The Sentient Cell: The Cellular Foundations of Consciousness

Arthur S. Reber · Frantisek Baluska · William Miller

sht 2023 · Oxford University Press

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All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that maintain consciousness requires a nervous system. The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, the role of genes, the impact of cognition, and how biological information is processed by all species. It also calls for a rethinking of a variety of issues including the moral implications of the sentient capacities of all species, how welfare concerns need to be expanded beyond where they currently are, and critically, how all life is intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology. The Sentient Cell explores this revolutionary model, which updates the standard neo-Darwinian framework within which current approaches operate and examines the underlying biomolecular features that are the likely candidates for the "invention" of consciousness and outline their role in cellular life.

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Arthur S. Reber is Broeklundian Professor, Emeritus at Brooklyn College of CUNY. He completed his Ph.D. at Brown University under the direction of Richard Millward. His primary focus has been on implicit or unconscious learning based on principles of evolutionary biology. He has previously published The Cognitive Unconscious and The First Minds with OUP. Franti?ek Balu?ka was Group Leader at the IZMB, University of Bonn. He is one of the leading scientists in the fields of cell biology, cytoskeleton, polarity and plant sensory biology. He published more than 200 peer reviewed papers. Web of Science scores 283 entries with H-Index 63. In order to foster this new sensory and behavioural view of plants and their roots, he has cofounded together with Taylor & Francis two scientific journals: Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative and Integrative Biology. He is editor of the book series Signaling and Communication in Plants at the Springer Verlag. William B. Miller has been a physician in academic and private practice for over 35 years. In that time, he has also published dozens of peer-reviewed academic articles and seven books concentrating on cellular intelligence and its role in biological and evolutionary development, the cellular measurement of environmental information for decision-making and problem-solving, and the intimate partnership between the virome and the cellular domains.