

Consciousness has no boundaries. That consciousness resides in the brain is antiquated, as even science now admits to a gut-brain connection. Cells are intelligent and constantly adapting. As we speak, they are learning how to cope with the Covid virus. They have memory such as "muscle memory". Intelligence permeates the universe as waves and there are no boundaries. What's more, the memory of this intelligence never dies. It lives forever, like the light of a star.

Indeed, the general justification for sentience seems rather poorly constructed, assuming that one even exists and that, for better or worse, seems to be the case given how the "we" of sentience is widely treated as an established fact even though the only real truth that "we" are aware of is the "I" of consciousness. How the "I" becomes "We" in this context is the single most pressing matter and whatever the reasons that are/may be involved, we must, in some sense of that word, ultimately rely on logic and its principles to come to a conclusion on the matter. Or is the reasoning backwards? As impossible as that sounds, there seems to be no contradiction at all as far as I can see and you might want to make a note of that before proceeding any further.

Coming to pantheism and papsychism, these mean nothing without first coming to some conclusion regarding the issue touched upon in the previous paragraph. My two cents. Hope you can think of some way of converting that into something worthwhile.