Consciousness All the Way Down?

Materialism is the view that everything that exists can be reduced to material stuff. There's nothing in reality that's immaterial or which doesn't somehow derive from matter. There's no immaterial mind or soul, no immaterial beings like angels or God.

The Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick (1916–2004) expressed it this way:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

Of course, if materialism is true, as a considerable majority of 19th and 20th century philosophers and scientists assumed, then consciousness is some kind of illusion generated by the material brain. Moreover, if materialism is true theism becomes much more difficult to defend, since God is not made of matter.

Unfortunately, for materialists, however, there's increasing evidence accumulating in the 21st century that materialism is false.

A number of contemporary philosophers are embracing a view called panpsychism which holds that all matter down to the tiniest atom is to some degree conscious. If this is true (I'm skeptical) then consciousness is not just something that arises in complex vertebrate brains, but inheres even in the simplest material entities.

The authors of a recent scientific paper don't go quite that far but hint strongly that consciousness is a property not just of brains but of every living cell. They argue that "all biology is cognitive information processing."

Denyse O'Leary at Evolution News raises an eyebrow at the word "cognitive":

The word “cognitive” is worth examining. According to Merriam–Webster, it means "of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)", or "based on or capable of being reduced to empirical factual knowledge."

Which definition do the authors...mean when they tell us that “As the internal measurement by cells of information is self-referential by definition, self-reference is biological self-organization, underpinning 21st century Cognition-Based Biology.” Do they mean that cells, in some sense, think?

They don’t quite say but the hints are intriguing....they write of "the contemporary recognition that cellular cognition governs the flow of biological information.”

The authors cite as evidence the astonishingly complex feedback loops in every cell in the living world. O'Leary quotes from their conclusion:

When biology is framed as an informational interactome, all forms of biological expression interact productively in a continuous, seamless feedback loop. In that reciprocating living cycle, there is no privileged level of causation since all aspects of the cell as an organized whole participate in cellular problem-solving….

So, O'Leary remarks, the cell acts on itself (self-organization) instead of merely being acted upon by [its] genes. But also, they write,

The origin of self-referential cognition is unknown. Indeed, it can now be declared biology’s most profound enigma. Yet, that instantiation can be properly accredited as equating with the origin of life.

In layman's terms if the workings of the cell exhibit consciousness then presumably the very first cell was conscious. How did something like this just pop into existence? How did consciousness arise from unconscious substrate, and if even the substrate is conscious how did the universe come to be like that?

O'Leary states:

In short, we have no idea how cells, which have been around for billions of years, could become so complex that they can be compared to intelligent beings (“self-referential cognition”) without any design in nature at all. Well, maybe they couldn’t have. Maybe the main thing to take away here, whether the authors intend it or not, is this: If biologists don’t want intelligent design, they will surely need to come up with something more convincing than Crick’s materialism.

There's more in her article. One thing she points out is that puzzles like the ones the authors of the paper adduce go some distance in explaining why panpsychism is beginning to supplant materialism among scientists if not yet in the popular culture which always lags a generation or two behind science and philosophy.